16
green colour, this differentiation cannot be certainly effected sufficiently early to admit
of their being replaced by transplanting other individuals from the seed-beds. This
being the case, and because, if they are of no use they nevertheless do not induce excessive
formation of seed in the normal plants, they are left standing. With the male plants, which
they term the female,1it is very different. As already explained, the greatest care is
taken to detect and eradicate these before they flower at all, and a daily search is
subsequently made for anything in the shape of a monœcious condition. As many as 20
fields were searched by the writer, plant by plant, in 1893 without a single abnormally
monœcious plant being found. In another field which, owing to some irregularity in com-
plying with excise regulations, had early in the season passed out of the owner's care and
had consequently not received the two latest and, it might be imagined, most important
visits from the poddar, only one plant was found where there were a few male flowers
among the female. This field should have carried 2,500 plants ; allowing for losses due to
inattention to weeding and to irrigation it still contained over 1,800 plants. But while the
absence of males from the fields is so striking and complete, it is impossible to find any
normal plant without healthy fruits by the time that the Gánjá is ripe for the sickle. The
explanation of this is not difficult, because though the males are so carefully removed from
the fields, no attention is given to the surplus stock of plants in the seed-beds where the
males and females both flower freely and, owing to the plants being comparatively starved,
do so much earlier than the plants that grow in the fields or that come up as casuals about
homesteads and along roadsides. Moreover, though the males among the plants near dwel-
lings are sometimes pulled up, this is not always done, and the males that come up in
hedges are rarely interfered with. A certain amount of pollination in a field is thus in-
evitable in an anemophilous species like Cannabis, and the formation of some fruit is easily
accounted for without its being necessary to postulate parthenogenesis, although that has
been, on apparently good grounds, claimed by Spallanzani as possible. 2 With the Khásiá
plants it is very different ; they never set seeds at all. 3 It is not impossible that these
plants are a consequence of impregnation by imperfect pollen such as is sometimes met with
in abnormal flowers ; seeds may have been set and these seeds were not only capable of germi-
nation but capable of producing outwardly normal plants, which, however, are incapable of
further reproduction. On the other hand, it has to be noted that Khásiá plants have never
been found either in seed-beds or in waste places, and the explanation of the condition may
be that the conditions under which the plants are grown in fields are somewhat abnormal.
They are subjected to the highest cultivation possible, stimulated by manures and irrigation;
it may therefore only be that their vegetative functions are so overstimulated, that the sexual
functions remain dormant.
Monœcious Conditions. —It is by no means unusual for monœcious conditions
to occur in diœcious plants and in Cannabis such conditions are frequent. A
1 This misapplication of the sexual names prevailed as generally in Europe 300 years ago as it does in
India now ; Dalechamps ( Hist. Gen. Plant. p. 497 [ 1587] ) is among the last of the systematic herbalists to
describe the seed-bearing sex as Cannabis mas, the sex with flowers inutiles et vanescentes being for him
Cannabis fæmina. In common speech the same error prevails still among country people, male hemp in
Germany being known as Fimmel, female as Mäschel ; in England the male is, or was, Fimble Hemp, the
female was Carle Hemp. While, however, all the peoples speaking Romance or Teuton tongues, thus, like
the Indo-Persians, reverse the sexes, in Russia, the late Dr. Batalin informed the writer, the common people,
like the inhabitants of China and Japan, term the seed-bearing plant female, the staminate one male.
2 Dissertazioni di fisica animale e vegetale: Modena, 1780; ii, p. 279.
3 We have thus to deal with the fact that Cannabis, if allowed to form seeds, will not yield a full crop
of the Gánjá resin ; the resin is formed but is reabsorbed during the ripening of the seeds, On the other
hand, unless the plant is capable of forming seed, it does not produce the resin.