rooms in the Temple Ellis occupied when in London. His first symptom was a 'consciousness of energy and intellectual power.' Weir Mitchell had likewise experienced the same intellectual exhilaration, and had unsuccessfully experimented, during the course of the emotional state, with the writing of poetry.

...

Ellis's visionary experiences, unlike those of William James, were eminently satisfactory. 'Every color and tone conceivable to me,' he wrote, 'appeared at some time or another. At first there was merely a vague play of light and shade which suggested pictures, but never made them. Then the pictures became more definite, but too confused and crowded to be described, beyond saying that they were of the same character as the images of the kaleidoscope, symmetrical groupings of spiked objects. Then, in the course of the evening, they became distinct, but still indescribable - mostly a vast field of golden jewels, studded with red and green stones, ever changing. This moment was, perhaps, the most delightful of the experience, for at the same time the air around me seemed to be flushed with vague perfume producing with the visions a delicious effect and all discomfort had vanished, except a slight faintness and tremor of the hands, which, later on, made it almost impossible to guide a pen as I made notes of the experiment; it was, however, with an effort, always possible to write with a pencil.'

About 3.30 A. M. the effects of the phenomena diminished and he fell into a peaceful and dreamless sleep. He awoke at the usual hour with no unpleasant reminiscences. 'Only my eyes,' he wrote, 'seemed unusually sensitive to color, especially to blue and violet. I can, indeed, say that ever since this experience I have been more æsthetically sensitive than I was before

to the more delicate phenomena of light and shade.'

Some time later he again put himself under the influence of mescal to test the effect of music upon the visions. 'The chief object of the tests was to ascertain how far a desire on the composer's part to suggest definite imagery would affect my visions. In about half the cases there was no resemblance, in the other half there was a distinct resemblance, which was sometimes very remarkable. This was especially the case with Schumann's music, for example, with his Waldszenen and Kinderszenen; thus "The Prophet Bird" called up vividly a sense of atmosphere and of brilliant feathery birdlike forms passing to and fro, "A Flower Piece" provoked constant and persistent images of vegetation, while "Scheherazade" produced an effect of floating white raiment, covered by glittering spangles and jewels. In every case my description was, of course, given before I knew the name of the piece.'

III

Since the experiments of the early investigators the properties of the drug have been further analyzed, and in the years 1926, 1927, and 1928 three monographs devoted exclusively to the subject appeared in three different countries. Le Peyotl, by Alexandre Rouhier, was the first to appear; Der Meskalinrausch, seine Geschichte und Erscheinungsweise, by Dr. Kurt Beringer, the second; and Mescal: the 'Divine' Plant and Its Psychological Effects, by Dr. Heinrich Klüver of Columbia University, the third. Dr. Klüver's volume was published in London. While the work that has been done on the drug has resulted in the accumulation of a considerable amount of material with respect to certain of its properties, there remain fields of psychological inquiry that have not been touched upon, and it was with the view of testing certain of the lesser-known qualities of the drug that an experiment was conducted with the author of this paper as the subject, on March 24, 1929, in conjunction with one of the physicians of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

About nine o'clock in the morning a dose of .3 gramme of the drug was injected intramuscularly. For a brief while there were no sensations; then began a slight nausea, which was relieved, save for a sensation of obstruction in the throat, by lying upon the back and breathing deeply. The pulse fell rapidly from seventy-two to sixty, accompanied, however, by no loss of bodily vigor, though for the greater part of the experiment I lay upon a couch in order to experience the full benefits of the drug. I was quite definitely aware, moreover, of an increase in intellectual force which

seemed to disclose the fallacy of a philosophical argument of J. M. Keynes with which for the last day or two I had been concerned. This increase was, however, deceptive, as I learned the next day, for a reëxamination of Keynes's argument proved that its validity could not be impugned by the point suggested under the influence of mescal. Toward the cessation of the feeling of nausea, which lasted not longer than half an hour and which was accompanied by one or two spasms of the diaphragm but no vomiting, the visions began. Contrary to the experiences of other investigators, the appearance of the visions was not gradual, but began with the suddenness of an image projected by a stereopticon. Clearly, and at once, I saw a spiked cylindrical object of brilliant flashing colors suspended in a space of the deepest blue. The scene persisted for perhaps three minutes and then vision followed vision in indescribable and

riotous profusion. For the most part the pictures were unrelated to experience and are impossible to describe, but occasionally, among the hundreds of images that appeared and changed and disappeared, there would occur some recognizable object: for a moment I saw a pearl of monstrous size and of the silkiest lustre suspended above two saw-toothed designs that moved back and forth across one another; I saw a room whose corners were nicely rounded, as were also the edges where the walls met floor and ceiling, and so startlingly immaculate was it that, had it not been composed entirely of multitudinously, deeply colored tiles set in constantly shifting patterns, I should have supposed it to be a room miraculously translated from one of the Utopias H. G. Wells has so often and hygienically imagined; again, great Renaissance picture tapestries of the finest detail and execution and marvelously rich with gold floated slowly upward, keeping time with distinctly audible music, which, I reasoned, came from a graphophone in a neighboring room, but which I learned later was only a product of my imagination.

