ON A SUBSTANCE RESEMBLING MYRRH. 
333 
It may be alleged that this method would be too restrictive for 
trade, but it may be advanced that the public interest should be 
of paramount importance, and that such precautions are neces- 
sary, that the numerous patients who employ the cinchonas 
may not be injured by them. 
It is desirable that the cinchonas brought to France should 
be examined by commissions, who will classify them accord- 
ing to their value, and who will reject those which ought 
not be employed. These commissions to be composed 
of persons who have given proof of skill, and are familiar with 
the different species of bark. A. C. 
Journ. de Chimie Medicale. 
ART. LXV. — NOTE UPON A SUBSTANCE OF FOREIGN ORI- 
GIN RESEMBLING MYRRH, AND THE PECULIAR PRIN- 
CIPLE CONTAINED IN IT. By M. Planche. 
Naturalists are still in doubt with respect to the parti- 
cular plant which produces myrrh, although this gum resin 
has been employed from the earliest antiquity, either as a per- 
fume or as a therapeutic agent. Better informed as regards the 
intimate composition of this immediate product by the la- 
bors of Cartha, of Neuman, of Braconnot, of Pelletier, and 
more recently by the analysis of Brandes, whose results most 
nearly approach those of our learned compeer; sufficiently in- 
structed on the other hand, upon the nature of a new or false 
myrrh, examined in 1829, by M. Bonastre, we find two 
points of departure sufficiently well established to determine 
in what the new substance, with which we are about to occupy 
ourselves, is analogous to common myrrh, and in what it differs 
from it. 
This substance made part of a collection which I ob- 
tained, about two years since, of an old druggist of Paris, and 
which he had picked himself from a case of myrrh, so fully 
