Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966. First edition. Small 8vo; orange cloth; white spine titles; dust jacket. xviii, 108pp., with index. A touch of wear at base of spine; mild offsetting to endpapers; former owner's name penned on ffep. Nearly fine in a very good jacket, unclipped ("$3.95"), with shallow chipping and short closed tear at base of spine, moderate hinge wear.
Scarce first printing, preceding the second by three years, of this volume collecting two early works by the German-American psychologist best known for his contributions to the fields of Gestalt psychology and animal behavior. In the 1920s, however, Klüver’s interest in eidetic visual phenomena led him to conduct a series of experiments during which he ingested mescal “buttons,” the dried tops of the peyote cactus, a plant with an ancient history of ritual use among indigenous populations of Mexico and the American southwest. His resulting 1928 monograph, Mescal, broke ground as the first English-language work on the subject. Indeed, Klüver was decades ahead of his time in considering psychoactive compounds as worthy of serious scientific investigation, particularly with regard to the human visual apparatus. The present volume contains the full text of Mescal along with the later Mechanisms of Hallucinations (1942), and with a new preface by Klüver.
