310 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
Treasury under date of April 7, 1886. The President of the 
Academy, Professor Marsh, appointed a committee, consisting 
of Ira Remsen and George F. Barker who reported on June 14, 
1886. As various methods had been employed for determining 
the percentage of morphine in opium, the committee at first 
proposed to ascertain which of them was calculated to give the 
most accurate results, but having learned that the Treasury 
Department would be satisfied with a less thorough investigation, 
it confined itself to a single method. 
By employing Fltckiger’s process, as modified by Squibb, it 
was determined that the percentage of morphine in the syrupy 
liquid opium was 19.53, and in the same when reduced to a dry 
powder, 25.28 per cent.*”° 
A year later, in 1887, a second request was received from the 
Acting Secretary of the Treasury for the same information 
regarding another sample of smuggled opium. The President 
seems not to have been entirely satisfied to have the Academy 
called upon to answer these comparatively unimportant inquiries. 
Notwithstanding, he requested the same two chemists to serve a 
second time, and appointed Professor Charles F. Chandler as the 
third member of the committee. In a letter addressed to the 
chairman of the committee, however, under date of May 4, 1887, 
he remarked: “The province of the Academy is not to conduct 
a technical examination merely, but especially to bring out the 
scientific principles involved in the investigation, and in this 
spirit I wish the work to be undertaken.” ** 
Having in view this injunction of the President, the committee 
returned to its original plan of first testing the various methods 
of analysis to ascertain which of them gave the most uniform 
results, and then applying this particular method to the problem 
at issue. Accordingly, the committee engaged the services of 
Mr. I. H. Kastle of Johns Hopkins University to make the 
necessary experiments. Five methods were investigated, namely, 
that of the United States Pharmacopeeia, Fliickiger’s method, 
**° Rep. Nat. Acad. Sci. for 1886, p. 40. 
*2 Rep. Nat. Acad. Sci. for 1887, p. 32. 
