680 
PHARMACEUTICAL MEETING. 
farm where there was a remarkably diminutive haycock, which had to be inves¬ 
tigated. “ Why do you make your stacks so small?” was the question. “ We 
should have made it larger ” was the answer “ if we had had more hay.” I 
leave you to draw the moral. We want a liberal contribution of material. 
All has prospered this past Council year which is hastening to expire. The 
examinations are besieged—the Secretariat is more than doubled and we must 
keep pace with the exigences of the times in providing within these walls for 
the demands of the Examiner and the instruction of the candidate. 
I ask you to-night to complete the scheme—will you kindly talk about it to 
your friends—unaided I am powerless, but with your support success is certaiu. 
I offer an inexpensive good—nothing visionary but that which by the soberest 
calculations may be obtained. I do not appeal to you from motives of listless¬ 
ness or indolence ; I am not empty-handed for I show work done—and recol¬ 
lecting the extreme personal indulgence that has smiled on every public under¬ 
taking I have yet attempted, 1 may translate the experience of the past into 
a promise for the future ; and when I solicit your assistance in the establishment 
of a collection of autograph formulae which shall stand without a rival, I know 
that the members of a great Society will not let me plead in vain. 
The Chairman said the subject which Air. Ince had brought before them 
was one of very great importance, and the way in which he had brought it 
before them must have been a source of gratification to them all, accompanied 
as it had been by a most handsome and liberal contribution to the Society’s col¬ 
lection of prescriptions. That these autograph prescriptions were of vast im¬ 
portance to students, and also to the examiners in their labours in examining, 
there could not be a doubt; and any addition of representative formulae was of 
the greatest possible importance. Young men who came up for examination, 
and saw prescriptions written by a London physician, sometimes said that they 
had never seen any written in that way before, and that in the town they came 
from they were written in a different way. 
Air. Haselden said that if they placed a large number of prescriptions be¬ 
fore the students which they had never had an opportunity of seeing before, 
whether it be a collection of to-day or twenty years ago, there would always be 
the same difficulty as regarded the handwriting. If the Society could collect a 
large Dumber of books, with prescriptions of a similar character and writing, 
but not copies the one of the other, and allow the candidates one set to study, 
retaining the other set for the examiners, young men could then come into the 
examiners’ room with a little more confidence; but, unless the Society could do 
that, he did not think they would assist the candidates much, and it would be 
no better to have ten or twelve books than three or four. If the candidates 
had an opportunity of seeing the large number of prescriptions, there would be 
no great difficulty ; but, not having that opportunity (neither would it be 
desirable that they should have the examiners’ books), when they came to 
Bloomsbury Square they were at the same disadvantage when they saw a number 
of books as when they saw only one or two. He thought the London members 
might in some way assist these young men. He did not mean to say that he 
would himself write them out, or show them such prescriptions as he had used 
for the examination, but he was quite prepared to show any student, at a con¬ 
venient time, any prescription, out-of-the-way or not out-of-the-way, which he 
might have upon his premises. Formerly, he had a very large collection of pre¬ 
scriptions from all classes of writers, but he was sorry to say that some three or 
four years ago, when some alterations were made in his premises, they were 
turned out, and put into the fire. There was one kind of prescription which it 
was very difficult to obtain. At the examinations candidates were required to 
point out and discover unusual doses. Now, it was very difficult to obtain 
