150 PHILADELPHIA COLLEGE OF PHARMACY. 
tied for the practice of Pharmacy. This class of students, it 
is believed, constitute the larger portion of those attending 
the lectures. All apprentices engaged in wholesale stores 
are included in it, besides many who are brought up in re- 
tail establishments. When we consider that apothecaries, 
as at present existing, are men of every degree of attain- 
ment, from the mere pretender, to the accomplished Pharma- 
ceutist, some of them owing their instruction to a brief term 
of apprenticeship in which their opportunities were ex- 
tremely limited, and many of them following the business 
with a stock of knowledge altogether inadequate to its pro- 
per prosecution, we can be at no loss to account for the fact 
so often apparent to those who have served on the Examin- 
ing Committee, that students coming from such preceptors 
frequently manifest gross ignorance in regard to Pharmacy, 
though by the Lectures in the School they may have ac- 
quired a considerable knowledge of Materia Medica and 
general Chemistry. 
That Pharmacy is a branch of knowledge distinct from 
Chemistry and Materia Medica, no one will deny, and that 
its teacher should be practically familiar with its rules, and 
operations is equally evident. The time devoted by the Pro- 
fessor of Materia Medica to teaching his branch is hardly 
sufficient for him to do full justice to it if kept within its 
legitimate bounds, and if he attempt an extended view ot 
Pharmacy, it must evidently be at the expense of his own 
important subject. Hence we find that Pharmacy, as at 
present taught by the Professor of Materia Medica, is limit- 
ed to a cursory notice of the more prominent preparations 
of drugs, introduced as occasion offers in the course of his 
lectures. To any one at all acquainted with the exten- 
sive duties that appertain to the chair of Chemistry, it will 
be obvious that the time devoted to them is sufficiently 
brief, without the frequent digressions now required in 
illustrating the Pharmaceutical preparations. 
Your Committee believe, if a course of lectures on Phar- 
