3IO NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



Treasury under date of April 7, 1886. The President of the 

 Academy, Professor Marsh, appointed a committee, consisting 

 of Ira Remsen and George F. Barker who reported on June 14, 

 1886. As various methods had been employed for determining 

 the percentage of morphine in opium, the committee at first 

 proposed to ascertain which of them was calculated to give the 

 most accurate results, but having learned that the Treasury 

 Department would be satisfied with a less thorough investigation, 

 it confined itself to a single method. 



By employing Fliickiger's process, as modified by Squibb, it 

 was determined that the percentage of morphine in the syrupy 

 liquid opium was 19.53, ^"<^ i^ the same when reduced to a dry 

 powder, 25.28 per cent."" 



A year later, in 1887, a second request was received from the 

 Acting Secretary of the Treasury for the same information 

 regarding another sample of smuggled opium. The President 

 seems not to have been entirely satisfied to have the Academy 

 called upon to answer these comparatively unimportant inquiries. 

 Notwithstanding, he requested the same two chemists to serve a 

 second time, and appointed Professor Charles F. Chandler as the 

 third member of the committee. In a letter addressed to the 

 chairman of the committee, however, under date of May 4, 1887, 

 he remarked: " The province of the Academy is not to conduct 

 a technical examination merely, but especially to bring out the 

 scientific principles involved in the investigation, and in this 

 spirit I wish the work to be undertaken." ^" 



Having in view this injunction of the President, the committee 

 returned to its original plan of first testing the various methods 

 of analysis to ascertain which of them gave the most uniform 

 results, and then applying this particular method to the problem 

 at issue. Accordingly, the committee engaged the services of 

 Mr. I. H. Kastle of Johns Hopkins University to make the 

 necessary experiments. Five methods were investigated, namely, 

 that of the United States Pharmacopoeia, Fliickiger's method, 



'"Rep. Nat. Acad. Sd. for 1886, p. 40. 

 "' Rep. Nat. Acad. Sci. for 1887, p. 32. 



