518 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1941 



was the discovery of an American species of ginseng in the forests 

 bordering the St. Lawrence near Montreal. Ginseng had long been 

 a common drug among Iroquois herbalists, who set no especial value 

 on it until an artificial demand for it created by the China trade 

 raised the price out of all proportion to its medicinal properties. The 

 burgeoning traffic in ginseng was to bring illusions of wealth to the 

 French colonists and stimulate a search by both white and Indian 

 ginseng hunters that within a century would nearly eradicate the wild 

 species in northeastern America. In 1709 Father Jartoux, a French 

 Jesuit missionary to China, had undertaken a mapping expedition 

 into inner Tartary for the Chinese monarch; there he met 2,000 na- 

 tives occupied in hunting a plant they called Gin-seng, which com- 

 manded a high price in oriental markets. Jartoux's paper entitled 

 "A Description of a Tartarian Plant called Gin-seng," which ap- 

 peared subsequently in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal 

 Society of London, came to the notice of a brother Jesuit, Joseph 

 Frangois Lafitau (1681-1746) during a visit in 1715 to Quebec on 

 business for his mission (pi. 1, fig. 1). Lafitau had come out to 

 America in 1711 to work among the Caughnawaga band of Mohawk 

 living at Sault St. Louis above Montreal where he remained during 6 

 years before returning to France. Scholar, botanist, and etlmologist, 

 he vainly searched the Relations for references to the plant, but he 

 did not abandon hope of finding it growing in Canada, the ecology 

 of which impressed him as being markedly similar to that of Tartary ; 

 and in thinking that the native Indians were related to Tartars, he 

 was among the earliest writers to develop the theory of an Asiatic 

 origin for the American Indian. He held that because the French 

 of Canada had an inferior regard for Indian medicine, the Jesuits 

 had not made such remarkable discoveries as their brothers in South 

 America. Sparing what time he could from missionary labors and 

 exercising care not to antagonize his brothers by seeming to confirm 

 native beliefs, or to arouse the suspicions of the Indians by mani- 

 festing too much interest in their culture, he made field trips and 

 questioned Mohawk herbalists who appeared to know many of the 

 excellent plants that filled America. To one who displayed such 

 respect for their ability, they were not opposed to divulging some 

 private knowledge which was hereditary in their families, and they 

 encouraged him to continue his search because they hoped he would 

 find the plant which he described to them. Although such interviews 

 were not advancing the ginseng quest, they provided a body of data 

 on native customs and beliefs and medical information which he 

 hoped would increase knowledge of savages and medicine in Europe. 

 Retaining memory of the plant through the winter of 1715-16 and 

 having passed 3 futile months in the field, he unexpectedly en- 

 countered the mature plant growing within striking distance of a 



