supposes they called the former ‘teonanacatl’ and the 
latter ‘peyotl’ 
Much of the work done by SafFord in the identifica¬ 
tion of important and interesting economic plants of an¬ 
cient Mexico was brilliant. It is not surprising, therefore, 
that workers were inclined to accept his treatment of 
teonanacatl. Safford’s erroneous identification unfortu¬ 
nately was generally accepted and has become rather 
firmly established in both botanical and anthropological 
literature. 
Until recently, no published objections were raised 
against Safford’s identification. From the first, however, 
Doctor Bias P. Reko maintained that peyote and teo¬ 
nanacatl were not identical. Reko has carried out rather 
extensive botanical collecting and anthropological inves¬ 
tigations of several kinds in Mexico for more than a 
quarter of a century. From his own experience and from 
a belief in the dependability of the early reports, he in¬ 
sisted on the presence of a narcotic mushroom among 
Mexican Indians. Thus, in 1919, he stated (15) that nan- 
acatl was “div. generos de hongos, especialmente un hon- 
go negro que crece sobre estiercol y produce efectos 
narcoticos,” and in 1923, he wrote as follows in a letter 2 : 
“• . . I see in your description of Lophophora that Dr. 
Safford believes this plant to be the ‘teonanacatl’ of 
Sahagun which is surely wrong. It is actually, as Saha- 
gun states, a fungus which grows on dung-heaps and 
which is still used under the same old name by the In¬ 
dians of the Sierra Jaurez in Oaxaca in their religious 
feasts. . 
2 Letter: B.P.Reko, Guadalajara, Mexico, to J.N.Rose, United States 
National Museum, Washington, D. C., July 18, 1923; herbarium 
sheet No. 1745713, United States National Herbarium,Washington, 
D.C. 
[ 47 ] 
