Address. 
91 
Being now deemed fit to enter into business for yourselves as 
graduates of pharmacy and master apothecaries, I need hardly 
guard you against forming any vain estimate of the sufficiency 
of your present knowledge, which would lead you to discon- 
tinue your studies. You are all aware, no doubt, that, in this 
College, you have been enabled to lay the foundation only of 
pharmaceutical science ; and on that foundation, it is incum- 
bent on you to raise the superstructure of diversified know- 
ledge, if you wish to attain eminence and wealth. As apothe- 
caries, therefore, in business, you must still continue to be 
students, — students indeed to the end of your lives. 
If I may venture to throw out a few suggestions on the 
subject of the future prosecution of your studies, I would re- 
commend to you to continue assiduously to cultivate the 
sciences of Chemistry and Botany. Even supposing your 
present proficiency in chemistry to be highly respectable, 
still, to keep pace merely with the discoveries in this science, 
requires that the chemist should be unceasingly a student. 
Botany also is a science which is constantly enlarging, and, 
as forming the key to the proper understanding of the vege- 
table Materia Medica, is of the highest importance. Works 
on these and other sciences, bearing more or less on phar- 
macy, should be constantly in course of perusal, to occupy 
profitably those spare hours which the wasteful of time are 
so apt to throw away. Besides a course of reading on these 
sciences, chemistry may be pursued by experimental re- 
searches, and botany, by excursions into the country, with a 
view to the recognition and investigation of our native plants. 
As a key to the acquisition of the stores of knowledge accu- 
mulated in other countries in relation to his profession, the 
ambitious pharmaceutist will pay attention to foreign lan- 
guages, in addition to the Latin, which is essential to the ac- 
curate comprehension of prescriptions. To this end, his first 
attention should be directed to the French, as being the most 
useful of modern languages. Next to it, the German deserves 
to be studied, as the language in which are written the most 
elaborate and extensive treatises on pharmacy. The study 
of these languages will form a delightful occupation for that 
leisure time which most professional young men, at the com- 
