In 1962, Dr. Richard Evans Schultes and I set upa 
search for botanical folklore of potential interest to health 
and medical sciences.* Projects with this objective are 
not new. Ethnobotanical information has been gathered 
traditionally from both old and new writings in anthro- 
pology and botany, from archaeological materials and 
from field work. We believe that our project was unique 
in that it relied exclusively on mainly unpublished data 
from labels accompanying herbarium specimens. In five 
years, a sheet by sheet examination of over 2,500,000 
specimens of flowering plants in the combined herbaria 
of the Arnold Arboretum and Gray Herbarium of Har- 
vard University was completed. ‘These specimens span a 
century and a half and are worldwide in representation. 
Irom these repositories the harvest amounted to nearly 
7,000 notes from over 5,000 species. Materials ranging 
from magic to chemistry were recorded there, wherever 
was some hint of the presence of biodynamic agents. All 
species were checked in Uphof’s Dictionary of Hconomic 
Plants’ in order to eliminate from our compilation al- 
ready well known uses. One exception which was made 
to this procedure was in conserving any note which ex- 
tended the geographic representation of a known use. 
The search was undertaken in the belief that the major 
herbaria of the world represent untapped reservoirs of 
vital data. In some instances, they might provide the 
only remaining clues to the materia medica and nutritional 
* The project was supported in turn by Smith, Kline and French 
Laboratories, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Eli 
Lilly Research Laboratories. It was sponsored by the Botanical Mu- 
seum of Harvard University. The author is indebted to Dr. Schultes 
for his encouragement and guidance. She is grateful also to Profes- 
sors Richard A. Howard and Reed C., Rollins, Directors respectively 
of the Arnold Arboretum and Gray Herbarium of Harvard University, 
for their generous permission to use these two herbaria. This paper 
was presented on August 31, 1969, at the XI International Botanical 
Congress (under Ethnobotany), in Seattle, Washington. 
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