David Prain

David Prain
By http://shibpurinternational.com/sublink/images/Botanical%20Garden/David%20Prain.jpg
Born	11 July 1857 Fettercairn, Kincardineshire, Scotland
Died	16 March 1944 Whyteleafe, Surrey, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Botanist and medical officer
Institutions	Indian Medical Service; Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta; Botanical Survey of India; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Known for	Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá
Botanical author abbreviation	Prain

David Prain (11 July 1857 – 16 March 1944) was a Scottish botanist and medical officer of the Indian Medical Service. He was curator of the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden at Sibpur near Calcutta from 1887 and succeeded to the superintendency of that garden and to the directorship of the Botanical Survey of India in 1898. From the end of 1905 until 1922 he was director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

In 1893 the Board of Revenue of the Lower Provinces of Bengal deputed him for three months to report on ganja. The resulting Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá set out the botany of the plant, the formation of its resin and the working of the licensed cultivation in Bengal. It concluded that the use of ganja was "widespread and innocuous" and that the harm from its abuse had been "greatly exaggerated".^: 75 The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 took its definitions of ganja, charas and bhang from that report, used his outline of the Bengal cultivation and examined him as a witness.^: 59 He returned to the plant in 1904 in a memoir on the flowers of Cannabis sativa, in which he identified the feature by which the Bengal cultivators' male-plant expert, the poddar, told the sexes apart.^: 4

Early life and training

Prain was born at Fettercairn in Kincardineshire on 11 July 1857, the elder child of David Prain, a native of Inchture near Dundee, by his wife Mary, daughter of George Thomson, a farmer and miller of the Vale of Alford in Aberdeenshire. He was taught at the Fettercairn parish school until he was 15 and then for a year at Aberdeen Grammar School. A bursary took him to the University of Aberdeen, where he added to his means by teaching in the vacations and graduated MA in 1878 with honours in natural science, botany being his strongest subject.

Two years of teaching at Ramsgate College allowed him to return to Aberdeen in 1880 to study medicine. He qualified MB and CM in 1883 with the highest honours and became a licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in the same year.

Indian Medical Service and the Calcutta garden

Prain entered the Indian Medical Service at the head of the list. C. E. Buckland's Dictionary of Indian Biography dates his entry to 1884. Prain himself told the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1894 that he had been in the service since October 1884.^: 305 Army duties in India were interrupted in 1885 by a few months at the Royal Botanic Garden, where he acted as curator of the herbarium under George King. He was recalled to that post in 1887. Within a year King went on leave and Prain acted for him as superintendent of the garden, government quinologist and professor of botany at the Medical College in Calcutta. He held the three posts temporarily again in 1891–92 and succeeded to them when King retired in 1898, together with the directorship of the Botanical Survey of India. The chair of botany he had held from 1895.

He was at once made a trustee of the Indian Museum, placed on the committee of management of the zoological garden at Alipur and on the board of visitors of the engineering college at Shibpur. The viceroy nominated him a fellow of the University of Calcutta. He carried the cinchona department through a general depression in the trade. Over his Calcutta years he kept up a large output of botanical publication, including a flora of Bengal, Bengal Plants (1903). He also collected in Tibet at the time of the Younghusband expedition. Burkill wrote of him that "he preferred to study plants which in one way or another serve man". He had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 6 February 1888.

Prain was promoted major in 1896. His promotion to lieutenant-colonel was dated 1 October 1904.

The ganja report of 1893

The Board of Revenue of the Lower Provinces instructed Prain on 18 February 1893 to report on the cultivation and use of ganja. He went on deputation on 18 March, had the period extended by a month beyond the two originally allowed and returned to duty on 17 June. He signed the covering letter at Sibpur on 21 June 1893 as Surgeon-Captain D. Prain, curator of the herbarium.^{: covering letter} The Board set him five points: the waste under the existing system of manufacture, how the active principle of the drug could best be obtained, the best means of preserving ganja, the effect on it of being kept under existing conditions and the effect of ganja as an article of excise. He wrote the report as a supplement to the report of 1877 by Hem Chunder Kerr and did not repeat what that report already held.^{: covering letter}

Its opening chapter denied any botanical basis for separating Indian hemp from the fibre plant. Prain wrote that there were "no botanical characters to separate them" and that they did "not differ as regards the structure of stem, leaves, flowers, or fruit". Hemp "as a fibre-yielding plant in no way differs from hemp as a narcotic-producing one".^: 1 He explained the resin as a reserve substance that the plant lays down when it has nearly finished growing and then draws on to ripen its seed. Where seed is set the resin is absorbed; where the plant is prevented from setting seed it stays on the surface of the flower heads as a sticky exudation. In the Himalaya, Tibet and Turkestan the substance is superfluous to the plant's own needs and appears early as a glandular exudation, so that resin can be gathered there without preventing seed.^: 1–2

