162 
SELECTED ARTICLES. 
pay an individual and a clerk an annual sum for looking after 
such cases in London and its neighbourhood. Does the num- 
ber of persons who practice as apothecaries in violation of the 
Act, much exceed the number that you have prosecuted ? 
That is most likely, 1 think. Has your Society ever endea- 
voured to ascertain, by causing local inquiry to be made in 
every part of England and Wales, who the persons are that 
are actually in practice, v^hich of them practise as apotheca- 
ries, and how many do so with, and how many without, the 
requisite qualification ? No. I do not know that the Society 
have employed any person particularly for that purpose. I 
believe that during the trials that have taken place in various 
parts of the country, our clerk has been furnished, when he 
has attended those trials with information respecting indivi- 
duals in that neighbourhood, and I may state, that since this 
committee began to sit, the medical public have been much 
more in the qui vive with regard to unqualified individuals 
than before; for we have received, in the last three months, 
more informations on this subject, than at any previous time. 
Do you recollect what is stated in the preamble to the statute 
of 1813, to be the object of the statute ? "And whereas much 
inconvenience has arisen from great numbers of persons of 
many parts of England and Wales exercising the functions of 
an apothecary, who are wholly ignorant and utterly incom- 
petent to the exercise of such functions, whereby the health 
and lives of the community are greatly endangered, and it is 
become necessary that provision should be made for remedy- 
ing such evils." The object of the statute being to prevent 
those persons from exercising the functions of an apothecary, 
who are wholly ignorant and utterly incompetent to the 
exercise of such functions, are the individuals whom the So- 
ciety has selected for prosecution those particular individuals, 
who, out of the many violaters of the statute, appeared upon 
inquiry to be the most ignorant? I should say so, for the most 
flagrant cases have been always the first selected for prosecu- 
tion. Yet if the choice of the persons to be prosecuted by 
the Society depends, as you say that it generally does, not 
upon its own impartial inquiries, but upon the informations 
