102 AFPENDIX. 
PAPAVERACEZE. 
The Opium Assay Question- 
Perhaps 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 sae how opium can “best” be assayed and 
just how the method of Prof. X or Mr, Y. is inaccurate and 
unreliable. There is a so 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 vee poe. — a ——— of fact, we 
possess not asingle a alysis of any plant 
or of any of its organic constituents. Plant as 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 Fliickiger, Squibb, and 
of the U. 8. Pharmacopwia—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 while still at the laboratory of Gehe. 
Rath Fresenius at Wiesbaden during the past summer, and the 
