HERITAGE FROM AMERICAN INDIANS—SAFFORD 407 
lagenaria), whose dried fruit furnished the aborigines with bottles, 
pots, and dishes. The ancestors of the Indians were not acquainted 
with any cereal, legume, or fruit of the Old World. They had to 
begin by eating the fruits, nuts, seeds, and roots of wild plants grow- 
ing in the prairies, forests, mountains, and swamps. They soon 
learned to choose the best kinds, to reject the harmful ones, and to 
preserve fruits, nuts, and even edible roots for use in winter. This 
practice of storage is not surprising, since squirrels, beaver, and 
many other animals make stores of different provisions for winter. 
The most interesting thing is that the first inhabitants of America 
learned not only to gather wild plants for their food but, in addition, 
to sow, cultivate, and develop the kinds most agreeable to their taste. 
This primitive cultivation was the true beginning of agriculture in 
America. 
The aborigines learned by experience that certain plants were 
poisonous; that others had purgative or constipative or stimulant 
or calmant qualities, or were even intoxicating, but without being 
able to explain the reasons for the intoxication. They therefore 
attributed to these plants a virtue or divine power, and in certain 
instances they even worshipped these plants as deities. 
Among their divine plants were the tobaccos and Daturas; in Peru 
the floripondio (Datura arborea) and tonga (Datura sanguinea), 
intoxicating plants employed by the priests in the Temple of the Sun 
at Sagamoza; and, in the Antilles, a certain tree of the Mimosa 
family which produced seeds from which they made snuff that caused 
a form of delirium. It was Fra Ramon, a friar companion of Colum- 
bus, who left us a description of this snuff, called cowoba or cohoba, 
which the Indians of the island of Hispaniola were accustomed to 
inhale, employing for the purpose a forked tube whose two ends 
they placed in their nostrils. In Mexico the priests and medicine 
men of the ancient Aztecs gave themselves up to practices of magic 
and necromancy after they had become excited or tipsy by means 
of some of these plants, especially a species of Datura and a little 
spineless cactus called peyotl. Even to-day this peyotl (Lophophora 
williamsit) is worshipped and employed by several Indian tribes 
of Mexico and the United States in their religious rites. Many of 
the priests of the ancient Mexicans were prosecuted by the authori- 
ties of the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century. I have had 
the good fortune to read the minutes of trials of this sort, and I 
have found in them information that has enabled me to identify a 
number of the plants used by the Mexican Indians in their religious 
rites. 
It was from the Chichimeca Indians of northern Mexico that they 
learned the use of this intoxicating cactus, called by them teonana- 
catl (“divine mushroom”) and by the Spaniards “ devil’s-root.” It 
