636 
PHARMACEUTICAL MEETING. 
alcohol, dextrine, naphtha, and perhaps some others. This brings me to the end 
of the Codex Materia Medica. In my next communication I shall commence 
the Pharmacopoeia, or that part containing the preparations, 
{To 1)6 continued^ 
THEORY OF THE UNIVERSAL CODEX.* 
BY JOSEPH INCE. 
I wish, in anticipation of the Paris International Congress, to direct attention 
to some sentences contained in the preface to the Codex, “ The Commission 
was convinced that the French Pharmaceutical Codex, with the exception of 
some additions and modifications, which would have altered neither the general 
sense of the text nor the dose of its essential formulae, might have become an 
universal Pharmacopoeia.” “ It had hoped ” is the last sentence “ that it might 
have placed under the protection of the name of the third Napoleon a work for 
the public health whieh should have been universal.” The declaration of the 
Congress goes still further. “At this moment, when different States are so 
strenuous in their endeavours to generalize the use of one uniform system 
of weights, measures, and coinage, the Congress will naturally have under 
consideration the necessity of establishing a Codex, or legal formulary, which 
shall give the law to Pharmaceutists throughout the civilized world. Such a 
Codex would determine uniformity of composition, in all Pharmacies, of the 
most important remedies, whose use has been established by universal experience.” 
The second question, therefore, for discussion in August next is, the means 
to be employed for the construction of an universal Codex, I believe such 
views to be utopian and unphilosophical, and their fulfilment to the last point 
undesirable. With your permission, I proceed to give a reason for the faith 
within me. 
Let a man with no wish to establish or defend a theory consult the pages of 
the British Pharmacopoeia, the conviction will force itself upon his mind, as he 
surveys its various preparations, that it is specifically English, its main charac¬ 
teristic being strength. It remains English, examine it anyhow, or anywhere, 
or at any time. Its tinctures, extracts, spirits, simple and compound formulae, 
its choice of drugs and plants, the routine of its remedial agents, its general 
plan, its special applications, the doses of its posological table, the entire absence 
of other tinctures, extracts, spirits, simple and compound formulae found else¬ 
where, stamp it as essentially, undeniably, and nationally British. Leaving the 
wmrk as it exists in print, the practice of medicine amongst ourselves, which 
once created, but now is regulated by this book, bears identically the same 
characteristics. Investigate the formulae contained in that wonderful compen¬ 
dium, ‘ The Pharmacologia,’ by the late Dr. Paris, or a batch of recipes from 
any dispensing English house; read them without order or selection, and desiring 
earnestly not to confirm a foregone conclusion ; yet view them in every twist of 
the kaleidoscope—the dose, the choice, and the avoidance; the combination and 
the mannerism are national and British. Now take the Codex, at this moment 
under consideration : its whole arrangement is steeped in the atmosphere of 
French national life; it is a book written for the French nation, containing 
French formulae, and in consequence is not to be judged by English modes of 
* Vide chapter in Paris’s Pharmacologia, entitled ‘The Influence of Soil, Culture, Climate, 
and Season.’ 
