( 209 ) 
4772. Grapenuts.—An artificial cereal breakfast food. Presented by F. H. 
Leggett & Company, of New York City. 
Drugs 
Vegetable drugs are plants or parts of plants from which 
medicines are made. A drug, if used in the natural state 
as medicine, is both a drug and a medicine, but usually 
the medicine is prepared from the drug in such a way as to 
destroy the original character of the latter. This may be 
done by extracting from it in a pure state the proximate 
principle that possesses the medicinal activity, as quinine 
from cinchona bark or morphine from opium; or a tincture, 
solid or fluid extract, syrup, or other galenical preparation 
may be made from it. 
Some drugs are better adapted for the manufacture of 
one of these preparations and some for another, so that 
much study of drugs is required before the best methods of 
their employment can be determined. ‘There is more or 
less conformity between botanical relationship and similar 
medicinal properties, although there are striking exceptions 
to the rule. Related plants, even when they do agree in 
medicinal properties, may differ very widely in the strength 
of such properties. Almost equally great differences in 
strength may exist between different lots of the same drug. 
Thus, one lot of opium may contain but three or four per 
cent. of morphine, while another may have fifteen or 
twenty per cent. These differences may be due to the 
region of growth, to the climate or the character of the 
season, to the stage of the plant’s development when 
collected, to the method of curing, the care in packing and 
transporting, or to the length of time that has elapsed 
since collecting. It is therefore clear that medicines made 
from such drugs by a fixed process may exhibit equal 
differences in activity, and such differences have been of 
grave importance in medical practice. 
The art of making medicinal preparations from drugs 
pertains to Pharmacy, which is thus one of the most im- 
