Annals of the Royal Botanic Garden Calcutta. The Aconites of India: A Monograph

P. J. BRUIT] in the 5th Volume of the Annals of the Botanic Garden of Calcutta (1896) had proved the existence of a considerable number of new forms but had also complicated matters by the adoption of a system of extreme synthesis. [...] No wonder that the comparison of the Arab pharmacopmas yields so little result concerning the origin and the nature of their "bish" beyond the broad fact that it consisted of the root of one of the poisonous Aconites of India. [...] do Datura; sed quid ?" Whilst in the West after the downfall of the Arab civilisation the knowledge of the Bish of India was soon lost conservatism and a pious regard for the authority of the Arab writers secured the drug a safe place in the Persian Pharmacoperas; nut nothing was added that might have thrown further light on it. [...] This closes the early history of "bish.— " a quaint mixture of fiction and truth lost at one end' in the mist of the wisdom of ancient India and dying out at the other in the barren traditions and reiterations of. the Persian Phartuacopeeas. [...] Such was the condition of our knowledge of the poisonous Aconites of India when the circumstances which I have explained in the preface to this paper caused me to take up the study of the Indian Aconites on the broad basis of a monograph.