Talk:David Prain

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Page scope

David Prain is a biography of the author of Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá (1893). The report has its own article; this page covers the man and the whole of his cannabis work, including his evidence to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission and his memoir of 1904. No accession record names him as a collector, so the page carries no specimen table.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and unresolved identifications here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Source conflicts on life and career dates

Age at death. The Kew Guild notice (1944) gives "aged 87 years". A birth on 11 July 1857 and a death on 16 March 1944 make him 86. The article gives the two dates and no age.
Place of death. The Dictionary of National Biography 1941–1950 and the Royal Society of Edinburgh's biographical index both give Whyteleafe, Surrey. The Kew Guild notice gives "his residence, The Well Farm, Warlingham". The two Surrey villages adjoin. The article follows the DNB and the RSE index.
County of birth. The DNB gives Fettercairn, Kincardineshire; the RSE index gives "Fettercairn, Angus". The article follows the DNB.
The Calcutta superintendency. The DNB dates it to King's retirement in 1898. The Kew Guild notice says "he was appointed in 1908 Superintendent of the Gardens", which cannot be right, since he was at Kew from the end of 1905; it is most likely a misprint for 1898. The RSE index compresses the whole Calcutta career to "Director 1885-1905, Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta", which is wrong both in the title and in the opening year. The article follows the DNB, which agrees with Buckland (1906) on the 1887 curatorship and the 1895 chair.
Entry to the Indian Medical Service. The DNB gives no year. Buckland (1906) gives 1884, and Prain told the commission in 1894 that he had been in the service since October 1884. The RSE index gives "Indian Medical Service 1883-5". The article gives Buckland's year and Prain's own statement, attributed to each.
Length of the first army posting. The DNB has "two and a half years of army duties in India, interrupted in 1885 by a few months at the Royal Botanic Garden". Prain's oral evidence has him in special civil employ with the botanical gardens from October 1884 onwards, "with the exception of about a year in military employ". The article states the 1885 secondment and the 1887 recall and does not total the military service.
The knighthood. The DNB gives June 1912. The London Gazette of 12 July 1912 records the conferral at Buckingham Palace on Monday 1 July 1912. The article gives the Gazette's date.

The Royal Society obituary

Burkill's obituary of Prain in the Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society (vol. 4, no. 13, 1944, pp. 746–770, doi:10.1098/rsbm.1944.0020) is the fullest account of his life and carries a catalogue of his publications at pp. 763–770. Crossref confirms every field of the citation and the Royal Society's site marks the article free, but the PDF is behind a bot check that refuses automated retrieval, and the article page itself shows only the first paragraph. It is not cited here because it has not been read. The DNB entry used throughout this article is by the same author and rests on the same material, and Burkill names the Royal Society obituary and a notice in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, session 156 (1943–44), as his sources. E. J. Salisbury's obituary in Nature (vol. 153, 8 April 1944, pp. 426–427, doi:10.1038/153426a0) is also unread and uncited.

Names and spellings in the sources

Both scans of volume IV of the commission's evidence print the name of the secretary of the Royal Society's pharmacological committee as "Dunstane". The article uses the printed form rather than normalising it. The Kew Guild notice is signed "A.D.C."; the same issue names A. D. Cotton as Hon. Secretary and Editor of the Journal, but the article cites the initials as they stand, which is how the wiki already cites the Kew Bulletin notice of George Watt. Prain spells the male-plant expert parukdar in 1904, where the commission has parakhdar; the variants are collected on Talk:Poddar.

Figures read off scans

Two figures quoted from the commission's volume IV, the "tola and half of dry leaves" Prain took and the "grant of £500" proposed in the Dunstane letter, were each read in two independent scans, the Internet Archive text of `b32222920_0004` and the copy held with the project sources, and the two agree. The daily dose of ganja in grains given in his written answer 28 is not quoted: the two scans disagree on its first digit and no page image has been checked against them.

The commission's corrections

The commission corrected Prain's description of the plant at vol. I ch. II para. 21, on the colour of the stem and on his statement that the male plant carries no trace of a rudimentary female flower; at Khandwa it found male-looking plants with a few female flowers or seeds. Prain's memoir of 1904 describes solitary female flowers taking the place of the lowest male flower clusters on the Indian male plant, and identifies them as the poddars' guide. No source connects the two, and the article does not.

Notes compiled when the page was drafted, 17 September 2026.