ON DRUG GRINDING. 
199 
sooner or later discovered, and they lose their character and 
their business. I have in my time seen failures from both these 
causes. 
There is, perhaps, no other business in which there are greater 
opportunities, more temptations to dishonesty and fraud, and more 
thanklessness— I may say punishment — for being honest, than in this 
business of powdering drugs. You have not only the temptations 
and fault-finding on one side to resist, but you have the punish- 
ment on the other side. Often have I been censured and frequent- 
ly made to pay for losses in powdering drugs, which were altoge- 
ther unavoidable and from no fault of mine, but from the nature and 
state of the article sent to me, which might have been avoided 
by adopting the plan I have every reason to believe is sometimes 
pursued elsewhere, of putting some foreign substance in the article 
to make up a portion of the loss in powdering. 
It is perfect nonsense to expect a uniform loss in powdering any 
particular drug, with but few exceptions ; cream tartar, for in- 
stance, is one from which there seems to be no evaporation in the 
process of grinding; on the contrary I have sometimes thought there 
was an absorption from the atmosphere sufficient in some . cases to 
increase the weight. In this article I rarely lose more than from 
half to three quarters of one per cent, and most of that arises from 
extraneous substances — nails, chips, and other things we discover in 
it and throw out. Mr. Redwood states that the loss in powdering 
this article in London, is two per cent; from the slow and bungling 
manner in which they grind it there I only wonder it is not more. 
We sometimes receive vegetable substances, roots, barks, gums, 
&c, direct from the hold of a ship, or from damp cellars; at other 
times we receive the same articles from the garret of a store, 
where they may have been for a year or more. It is ridiculous to 
expect the same loss in both cases. Most of the articles we powder 
contain more or less water, which we are obliged to dry out, and 
if we did not dry them artificially, when we reduced them to such 
minute particles as constitute a fine powder, the water would in a 
great measure escape by evaporation ; this constitutes the loss in 
powdering drugs, at least the great amount of it. Some time back, 
I received a large lot of Bayberry bark from a house in this city, 
who had bought it without sufficient examination, for it had been 
