k 



PREFACE. xiii 



ought to have been adopted : the real duty of these committees 

 seeming to be confined to correcting any defects in the standing 

 medicines of the shops, to the rejection of those entirely obsolete, 

 and the addition of whatever new compositions may be proposed 

 by any of the members, after the best general mode of preparing 

 them has been discussed ; nor does it seem necessary to wait for a 

 new edition for the regulation of these additions, which, when 

 very active, as Prussic acid, vinum colchici, and the like, require 

 an uniformity of preparation to be speedily instituted ; as an offi- 

 cial communication might be made to the society of apothecaries, 

 the different medical journals, and the teachers of materia medica, 

 for the information of the profession. 



As the edition of 1745 excelled in Galenic pharmacy, the next, 

 of 1788, may be regarded as the best compendium of chemical 

 pharmacy the college has produced. Some new names were, 

 indeed, introduced from Bergmann, but they were only such as 

 the improved state of that science called for. In the Galenical 

 compositions simplicity was pursued to the utmost, and probably 

 to an injurious extent ; since it is well known, that a mixture of 

 drugs will frequently have more effect than the same quantity of 

 either of them separately, and a mixture of spices is more agreeable 

 than any of them alone. 



The edition of 1809 is chiefly remarkable for the entire adop- 

 ion of the chemical nomenclature of Lavoisier and his coadjutors. 

 It does not appear that any necessity existed for this adoption of 

 Lavoisier's names ; since, although our experimental chemists had 

 adopted this innovation, as being more conversant with the French 

 authors, than with the 1788 edition of the Pharmacopoeia, in 

 which Bergmann's nomenclature of salts had been reduced to 

 actual use, yet even the French school of mineralogy, little as that 

 nation is inclined to prefer foreign usages, still follow the nomen- 

 clature of Bergmann, and therefore the retention of those names 

 would not have been without precedent, even in Paris itself. 



A preference was evidently given, in ordering the chemical pre- 

 parations, to the moist way, with the idea of enabling the apothe- 

 caries to prepare this class of medicines themselves ; but in fact 

 the college might more properly have put the whole of them into 

 the drugs, merely noticing the strength of some of them, as they 

 have done with oil of vitriol and spirit of wine; and, following 



