I7I. 
173, 
173. 
Germany. Both editions in English. 1st ed 832 pp; 2nd ed 915 pp plus plates 
and illus. In 1st ed see pp 472, 506, 507. In 2nd ed see Pp 543-4. 
In 1941 or thereabouts Dr. Singer, working over mushroom collections in the 
Farlow at Harvard, came upon a specimen that R. E. Schultes had brought back in 
1938 from Huautla de Jiménez and that, according to Schultes’ field notes, the Maza- 
tec Indians had said was vision-producing. Dr. Singer correctly identified it and he 
was the first person to associate the genus Psilocybe with the Mexican sacred mush- 
rooms. His priority lies in this fungal identification in the Cambridge laboratory. 
Unfortunately his discovery proved to be stillborn. He did not disclose what he had 
found even to Dr. Schultes, who would have been intensely interested. He published 
nothing on the subject until about a decade had elapsed, when in the first edition of 
his work on the systematics of the Agaricales, more than 800 pages long, he dropped 
in casually two brief, enigmatic allusions, lost in the expanse of that vast work, to 
the use of Psilocybe sp. by Mexican Indians. He cited no source or authority. Those of 
us who later became interested in the identification of the species so used would 
have been helped by Dr. Singer’s discovery, had we known of it, and would have 
been delighted to give him full credit. When we published our book, some rs years 
had elapsed from the date of this identification. He had done nothing with it. We 
were ignorant of it. We owed him nothing. He revealed to me his prior identification 
of the mushroom specimen when we met him, on the one and only occasion, at 
Huautla de Jiménez and at the nearby airstrip, on Monday, July 15, 1957, during 
his hurried passage through an area that we had been studying for some years. By 
this time we had done much of our work and had brought out our book, here listed 
as Entry 1. It is understandable that the circumstances should have caused Dr. Singer 
disappointment, but I must disclaim responsibility for them. 
In the second edition of his Agaricales, on pp 43-4, Dr. Singer greatly expands his 
comment on the use and properties of these mushrooms. His cultural observations 
must be read with caution. He asserts that the Guatemala Indians use the mushrooms 
as a drug. Until our book came out in 1957 this had never been reported by any 
student of the indigenous cultures. Since our book appeared no one has reported 
from Guatemala the use of these mushrooms. In our book we advanced the bold 
surmise that there had once been a mushroom cult in Guatemala of which the 
symbols—the archeological artifacts known as “‘mushroom stones” and pottery 
“mushrooms” —are occasionally found today. According to our hypothesis, the ritu- 
alistic use had prevailed for centuries, even millennia, but had died out in the Maya 
country in Pre-Columbian times, for reasons unknown. The resolution of this 
problem hangs on evidence that is being slowly accumulated. That Dr. Singer should 
link the present-day Maya with the use of the Sacred Mushrooms shows how alien 
to him are the problems of Indian culture. He made a like assertion before, in the 
Bull of the Chicago Nat His Museum (see Entry 171), whereupon we drew his atten- 
tion by private communication to his error. He now persists 1n it. R.G.W. 
. “Sacred mushrooms inspire medical research.” Chicago Nat Hist 
Mus Bull, Dec 1957, p 7. 
———,, AND ALEXANDER H. Situ. ‘“New species of Psilocybe.”” Mycologia. 
Vol 50, No 1, Jan-Feb 1958, pp 141-142. 
. “Mycological investigations on Teonanacatl, the Mexican hallu- 
cinogenic mushroom.” Part I: “The history of Teonandcatl, field work and 
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