THE ALUMNI JOURNAL 65 



assayer and the work of the so called manufacturer of the active con- 

 stituents he merely extracts the active constituents from the drug, 

 which is exactly what the assayer does. Whatever difficulty is en- 

 countered by the one is exactly as likely to occur in those of the other. 

 If the manufacturer possesses means of avoiding the difficulties the 

 assayer may employ the same means. 



As to class 2 . . . It would seen unnecessary to record the claim 

 that the fact that a present method of assay is unsatisfactory proves 

 nothing unless it also true that it cannot be made satisfactory. All 

 that the Doctor says about the unsatisfactory and "unworkable" char- 

 acter of the present official processes is true. In some cases . . . be- 

 cause knowledge of the subject is in the formative condition. This 

 is equally true of the knowledge which constitutes the working basis 

 of the manufacturer and equal defects exist in the products which he 

 is urging upon the medical profession with the assumption that they 

 are perfect. At present this is not true in a legal as it is in a scien- 

 tific sense ; the Pharmacopoeia has in many instances gone contrary 

 to its best lights, inaccurate processes having been introduced when 

 perfect and accurate ones were available. 



It is perfectly well established that commercial supplies in general 

 of aconitine, digitalin, strophantine, aspidospermine, pelletierine, 

 physostigmine, picrotoxia, santonin, etc., etc., are so unreliable that 

 one would not think it necessary to mention the fact but for the as- 

 sumption in Dr. Robinson's paper that this is not the case. 



For Diastase, anylopsin, trypsin, pepsin, etc. in which the active 

 constituent cannot be extracted by any known process, the standard- 

 ization methods work very well . . . Altho the commercial method 

 concerns itself with only one constituent, while therapeutics must 

 consider others, the fact that one can be thus definitely fixed proves 

 that the others can be. We may then compare the desirability of 

 using the assayed preparation with that of using the extracted con- 

 stituent. This being the essence of the question, it is admitted that 

 in many cases the latter method is greatly to be preferred and that 

 theoretically this is the objective toawrd which we are working. This 

 concession is, however, very dififerent from saying that standardization 

 is not necessary, that it has no field of usefulness, or that it is to be 

 condemned as incompetent because it has not yet passed the formative 

 state. 



