THE PHAEMACEUTICAL JOURNAL, 
SECOND SERIES. 
YOL. YIII.—No. IX.—MARCH, 1867. 
THE PROPOSED EXTENSION OE THE PHARMACY ACT. 
We report in our Journal of this month transactions which may, and if 
followed up in the spirit evinced in the beginning, we believe will, expedite 
an advantageous solution of the question so long at issue between the Phar¬ 
maceutical Society and the “ outsiders,” making perhaps the term “ outsiders ” 
an obsolete word in Pharmaceutical nomenclature. Some three or four years 
ago, ideas which presented themselves to the minds of the founders of this 
Society in 1841, dawned also on those who had failed sooner to see the desi¬ 
rability of uniting the chemists and druggists of Great Britain in one associa¬ 
tion. As might be expected, the first anxiety seemed to be for a benevolent 
fund and protection to trade interests, both excellent in their way, but having 
only a class interest to recommend them, not important enough to obtain ex¬ 
ternal aid, and therefore totally incapable of effecting any great purpose. 
Subsequent events occurred to awaken the chemists and druggists, both 
those who had and those who had not joined the “United Society,” to the 
advantages to be derived from registration. Registration may be of two 
kinds. Doubtless the names of all the members of the Society of Freemasons 
in England are registered, and such registration assures to each member his 
rights from the Society. But it goes no further; the law does not distinguish 
a Mason from other men. This we would call private registration. The 
other is public registration, where a man, by virtue of some qualification or 
service, is placed on a register authorized and protected by Parliament. It 
happened in 1862 that a Bill to amend the law relating to juries was brought 
into Parliament, and to this Bill—a source of discord, as it proved, between 
“pharmaceutical chemists” and “chemists and druggists” at the time—we 
attribute the great virtue of having, by showing the value of registration, 
advanced the objects of the founders of the Pharmaceutical Society very 
materially. 
To sit on a jury was probably deemed a privilege in the early days of our 
national liberties, but, as society advanced, that which had been a right be¬ 
came a duty ; and we are inclined to think that what we now regard as an 
exemption at one iime Vi privation. Persons are omitted from the jury 
lists from various causes, one being the fact of holding service under the 
Crown. This may have arisen from a fear that the influence of the Crown 
might be carried into the jury-box. Another, the circumstance of a man’s 
peculiar professional service to the public being of so much importance as to 
outweigh the service he would render as a citizen, as in the case of medical 
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