THE 
AMERICAN  JOURNAL  OF  PHARMACY. 
FEBRUARY,    18  7  4. 
PH  ARM  AC  0  GNOSTIC  AL  AND  CHEMICAL  NOTES. 
By  John  M.  Maisch. 
Read  at  the  Pharmaceutical  Meeting,  January  20,  1874. 
It  is  desirable  occasionally  to  call  attention  to  drugs  of  handsome 
appearance  and  excellent  qualities,  if  it  be  for  no  other  purpose  than 
to  let  the  profession  know  how  perfect  a  drug  may  be  preserved,  even 
in  commerce,  so  as  to  represent  all  its  characteristics  and  show  any 
admixture  if  such  should  be  present.  These  considerations  induce 
me  to  notice  two  drugs,  Pomegranate  bark  and  Chiretta,  which  I 
recently  obtained  from  Messrs  Cramer  &  Small,  of  this  city. 
Pomegranate  Bark  usually  occurs  in  our  commerce  in  small  frag- 
ments of  quills,  which  rarely  attain  the  diameter  of  a  finger.  The 
bark  in  question  is  in  single  and  double  quills,  varying  in  length  from 
two  and  a  half  to  seven  inches  and  from  one-half  to  one  inch  in  diameter. 
It  has  apparently  been  collected  from  the  lower  part  of  the  trunk 
and  the  thicker  roots,  and  agrees  in  all  respects  with  the  bark  as 
usually  seen  in  commerce  and  which  is  evidently  collected  from  the 
smaller  branches  of  the  tree  and  root.  Those  quills,  which  are  cov- 
ered with  a  rather  thick  pale  brownish-grey  cork,  more  or  less  covered 
with  irregular  longitudinally  cleft  ridges,  appear  to  me  to  belong  to 
the  root,  while  the  trunk  bark  appears  to  have  a  thinner  cork  with 
the  fissured  ridges  in  more  regular  longitudinal  direction,  and  a  color 
more  decidedly  grey,  varied  by  patches  of  blackish  brown.  It  will  be  re- 
membered that  Dr.  C.  Harz  stated*  a  few  years  ago  that  the  commer- 
cial pomegranate  bark  is  always  the  bark  of  the  overground  axis, 
*  American  Journal  of  Pharmacy,  1870,  p  220. 
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