ment of the local doctor’s kit. Mr. Paul H. Allen (in 
litt., January 14, 1952) has written the following infor- 
mation to me: 
Payé | witch-doctor] kits seen in the Bajo Vaupés, but particularly 
from the lower Querari and vicinity, contained lumps of an amber 
gum, which local people told me was the active principle of paricd. 
I doubted it very strongly, and the payés were far too suspicious and 
resentful of my collecting activities to be very communicative, much 
less to be willing to stage a demonstration. 
Dr. Lothar Petersen, a physician in Bogota who spent 
many months in medical studies amongst the Indians of 
the Vaupés, likewise found these lumps of resin and re- 
ports that it is known locally as parica. He procured 
several lumps from a witch-doctor in the headwaters of 
the Rio Piraparana, but he also was unable to learn the 
tree from which the resin was obtained. Dr. Petersen 
has kindly given me two small lumps which will be stud- 
ied chemically in an attempt to ascertain their approxi- 
mate composition and, thus indirectly, perhaps to dis- 
cover their botanical source. 
It is clear from the problems raised in the present 
paper that much botanical work still must be carried on 
in our study of narcotic and stimulant plants in the Am- 
azon Valley. It is hardly believable that such a widely 
used and virulent narcotic snuff as ydkee would have to 
wait until this late date in the history of botanical ex- 
ploration of the Amazon for identification. It makes one 
wonder how many more narcotic plants, up to now ob- 
scured by better-known ones, still wait to be discovered. 
The drawings reproduced in this article were made 
possible through a grant from the American Academy 
of Arts and Sciences. 
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