SALE OF POISONS. 
501 
preciate the value of technical knowledge. Therefore, where there is sufficient 
population to support a druggist, a druggist locates himself, and the public 
wanting pills feel a greater security in purchasing them at a shop showing 
coloured bottles in its window than they would if a row of tea-chests and 
sugar-loaves denoted the leading wares to be obtained thereat. But even 
this security loses its value as all things progress, and the mere exhibition of a 
red bottle is in itself insufficient guarantee of fitness to dispense medicines. 
As surely as a superiorly educated man works behind those brilliant bottles 
which first attracted his customers, so surely will that special shop become 
more attractive, and colours just as brilliant lower down the street, not backed 
by a qualified man, will cease to lure the valetudinarian. We may com¬ 
mend this fact even to men who obtain registration under the new, or even 
under the old, Pharmacy Act. The certificates of examination which must 
hereafter be possessed by all who call themselves Pharmaceutical Chemists or 
Chemists and Druggists, will come iuto competition with other like certifi¬ 
cates, and one will pale before another, even as the symbolic bottles we have 
mentioned, unless there be a practical aptitude on the part of the possessor to 
fulfil the duties which he has evinced theoretical education enough to obtain. 
We may especially urge this as an answer to many correspondents who ask 
us, wherein a man will be benefited by working up to the highest standard 
when a lower would secure for him all trade privileges? It is manifest that 
even the working up itself must assist in training a man for his future prac¬ 
tice. We believe as a rule the public will seek out the best qualified to supply 
their wants in a matter so important as physic—an article at once of the ut¬ 
most value and the utmost danger. But there are even in this nineteenth 
century, as there were in the sixteenth, some remote places where the grocer, 
or rather the huckster, has up to this year been resorted to for the minor 
medicaments, and among them some drugs even which are now forbidden 
to be sold except by registered persons. The habits of the people in some 
districts have caused certain poisons, more particularly opium, to be regarded 
as a necessity ; common use has deprived it of its dangerous reputation, and 
it has been seemingly as reasonable to buy a quarter of an ounce of opium 
at the village shop as a quarter of an ounce of tea. The sale of it has con¬ 
sequently been a not unimportant source of profit to these small traders. The 
Pharmaceutical Society felt all this as a difficulty in framing the Pharmacy 
Act, and accordingly omitted opium in the schedule of their draft Bill; this 
omission was, however, overruled, and opiates were inserted ultimately with 
extra stringency—a stringency, indeed, which seems ridiculous to practical men. 
No wonder then, that many village shopkeepers who had not the slightest 
pretension to call themselves “Chemists and Druggists” according to the re¬ 
quirements of Section 3, should have applied for registration and been refused. 
No wonder either if many such should have found means to obtain the signa¬ 
ture of persons qualified to give certificates, and, presenting what was to all 
appearance true and good proof of title, have obtained registration. This, how¬ 
ever, is an error which will soon correct itself. When the register which will 
ere long be in the hands of every local secretary of the Pharmaceutical Society 
appears, these improper entries will be pointed out to the registrar, and the 
names of persons so improperly registered will be, on due evidence, erased,— 
the persons themselves, as well as those who falsely assisted in procuring their 
registration, being liable to severe penalties under the Act. Year by year the 
register will be purged of its impurities, and the whole benefit of recent legis¬ 
lation be secured as well for the public as for chemists. 
We cannot but regard this extra stringency in the matter of opium and pop¬ 
pies which was imported into the Bill, although resisted by its promoters to the 
last, as a most unfortunate addition. A chain is but equal in strength to its 
