102 ArPENDIX. 



PAPAVEKACE^. 



The Opium Assay Question. 



Perliaps no chapter of Pharmaceutical Chemistry has received 

 more attention and been more discussed than that of opium and its 

 analysis. Scarcely a Journal appears nowadays that does not con- 

 tain an article or two upon how opium can " best" be assayed and 



just how the method of Prof. X or Mr. Y is inaccurate and 



unreliable. There is a certain sameness about articles written about 

 opium assaying — a sameness that becomes monotonous in course of 

 time, and causes the reader "to become perplexed, if not disgusted, 

 as the result of a perusal of them. Invariably the author picks all 

 other methods to pieces and then proposes an ** original new" 



method which gives better agreeing results^ and is much more easily 

 manipulated than any yet proposed. As a matter of fact, we 

 possess not a single accurate and exact method of analysis of any plant 

 or of any of its organic constituents. Plant analysis, as Dragen- 

 dorff aptly remarks, has not yet reached the stage which enables us 

 to say, without an interrogation point at the end of our sentence, 

 that this plant contains just so much of that constituent and no 

 more. Plant analysis is as yet synonymous with approximate 

 analysis, and until our knowledge of the chemistry and physiology 

 of plant life and growth has advanced considerably beyond its 

 present status, it is doomed to continue to be approximate analysis. 

 Hence, no method is accurate, as, for instance, is the determination 

 of sulphuric acid as barium sulphate, or of hydrochloric acid as 

 chloride of silver, and if one of them does give better agreeing 

 results, and such as are nearer the mean of those obtained by all other 

 methods, this is due most probably to the fact that in this particular 

 method the sources of error are more nearly counterbalanced than 

 in the others. It was, hence, from a purely impartial and critical 

 standpoint that I undertook to compare several of the most promi- 

 nent methods for assaying opium. 



Those decided upon were the methods of Fluckiger, Squibb, and 

 of the U. S. Pharmacopoeia— being virtually the ammonia versus 

 the lime method. The drugs examined were Smyrna opiums from 

 the house of Merck and of Gehe & Co., the former having been 

 ordered and received by myself whUe still at the laboratory of Gehe. 

 Bath Fresenius at Wiesbaden during the past summer, and the 



