Peruvian and Chilean psychoactive plants mentioned in Ruiz's Relación (1777-1788).

Between 1777 and 1788, the Spanish botanist Hipolito Ruiz directed a plant collecting expedition to Peru and Chile. Ruiz is commonly regarded — and quite correctly so — as a systematic and floristic botanist, yet his writings indicate that he should also be considered a major ethnobotanist of his period. Ruiz was deeply interested in the use of plants and in the classification of economic plants. In these early days of scientific botany, for example, he devoted special attention to Cinchona, source of quinine, and wrote extensively on this genus. He published mono graphic studies on specific native medicinal plants. Indigenous uses of plants are often noted in his descriptions of new species. In Ruiz's Relacibn Historica del Viage que Hizo a los Reynos del Peru y Chile el Botdnico Hipolito Ruiz en al Ano de 1777 hasta el de 1788, en Cuya Epoca Regreso a Madrid, a kind of diary, one finds the greatest wealth of his ethnobotanical data. In 1940, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago published an English translation of the Spanish edition of Ruiz's Relacion, edited by Padre Agustfh Jesus Barreiro in 1931 (Ruiz 1940). This edition represents only a part of the Relacion, a preliminary and incomplete draft. During the Second World War, while he was serving as Colombian Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the late Dr. Jaime Jaramillo-Arango discovered in the British Museum (Natural History) the manuscript of the entire