nated by the ferocious Caribs and the Europeans!’ 
The use of tobacco spread throughout the world with 
epidemic speed. European explorers penetrating to lands 
far distant in Africa and Asia sometimes found that to- 
bacco had reached there before them. Even the Church 
did nothing to combat it,—outside of Mexico, that is. 
The French abbé with his snuff box is a familiar figure 
in Europe’s cultural history. 
Peyotl — Lophophora Wilhiamsn (em.) Coult. 
The history of peyot/, known to science as Lophophora 
Williamsii (em.) Coulter, has been utterly different but 
equally spectacular. A cactus,’ it is by that fact exclu- 
sively a New World plant, native to the arid regions of 
northern Mexico —to Coahuila, Zacatecas, San Luis 
Potosi, and Querétaro. Presumably the plant in colonial 
times grew only in the north, but its use extended south 
as far as the state of Oaxaca.* Today the Indians of cen- 
tral and southern Mexico seem to know it no longer. But 
the Indians of the north still consume it in their religious 
ceremonies, and it is extending its range, inching its way 
northward from tribe to tribe in the Plains area until it 
has now finally reached Canada. In the same spirit of 
blind misunderstanding that actuated the Church in co- 
lonial Mexico, there are elements in the North American 
community that would invoke the police and courts to 
stop a practice that gives spiritual solace to our surviving 
Indian population. 
On a different cultural plane, peyotl made its bow in 
the great world in 1888, when the toxicologist Louis 
Lewin of Berlin published the first paper attempting to 
classify it botanically and describing its sensational quali- 
ties. He was followed by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell (1896) 
and Havelock Ellis (1897), men who commanded wide 
attention in the English-speaking world.’ These papers 
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