THE 
AMERICAN  JOURNAL  OF  PHARMACY. 
MAY,  1872. 
PH ARM ACO GNOSTIC AL  NOTES. 
By  John  M.  Maisch. 
Read  at  the  Pharmaceutical  Meeting  held  April  16th. 
Many  interesting  questions  connected  with  our  indigenous  materia 
medica  require  investigation,  and  it  is  in  most  cases  not  easy  to  obtain 
the  desirable  information.  The  various  inquiries  instituted  within  the 
past  few  years,  in  dhTerent  sections  of  the  United  States,  into  the 
statistics  of  this  branch  of  the  drug  trade,  have  resulted  in  total  fail- 
ures, and,  except  to  the  initiated,  very  little  is  known  of  the  localities 
where  many  of  the  staple  articles  of  our  indigenous  materia  medica 
are  collected  for  the  general  commerce,  the  information  being  usually 
limited  to  the  geographical  section  of  the  country.  The  difficulties 
encountered  in  such  investigations  have  been  well  pointed  out  by  Mr. 
C  Lewis  Diehl,  in  a  paper  published  in  the  Proceedings  of  the  Ame- 
rican Pharmaceutical  Association,  1870,  p.  137.  The  knowledge  we 
possess  on  this  particular  point  appears  merely  to  indicate  that  the 
wholesale  market  has  now  to  depend  on  the  Southern,  South-western 
and  Western  States  for  a  supply  of  drugs  which  were  formerly  sup- 
plied in  sufficient  quantities  by  the  Eastern  and  Middle  States.  While 
this  may  undoubtedly  be  in  part  accounted  for  by  the  increased  de- 
mand, it  must  be  also  to  some  extent  due  to  injudicious  collection, 
whereby  some  medicinal  plants  have  become  nearly  or  entirely  extinct 
in  certain  localities  where  formerly  they  were  frequently  met  with. 
The  same  cause  appears  to  have  had  already  similar  results  in  some 
Western  localities.  In  Professor  Diehl's  paper,  cited  above,  we  find 
the  following  passage,  which  seems  to  point  in  this  direction :  "  For- 
merly there  was  a  lively  trade  in  indigenous  drugs  in  New  Albany, 
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