Richard Spruce, a correction

Richard Spruce and his writing on Amazonian drugs
A bibliographic correction

Richard Spruce (1817-1893) is well known by the students specialized on the ethnobotany of psychoactive plants, due to his adventure in the Amazon, Orinoco and Andes, and because he was the first botanist to classify the ayahuasca vine as Banisteria caapi Spr., today considered a synonymous of Banisteriopsis caapi (Spruce ex Griseb.) Morton.

Richard Spruce devoted a paper to South American “narcotics”, compiling the knowledge he had acquired during his travels regarding the traditional intoxicants in the Amazon and the Orinoco. It is important to clarify what appears to be a previously unresolved bibliographical misunderstanding. Spruce’s published writings—Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes and numerous other works—were collected and condensed into a two-volume work published in 1908 and edited by Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace included the article on narcotics in this work (Spruce, 1908, vol. II, pp. 413–455, chapter 25). In the introduction to the chapter, Wallace noted that Spruce’s paper was published in 1870 in the short-lived Geographical Magazine. There is actually a magazine with this title of which only five volumes were published, from 1874 to 1878. Personal consultation of these volumes (available on archive.org) has not revealed the presence of any writings by Spruce. Wallace also reported that Spruce sent a manuscript of the article on narcotics that he would publish in 1870 to the botanist G. Stabler, who passed it on to Wallace, and it is this manuscript that Wallace included in the 1908 volume. The suspicion arises of a bibliographical error on Wallace’s part, since an article by Spruce on South American inebriating sources entitled “On some remarkable narcotics of the Amazon Valley and Orinoco” was published in 1873 in the journal Ocean Highways (Spruce, 1873), and his text with the same title is present in full in chapter 25 of Wallace’s edited volume, where other writings by Spruce concerning inebriating sources and their uses among various ethnic groups are added.

The wrong bibliographic item published in the 1908 edition of the Spruce’s book.

This article is very famous and important in the history of ethnobotany of psychoactive drugs, but I suspect that many researchers had the opportunity to read it only from the 1908 edition, and not from the original journal were it was published, and this because the wrong bibliographic item given by Wallace.

Here I present the correct bibliographic item, and the possibility to freely download this historic article:

SPRUCE RICHARD, 1874 (1873), On some remarkable narcotics of the Amazon Valley and Orinoco, Ocean Highways, vol. 1, pp. 184-193.