THE ALUMNI JOURNAL. 



251 



methods of bacteriological investigation are 

 still of a chemical nature. The preparation of 

 the culture fluids, the application of the tests, 

 and the isolation of the products are chemical 

 operations, and the advances to be made in the 

 near future are to be looked for mainly on the 

 chemical side of the subject. For this reason 

 the absence from the columns of this journal of 

 papers resting upon the bacteriological ques- 

 tions, has been a matter of surprise to the 

 writer, and the important contributions which 

 have been herein recently made by Dr. 

 Schweinitz, Dorsett, Bennett, Pammel and 

 Mason, a source of congratulation. Their re- 

 sults foretell the rich harvest of the future when 

 the complete quantitative value of the chemi- 

 cal actions involved are known, and the diifer- 

 ent views which they may be expected to in- 

 augurate as to the nature of many bodies 

 now grouped closely together, but which de- 

 port themselves very differently when bacteria 

 are the reagents made use of. 



It is for these reasons that the writer desires 

 to put on record the slight observations which 

 he has made during the course of ordinary 

 chemical work. They spring out of some anom- 

 alous behavior of specimens of milk sugar 

 which were being examined for purity. All the 

 samples of pulverized milk sugar coming from 

 drug stores which he examined, proved to con- 

 tain a ferment when their solutions were kept 

 at the optimum temperature for a sufficient 

 length of time. The lactic acid produced was 

 isolated in the form of calcium lactate. This 

 was not the case with some lactose crystallized 

 in nodular masses of prismatic crystals which 

 has been obtained originally from Kahlbaum, 

 and had been standing for twenty-five years in 

 a stoppered jar. It was sterile. With the ex- 

 ception of this specimen, all the others gave an 

 abundant crop of bacteria when definite weights 

 dissolved in sterilized water were submitted to 

 ordinary gelatin-peptone culture. The maxi- 

 mum number obtained in this medium was 

 1,400 colonies per gram, of milk sugar. In 

 studying these colonies I looked more particu- 

 larly for the bacillus acidi lactici and the other 

 ten or twelve species, which are at the present 

 time classified as the specific milk bacteria, but 

 without success. With a lactose-litmus gelatin 

 solution a still larger number of colonies was 

 obtained, and possibly larger search in this 

 medium might have revealed the specific milk 

 bacteria of lactic acid fermentation. But my 

 immediate object had been attained, and the 

 presence of bacteria as a common impurity in 

 lactose, to be looked for and avoided by the 

 chemist and the druggist, sufficiently demon- 

 strated. — Am. Chem, Soc. 



NOTES ON A NEW KINO. 



Although kino was introduced into European 

 medical practice nearly 150 years ago and has 

 gradually been incorporated into ten Phar- 

 macopoeias, including our own, the French 

 Codex, and the Pharmacopoeia of the United 

 States, there is still some uncertainty about the 

 origin of at least a portion of the supplies from 

 which the wants of pharmacy are filled, while 

 recent research into the astringent properties 

 of the commercial drug reveals a most unsatis- 

 factory divergence of tannin value and solu- 

 bility in the examined samples, although the 

 specimens were all obtained from the chief 

 source of the market supply in Europe. The 

 tannin value of six specimens examined in this 

 way ranged from 14.2 per cent, to 52 percent., 

 the least satisfactory of the samples yielding 7 

 per cent, of a grey-colored ash, while the best 

 only gave 1.75 per cent, of white ash. The test 

 for solubility in rectified spirit, as laid down in 

 the British Pharmacopoeia, was answered only 

 by one specimen out of the six. and this, by the 

 way, was the one containing the highest per- 

 centage of tannin. It is further noteworthy 

 that this specimen was not derived from 

 Pterocarpus '}nat supiuni Roxb., the East Indian 

 kino-yielding tree, which is the only one men- 

 tioned in the British Pharmacopoeia as the 

 source of the drug, but from Pterocarpus 

 erinaceus Lam., and was, in fact, imported 

 from tropical Africa, the habitat of that tree. 



Although kino is not a very important drug, 

 it is nevertheless prescribed sufficiently often 

 to render uniformity in quality a most desirable 

 property of the supply, and in this respect the 

 East Indian kinos, upon which pharmacy has 

 been solely dependent for many years, fall 

 lamentably short. It is difficult to understand 

 the cause of this fact, for Pterocarpus mar- 

 supium Roxb. is by no means a rare tree. The 

 entire therapeutical requirements of kino do not 

 exceed three or four tons a year, and the prepa- 

 ration of the drug (consisting simply in making 

 longitudinal incisions in the bark round the 

 trunk of the tree, allowing the gum to exude into 

 a receiver formed of a broad leaf and drying it 

 in the sun) is so simple that sufficient supply 

 of kino of fairly constant therapeutical prop- 

 erties ought to be a matter of course. Without 

 going further into this question, it may be suf- 

 ficient to state here that during the past five or 

 six years the supply of pharmaceutically satis- 

 factory kino has been altogether insufficient to 

 fill the requirements, and that the price of the 

 drug is now about thirty-five times higher than 



