262  United  States  Pharmacopoeia.  {Amj£^£2.arm' 
macopceia  of  the  United  States,"  as  the  book  was  called  even  at  that 
time,  was  printed  in  Boston. 
This  first  edition  had,  however,  several  original  features,  in  which 
it  differed,  not  alone  from  the  earlier  American  works,  but  also  from 
any  of  the  European  Pharmacopoeias  that  were  in  use  in  or  con- 
sulted in  different  parts  of  the  country. 
The  Materia  Medica,  or  "  Catalogue  of  Medicinal  Substances  not 
included  in  the  Preparations,"  was  divided  into  a  primary  and  a  second- 
ary list.  This  was  done  so  that  a  physician  or  an  apothecary  might 
tell  at  a  glance  whether  or  not  a  particular  substance  was  much  used 
or  popular,  or,  as  noted  in  one  of  the  later  editions,  "  it  permitted  a 
discrimination  between  medicines  of  acknowledged  value  and  others 
of  less  estimation."  The  second  point  of  difference  was,  that  while 
other  Pharmacopoeias  had  either  been  printed  in  the  vernacular  or 
entirely  in  Latin,  the  body  of  this  book  was  primarily  in  Latin,  but 
had,  on  the  opposite  pages,  a  free  translation  of  the  Latin  into 
English. 
This  was  evidently  done  for  several  reasons:  in  the  first  place,  the 
vernacular  was  introduced  to  make  the  book  accessible  to  a  number 
of  physicians  and  pharmacists  who  were  not  familiar  with  the  Latin, 
while  the  Latin  was  used  to  make  the  book  more  popular  in  those 
sections  of  the  country  where  the  English  language  was  not  so  well 
understood,  and  also,  "  To  make  the  meaning  of  the  various  direc- 
tions more  clear,  in  case  the  English  might  be  considered 
ambiguous." 
As  noted  above,  this  first  volume  was  printed  in  Bjston,  and  con- 
sisted of  272  octavo  pages.  If  we  subtract  from  this  101  pages  of 
duplicated  material,  we  would  have  a  book  of  171  pages.  These 
pages,  as  is  shown  in  the  following  tables,  contained  a  total  of  621 
titles.  Of  these,  221  were  in  the  primary  and  71  in  the  secondary 
list  of  the  Materia  Medica.  These  two  lists  are  described  in  the 
introduction  as  being  "  A  Catalogue  of  Simple  Medicines,  together 
with  some  prepared  medicines  which  are  kept  in  the  shop  of  the 
apothecary,  but  not  necessarily  prepared  by  him."  Among  these 
simple  medicines  we  find  antimonum,  argentum,  aurum,  cuprum  and 
plumbum ;  these  were  raw  materials  from  which  corresponding 
chemical  compounds  were  to  be  made  by  the  apothecary.  Organic 
drugs,  in  use  at  the  present  time,  were  well  represented  in  this  first 
edition  ;  among  them  we  may  note  such  familiar  substances  as 