But altogether, as I have mentioned, the pictures were, save for a few exceptions, indescribable. Nine tenths of the pictures were composed of geometrical forms which passed before the eyes in no uniform motion, but from left to right and right to left and up and down. At one time, for perhaps half an hour, there was a series of several hundred pictures of machinery, likewise in geometrical form and in violent motion, and at another time I saw hundreds of modern French paintings (influenced perhaps by a recent visit to a gallery devoted almost exclusively to such paintings) individually and in collections, but rich in color beyond the dreams of any painter. The visions seemed to approach a peak, accompanied also by a sensation of physical exhilaration or bodily intoxication, and at what appeared to be the maximum point there occurred the most satisfactory experience of the experiment from the standpoint of the loveliness of the visions. A delicious feeling of well-being and tonicity was suffused throughout the whole body. The picture that took shape was of incredible magnificence. I was looking into the depths of space - of a blue so vivid, so clear, that I seemed to see it for the first time, and to be conscious of it with an intense awareness equal perhaps to that of the mystics at the beginning of the Christian era who turned their eyes skyward and discovered, for the first time in the history of the race, the color blue, to which, apparently, all races had been insensitive, as if afflicted with a racial color blindness.

The overwhelming depth of the vision illustrated far more strikingly than would be possible by graphical representation the truthfulness of Spengler's observation that blue is the color of expanse and distance and boundlessness. Scattered in clusters throughout this space of blue were galaxies of golden stars that were, like the stars of reality, not disks, but points; and intermingled with the stars large orange and yellow nebulæ moved in elliptic and circular orbits. The nebulæ and stars were not projected against space as against a curtain, but inhabited it and made the picture as three-dimensional as a cube. Indeed, a characteristic of all the visions into which spatial qualities entered was their strikingly three-dimensional properties. Suddenly, as I watched the scene, I yielded to a belief that by an effort I could peer into the centre of space, and the stars and nebulæ, instead of passing from left to right or right to left as the other pictures had done, streamed by me, on either side, in a welter of gold

and orange and yellow. But only for a moment. The scene changed and I saw the blue sea. A beautiful white wave came from across the wide expanse of water, curving counter-clockwise, and as it approached the foreground it broke and dissolved into soft and bubbly colors. Thereafter the visions declined in intensity and were composed largely of novel geometrical forms. My eyes, I found, were painfully sensitive to light. The visions, moreover, vanished upon opening the eyes and were not visible even in a room from which all light was excluded. Pictures continued to form, though more faintly as the afternoon progressed, until I fell into a dreamless sleep about 7.30 р. м.

In the morning, before the visions had reached their peak, the attempt had been made, with surprising results, to test the influence of music. Three graphophone records of pieces with which I was not familiar were played and descriptions of the visions that were induced or occurred while the music was being played I dictated before the titles were divulged. Schumann's 'Quintet in E Flat Major' was the first piece. Three distinct pictures formed: a pattern of flashing, gold inlaid, exquisitely decorated Turkish swords, golden stars in space, and two knights in full regalia with broad cloaks elaborately designed flung about their shoulders, charging each other upon great white horses. Rimski-Korsakov's 'The Sea and Sinbad' followed: at the first strains of the music a picture of indescribable loveliness formed; sea gulls flew in sweeping flights over a blue sea against a sunset of gorgeous colors. The gulls seemed to be riding upon the wind, which I felt could almost be seen. The picture changed suddenly and I was looking into the depths of a tremendous whirlpool whose sides, of a deep blue, were flecked with particles of the brightest gold. As suddenly as this picture formed it was succeeded by a scene of tall waves proceeding evenly across the picture. The music closed, however, with a picture of lumps of sugar arranged in geometrical patterns. The last piece was the fourth movement of 'Scheherazade, The Festival at Bagdad.' Some time elapsed before any pictures formed, and then, indistinctly, there appeared the interior of a Gothic cathedral with a crimson throne high in the centre. This picture persisted for a moment, to be succeeded by a view of hundreds of women in Oriental costumes of no striking ornamentation spread in patterns over a brown hill and swaying gently to the music. This picture persisted throughout the course of the music.

