before an audience of scientists, many of whom were 
plainly incredulous, so astonishing were his findings.” 
In this number of the Botanical Museum Leaflets he him- 
self rounds out and completes his discoveries, and I shal] 
not anticipate them here. 
Ololiuhqui in Nahuatl is the name of the seeds, not of 
the plant that yields the seeds. The word means ‘round 
thing’, and the seeds are small, brown, and oval. The 
plant itself is a climber, called appropriately coaaihuitl, 
‘snake-plant’, in Nahuatl, and Aiedra or bejuco by the 
Spanish writers. It isa morning glory, and it grows easily 
and abundantly in the mountains of southern Mexico. 
Unlike teonanacatl, it bears seed over months and the 
seed can be kept indefinitely, and carried far and wide, to 
regions where the plant itself does not grow. In Spanish 
it is commonly known as semilla de la Virgen, and in the 
various Indian languages there are names for it that 
should be carefully assembled by teams of linguists and 
then studied for their meanings and associations. In 
Oaxaca, only among the Triqui of Copala have I found 
no familiarity with it. 
Past experience has shown that for a divinatory plant 
to enlist the attention of the outside world two steps are 
usually necessary. First, it should be correctly and se- 
curely identified. Second, its chemistry should be con- 
vincingly worked out. Richard Evans Schultes settled 
the identity of ololiuhqui inthe definitive paper published 
in 1941.” It is the seed of a species of Convolvulaceae: 
Rivea corymbosa (.) Hall. fil. Schultes was not the first 
to link ololiuhqui with this family, but for decades there 
had been disputes over its identity, and since Schultes 
published his paper there has been none. The starting 
point for any student of the subject is Schultes’s paper. 
It is not my intention here to tell over again the story 
told by Schultes. I will only supplement what he had to 
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