4iS 
Hyoscyamus  Muticus. 
{  Am.  Jour.  Pharm 
I  September,  1902.  ' 
future  there  is  little  to  fear  of  any  backward  step  being  taken,  at 
least  not  in  the  coming  edition  of  the  United  States  Pharmacopoeia. 
The  committee  having  the  revision  in  charge  has  been  definitely 
instructed  to  retain  the  metric  system  of  weights  and  measures,  as 
adopted  in  the  last  decennial  revision,  and  unless  the  members  of 
this  committee  are  individually  and  collectively  willing  to  betray 
the  trust  that  has  been  placed  in  them  by  the  Convention  of  1900, 
they  will  not  in  any  way  abrogate  or  change  from  the  advance  that 
was  made  more  than  ten  years  ago.  On  the  other  hand,  let  us  hope 
that  the  Revision  Committee  will  jealously  guard  the  established 
record,  so  that  the  professions  of  medicine  and  pharmacy  may  go 
down  in  history  as  being,  at  least  officially,  ahead  of  their  contem- 
poraries in  furthering  a  reform  that  should  have  been  introduced 
long  ago. 
HYOSCYAMUS  MUTICUS. 
By  J.  B.  Nag^voort. 
It  seems  feasible  to  grow  this  plant  in  a  temperate  zone,  which 
would  be  a  pleasing  solution  of  our  dependency  on  European  Hyos- 
cyamus niger,  arriving,  as  this  often  does,  in  a  very  poor  condition 
for  pharmaceutical  purposes — mouldy,  blackened,  low  in  alkaloidal 
contents. 
Seed,  personally  obtained  from  Egypt,  has  grown  to  small  plants, 
promising  well,  under  different  conditions ;  in  sand,  in  poor  sandy 
soil,  and  in  common  garden  soil,  in  the  United  States  as  well  as  in 
Holland. 
Of  course  there  is  still  a  wide  stretch  between  this  condition  and 
mercantile  requirements. 
It  might  not  be  superfluous  to  refer  to  Gadamer,  Archiv  d.  Pharm. , 
1898,  236,  704  [leaves  of  Hyoscyamus  muticus  contained  ±  14  per 
cent,  (one  and  four-tenths  per  cent.)  Hyoscyamine].  And  to  Dunstan 
and  Brown,  Transactions  of  the  (English)  Chemical  Society,  1901, 
vol.  79,  "The  quantity  obtained  corresponded  with  0-87  per  cent, 
(eighty-seven  hundredths)  calculated  on  the  dry  material." 
The  calculations  of  o-i  per  cent,  (one-tenth)  and  less,  of  hyoscya- 
mine, in  henbane,  obtained  in  the  European  market,  are  usually 
made  on  the  material,  air-dried  and  in  a  condition  to  be  pulverized 
and  sifted.  This  condition  will  not  differ,  therefore,  very  much  from 
the  condition  of  Professor  Dunstan's  material. 
