Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/58

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ESCAL (Anhalonium Lewinii) belongs to the group of plants which in various parts of the world have been intimately connected with religion and have received the honors due to divine beings. This group may indeed be said to be large, but mescal—on account of the special appeal to the supernatural which its peculiar properties make—belongs to the innermost circle of such plants. It is or has been venerated by the Indians of many tribes over a very large region in Northern, Central and Eastern Mexico, in New Mexico, in Texas and in Indian Territory, each tribe having its own name for the plant—mescal, hikori, peyote, kamaba, etc. Botanically it is a cactus, belonging to the special and little known group of the Melocacteæ; there are in the group some six or seven Anhalonia; they all grow in inaccessible spots on high and rocky peaks, and have only in recent years become known to science. The plant most nearly allied to the Anhalonium Lewinii is the A. Williamsii, from which is obtained the alkaloid pellotin, lately found of therapeutic value as a hypnotic. Mescal buttons (as from their shape the dried tops of A. Lewinii are locally known) are somewhat brittle discs some two or three centimeters in diameter and partially covered by a hairy cushion. Lewin and Henning in 1885 first described this cactus and made experiments on animals with it, from which Lewin concluded that it is 'intensely poisonous,' resembling strychnine in its action, and by its lethal action standing apart from all other Cacteæ. This opinion probably rendered investigators of mescal cautious, and little further progress was made in our knowledge until 1894, when Mr. John Mooney, agent among the Indians, who had read a paper on this subject before the Washington Anthropological Society three years earlier, brought to the United States Bureau of Ethnology a large supply of mescal buttons which were entrusted to Professor Prentiss and Dr. Morgan, of Columbian University for physiological investigation.