448 
Correspondence. 
(Am,  Jour.  Pharm. 
I  September,  1904. 
ceutical  schools  will  gladly  adopt  high-school  graduation  as  a  con- 
dition of  admission,  and  that  they  will  not  do  so  under  any  other 
circumstances,  because  they  cannot. 
In  this  school  only  about  one-third  of  the  students  have  a  com- 
pleted high- school  education  or  its  equivalent,  only  two-thirds  have 
had  as  much  as  two  years'  high-school  Work,  and  the  remainder 
have  been  admitted  to  high  school  or  have  had  one  year  of  high- 
school  work.  Completed  high-school  work  is  required  for  the  course 
leading  to  the  degree  of  Pharmaceutical  Chemist,  but  if  we  should 
require  that  grade  of  preliminary  education  of  all  our  students  it  is 
absolutely  certain  that  all  students  who  do  not  have  a  high-school 
education  would  simply  be  driven  into  other  pharmaceutical  schools 
and  nothing  would  be  gained  by  such  a  course,  as  no  distinction  is 
made  on  the  basis  of  general  education  when  these  young  men  pre- 
sent themselves  before  the  boards  of  pharmacy  for  examination  and 
registration.    They  would  all  remain  in  pharmacy. 
Good  general  education  is,  to  my  mind,  of  far  greater  importance 
in  our  efforts  to  advance  pharmaceutical  education  than  either 
special  education  in  the  schools  of  pharmacy  or  the  training  in  the 
shops,  because  it  lies  at  the  bottom  of  all,  and  wherever  the  founda- 
tion is  poor  the  structure  will  be  correspondingly  weak. 
I  have  for  many  years  felt  that  the  pharmacy  laws  confer  vast 
discretionary  powers  upon  the  boards  of  pharmacy  which  the  boards 
have  never  used.  The  boards  have  it  in  their  power  to  insist  upon 
adequate  preliminary  education  before  the  examinations  they  hold 
and  before  issuing  licenses.  Probably  the  boards  have  not  held  this 
view  or  perhaps  they  have  not  even  thought  of  it.  If  at  the 
approaching  joint  conference  of  the  State  boards  of  pharmacy  and 
the  conference  of  pharmaceutical  faculties  this  question  should 
receive  full  consideration,  I  believe  that  the  boards  of  pharmacy  may 
be  expected  to  establish  a  much  better  standard  of  general  education 
for  admission  to  the  ranks  of  pharmacy  than  is  now  prevailing,  and 
I  also  believe  that  the  schools  of  pharmacy  will  do  all  that  the  boards 
of  pharmacy  see  fit  to  prescribe,  and  probably  much  more. 
The  responsibility  for  the  low  standard  of  education  in  pharmacy, 
as  compared  with  that  in  other  professions,  certainly  rests  with  the 
boards  of  pharmacy  and  not  with  the  colleges.  The  pharmacy  laws 
uniformly  require  the  boards  to  examine  into  the  qualifications  of 
the  candidates  for  registration  and  to  register  only  those  whom  they 
