Department with which he illustrated his brief account of 
chamairo (Cardenas, 1969). However, no duplicates of this 
collection have been located among the Mulford Expedition 
collections at the New York Botanical Garden (Schofield, 1980, 
pers. comm.), at other major U.S. herbaria, nor in Cardenas’ 
personal herbarium which is now preserved at the Instituto 
Miguel Lillo, Tucuman, Argentina. 
In 1964, Dr. Gerald Weiss, an anthropologist at Florida 
Atlantic University, collected an ethnobotanical voucher speci- 
men of chamairo among the Campa Indians of the Rio Tambo 
in eastern Peru. Consisting of leaves and a piece of stem and 
preserved at the Field Museum, this specimen has been posi- 
tively identified as Mussatia hyacinthina (Standl.) Sandw. by 
Dr. Alwyn Gentry, a specialist in American Bignoniaceae. A 
second authenticating specimen was collected by Gentry, 
Schunke and Aronson in the Huallaga valley of Peru near 
Tocache. This collection was recognized in the field as chamairo 
by Schunke and botanically identified by Gentry as M. hya- 
cinthina. 
The genus Mussatia includes only two species: M. hyacinthina 
which ranges from Mexico south to Guyana and Bolivia; and M. 
Prieurei (DC.) Bur. ex K. Schum., which occurs in the Guianas 
and Amazonian Brazil. To my knowledge, there have been no 
previous reports of economic uses for either species, and, 
according to Gentry (pers. comm.), the chemistry of Mussatia is 
completely unknown. 
From the data presented here, it is clear that chamairo is 
rather widely employed as a coca admixture from central Peru 
south to northern Bolivia. It is employed mainly as a flavoring 
to sweeten coca but may also be chewed alone for its euphoric 
and medicinal effects. In view of these properties, chamairo bark 
should be examined for potential pharmacologically active 
constituents. 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
I would like to thank José Schunke Vigo for providing 
valuable ethnobotanical information on chamairo; Dr. Alwyn 
Gentry for identifying specimens and providing other data; 
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