S7I 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
[November 9, 1872. 
or fallacy in argument and supplying illustrations to 
conceptions it may aid by its logic the perception of truth ; 
that reading which supplies the motives for deeds of men, 
some of which were once thought great, that places in 
bold relief a concatenation of causes, following facts 
which their authors assumed they had hidden in the 
secrecy of plots, that tells us of the virtues of peoples 
■and of their rulers whilst working out a glorious chap¬ 
ter of their history, of their vices and crimes, while 
preparing the chronicle of their decline and fall; teach¬ 
ing us to read history, or, as Macaulay terms it, “ the 
title-deeds of nations,” and judge of humanity as it is, 
Low noble and how base! To be national in patriot¬ 
ism, and cosmopolitan in sympathy, no longer meriting 
the description “ to to divisos orbe Britannosbut using 
for the expressions of our thoughts the languages of 
tLose beyond our insularity. To understand a language, 
the legacy of an empire once mistress of the world, 
sometimes called a dead language, if that really can be 
so called in which half Europe says its prayers, and which 
is still the pharmaceutical language par excellence. Con¬ 
tinue therefore the study of the subjects already taught 
you, add to them such as further facilities may induce 
you, or their importance dictate to you the advantage 
of commencing, and believe me your work will not re¬ 
main unrequited. Whilst you perhaps are labouring at 
first under fortuitous disadvantages, your powers of 
mind will be sustained at a vigorous tone, the goal of 
high proficiency will ever be in your sight, and in 
• nearing it your stamina will respond to your will, as 
•the thorough-bred horse answers to the call of his 
rider when he bounds forward and leaves the half- 
breds labouring in his rear. In what manner, and to 
what extent will you continue your school curriculum P 
Am I too exacting when I ask you to devote one quarter 
of an hour a day to literature, say English one day, 
one modem language the next, Latin the third ? It is 
a modicum of time, and how to be better filled than for 
instance in reading Macaulay’s Essays, Lays, or History 
of England, the poetry of Tennyson, Longfellow, or 
of your national poet. Sir W. Scott, the classical En¬ 
glish of Washington Irving, or one of those admirable 
works that yearly issue from the press ? Again, on 
your French day, what intellectual pleasure is afforded 
by the essays of Montaigne ; the majestic lines of Cor¬ 
neille and Racine, or the incisive wit and satire of 
Boileau, the modern Horace! On your third day to be 
amidst the scences of nearly two thousand years ago, 
and in the Roman forum or senate, to hear the very 
words in which Cicero denounced Cataline, or pleaded 
for Milo ! Verily your minds would travel amongst 
many men and many cities. You are reported north of 
the Tweed to be great wanderers. We read of your “ tra¬ 
velled Thane, Athenian Aberdeen,” and I trust this cha¬ 
racteristic will lead you far in the direction I have 
indicated. 
