(L.) Speg. (Humboldt, 1819). In 1819, he reported that the May- 
pure Indians of the Orinoco, whom he had seen prepare the 
drug eighteen years earlier, softened and kneaded the beans of 
this leguminous tree into small cakes with cassava flour (Mani- 
hot esculenta Cranz.) and lime from snails; these cakes were 
the supply of snuff when it was desired. Von Humboldt erron- 
eously reported that “*. . . itis not to be believed that the Niopo 
acacia pods are the chief cause of the stimulating effects of the 
snuff’? but that ‘*. . . these effects are due to the freshly cal- 
cined lime.”’ The botanist K. S. Kunth, who worked with 
Humboldt, reported in 1825 the following concerning this 
plant: ““Ex seminibus tritis calci vivae admixtis fit tabacum 
nobilisque Indi otomacos et guajibos utuntur’’ (Kunth, 1825). 
It was the British plant-explorer Richard Spruce, however, 
who offered the earliest detailed report on the narcotic, basing 
it on field studies amongst the Guahibos of the Orinoco of 
Colombia and Venezuela in 1851 (Spruce, 1908). He collected 
not only voucher herbarium specimens of Anadenanthera 
peregrina but material of the pods and beans for chemical study 
and ample ethnological material connected with the prepara- 
tion and use of yopo — material still preserved at the Royal 
Botanic Gardens, Kew. It is interesting to note that the seeds 
collected in 1851 for chemical study were not analyzed for 
more than a century and that their analysis was published only 
in 1977 (Schultes, Holmstedt, Lindgren and Rivier, 1977). 
It is believed that another species of Anadenanthera — A. 
colubrina (Vell.) Brenan — was formerly employed in prepar- 
ing an intoxicating snuff Known as vilca or huilca in southern 
Peru and Bolivia and cébi/ in northern Argentina. This species 
of Anadenanthera has the same active principles — tryp- 
tamines — as the closely related A. peregrina of the Orinoco 
and could have been the source of an inebriating preparation. 
The evidence, however, is wholly circumstantial and rather 
weak. No voucher material has ever been connected with the 
preparation of an hallucinogenic snuff in southern South Amer- 
ica, and, of course the Indians who formerly prepared vilca and 
cébil have long since disappeared (Altschul, 1967). Recent 
studies have, however. discovered the hallucinogenic smoking 
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