4
taken by a third panicle usually smaller than the lateral ones, often reduced to a
simple cyme or a single flower ; in Indian plants the writer has only once or twice met
with a single flower, in most cases the axil is altogether empty (PLATE 1, fig. 1).
Moreover, it is, in India, very usual to find that the lowest pairs of stipular panicles,
that is to say, the pairs of panicles which should occur at the bases of the floral
branches lowest down on the stem, are either entirely absent or are replaced by
pairs of solitary female flowers (PLATE 1, fig. 2). Though simulating a panicle,
the male inflorescence is not in reality a spiral of racemes but a spiral succession
of cyme-systems in which the axis is defined and gives out two branches, the lower
smaller than the higher, which latter repeats the process (PLATE 1, fig. 3).
The presence of a female flower, instead of a panicle of cymes, in the axil of a stipule
at the base of a stem-branch in a male plant was first noticed by Autenrieth 1
though the flower
referred to by him happened not to be a normal female but a pseudo-hermaphrodite one,
and the fact that it replaced a whole panicle, not merely a single flower, does not seem to
have impressed him.
In India the phenomenon is of very common occurrence ; as a rule the leaves and
branches low down on the stem are opposite or sub-opposite and, as a rule, too, the lowest
branches are decidedly extra-axillary, a character in which the solitary female flowers
which are basal to the lowest male floral branches follow them, though these indicate their
relationship to the stipules as definitely as the upraised branches do their relationship to the
leaves ; these female flowers are very often abortive and are sometimes only represented by
a partially developed enveloping bract.
A remarkable but well-known feature of hemp-cultivation, as practised in Bengal, is the
care and success with which all male plants are eliminated, long before they flower. The
object is to prevent undue fertilization of the female plants, which yield the Gánjá resin that
it is the cultivator's object to obtain. The process of weeding out the males, which is con-
ducted by a special expert—the parukdar or poddar —has been described by Kerr. 2 When
the writer first visited the Gánjá mahals in 1893 it was impossible to test the accuracy of
Kerr's statements, the season being so far advanced that the elimination of males had
already been effected ; it was, therefore, impossible to understand Kerr's allusion to certain
" filaments or stipules," mentioned by him as the poddar's guides. The hemp districts
were, therefore, re-visited, a few years later, at the proper season, in order to ascertain
precisely what was meant. It was interesting to find then that the " filaments or stipules "
in question were the often abortive, solitary female flowers that so frequently, in the Indian
male hemp plant, take the place that theoretically should be occupied by the lowest pairs
of paniculate male inflorescences.
The nature of the male inflorescence has been studied by Wylder, 3 Eichler, 4 and
Briosi and Tognini. 5 The accounts that these authors give differ less in reality than would
1De discrimine sexuali,p.7,t. 2,fig. 18.
2 Report on the cultivation of and trade in Gánjá in Bengal : Calcutta 1877, p. 18.—The process, it
need hardly be remarked, is empirical ; the cultivators reverse the sexes and term the rejected plants, as
being the less valuable kind, females; the nobler and more useful ones, which they retain, are, for them,
the males. They know that pollen-bearing plants do in some way affect the value of the Gánjá crop and
therefore remove them. But of the precise significance of what is done, neither the cultivators nor
the poddars are aware.
3 Flora (1844), p. 735, t. 3, f. 1, and Flora (1851), p. 434.
4 Bluthen-diagramme : Berlin, 1878 ; ii. p. 60.
5 Intorno all' anatomia della Canapa, i. 93.