In the historical and statistical department of the subject, I owe my cordial thanks for most valuable assistance to the distinguished traveller the Syed Keramut Ali, Mootawulee of the Hooghly Imambarrah, and also to the Hakim Mirza Abdul Razes of Teheran, who have furnished me with interesting details regarding the consumption of hemp in Candahar, Cabul, and the countries between the Indus and Herat. The Pandit Moodoosudun Gootu has favored me with notices of the statements regarding hemp in the early Sanscrit authors on materia medica; to the celebrated Kamalakantha Vidyalanka, the Pandit of the Asiatic Society, I have also to record my acknowledgments; Mr. DaCosta has obligingly supplied me with copious notes from the “Mukzun-ul-Udwieh,” and other Persian and Hindee systems of materia medica. For information relative to the varieties of the drug, and its consumption in Bengal, Mr. McCann, the deputy superintendent of police, deserves my thanks; and, lastly, to the medical gentlemen named in the sequel, I feel much indebted for the clinical details with which they have enriched the subject. _Botanical Characters--Chemical Properties--Production._ _Botanical Description._--Assuming, with Lindley and other eminent writers, that the _Cannabis sativa_ and _Indica_ are identical, we find that the plant is diœcious, annual, about three feet high, covered over with a fine pubescence; the stem is erect, branched, bright green, angular; leaves, alternate or opposite, on long weak petioles; digitate, scabrous, with linear, lanceolate, sharply serrated leaflets, tapering into a long smooth entire point; stipules subulate; clusters of flowers axillary with subulate bractes; males lax and drooping, branched and leafless at base; females erect, simple and leafy at the base. Calyx downy, five parted, imbricated. Stamens five; anthers large and pendulous. Calyx covered with brown glands. Ovary roundish with pendulous ovule, and two long filiform glandular stigmas; achenium ovate, one seeded.--_Vide Lindley’s Flora Medica_, p. 299. The fibres of the stems are long and extremely tenacious, so as to afford the best tissue for cordage, thus constituting the material for one of the most important branches of European manufactures. The seed is simply albuminous and oily, and is devoid of all narcotic properties. _Chemical Properties._--In certain seasons and in warm countries a resinous juice exudes and concretes on the leaves, slender stems, and flowers; the mode of removing this juice will be subsequently detailed. Separated and in masses it constitutes the _churrus_[1] of Nipal and Hindostan, and to this, the type or basis of all the hemp preparations, are the powers of these drugs attributable.