THE ALUMNI JOURNAL. 



243 



gustingness ; the more repulsive they 

 were, the more effectual. Hence Mon- 

 taigne's ridicule of the monstrous com- 

 pounds used by doctors in his day — 

 'dung of elephant, the left foot of a tor- 

 toise, liver of a mole, powdered excre- 

 ment of rat,' etc. Hence 'the belief that 

 epilepsy may be cured by drinking water 

 out of the skull of a suicide or by tasting 

 the blood of a murderer ; ' that ' moss 

 growing on a human skull, if dried, 

 powdered, and taken as snuff, will cure 

 the headache ; ' and that the halter and 

 chips from the gibbet on which male- 

 factors have been executed or exposed 

 have medicinal properties. And there 

 prevails in our own days, among the un- 

 cultured and the young, a similarly de- 

 rived notion. They betray an ingrained 

 mental association between the nastiness 

 of a medicine and its efficiency : so much 

 so, indeed, that a medicine which is 

 pleasant is with difficulty believed to be 

 a medicine." — Br. Col. Dr. 



NEW OFFICERS OF THE AMERICAN 

 PHARHACEUTICAL ASSOCIATION. 



The forty-third annual meeting of the 

 American Pharmaceutical Association 

 completed its most important work at 

 Denver, Col., August 16. The following 

 officers were elected : President, Prof. J. 

 M. Good, of St, Louis, Mo.; Vice-Presi- 

 dents, Charles E. Dohme, of Baltimore, 

 Md., A. Brandenberger, of Jefferson City, 

 Mo., Mrs. M. O. Miner, Hiawatha, Kan.; 

 Treasurer, S. A. D. Sheppard, Boston, 

 Mass.; Secretary, Charles Caspari, Jr.; 

 Members of the Council, George L-. 

 Hechler, of Cleveland, O., Charles M. 

 Ford, of Denver, Col., W. J. M. Gordon, 

 of Cincinnati, O., and Jacob Bergheim, 

 of Houston, Tex. 



The next meeting of the Association 

 will be held in Montreal, August 12, 

 II 



NOTES HERE AND THERE. 



Photographing in Colors. — An important 

 paper on the theory of color photography is 

 contributed to No. 6 of Wiedemann' s Annalen 

 by Herr Otto Wiener. The paper deals with the 

 methods of attacking this problem, which are 

 based not upon the photography of the different 

 constituents of colored light and their subse- 

 quent recognition, like Mr. Ives's heliochromy 

 and similar processes, but upon the direct pro- 

 duction of color by the influence of light upon 

 certain chemical substances. The most recent, 

 and, in a way, the most successful, of these 

 methods is that due to Lippman, and the ques- 

 tion raised by Herr Wiener is whether the old 

 processes invented by Becquerel, Seebeck and 

 Poiteven are based upon interference colors like 

 Lippmann's or upon " body colors," i. e., colors 

 produced by partial absorption of the incident 

 light. That Lippmann's colors are due to in- 

 terference may be very simply proved by 

 breathing upon a plate with a photograph of 

 the spectrum, when the colors quickly wander 

 toward the violet end, this result being due to 

 an increase in the distance between the model 

 layers. This experiment cannot be applied to 

 a spectrum photographed by Becquerel's 

 method. But Herr Wiener succeeded, by a 

 simple and ingenious contrivance, altering the 

 path of the rays through the colored film by 

 placing a rectangular prism on the plate, with 

 its hypothenuse surface in contact with the 

 spectrum. This experiment had the startling 

 result that that part of the spectrum covered by 

 the prism appeared strongly displaced toward 

 the red. Hence Zenker's theory of Bacquerel's 

 process, enunciated in 1868, which ascribed the 

 colors to interference is substantiated. Instead 

 of Bacquerel's homegeneous sheet of silver 

 chloride containing subchloride, Seebeck used 

 the powder, and Poitevin mounted the salt on 

 paper. In these two processes the effect de- 

 scribed is not observed. Hence these colors 

 are body color in these two cases. The produc- 

 tion of these body colors is a very mysterious 

 process, but the author hopes that here will 

 eventually be found, a satisfactory solution of 

 the problem. To account for the production of 

 these colors he advances a temarkable theory, 

 which has a well-known analogy in compara- 

 tive physiology. Given a collection of com- 

 pounds of silver chloride and subchloride of 

 indefinite proportions, such as those which Mr. 

 Carey Lea calls by the collective name of 

 "photochloride," we must suppose, according 

 to the modern kinetic theories, that they are 



