Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Indiana Academy of Science Volume 22 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 Excerpt: ...Experiment Station, Purdue University, Lafayette, Id. The Improvement Op Medicinal Plants. By F. A. Milleh. Certain suggestions were made before the last meeting of the Academy for the possible improvement of valuable medicinal forms through the application of breeding methods. Some of these suggestions have been carried out during the past summer upon experimental plots of belladonna, henbane, stramonium, digitalis and cannabis. The results, though only tentative, are extremely encouraging, and indicate a means of obtaining not only greater yields of the resulting drugs, but better and more reliable medicinal products. Belladonna has shown great uniformity in morphological characters, but considerable variability in the percentage of alkaloids in selected plants. In a comparatively small number this variation was found to be over 50%, or from 0.52% to 0.87% total alkoloids as found in the highest and lowest yielding individuals. Much has been said concerning the variation in total alkaloids as influenced by various conditions. In fact some experimental work has been done upon the influence of such factors as food elements, light and shade, soils, meteorology, etc., upon the production of alkoloids and other active principles. It now seems apparent, however, that before such data can have any scientific bearing, or be utilized as a means of following the influence of given factors, uniform strains of the plants under investigation must first be obtained. This apparent necessity is due to the wide variations which have been found to exist between the individuals of a given group which have been grown under uniform conditions. A group of individual plants varying over 50% when grown under uniform ecological conditions cannot be expected to behave uniformly wh...