564 
German  Pharmacopoeia. 
(  A.m.  Jour.  Pharm. 
\   December,  1900. 
very  carefully,  and  another  list  of  active  drugs  and  preparations 
that  are  to  be  carefully  kept  separate  from  other  remedies. 
Next  in  order  we  find  a  new  addition  to  this  Pharmacopoeia,  and 
one  that  will  no  doubt  cause  considerable  discussion  and  criticism. 
It  is  a  list  of  the  atomic  weights  of  the  elements  that  are  contained 
in  the  official  chemical  substances.  This  list  is  quite  an  innovation, 
as  the  atomic  weights  here  presented  are  calculated  on  the  basis  of 
oxygen  with  the  equivalence  of  16.  This  official  recognition  is  evi- 
dently a  concession  to  the  committee  of  the  German  Chemical 
Society,  that  was  appointed  to  consider  this  subject  of  atomic 
weights,  and  reported  on  the  advisability  of  this  particular  change. 
Whether  or  not  it  meets  with  general  approval  remains  to  be  seen. 
Following  this  we  have  a  table  of  the  variations  in  the  specific 
gravities  of  many  of  the  official  substances  at  various  temperatures 
from  plus  12°  to  25°C.  Then,  in  place  of  an  index,  we  have  a 
table  of  synonyms  and  their  equivalent  in  the  official  title,  and  in 
j  conclusion,  a  list  of  the  official  German  titles  with  their  correspond- 
ing Latin  terms. 
Having  taken  this  rapid  survey  of  the  book,  let  us  turn  back  to 
the  main  portion  of  the  work,  and  incidentally  compare  some  features 
of  this  with  our  own,  and  also  with  the  recent  edition  of  the  British 
Pharmacopoeia.  To  do  this  more  readily  we  have  tabulated  the  dif- 
ferent points  that  we  wish  to  call  attention  to ;  this  will  facilitate  com- 
parison, and  at  the  same  time  make  the  argument  more  apparent. 
The  first  point  of  interest  is  the  number  of  official  articles ;  this 
varies  from  628  in  the  German  to  990  in  our  own  Pharmacopoeia. 
This  is  well  shown  in  detail  in  the  appended  list: 
Analysis  of  titles  in 
G.P. 
B.P. 
U.S.P. 
 i77 
174 
255 
 15 
15 
18 
 178 
186 
239 
 234 
45i 
473 
0 
5 
0 
0 
 628 
826 
990 
It  will  be  seen  that  our  own 
Pharmacopoeia  leads,  as  far  as  the 
number  of  official  titles  is  concerned,  with  the  British  Pharma- 
copoeia second.  This  is  no  doubt  largely,  if  not  entirely,  due  to  the 
fact  that  our  own  book  is  used  over  a  much  greater  territory,  and 
by  a  more  composite  people,  and  these  naturally  have  a  greater 
