784 
ANNUAL MEETING. 
felt more strongly now than ever the inadvisability of instituting anything like the 
regulations in these three divisions of the second paragraph. He had been looking 
through some back numbers of the ‘ Pharmaceutical Journal’to see what had been 
the course of poison legislation, and if they took the sixteenth and seventeenth volumes, 
which were issued at the time when, perhaps, there was more public excitement in 
connection with poison legislation than at any other period of their history,—arising 
out of the Kugeley murders, when strychniue was the fashionable domestic poison,—it 
would be found that nearly every number contained a leader on the question of re¬ 
strictions on the sale of poison, and most of these bore the impress of Mr.j Bell’s 
writing. He then—and he was convinced that if he were alive at the present time 
he would adhere to the same view—could find no term strong enough to express the 
dislike which he had, and which the Society then had, to restricting legislation witli 
respect to the keeping and storing of poisons. He said that this restrictive legisla¬ 
tion was an insult to pharmaceutists; and he further suggested, in one article, that 
if any of the abortive Poison Bills were carried through Parliament, it would be 
necessary for the authorities in Scotland Yard to act on the plan which was adopted 
in France, of training dogs to hunt truffles, and they would have to train dogs to 
snuff out poisons in pharmacies. 
Mr. Wilkinson begged to move an amendment to the resolution. He thought the 
whole course of legislation on this question had been one continued series of blunders. 
In the first place, it was a blunder to insist on a poison schedule being joined to the 
Pharmacy Act; it was a blunder w T hen Parliament did combine these two things to¬ 
gether, and it was a blunder on the part of the Council when they made the last 
addition to the schedule of poisons, because in the first place, in making that addi¬ 
tion, they added a great number of preparations, and that very word “preparation” 
had been the great bugbear of the present schedule. Nobody knew what it meant. 
They were told that preparations of this, that, and the other, were included in the 
schedule, and were not to be sold except under certain restrictions. But the greatest 
mistake of all in the matter wa3 the adding of vermin destroyers to the list of poisons 
in the schedule. Everybody knew that all these preparations contained either arsenic 
or strychnine, and they were told now in one part of the Act that preparations of 
strychnine and arsenic were not to be sold without registration, yet in another part 
they w r ere told to sell these vermin destroyers by merely labelling them “ Poison.” 
Again, with regard to putting forward these regulations, it would have been a great 
mistake, but that it w T as not altogether their own doing. However, he had in his 
hand a sort of manifesto which was put forward by the Council some twelve years ago 
when a Poison Bill v r as before the House of Parliament, and it did so distinctly argue 
against the adoption of some such regulations as were now proposed, that he could not 
help reading it. It w r as called a short and clear statement of the grounds of objec¬ 
tion to the several clauses of the Poison Bill before Parliament. This was in 1858. 
The first reason given w r as this : “ The Bill is founded on erroneous principles, con¬ 
taining as it does many intricate, frivolous, and impracticable regulations with regard 
to the details of the management of a chemist’s business, resulting from ignorance as 
to the nature of the business and the requirements of the public.” He did not think 
any description which any one could apply to these regulations could be better than 
that. Then it said : “ The 4th and 5th sections relating to the entry of every sale of 
a poison would, in fact, facilitate the sale of poisons, by throwing on the Legislature 
the responsibility now resting on each individual chemist, who would have much more 
difficulty than he now has, in refusing to sell poisons if they were applied for accord¬ 
ing to the terms and conditions of an Act of Parliament.” The fact was, that the 
public could now get poisons with much greater ease than they could before. If he 
sold a person a pennyworth or half an ounce of laudanum, he always asked a great 
many questions as to what it was wanted for, and how it was to be used, because in 
case of an accident, the responsibility w T as with him, and if a person poisoned their 
child, a coroner and a jury had no words hard enough to apply to the chemist for 
selling the poison. But now they w r ere constantly selling it in accordance with the 
provisions of the law. Formerly he should hardly have sold arsenic or many other 
preparations to any one, but now if a person came and asked for an ounce of arsenic, 
or cyanide of potassium, or strychnine, or prussic acid, all he had to do was to get 