On that basis the second chapter defined the three products. Siddhi, bhang, subji or patti were the dry leaves of either sex, cultivated or not; charas was the resin collected separately; and ganja was "the dried flowering-tops of cultivated female hemp plants which have become coated with resin in consequence of having been unable to set seeds freely".^: 3–4 He also corrected Kerr on the khásiá plants of the Bengal fields, which Kerr had called hermaphrodite. Prain found that they flowered more freely than any other plants in the field and were barren females: in some hundreds examined the ovules looked perfect, no seed formed and no resin was deposited. He allowed that the want of function might be "only due to the unnatural conditions, resulting from high cultivation". In the same paragraph he cited Kerr approvingly, that the plants are "more bushy and look more healthy than the others". He followed Kerr too on their fate at harvest, left standing in the field or cut for fuel.^{: 2, 5, 13}

Prain did not see the poddars at work. These men, he wrote, "profess ability to recognise the sexes long before the plants are mature" and go round a field "three or perhaps four times during a season". He added: "How these men distinguish the plants I cannot say; I have not yet had opportunities of seeing them at work. The remarkable thing is that the work is well done."^: 4 He tested the result instead. A field of about a bigha had passed out of its owner's care early in the season and so had missed the last two rounds. It should have carried nearly 2,500 plants and must still have carried 1,800 to 2,000. It held no male plant at all, only one abnormal female with some male flowers on it. On another occasion he searched 20 fields without finding a single such plant.^: 4

The second part of the report turned to history and origin. Prain placed the plant's home outside India: it was "a native of Southern Siberia, being indigenous in the Kirghiz steppes" and truly wild from there eastward, while elsewhere it grew only as an escape from cultivation. The earliest Indian notice he found was in the Atharva Veda, under a name he read as belonging to the plant's fibre use, which he took to indicate that the fibre had come east before the drug.^: 38–41

He closed by dismissing as "chimerical" the opinion, sometimes seriously expressed, that the plant could be extirpated.^: 74 Ganja, he wrote, might be used or abused like any other stimulant or sedative narcotic: "the use here is widespread and innocuous; the abuse, though dangerous, is very limited; the harm that results from its abuse has been not only greatly exaggerated, but much misunderstood". Writers who had described its effects appeared to him to have met only cases of abuse and to have taken them for the ordinary result.^: 75 As an administrative document of its period the report also sorts consumers by rank and character. It explains the disrepute of hemp in Bengali society by what Prain called an initial contempt for the class that cultivates and prepares the fibre.^: 75–76

Evidence to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission examined Prain as its witness number 113, describing him as curator of the herbarium and librarian of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta. He opened his written answers by saying that he had not been specially interested in hemp before the deputation and had possessed until then only "a fairly complete knowledge of the botanical and a general average acquaintance with the physiological and therapeutic characters of the plant and its products".^: 303

Prain marked the standing of his own answers as he gave them. Where one rested on enquiry rather than observation he said so and ruled it out: his information on excessive consumption "partakes of the nature of hearsay evidence, and is not admissible" and answers drawn from Bengali friends were "inadmissible as evidence".^: 303–304 Asked whether the inquiry had changed his views, he answered:

I commenced my enquiry into the use of the plant with a preconceived idea, derived from copious assertion, that ganja was a pernicious drug, and that charas and bhang were harmless. I have found that charas and ganja are the same thing in reality, used in the same way, and that, therefore, general opinion was absolutely unreliable. I have been unable to find a single instance during three months' enquiry of any evil effects arising from the use of any of the three products of hemp.^: 304

On insanity he reported no case in his own practice or experience in which any hemp preparation had produced it, while pointing out that his medical work in India had been "entirely with a military, and never with a civil population".^: 304 In cases with a ganja history that had been put to him he had never been able to establish whether ganja or bhang was at issue. Too little weight, he thought, had been given to the use of the drug by people whose minds were already troubled or deficient.^: 304

His oral evidence records the experiments behind the report. He had taken bhang himself, "about a tola and half of dry leaves" in an emulsion made as Kerr described but without the spices, found the tendency to laugh not marked and was "rather disappointed with the result". He had conducted the experiments on monkeys and cats. Those on monkeys he thought unsatisfactory, because of the difficulty of giving them a dose. He had tried ganja in a chillum and taken the three whiffs that he identified as the regulation dose, but could not inhale, so that there were no effects; he never inhaled ganja by smoking at all.^: 305 He was "extremely disappointed" that the chemical part of the report had been "only partial and inconclusive". He put in a letter of 18 November 1893 from Professor Dunstane, secretary of the Royal Society's pharmacological committee, who offered to isolate the active constituent in about two years if the Government of India would meet the cost "by a grant of £500". Prain recommended that the chemical inquiry be completed, calling it important both practically and scientifically.^: 305–306 A further report of 27 April 1894, appended to his evidence, gave the first results of the storage trials: ganja stored in gunny and straw was in perfect order, while samples sealed in tin had fermented. As a commercial article the tinned cakes were "valueless".^: 306–307

The commission's use of his work

The commission put Prain's definitions of the three products at the head of the list of questions it sent out, noting that they were borrowed from him. It added that the word "cultivated" often had to be read out of the definition of ganja.^: 59 Its account of cultivation in Bengal follows Kerr for the detail and Prain for the outline.^: 60

