Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
June,  1900. 
Alkaloidal  Assay  Work. 
271 
It  has  been  urged  for  years,  and  is  still  true  to-day,  how  disas- 
trous it  is  to  pharmaceutical  progress  if  the  druggist  is  intimidated 
with  elaborated,  costly  or  complicated  apparatus.  There  is  no 
necessity  to  dwell  upon  this  theme.    We  all  know  it. 
Thompson's  sawdust  process  for  Extr.  fluida  has  the  great  draw- 
back that  the  sawdust  has  to  be  prepared  for  it.  This  pays  only  if 
the  article  is  wanted  regularly. 
Rusting,  a  young  Dutch  apothecary  of  much  promise,  the  kind  of 
man  to  apply  his  pharmaceutical  experience  to  chemical  manipulations 
(which  in  parenthesis  promoted  the  spreading  of  chemistry  in  the 
days  of  apothecaries  like  Scheele,  Serturner,  Pelletier  and  Caventou, 
Trommsdorf,  Geiger,  Mohr,  Merck,  Fliickiger ;  public  benefactors, 
like  J.  C.  Bemelot  Moens,  one  who  made  two  blades  of  grass  grow 
where  one  used  to  grow  only — in  other  words,  who  doubled  the  out- 
put of  quinine  sulphate,  made  quinine  cheap  by  his  scientific  culture 
of  Cinch.  Succ.  Ledg.  on  Java,  where  he  was  military  apothecary 
at  first  and  later  director  of  the  cinchona  plantations,  not  to 
mention  the  living,  of  course),  invented  a  similar  scheme,  even  of 
wider  application,  which  leaves,  as  one  will  see,  all  the  others  be- 
hind in  expediency,  cleanliness,  cheapness,  and  is  quantitatively  very 
satisfactory.  It  deserves  greatly  to  be  propagated,  and,  since 
references  are  scarcely  met  in  literature,  it  is  offered  here  for  a 
wider  circulation.  Only  a  very  small  variation  is  made  in  the  origi- 
nal, which  could  be  dispensed  with,  where  it  is  applied  to  the  only 
two  Dutch  fluid  extracts,  Ex.  fid.  Chinse  Succ.  and  China  liquida, 
the  previous  one  containing  only  10  per  cent,  alcohol,  the  latter 
one  none  at  all;  but  which  will  make  the  "Tragacanth"  scheme  of 
wider  application  for  the  many  English  and  American  fluid  extracts, 
with  their  large  percentage  of  alcohol. 
For  accurate,  expedient  and  cheap  assaying  of  "drugs,"  as  we 
usually  understand  the  word,  Schwickerath's  full  report,  in  the 
Pharm.  Rundschau  for  1894,  page  136,  with  his  use  of  so-called 
petrol,  ether,  instead  of  ethyl  ether,  as  recommended  by  Keller, 
later  on,  has  yet  its  full  value. 
The  Method. — Weigh  in  a  porcelain  or  other  small  dish  3  grammes 
of  the  Extr.  fluidum,  add  5  c.c.  of  water  and  expel  alcohol.  Trans- 
fer, in  the  usual  analytical  way,  into  a  medicine  bottle  of  about  100 
c.c.  capacity,  add  60  c.c.  ethyl  ether  (pure  ether),  and  make  alka- 
line;   add  small  quantities  at  a  time  of  a  5   to   10  per  cent. 
