Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
March,  1910. 
}       Physiological  Standardisation.  107 
of  these  preparations  the  clinician  would  cease  to  complain  as  to 
the  quality  of  the  tincture  of  digitalis  which  is  dispensed  to  his 
patients. 
Another  drug  which  has  attracted  attention  as  a  worthy  object 
of  physiological  assay  is  ergot.  The  earliest  effort  to  ascertain  the 
quality  of  ergot  by  biological  means  appears  to  have  been  made  by 
Griinfeld  with  the  method  suggested  by  Prof.  Kobert,  of  determining 
the  dose  necessary  to  interrupt  the  circulation  in  the  comb  and 
wattle  of  the  rooster.  Little  practical  use  was  made,  however, 
of  the  biological  method  in  connection  with  ergot  until  1898,  when 
Houghton  published  an  account  of  some  results  of  cock's  comb 
assays  practiced  commercially.  The  workers  with  this  drug  have 
not  been  nearly  so  numerous  as  in  the  case  of  digitalis  and  the 
results  are  correspondingly  meagre.  Beyond  the  mere  proof  of 
the  variability  of  galenical  preparations  of  ergot  almost  nothing 
of  value  was  added  to  our  knowledge  of  this  drug  until  within  the 
last  few  years ;  from  a  pharmaceutical  standpoint  no  more  was 
known  of  ergot  at  the  opening  of  the  present  century  than  fifty 
years  ago. 
Within  the  last  three  or  four  years,  however,  it  has  been  the 
subject  of  more  study  and  some  very  interesting  facts  have  been 
brought  to  light  by  the  work  of  Kraft,  of  Barger  and  Dale,  of  Ed- 
munds, and  others.  In  the  experiments  which  have  been  going  on 
in  the  pharmacological  laboratory  of  the  University  of  Pennsyl- 
vania during  the  past  two  years  we  have  been  able  to  show  that  the 
inferior  quality  of  the  fluidextract  of  ergot  which  is  at  present  on 
the  market  is  due  largely  to  changes  which  take  place  after  its 
manufacture ;  even  in  hermetically  sealed  bottles  the  loss  of  potency 
is  at  the  rate  of  about  3  per  cent,  a  month,  and  if  the  preparation 
is  not  guarded  from  contact  with  the  air  the  deterioration  may 
amount  to  50  per  cent,  in  a  few  weeks.  Our  recent  evidence, 
although  not  conclusive,  inclines  us  to  the  belief  that,  contrary  to  the 
popular  opinion,  the  crude  drug  does  not  Aveaken  so  rapidly  as  the 
fluidextract.  We  have  also  worked  out  a  method  of  chemically 
determining  the  quality  of  ergot  which  has  so  far  yielded  us  figures 
fairly  parallel  to  the  results  of  physiological  tests  of  the  drug. 
I  should  like  to  mention  one  other  individual  example,  very 
briefly,  of  progress  in  a  pharmaceutical  subject  through  physiologi- 
cal methods ;  not  so  much  because  of  the  importance  of  the  drug  in 
question  as  for  an  evidence  of  what  can  be  accomplished  by  a  single 
