410 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1916. 



of carved bone, many of them of beautiful designs, and the gourds 

 were suspended by carved bone toggles resembling Japanese netsukes. 

 Specimens of the latter may be seen in the Field Museum at Chicago. 

 Two packages of leaves from Peruvian graves sent to the Smithsonian 

 Institution by the late Henry Meigs, the builder of the great trans- 

 Andine railway from Callao to Oroya, were found by the writer, one 

 bearing the label " tobacco," the other " Paraguay tea." The contents 

 of both of these packages proved to be coca leaves, easily identified 

 by the pseudo-rib, extending on each side of the midrib from the 

 base to the apex. 



In the accompanying illustrations plate 13 is a photogi'aph by Mr. 

 Grover Bruce Gilbert of a specimen collected by Mr. O. F. Cook at 

 Santa Ana, Peru, during his recent mission to South America.^ 



The leaves of Erythroxylon Coca^ which from remote ages have 

 been used by South American Indians as a stimulant, are the source 

 of cocaine, now so widely used in surgery to deaden pain and also as 

 a narcotic. Like other narcotic alkaloids, although it is a great 

 blessing to the human race when wisely used, yet when abused it is a 

 terrible curse. In Peru the use of coca by miners and cargueros is 

 still common. There the entire leaf is used. In North Brazil, where 

 it is also extensively used under the name ipadu, the leaves are ground 

 to a fine powder. Spruce, who saw the process of preparing the 

 leaves near the mouth of the Eio Negro in 1851, gives the following 

 account of it in Hooker's Journal of Botany for July, 1853 : 



The leaves of ipadli are pulled off the branches one by one and roasted on 

 the niandiocca-oven, then pounded in a cylindrical mortar, 5 or 6 feet in height, 

 made of the lower part of the trunk of the Pupunha or Peach Palm iGuilielma 

 specioso), the hard root forming the base and the soft inside being scooped out. 

 It is made of this excessive length because of the impalpable nature of the 

 powder, whicli would otherwise fly up and choke the operator ; and it is buried 

 a sufficient depth in the ground to allow of its being easily worked. The pestle 

 is of proportionate length and is made of any hard wood. When the leaves are 

 sufficiently pounded the powder is taken out with a small cuya fastened to the 

 end of an arrow. A small quantity of tapioca, in powder, is mixed with it to 

 give it consistency, and it is usual to add pounded ashes of Imba-tiba or Drum 

 tree {Cecropia peltata), which are saline and antiseptic. With a chew of ipadti 

 in his cheek, renewed at intervals of a few hours, an Indian will go for days 

 without food and sleep. 



In April, 1852, I assisted, much against my will, at an Indian feast in a 

 little rocky island at the foot of the falls of the Rio Negro ; for I had gone 

 down the falls to have three or four days' herborising, and I found my host — 

 the pilot of the cataracts — engaged in the festivities, which neither he nor 

 my man would leave until the last drop of cauim (coarse cane or plantain 

 spirit) was consumed. During the two days the feast lasted I was neai'ly 

 famished, for, although there was food, nobody would cook it, and the guests 

 sustained tliemselves entirely on cauim and ipadti. At short intervals ipadfl 



1 See Mr. Cook's paper entitled " Staircase Farms of the Ancients " in Tlie National 

 Geographic Magazine, 29 : 474-534. May, 1916. 



