“During divine worship the priests chewed Coca leaves, and unless they were supplied with them, it was believed that the favour of the gods could not be propitiated. It was also deemed necessary that the supplicator for divine grace should approach the priests with an _acullico_ (or quid) in his mouth. It was believed that any business undertaken without the benediction of Coca leaves could not prosper, and to the shrub itself worship was rendered. During an interval of more than three hundred years Christianity has not been able to subdue this deep-rooted idolatry, for everywhere we find traces of belief in the mysterious powers of this plant. The excavators in the mines of Cerro de Pasco throw chewed Coca on hard veins of metal, in the belief that it softens the ore and renders it more easy to work. The origin of this custom is easily explained, when it is recollected that in the time of the Incas it was believed that the _Coyas_—the deities of metals—rendered the mountains impenetrable if they were not propitiated by the odour of Coca. The Indians, even at the present time, put Coca leaves into the mouths of dead persons, to secure to them a favourable reception on their entrance into another world; and when a Peruvian Indian on a journey falls in with a mummy, he, with timid reverence, presents to it some Coca leaves as his pious offering.” The reliance, Pöppig says, on its extraordinary virtues among the Peruvian Indians is so strong that, in the Huanuco Province, they believe that if a dying man can taste a leaf placed on the tongue, it is a sure sign of his future happiness.[7] [Footnote 7: Quoted in Markham’s Travels in Peru and India. London, 1862.]