PHARMACEUTICAL MEETING. 
398 
last Pharmaceutical Meeting. No doubt the comparatively high price of this 
pure metal has hitherto prevented its use in pharmacy. 
Mr. Watson said he had found the same difficulty in the metallic bismuth of 
commerce that Mr. Wood had ; namely, that of getting rid of all traces of copper. 
There were many different qualities of commercial bismuth in the market, but 
he had generally found that if they could only procure Saxony bismuth, it con¬ 
tained as little as (H)01 of copper and no arsenic ; whereas the qualities gene¬ 
rally met with contained 0’004 or 05 per cent. The bismuth that had been 
imported from Australia lately contained a much larger proportion of copper, and 
also traces of arsenic. He had frequently tried bismuth by fusion with nitre, 
but could not get rid of the last traces of copper. 
Dr. Attfield thought too much had been made of the presence of a trace of 
copper in bismuth, and too little of other impurities which were colourless. He 
should like to ask Mr. Wood whether his one part of copper in one thousand of 
bismuth gave much of a blue colour to the liquor, say, when they were looking 
at a Winchester quart; and he should like to ask Mr. Watson what sort of a 
result, so far as the eye was concerned, he got with bismuth containing 1-10,000th 
part of copper ? Chemists and druggists generally, he feared, depended too 
much on the eye and too little on the test-tube. 
The President remarked that there was another point of view in which 
he suspected they looked at it, and that was the cost. If it became a question 
simply of purity, there was not the slightest difficulty; but it was a question of 
cost. There had been imported into this country large quantities of bismuth from 
Australia and Peru, and many of these specimens of metal were certainly very 
impure ; but there is one process which had been found to succeed, and that was 
at once to crystallize out the nitrate of bismuth, and by operating upon that they 
would get a bismuth which would be tolerably pure, the impurities remaining 
in the mother liquor almost entirely. That, however, was a long process, 
and they could do it with the other process quite well enough for medicinal pur¬ 
poses. 
Dr. Redwood mentioned that there was not so much bismuth produced in 
Saxony now as formerly, the mines not being so fully worked as they used to 
be. 
Mr. Watson, in reply to Dr. Attfield’s question as regarded the colour inse¬ 
parable from the solution made by the best Saxon bismuth, said he had found 
they could trace it clearly by the eye by adding a few drops of ammonia. He 
remembered some few months ago sending out some bismuth to a provincial 
chemist, containing, he believed, not more than 005 of copper, and it was 
returned to them. 
Mr. Wood remarked, with reference to Dr. Attfield’s inquiry, that the 
colour was due somewhat to the method of making the liquor. If the liquor 
were made with an appreciable excess of ammonia, and put into a wide bottle 
of some size, there would be a perceptible tint of colour. But it was not neces¬ 
sary to have that excess of ammonia; it was possible to re-neutralize that 
ammonia by acetic acid; and if they did that there would be no perceptible 
colour, or, at any rate, so far as his experience went, none which would at all 
interfere with the use of the product in pharmacy. No doubt the whole thing 
was a matter of cost and of hypercriticism, because he apprehended that if there 
were a slight trace of colour in the product, as a medicine it would not in the 
slightest degree interfere. But with regard to the cost he might state that, 
even in using the chemically pure bismuth which he had referred to, and which 
Johnson and Matthey sold at 40s., it was possible to make a liquor at 3s. a pound, 
which, he believed, was the price the original solution was sold at, although 
that was only one-third the strength of the solution made according to the 
