134 
BRITISH PHARMACEUTICAL CONFERENCE. 
A paper on the use of Benzoin in Ointments, by Mr. Dolibcr. 
On the Tartrates of Potash and Tartaric Acid from American Tartar, on 
Quicksilver in North Carolina, and on Mata, a leaf used by Mexicans to 
flavour Tobacco, on American Opium, the analysis of which showed it to con¬ 
tain over 10 per cent, of morphia, all by Mr. E. S. Wayne, of Cincinnati. 
On the inner coat of the gizzard of the South American Ostrich, as a re¬ 
medy for dyspepsia. (I hope we shall not be called upon to provide this new 
medicine.) 
Mr. Wm. Saunders of London, Canada W r est, contributed a paper on the 
relative value of the rhizoma and rootlets of Podophyllum peltatum y proving 
that the rootlets afford most resin. 
This will suffice to show you the useful and practical character of the work 
done by our transatlantic brethren ; and now, Gentlemen, let us take a brief 
review of some of the contributions to pharmaceutical knowledge made in our 
country since we last met. 
The detection and exact recognition of the vegetable alkaloids is one of the 
most important and delicate operations that it can fall to the lot of the chemist 
to attempt, and any addition to the tests already in use merits attention. 
Dr. Guy may therefore well deserve our thanks for the exactitude and un¬ 
wearied patience with which he has performed an immense number of experi¬ 
ments on the sublimation of the alkaloids, a process first brought to the at¬ 
tention of chemists in 1864, by Dr. Helwig of Mayence. Dr. Gu}' has arrived 
at the conclusion that the method of subliming substances in minute quantities 
on flat surfaces of glass, in order to their complete examination by the micro¬ 
scope, a method first recommended for arsenious acid and corrosive subli¬ 
mate, may be advantageously extended to the alkaloids and analogous active 
principles,—that characteristic results are readily afforded with very minute 
quantities, such as a thousandth of a grain of strychnine or even less,—that 
the results obtained by sublimation in the case of the alkaloids and analogous 
active principles are not more subject to failure than those of other tests,—in 
fact that several of the reactions are remarkable for delicacy, constancy and 
characteristic appearances. 
Closely connected with this subject is the question of the temperature 
which must be reached in order that any particular alkaloid may assume a 
gaseous form,—or in other words, that it may sublime. Dr. Guy impressed 
with the unsatisfactory statements made in toxicological works and the some¬ 
what rough modes of procedure adopted in order to test the volatility of such 
bodies, lias applied himself to devise a more exact method, to the results of 
which communicated in the Pharmaceutical Journal of Eebruary last, I must 
refer you. 
Another excellent observer who has also applied himself to this department 
of chemistry is Air. H. «T. Waddington, whose paper on micro-sublimaticn 
elicited when read some interesting remarks from Dr. Guy, Dr. Attfield and 
others. In common with Dr. Gu} r , Mr. Waddington had experienced the de¬ 
fects of the common method of subliming in a glass tube over a naked flame 
substances so easily decomposed as vegetable alkaloids, a method which has 
given rise to such statements as that a body is partly sublimed and partly 
decomposed, which seem to imply that the substance exposed to heat is not 
homogeneous, but that one part of it is volatile without decomposition, while 
the other is not. But no substance, as Air. Waddington remarked, can sub¬ 
lime and decompose at the same temperature: partial sublimation and partial 
decomposition must be owing to a mechanical defect in the arrangement for 
heating the substance. That the subliming and decomposing points of many 
substances approximate very closely is most probable, for when the heat has 
been most carefully applied, it has often happened that a sublimate has been. 
