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 medicinal 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
