Am'DJecUri9Pi8arn1'  }        Determination  of  Morphine.  851 
foreign  matter  to  a  similar  extent.  Instead  of  stating  that  the 
herb  should  be  "  without  the  presence  or  admixture  of  more  than 
10  per  cent,  of  its  stems  or  other  foreign  matter,"  it  would  seem 
advisable  to  permit  a  maximum  of  5  per  cent,  of  foreign  matter  and 
to  allow  the  presence  of  20  per  cent,  of  belladonna  stems  as  a 
maximum. 
Office  of  Drug,  Poisonous  and  Oil  Plant  Investigations, 
Bureau  of  Plant  Industry, 
U.  S.  Department  of  Agriculture, 
Washington,  D.  C. 
THE  DETERMINATION  OF  MORPHINE  IN  COMPLEX 
PRODUCTS. 
Part  III.    Opium  and  Mixtures  Containing  Opium. 
By  Alfred  Tingle,  Ph.D. 
Introduction. 
The  very  large  number  of  methods  which  have  been  proposed 
for  the  determination  of  morphine  in  opium  is  in  itself  a  strong 
argument  that  a  reliable  one  is  yet  to  be  sought.  Moreover,  not  one 
of  these  is  capable  of  simple  extension  to  cover  combinations  other 
than  opium  itself.  Even  when  used  on  such  closely  allied  derivative 
as  a  tincture  or  fluid  extract,  a  new  set  of  arbitrary  corrections  must 
be  empirically  determined  and  introduced  into  the  calculation  of  the 
results. 
To  apply  such  methods  to  mixtures  of  unknown  composition 
would  be  out  of  the  question  on  that  account  alone.  Further,  they 
cannot  be  applied  to  pills  containing  some  of  the  excipients  men- 
tioned in  Part  II  of  this  communication,  as  the  resulting  mixtures 
would  be  colloidal  suspensions  which  could  neither  be  filtered  nor 
even  dealt  with  by  decantation. 
Many  of  the  methods  proposed,  and  even  in  common  use,  are 
necessarily  inaccurate,  in  view  of  our  more  recent  knowledge  of 
opium.  For  instance,  L.  Debourdeaux  {Bull.  Sci.  Pharmacol.,  1910, 
XVII,  382-385)  has  shown  that  as  much  as  10  per  cent,  of  the 
morphine  in  opium  is  in  a  form  insoluble  in  water  and  alcohol,  and 
only  to  be  rendered  soluble  by  an  alkali  or  alkaline  earth.  Thus  the 
method  laid  down  in  the  United  States  Pharmacopoeia  is  quite  vain. 
