436 NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
essential to the 7naking of payes. Bancroft says : 
The order of Peiis is inherited by the eldest sons. 
A young Peii is initiated with superstitious cere- 
monies lasting several weeks. Among other things, 
he is dosed with tobacco till it no longer operates 
as an emetic" (Joe. cit.). 
Tobacco -smoke is blown on the sick person 
by the paye in almost all methods of cure, whether 
the maraca, niopo, or caapi be the primary agent. 
In lieu of the two latter it would seem that in some 
nations the enchanters narcotised themselves by 
chewing tobacco and swallowing the juice. The 
large cigar used on the Uaupes is smoked in the 
ordinary way, and the smoke blown from the 
mouth ; but in the country bordering the Pacific 
coast of Equatorial America the cigar — two or 
three feet long, but slenderer than that of the 
Uaupes — was held in the mouth at the lighted end, 
and the smoke blown from the opposite end upon 
the sick person, or, at a feast, in the faces of the 
guests, whereof Wafer has an amusing account and 
a rude picture (p. 327, loc. cit.). He calls the payes 
pawawers, evidently the same name, with a merely 
dialectic difference. It is curious that at the present 
day the Indians and negroes along that coast fre- 
quently hold the lighted end of a cigar in their 
mouths, as any one who has sojourned at Panama or 
Guayaquil may have observed. 
The uses of niopo (or parica) and of caapi (or 
aya-huasca) I have already indicated above. The 
former is the chief "medicine" of the payes on the 
affluents of the Amazon, both northern and southern, 
and on the Orinoco ; but the latter in the roots of 
the Equatorial Andes. I have not learnt that they 