IV

The intensity of the colors and the novelty of the visions seem to be the chief characteristics of mescal intoxication. Each picture is vividly colored and each color is as vivid almost as an arc light. Opening the eyes upon what would ordinarily appear as a colorful and lovely spring day, with the flowers in bloom and the green grass warm in the bright sunshine, discloses a world that is drab and dreary compared with the world seen with closed eyes. The visions, in the great majority of cases, were of unfamiliar scenes, over which little control could be exercised. I attempted, for example, to visualize a lake, and the picture that formed showed only the edge of a lake, on which a brown Indian sat in a brown canoe against a poisonously bright tropical jungle that appeared as if it might have been painted by Rousseau. Whether the drug possesses any therapeutic value is not, at present, certain. Prolonged indulgence in it, however, is probably harmful, though

this also is by no means certain. Among the Indians who use it habitually a shiftlessness of character and a lessening of resistance to disease have been observed by missionaries, and some cases of heart failure or hemorrhage while under its influence have been reported. Organizations of missionaries are actively engaged at the present time in securing the suppression of the drug, though whether they are motivated by a belief in the harmfulness of its physiological effects or by the fact that the Indians, so long as they continue to indulge in it, remain indifferent to the virtues of Christianity is not clear. At all events the Western States, under the exhortations of the missionaries and over the vehement protests of Indian leaders, are beginning to curb its use by legislation. The Paris press has also recently carried on a campaign to prohibit its use in France, where it has taken a strong foothold. Attempts have been made to suppress the drug as an intoxicant, and also under the Food and Drugs Act, but the courts have held that it is not an intoxicant, and as the Food and Drugs Act states that the term 'drug' 'shall include all medicines and preparations recognized in the United States Pharmacopeia or National Formulary' its use cannot be regulated under that act, since the United States Pharmacopeia and National Formulary do not recognize it.

The chief value of mescal seems to lie, however, in its use as an instrument for psychological and psychiatric investigation. The field of eidetic imagery in psychology and the psychiatric investigation of hallucinations may perhaps yield profitable results when studied in the light of the phenomena of mescal visions. Aside from the interest that may attach to the drug as a possible therapeutic agent, it also possesses an importance from the point of view of its educational effect upon

those who have once or twice been under its influence. Havelock Ellis has remarked that to be admitted to the rites of mescal is 'an educational influence of no mean value.' Certainly sensitivity to color and the capacity for its enjoyment are increased. Only those who possess robustness of health seem to be able to derive any enjoyment or benefit from it, however, and in that, as Ellis has likewise pointed out, lies

the safeguard against its widespread use. Even where robustness of health is present, the subsequent physiological effects are too costly to admit for the civilized man, if not for the savage, more than one or two experiences with the drug. But to experience its intoxicating qualities even once is to look ever afterward upon the external world with at least a keener appreciation of color.

I

THOSE first years of ours in Iowa were the bitter years just before the outbreak of the Civil War (said Grandmother Brown). We were abolitionists, of course. It was bred in our bones to hate slavery. You might say it was part of our inheritance as children of the Northwest Territory. Both Dan'l's people and mine were clear on that point. We were accustomed from our earliest youth to seeing runaway slaves along the Ohio River and advertisements offering rewards to anyone who would return them to their masters. I remember seeing slave owners coming over from Kentucky with chains and whips, looking for their slaves, and my horror at the sight. I remember particularly one time when we were living at the Brice House, seeing a man there who had caught his slave and was

1'Grandmother Brown's Hundred Years,' from which the Atlantic has borrowed several char

taking him back handcuffed. The black man had to eat weighted with irons. Think of a nice little girl standing in the dining-room door seeing that pitiful sight! Someone said the other day that the negroes were better off in slave days than they are now. How could that be, when now their children are taught and they are treated like human beings? See what good ministers some of them are! One of them preached a fine sermon here in our Presbyterian church not so long ago.

Oh, I never could have been anything but an abolitionist, a Whig, a Republican.

Dan'l felt the same way. Once, coming home from New Orleans, he saw a slave sale in St. Louis, saw men and women exposed for sale on a block in front of the courthouse, saw the auctioneer trying their agility and running his finger around their mouths exactly as if they were horses. We all hated slavery. My father helped many a slave