lxvi 
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 T>oint of view, the question 
of initiating, as a Government measure, experiments to test the reputed 
therapeutic value of indigenous drugs. The Government of Indiay 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 IH, 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 
