The seed is believed to possess many medicinal qualities, and for this reason children, too, often wear it.
Peasant women in Italy and Spain use the same seed as a protection against evil, and even American women have been known to put strings of them on teething children as a soothing remedy.
An important fact I established is that the Indians in the barrancas, in this part of the country, use something like trincheras for the cultivation of their little crops.

To obtain arable land on the mountain slopes the stones are cleared from a convenient spot and utilised in the construction of a wall below the field thus made.

The soil is apt to be washed away by heavy rains, and the wall not only prevents what little earth there is on the place from being carried off, but also catches what may come from above, and in this way secures sufficient ground to yield a small crop.

Fields thus made can even be ploughed.

On the slopes of one arroyo I counted six such terraces, and in the mountainous country on the Rio Fuerte, toward the State of Sinaloa, chile, beans, squashes, _Coix Lachryma-Jobi_, and bananas are raised on trincheras placed across the arroyos that run down the hills.