THE ALUMNI JOURNAL 156 



LIST OF DRUGS AND CHEMICALS. 



The question as to what drugs and chemicals shall or shall not 

 be admitted into the Pharmacopceia may well be left to those 

 delegates representing the medical and pharmaceutical professions, 

 the former being- able to authoritatively state the needs of the 

 physicians and the pharmacists being able to speak for their larger 

 constitiTency — the public and its demands for household remedies. 



CHEMICALS. 



The standards for chemicals that are admitted into the Pharma- 

 copoeia should, in the judgment of your committee, be based upon 

 their medicinal rather than on their chemical purity, the elimination 

 or reduction to lowest possible limit of all harmful impurities being- 

 demanded, but the presence of a small given percentage of a harm- 

 less constituent being permitted when its elimination would add 

 unduly to the cost of the finished product. It is believed that the 

 delegates from the American Chemical Society will be able to give 

 authoritative data on these points. 



DRUGS OF VEGETABLE ORIGIN 



Present tln' greatest problem, varying as they do from year to 

 year owing to greater or less rainfall, unduly hot or cold seasons, 

 etc., coupled with the fact that the bulk of the world's vegetable 

 drugs are of wild growth, collected by children and adults in most 

 cases of very limited intelligence. In making standards for these 

 articles it should be borne in mind that even under cultivation 

 crops dififer largely in standard and value from year to year, and if 

 this is so in regard to domestic crops raised with more or less 

 care in cultivation, how much more must the variation be with 

 wild crops gathered under all sorts of conditions by ignorant col- 

 lectors. Without doubt much can be done in the future to raise 

 the standard of indigenous drugs by educating the collectors and 

 the country store keepers who buy from them, and your committee 

 can conceive no better means to forward this end than the com- 

 pilation and distribution of descriptions in the simplest language 

 of indigenous medicinal plants, with illustrations of the plants 

 themselves and the medicinal portions of them, with simple direc- 

 tions as to time and method of collection and preparation for the 

 market. The Bureau of Plant Industry of the Department of 



