494 PIIAKMACOGRAPHIA. 



1874. examination what had been already recorded as fact, and to 

 H B Brady, devote their better energies to the more purely medical relations 

 of the subject the aspect of chief interest both to themselves 

 and those for whom they wrote. 



The question has often been raised, and once at least on very 

 high authority, why the overcharged curriculum of medical 

 study should still be encumbered with Materia Medica ; why, in 

 view of the separation which is gradually taking place between 

 the practice of medicine and that of pharmacy and of the scientific 

 education now received by the pharmacist, such matters as the 

 physical characters, sources, and chemistry of drugs should not 

 be referred to those whom they primarily affect. 



This, perhaps, is scarcely the place to discuss such questions 

 in detail, but they inevitably present themselves on a compari- 

 son of the present book with any of those to which allusion has 

 just been made. 



It is generally no very difficult thing to give an intelligible 

 account of a work embodying the results of scientific research. 

 It is not requisite that the knowledge of the reviewer should be 

 co-extensive with that of the author to enable him to form a 

 just estimate of its strong and weak points, or even to exercise 

 the critical faculty where opinions rather than facts are advanced. 

 But the task of introducing suitably a closely-printed volume 

 of 700 pages, containing scarcely anything but facts an un- 

 usual proportion of which are stated for the first time, and 

 those which are old assuming a new importance from their fresh 

 verification, the whole given with a condensation of style that 

 refuses page-room to a superfluous word is not one that can 

 be performed by the ordinary method of summarising results. 



The scope of the " Pharmacographia " and the intention of 

 its authors can hardly be better told than by a few extracts 

 from the preface. After defining the word pharmacographia as 

 " a writing about drugs," the authors state that " it was their 

 desire not only to write upon the general subject and to utilise 

 the thoughts of others, but that the book which they had 

 decided to produce together should contain observations that 

 no one else has written down. It is in fact a record of personal 



