PEEPARATION OF COD-LIVER OIL WITH IODIDE OF IRON .3 277 
radiance, only to give place to deeper darkness. You are to be our future Council 
—our Examiners; those who will have to stand between the Legislature and the 
Chemists of the nation, and your success in the Laboratory and the Lecture 
Koom is a thing in which the Council feel a lively interest. And then there are, 
besides all this, the sources of enjoyment which knowledge opens to its possessor. 
The hillside has a voice for you, the wild flower, the blue skies above, and the 
teeming earth beneath, all are full of interest to the man who has stored his 
mind with knowledge ; they bring pleasures which the votary of dissipation 
knows nothing about and sighs after in vain,—pleasures heightened by the 
consciousness that you are rightly using the varied faculties which your great 
jNIaker gave you. 
The following paper was then read :— 
ON A NEW PROCESS EOR THE PREPARATION OE COH- 
LIYER OIL WITH IODIDE OE IRON, BY WHICH DECOM¬ 
POSITION OE THE IODIDE AND INJURY TO THE OIL ARE 
PREVENTED. 
BY MR. SINIMBEEGHI, OP ROME, 
MEMBER, BY EXAMINATION, OE THE PHAEMACEUTICAL SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN.’ 
In a memoir addressed, in 1864, to the Pharmaceutical Society of Paris by 
the corresponding member M. Robourdin, chemist in Orleans, and contain¬ 
ing the result of experiments showing the necessary precaution to be adopted 
in the employment of certain reagents, the author notices the non-existence 
of iron in iodide of iron with cod-liver oil; and the general secretary of the 
Society, M. Bougnet, reported the fact in the following terms, in his ‘ Corapte 
Rendu’ of the 11th of November :— 
“ Prussiate of potash, containing in itself the body the presence of which it 
is intended to indicate, may, under certain circumstances, lead to error, indi¬ 
cating iron in medicines that do not contain it. And this has happened with 
regard to the iodide of iron with cod-liver oil, wRich was regarded till now as 
containing this metal in a considerable proportion, but it is now found not to 
contain any trace, according to the analytical test to which our Orleans cor¬ 
respondent has submitted it.” 
The assertion of Robourdin surprised me greatly, for doctors of great repu¬ 
tation daily sent their patients to my pharmacy to obtain the iodide of iron 
with cod-liver oil. In three samples of oil, and precisely those most com¬ 
monly in request, I desired to ascertain the fact noticed by Robourdin. Two 
had a garnet-red colour, and one a tint approaching to a deep green; but all 
three were much altered, and had more or less a nauseous pungent taste, and 
a disagreeable and almost disgusting smell of varnish. This alteration, com¬ 
monly known under the name of rancidity, which is produced by the absorp¬ 
tion of the atmospheric oxygen, gives to the cod-liver oil also a thicker appear¬ 
ance, and, with long exposure to the air, reduces it into an almost resinous 
mass, so that the cod-liver oil might take its place amongst the drying oils. 
I took 30 grammes of each of three different samples of oil, ami submitted 
them to the reaction of ferrocyanide of potassium. I obtained from all a very 
slight bluish precipitate; but I had no faith in the reaction obtained, on ac¬ 
count of the observation before stated by Robourdin, and therefore preferred 
the use of sulphocyanide of potassium, the action of which had been made 
most sensible by Natanson, with the addition of ether. The result of the re¬ 
searches was always negative, as the ether did not acquire even a pale rose- 
