Origin al Comnt un ication s. 
mencement of their business, are apt to have upon their 
hands. After some facility in reading has been attained, fur- 
ther improvement may be made by reading pharmaceuti- 
cal works in the respective languages; and thus important 
pharmaceutical knowledge and highly useful foreign lan- 
guages may be acquired at the same time. 
In accomplishing yourselves for the pharmaceutical profes- 
sion, more particularly in case you should engage in the bu- 
siness of importing druggists, it will be incumbent on you to 
enlarge your knowledge as to the geographical sources and 
commercial history of drugs. Here then is required of you 
those diversified attainments which distinguish the enlightened 
merchant. 
Lord Bacon has somewhere remarked, that every gentleman 
who engages in the exercise of a profession, enters into a tacit 
agreement with his brethren to maintain its honour and dig- 
nity, and to endeavor to improve it by new observations 
and discoveries. That you will maintain ihe ethical principles 
connected with your profession, and even raise their standard, 
I will not allow myself to doubt; but what I here wish par- 
ticularly to call your attention to, is the obligation which you 
are all under, of exerting yourselves to enlarge the bounda- 
ries of your profession, by adding to it important facts and 
observations. You have received the pharmaceutic art, en- 
riched with numerous discoveries, the result of ihe joint la- 
bours of those men who have adorned your profession, or dis- 
tinguished themselves in the sciences subsidiary to it. How 
are you to repay the advantages which you have derived 
from this rich inheritance of knowledge, prepared to your 
hands'? I answer, by assiduously adding to it, and by trans- 
mitting it to your successors, still richer and more valua- 
ble than you received it. In this way only can the debt 
of gratitude which you owe to your predecessors be repaid. 
For entering upon this honourable career of investigation, 
with reference to improvements and discoveries connected 
with your profession, our own country presents several ad- 
vantages. Our plants have as yet been but imperfectly in- 
vestigated, with reference to their medicinal virtues. Many 
of them may possess peculiar active properties, not now sus- 