The commission's discussion of whether hemp is indigenous to India opens on Prain's report. He was "clearly of opinion that the hemp plant is not indigenous to India, but that 'having reached India as a fibre-yielding species, the plant developed the narcotic property for which it is now chiefly celebrated there'". George Watt, in his article on hemp, was "not quite so decided as the above authority" in excluding the whole of India from the area of indigenous growth. The commission quoted Prain on the absence of botanical characters separating the Indian plant and called these "the most recent scientific views, and coming from Indian botanists they carry special authority".^: 15–16

It corrected his description of the plant on two points. He had not noticed that the stem varies in colour, a difference to which the replies from Nepal and Mysore attached stronger narcotic properties. He had also written that the male plant carries no trace of even a rudimentary female flower, whereas at Khandwa the commission found plants with the general appearance of males that carried a few female flowers or seeds.^: 16–17

The flowers of Cannabis

Plate I of Prain's memoir of 1904, drawn from a male plant. Figure 2, at the foot of the plate, shows solitary female flowers in place of the lowest clusters of male flowers.

Prain published On the Morphology, Teratology and Diclinism of the Flowers of Cannabis in 1904, as a major in the Indian Medical Service, in the government's series of scientific memoirs. He wrote that the subject of Cannabis had interested him since the deputation of 1893 and had occupied him at intervals since.^: 2

The memoir takes up a problem the standard treatments had left open. Organographic and histological study had cleared up most of the difficulties in the flower, but the morphological nature of the pistil and the ovule had defeated it. The most recent authors had rejected every theory advanced and declared the question insoluble. Prain proposed to approach it instead through teratology, by a systematic examination of the malformations that occur in the plant.^: 1 Many of those malformations he had noted in 1893. His drawings of them were shown to the Linnean Society of London on 15 November 1894. He declined an invitation to publish a paper because his deductions "did not then appear altogether conclusive". He afterwards revisited the Bengal cultivation tract and grew plants experimentally at the garden at Shibpur, which let him test and confirm most of the observations of 1893.^: 2

One of the return visits answered the question the 1893 report had left standing. Kerr had written that the poddars were guided by certain "filaments or stipules". In 1893 the season was too far advanced for Prain to see what was meant, the males having already been taken out. The hemp districts were therefore revisited "a few years later, at the proper season". The filaments proved to be "the often abortive, solitary female flowers" that so frequently, in the Indian male hemp plant, take the place that should be occupied by the lowest pairs of male flower clusters.^: 4

Prain called the poddar's method empirical. In his account the cultivators named the plants by their usefulness rather than their sex, calling the resin-yielding plant mardá or male, the pollen-bearing plant mádi or female and the barren female khásiá, a word he glossed as eunuch, capon or gelding. They knew that pollen-bearing plants affected the crop and removed them, but of "the precise significance of what is done, neither the cultivators nor the poddars are aware".^{: 4, 15}

Kew

Prain was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1905 and appointed director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew at the end of that year, in succession to William Thiselton-Dyer. The Kew staff met him in the Curator's Office Yard on a chilly December morning in 1905, shortly before the handover, when a group photograph was taken. He retired from the Indian Medical Service on 31 July 1906. Earlier that summer he had been appointed a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire, the notice naming the three Indian offices he had held: director of the Botanical Survey of India, superintendent of the royal botanical gardens and government quinologist, Calcutta.

He was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George on 1 January 1912 and knighted at Buckingham Palace on 1 July of the same year. He edited the Botanical Magazine from 1907 to 1920 and kept up his own taxonomic work in the hours after the official day. The war of 1914–18 took those hours from him. The demands were less the loss of staff, severe though that was, than the calls on him to direct the government's botanical problems "to proper places and proficient minds". He was a member or chairman of many committees. Burkill wrote that by 1919 he held most of the trusted positions. The Kew Guild remembered his insistence on accuracy and an undated memorandum handed back with "Not quite finished, is it?", along with his persistent and finally successful effort to raise the herbarium scientific staff's salaries to the level of those at the Natural History Museum.

Later life

Prain retired from Kew in 1922, shortly before his 65th birthday. He was president of the Linnean Society from 1916 to 1919, treasurer of the Royal Society from 1919 to 1929, a trustee of the British Museum from 1924 to 1936 and president of the Imperial Botanical Conference in 1924. He chaired the council of the John Innes Horticultural Institution from 1909. The Linnean Society gave him its Linnean medal and the Royal Horticultural Society, of which he was a vice-president from 1919, its Victoria Medal of Honour. Aberdeen conferred an honorary LL.D. on him in 1900 and St Andrews in 1911.

He married in 1887 Margaret Caird, daughter of the Rev. William Thomson, minister of Belhelvie. Their son was killed in the war of 1914–18 and Lady Prain died in 1942. Deafness in his later years made committee work difficult, though he kept his memory and his other faculties. He died on 16 March 1944.

The International Plant Names Index gives his standard botanical author abbreviation as Prain.

See also

• George Watt
• Hem Chunder Kerr
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Poddar
• Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá (1893)