THE AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHARMACY. 
171 
be saved ! It is a good plan in making such things as tinctures, etc., to take 
their sp. gr. and record it in your memorandum book. This takes very little 
time and is no expense, any bottle serving the purpose, but it is a very good 
check on the preparation, not as to quality, but to show if different lots of the 
substance agree. Of course this would be of little value in judging outside 
preparations. But these little checks are very serviceable, and naturally will 
occur to any careful pharmacist, and with a little care good preparations and 
cheaper can be made with much less trouble than when made carelessly. Many 
reliable wholesale houses are now putting numberless pharmaceutical preparations 
on the market, and often the pharmacist finds it cheaper to buy his preparations 
from these than to make them. The physician often prescribes medicines of a 
particular house and the pharmacist is forced to keep such medicines in stock. 
But if the pharmacist keeps good standard preparations, it will not be long 
before the physician recognises the fact in his prescriptions. It should be the 
pride of every pharmacist to dispense as many of his preparations as possible, 
with due regard to profits, and not allow himself to become a mere vendor of 
drugs. 
“It is unnecessary to call the druggist's attention to the importance of careful 
buying of stock, to buy from none but reliable houses, to do a cash business, 
and on no condition to go in debt. These things really are out of the sphere of 
little things ; but by following honesty in all things, not for policy’s sake, which 
is not honesty, but as a principle, and by strict economy, there should be profits 
even in the sharpest and keenest rivalry of trade.” 
THE DISPENSER AS OTHERS SEE HIM. 
In the course of an article upon the report of the inquiry instituted by Dr. 
Seaton into the accuracy of chemists and druggists in the dispensing of physi- 
cians’ prescriptions, to which we referred in our last issue, the London Daily 
News observes : — 
“ The chemist and druggist is ordinarily an educated and intelligent man, and 
he is a professional man as well as a tradesman. He has a name and position to 
make or to uphold, and is conscious of the responsibilities which rest upon him. That 
his assistants occasionally give way to a lazy impulse to weigh out the drugs in 
a somewhat rule-of-thumb fashion is perhaps not an evil that is at all hours 
altogether within his control, but that such carelessness does not often extend 
itself to serious deviations we may gather from the already-mentioned fact 
that there were only two serious errors out of 30 cases. The dispensers at 
co-operative stores would appear to be more serious culprits, and this is 
probably due to the fact that the head dispenser is an anonymous servant of 
the stores, and takes less personal pride and pleasure in his work than does 
the ordinary pharmacist, while his subordinates, dispensing on what may 
almost be called a wholesale scale, have still less care or sense of responsibility. 
At all events, in the course of Dr. Seaton’s investigation, they were shown to 
be three times more unreliable than the ordinary chemist and druggist. The 
4 drug company,’ whatever that may be, would appear to dispense accurately 
only by accident ; for only once in four times was it within the very liberal 
limit of 20 per cent, as regards the proportion of active ingredient, while the 
‘ doctor’s shop,’ which still exists here and there in poor neighbourhoods, would 
seem to be also hopelessly unreliable, though it is fair to remember that only 
two attempts were made to test its accuracy.” 
