EDITORIAL. 
389 
excellence that its pages thus far manifest, it will prove a valuable auxili- 
ary in the promotion of the agricultural interests of this region. Its scope 
is comprehensive, and the tone of many of its articles of a high order. We 
wish it all success. 
The Dispensatory of the United States of America. By George B. Wood, 
M. D., and Franklin Bache, M. D. Ninth Edition, carefully revised. 
Philadelphia. Lippincott, Grambo and Co. 1851. pp. 1456, 8vo. 
When a book becomes by usage an authority, those for whose guidance 
it is intended should watch it jealously, that no errors or fallacies creep into 
it, as it comes remodeled from the press. Our time has been too much oc- 
cupied to review the work before us, and for the present we offer but a short 
notice. 
The unexampled success of the Dispensatory of the United States has been 
owing less to any circumstances attending its publication, than to the intrin - 
sic merits of the work itself ; hence, as edition after edition has been thrown 
out from the press, its popularity has continued unabated, and we may 
safely say that at no former period of its history has the confidence of the 
Medical and Pharmaceutical professions in its accuracy and completeness 
been more general or stronger. In one sense it is the text book — the codex 
— of the United States Apothecary, more truly than is the Pharmacopoeia ; 
because, embodying, as it does, that work, very many apothecaries and 
physicians know the Pharmacopoeia only through the medium of the Dis- 
pensatory — a fact which, however honorable to the authors of the latter, is 
to be regretted, as depriving the former of that universally authoritative po- 
sition which it should hold. On the other hand, it may be said that had it 
not been for the deep interest taken in upholding the authority and 
dignity of the Pharmacopoeia in their excellent Commentary, by the authors 
of the Dispensatory, that work would have been far less influential in as- 
similating the practice of pharmaceutists than it now is. 
The present edition has been attended with an unusual amount of labor, 
arising chiefly from the fact that the revision of no less than three of the 
four Pharmacopoeias published in Great Britain and the United States have 
taken place since 1849. The progress of chemistry, the improvements in 
practical pharmacy, and the discoveries in therapeutics, have all tended to 
introduce changes in the national and collegiate medical authorities, and 
the radical substitution of a new system of weights for the old troy stand- 
ard, by the Dublin College, has added to the labor and perplexities 
of the Commentators. Substances formerly found in the appendix as 
unofncinal have been brought out in the regular text, and several, then up- 
held by pharmacopoeial authority have shrunk back into that omnium ga- 
theram, as of lesser importance. 
In the portion of the work dedicated to materia medica, fewer changes 
have been made, and yet fewer are apparent, than in the latter, or pharma- 
31* 
