kvi INTRODUCTION. 



should further consider, and report their opinion as to the action which 

 would be best calculated to give the suggested encouragement. The Com- 

 mittee should further consider, from a practical point of view, the question 

 of initiating, as a Government measure, experiments to test the reputed 

 therapeutic value of indigenous drugs. The Government of India, as at 

 present advised, are inclined to the opinion that such investigations can 

 more profitably be left to the enterprise of private individuals. 



This Committee has so far published two useful reports. 

 The Ayurvedic practitioners are holding conferences every 

 year in different cities of this country, in which medi- 

 cinal plants and drugs are exhibited. This will greatly 

 advance the cause of the more extensive use of indigenous 

 drugs. The chemistry of Indian medicinal plants is being 

 investigated by several chemists in different laboratories of 

 India, as is evident from their reports published from time to 

 time in journals of Chemical Societies and of other learned 

 institutions. The quarterly journal, named " Food and Drugs," 

 of Calcutta, now defunct, published several interesting papers 

 on indigenous drugs. There are also a few workers in Tata's 

 Research Institute, Bangalore, investigating this subject. Fifty 

 thousand rupees have been donated to the Tropical School of 

 Medicine recently established in Calcutta, by His Highness the 

 Maharaja of Durbhanga, and ear-marked for the investigation 

 of the properties and uses of indigenous drugs. 



But at present there is no Pharmaceutical Society or School 

 of Pharmacy in this country to carefully study and investigate 

 the subject of indigenous drugs. The establishment of such 

 an institution is highly desirable ; so also of farms of medicinal 

 plants. Regarding the growing of medicinal plants, Mr. F. 

 A. Miller writes in the Journal " American Pharmaceutical 

 Association III, pp. 34-38 " that the time has arrived to reduce 

 the work of drug cultivation to an exact science and to 

 determine the commercial possibilities of the most promising 

 forms, in the same manner as has been done in agricultural and 

 other economic farms."* 



The present war, as mentioned before, emphasises the 



* [Chemical Abstracts for February 20th, 1914, p. 786.] 



Mr. R. P. Craford writing in Scientific American Supplement, September 

 8, 1917 on " Reducing drug plant cultivation to a science," says, " that drug 

 plant cultivation is far from easy and the institution that works out these 



