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portant of the arts. That part of pharmacy that relates 

 to the identification, estimation, and selection of drugs is 

 Pharmacognosy. Many methods have been resorted to 

 in the history of medicine to secure or insure uniformity 

 in the strength of medicinal preparations. For the state 

 of perfection to which this art has now been brought, the 

 world is chiefly indebted to the house of Parke, Davis & 

 Company, of Detroit, and to George S. Davis, its manager, 

 and Albert B. Lyons, its distinguished chemist. These 

 pioneers, in the face of great opposition, devised a class of 

 fluid extracts known as "Normal Liquids," in which the 

 amount and character of the drug used was so regulated 

 that the preparation would always contain the same per- 

 centage of active constituent, that is, always have the same 

 medicinal strength. This method of manufacture has 

 since been developed and perfected until it is now the 

 basis of modern methods in medicine manufacture. It is 

 unfortunate that there are some drugs of which the medi- 

 cinal constituent cannot be determined. In such cases, 

 this method is not applicable, and in some of them the 

 method of physiological standardization is now resorted 

 to. By this method, the medicine is tested by adminis- 

 tering it to a standard animal and noting the degree of 

 the effect produced. The method is by no means so definite 

 and positive as that for chemical standardization above 

 described, but it has sufficed to vastly improve the quality 

 of some medicines of that class. 



The drugs in this Museum are classified primarily as to 

 the part of the plant represented: (i) roots, rhizomes, 

 bulbs, tubers, and other underground parts, (2) barks and 

 woods, (3) leaves, (4) herbs and other plant-bodies, (5) 

 flowers, (6) fruits, (7) seeds, (8) miscellaneous plant prod- 

 ucts, such as exudations, juices, and trichomes. Each of 

 these groups has a subordinate botanical sequence. 



