14 
HELEN ABBOTT MICHAEL 
trol my time. However, I came up for my final examinations 
after the accident at the end of the second year’s course, and 
passed in chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, with the same 
record as my examinations of the year before. 
The autumn following my second year at college, that is, 
in August of 1884, I read my first scientific paper before the 
American Association for the Advancement of Science, which 
was meeting that year in Philadelphia. I had worked during 
the late spring and early summer in the laboratory of Henry 
Leffman, but I was dissatisfied with the opportunities for the 
class of work I was doing, for I had become interested in the 
chemical analyses of plants, and through the advice of scien¬ 
tific friends I was introduced to Professor Sadtler, lecturer on 
chemistry at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. He of¬ 
fered me whatever help he could in the class of work I was 
then interested in, and placed me as a private student with 
Professor Henry Trimble, who was in charge of the chemical 
laboratory at the College of Pharmacy and had made a special 
study of plant analysis. 
About this time there was published, in English, Dragen- 
dorff’s scheme for the chemical analysis of plants, which was 
the best systematic method for plant analysis published up 
to that time. Previously to the appearance of this book, plants 
had been analyzed in a haphazard sort of way, and simply 
special methods had been used for the isolation of certain 
compounds that were suspected to exist in the plants under 
analysis. 
I was especially interested in the study of Mexican and 
Central American plants, not only on account of their not hav¬ 
ing been much studied up to that time, but because they con¬ 
tained substances of interest both scientific and medicinal. 
The facilities for this study were very good in Professor 
Trimble’s laboratory, and the College library was most com¬ 
plete in works of reference and journals containing the litera¬ 
ture on the subject. My first piece of work at the laboratory 
was the analysis of the bark of the Mexican candle-tree, bo- 
tanically known as Fouquieria splendens . This tree is men¬ 
tioned in the Mexican Boundary Survey reports. An interest- 
