Although the inhabitants of the Indies attach so much importance to the use of Coca, this product can not be acclimatized in our hemisphere, and our fathers who took up the use of tobacco with so much eagerness remained indifferent to Coca. Perhaps this indifference should be attributed to the exaggerations of the first importers, who coming to Europe still imbued with the legends gathered in the New World ascribed supernatural qualities to the new plant. The exaggeration of these statements soon became apparent. From this it was only a step to a denial even of its existence. And thus, for more than two centuries, we were deprived of the advantages to be derived from the judicious use of the plant. It should not be believed, however, that the various writers during these two centuries remained entirely silent regarding Coca. The study of the properties of the plant was still a field of research for a number of learned men, small, it is true, but they well knew that side by side with fiction, which they rejected, there was a reality that it were better to accept. We further observe, that Claude Duret, a magistrate of Moulins, who wrote a book, printed in 1605, on _The Marvellous and Wonderful Plants in Nature_, mentions Coca as one of the most worthy to figure in his colleccion. Nicholas Monardes in the _General History of Plants_, published in Lyons in 1653, calls attention likewise to the properties of Coca. In the seventeenth century, l'abbé Longuerue, who was a theologian, an historian, and a philologist, speaking of the Spanish colonies in South America, says, in regard to the mines explored in Peru: "The negroes can not work in the mines, they all die. Hardly any but the natives are able to endure this labor, and then it is necessary to relieve them frequently and that they should chew Coca, without which the quicksilver vapors would kill them." Linnæus says that Coca possesses: "the penetrating aroma of vegetable stimulants, the astricting and fortifying virtues of an astringent, the antispasmodic qualities of bitters, and the mucilaginous nutritive properties of analeptics or of alimentary plants. This leaf," he continues, "exhibits with energy its action on all parts of the animal economy: _Olido in nervos, sapido in fibras utroque in fluido_."