The intercourse between England and the continental 
States has become so constant and general as to render 
iamiliarity with at least one modern language, formerly 
the appendage of an accomplished, now a necessary part 
of a liberal commercial education. Your choice is not 
restricted. There is German, the language of science ; 
French, that of literature ; Italian, of poetry ; Castilian, 
the tongue of Cervantes, of gallantry and romance, and, 
I might now say, of business. It would not be unpro¬ 
fitable to devote a very short time in mastering the first 
rudiments of Greek. Do not alarm yourselves ; I have 
not come to impose any legal obligation upon you to 
study Greek, that you may be amused by the odes of 
Anacreon, read Euripides or Sophocles, nor even the 
Greek Testament; but to insinuate the value of your 
being familiar with the Greek alphabet. You know it is 
the genuine alphabet, as its two first letters, Alpha, Beta, 
are always telling us. Just glance only at the declensions 
of the nouns and adjectives, easily acquired after the 
Latin; just peep at a few verbs, say half-a-dozen, 
and pick up a preposition or two that may come in 
your way. The value of this information is the key it 
gives to so many current words relating to arts or 
science and to our immediate profession—words that 
to a beginner, without some clue, might appear formid¬ 
able. May I instance a case or two ? We read fre¬ 
quently of the Delta of the Nile and the Ganges, of the 
deltoid muscle, the sigmoid flexure, the ethmoid and 
sphenoid bones, etc. Now the termination oicl, is the 
English adaptation of eiSos, resemblance, and these words 
signify land having the configuration of the delta, or 
triangle, a muscle the shape of the delta, a flexure the form 
of a sigma, another Greek letter, and bones resembling a 
sieve and a wedge. If you know that K 77 A 77 , means a tu¬ 
mour, you quickly arrive at what hydrocele, bronchocele, 
hacmatocele may be, a watery tumour, a tumour on the 
windpipe, a blood tumour; &\ 7 oyisthe Greek for pain; and 
we have neuralgia, cephalalgia, odontalgia, pains in the 
nerves, the head, the teeth. vScvp is water, hence 
hydrogen, hydrothorax, hydrocephalus, the first vSwp 
yiyvo/nai, to produce water; hydrothorax, -water in the 
thorax, the chest, please recollect not the throat, hydro¬ 
cephalus, water in the head. Then y\vKvs, sweet, hence 
gylcerine, and yAvutia pt£a, sweet root, glycyrrhiza; 
ypacpeiv, to write, hence biographer. Well, I have gone 
far enough into this point either to bore you or interest 
you into pursuing the subject further; I hope the latter. 
And now a word as to the conditions upon which you 
may expect commercial success. To be the thriving 
man of business, you must be imbued with a strong im¬ 
pulse to work and the resolution to persevere. More¬ 
over, you must have instinctively, or must gain by ex¬ 
perience, a knowledge of human nature, your own in¬ 
cluded. It may have occurred, or probably will occur 
to your minds at some time during your apprenticeship or 
assistantship, that you are not at all times engaged to 
your own immediate profit in the duties of a public shop. 
My experience has told me that it is in the routine of a 
shop you acquire a capacity for business ; and recollect 
that while your commercial success is prepared for by 
your intellectual training, it will be much influenced 
by the tact which you may exhibit in your relations 
with the public when you are brought in contact with 
it. Many a well-read, and in every respect a worthy 
pharmacist, lags behind another more shrewd, more 
cognizant of human dispositions, their sympathies, their 
thoughts, their preferences. Some one may reply, Is not 
a man to appear before the world as he is, must he wear 
a mask ? I do not bid him to dissemble ; but remind him 
that if he styles himself a person, which he is, according 
to Act of Parliament, his persona is the symbol of his 
career, and I would beg him to learn ere he takes his part 
on the world’s stage where “ all the men and women are 
but players.” You will obtain an insight into the more 
or less distinctive manner in which different businesses are 
conducted, and you will find it a profitable rehearsal to 
seek out by comparisons your own short comings, and 
critically to estimate your aptitude in each daily shifting 
scene of life. “ See, observe and listen,” and there will be 
nothing servile or smirking in your manner. You will 
not be wanting in self-respect, and thus will respect 
others, whilst inviting all kindly feeling and securing 
support by your tact in ^business. Thus, with one you 
will exchange more frequently than you offer words of 
courtesy ;. to another your every word must be a propos 
of the business in hand ; to a third the conversation is 
familiar and friendly; to the distressed, the sick and 
the poor a few words of timely sympathy, and the same 
deportment you would observe towards a peer. 
If I might dwell a minute longer on this matter, I 
would say, read carefully, and adapt to your own cir¬ 
cumstances the memoirs of men who have preceded us. 
I shall not to-day refer you to the early difficulties over¬ 
come by a Faraday, a Miller, or a Herschel, but ask you 
to acquaint yourselves with the memoir of a man who 
opened “that shop in Oxford Street, 338.” Read every 
