H.—ANTHROPOLOGY 165 
provides another aspect. The Rio de la Plata was discovered by Juan 
Diaz de Solis in 1516. In 1534 an expedition was sent from Spain 
under Pedro de Mendoza to make permanent occupation of the country 
to the north. With him sailed one Ulrich Schmidt, or Schmiedel, as 
he was called by the Spaniards, a Bavarian agent of merchants in Seville. 
He ascended the Parana and Paraguay with the pioneer expeditions and 
made many journeys of exploration through the heart of the Guarani 
country, finally making a cross-country journey of some hundred and thirty 
miles from the upper Parana to Sio Vicente; after this he returned to 
Europe after an absence of nearly twenty years. His reminiscences are 
remarkable from several points of view, and perhaps especially for the 
accuracy of his memory and the almost incredible vileness of his ortho- 
graphy in dealing with Spanish and Indian words. His narrative is of 
great importance to anthropology, because it is the report of a pioneer 
and an observer. Whatever he may have forgotten, his mind is extra- 
ordinarily clear on the food question. He writes in detail what he had to 
drink and eat and where, day by day. Naturally, food was very impor- 
tant, and these European expeditions, living on the country, were often on 
the verge of starvation. For days they had to pass through unoccupied 
country, and their minds were naturally focussed on the food quest. 
Schmidt tells how the Carios make ‘ wine’ of Mandepore (manioc) and 
of honey; the Mbaia and Payagua, of ‘fenugreek’; the Guyacuru, of 
the algarroba bean. But in none of his copious food notes does he ever 
make mention in his twenty years’ experience of the use of the ilex leaf, 
either chewed or infused. 
During the period of Schmidt’s residence in Paraguay, Cabeza de Vaca 
was sent to the country as Adelantado. From Sao Francisco, in the far 
south of Brazil, where he landed, he made a remarkable overland journey 
to the newly founded settlement of Asuncién, passing through the heart 
of the country where the ilex grew naturally. In the course of his three 
years’ residence he made several journeys northward. His narrative 
(1555) is full of details of considerable ethnographical importance and, 
though he pays less attention to local foodstuffs than Schmidt, the 
precarious nature of his supplies led him to record much useful informa- 
tion on this subject. Yet in his account there is no mention of the ilex. 
Between 1569 and 1574 Nicolas Monardes published a work entitled 
Las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias occidentales, translated into English 
in 1580 under the far more attractive title Foyfull Newes of the New-found 
World. He gives an extended and delightful description of the properties 
of coca, tobacco and many other American products, but there is no 
mention of yerba mateé. 
Diaz de Guzman (1612) gives a descriptive account of practically the 
whole region occupied by the Spanish east of the Andes in his Historia 
Argentina (Paraguay did not become a separate province until 1620), but 
there is no mention in his pages of the ‘ Herb of Paraguay.’ Thus the 
first reference to the use of the ilex leaf does not occur in literature until 
more than ninety years after Schmidt entered the country, eighty-five 
years after Cabeza de Vaca passed through the forests which later became 
the principal source of supply, and more than half a century after 
