PHILADELPHIA COLLEGE OP PHARMACY. 153 
prescription when the error is obvious and life is concerned ; 
the teacher of Pharmacy might do essential service to 
many of the students by giving general currency to a sys- 
tem of precautions now mostly confined to the establishments 
of the more enlightened apothecaries. In the practice of 
extemporaneous Pharmacy, perhaps no kind of information 
is more requisite than a knowledge of nomenclature; both 
recognised and obsolete. The medical corps in a large 
city, is composed of individuals of various ages and from 
different countries, whose alma mater, scattered over Europe 
and America, recognise standards of unlike nomenclature, 
and the dates of whose accession to the profession range 
through a period of half a century. The ideas of nomenclature 
imbibed during the term of their collegiate studies are 
generally the most lasting, and hence it is that in this age 
of scientific exactness, we find occasionally prescriptions 
written as in the days of Stahl and Glauber, calling to mind 
the reign of Phlogiston. The periodical variations in our 
own Pharmacopoeia, and in those of Great Britain frequent- 
ly perplex the Apothecary, and demand an extensive ac- 
quaintance with the subject. We therefore infer, that a 
professor of Pharmacy would see the importance of instruct- 
ing the students upon this branch, so as thoroughly to arm 
them against difficulties to which they must be liable in 
the practice of their profession. A knowledge of Toxico- 
logy is generally considered of great importance to the 
Apothecary, and no one will deny its occasional utility. 
The Professors of Materia Medica and Chemistry dwell 
on this subject, so far as it relates to the vegetable and 
mineral poisons occurring in their respective courses. It 
would be an appropriate subject for a few lectures from 
the proposed Professor of Pharmacy, in which a lucid and 
systematic review of the more prominent poisons and their 
antidotes, with instructions relative to the preparation and 
administration of the latter, and the proper precautions to 
be observed in vending the former, would be found ex- 
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