192 
THE AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHARMACY. 
£t*jcrw %a\%Knaix+ 
The New l r ork Druggists Circular states that certain New York and Brooklyn 
druggists have recently been victimised by clever sharpers, who offered for sale 
imitations of Wyeth’s beef, wine, and iron, and other patent medicines. The 
goods were sold for less than schedule prices, and upon examination the labels 
were discovered to contain numerous typographical errors, and, although the same 
in size, colour, and type with those of the imitated preparations, were printed on 
inferior paper. Through the clever work of an amateur detective the fraudulent 
scheme was exposed. The swindle had been in successful operation for more than 
eight months. 
A correspondent, writing to the British Trade Journal , says : — A present 
want in Antananarivo (Madagascar) is a chemist’s shop. I should very much like 
to see some Englishman establish one ; it would be a paying establishment. The 
Jesuit Mission, with their usual foresight, used to have a fine supply of all drugs, 
but they gave them away more or less, and now we have nothing. Some of the 
natives sell a few odds and ends, but they have an interesting way of sending 
them out, such, for instance, as twenty- live drops of laudanum in an empty beer 
bottle, with a wisp of paper for a cork. 
A correspondent of a medical journal asks if there is anything in the 
“madstone” as a preventive of hydrophobia, to which query the journal replies: 
“No; but it may be an excellent remedy for hysterics, following the bites of 
dogs. The madstone is a form of faith cure.” 
The writer of “ Science Notes” in the British and Colonial Druggist is 
responsible for the following paragraph “ The Chair of Chemistry at Melbourne 
is now vacant, owing to Dr. Kirkland’s death, and anyone who wishes to waste his 
time and colonial postage may apply for the appointment, which is worth 
£750 per annum and a house (or an extra £100), with an increment of £150 
each pentennial period, up to £1200. The Australians want Sir H. Boseoe, 
M.P. ! This being out of the question, I think 1 can spot .the ‘approved’ 
candidate.” 
The British and Colonial Druggist states that the expense of printing and 
publishing the new edition of the “ British Pharmacopoeia” during the past year 
has amounted to £2638. Thirteen thousand five hundred and twenty-two copies 
of the work were sold up to 31st December. 
According to the Paris correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph the 
use, or rather abuse, of morphine seems to* be steadily gaining ground in 
France. From time to time protests are raised against this practice, which is 
becoming more and more popular with the fair sex. Some facts which have 
recently transpired at Macon show to what an alarming extent the habit is 
spreading. A chemist in that town has been prosecuted for selling morphine 
without medical authority to different persons, and among them to the wife of 
a doctor, who, unknown to her husband, consumed it on a large scale in 
injections. During the trial several physicians declared that a great number of 
the inhabitants gave way to this pernicious habit, and one of them, Dr. Jembon, 
who is attached to the Hotel Dieu, stated that more than a dozen of the lay 
nurses in that hospital regularly injected morphine into their bodies. 
“ Paracelsus,” in the British and Colonial Druggist , writes : — “ Francisceine 
is proposed as the name of a new alkaloid, which, I hear, has just been 
extracted from the Brazilian manaca root, the produce of the Franciscea uniflora 
and certain other species. The principle in question is a very powerful 
purgative and diuretic, having also some well-marked diaphoretic and emmena- 
gogue properties.” 
