Am.  Jour.  Pharm.  \ 
June,  1896.  j 
Assay  for  Sanguinaria. 
305 
Be  it  understood  that  no  countenance  is  suggested  herein  for 
adulteration,  sophistication,  ignorance,  or  for  carelessness  of  manipu- 
lation ;  only  a  plea  is  made  for  liberality  towards  those  members  of 
the  pharmaceutical  profession  who  aim  conscientiously  to  do  justice 
to  their  patrons,  who  use  proper  care  in  manipulations,  but  who 
cannot,  and  in  the  writer's  opinion  should  not  be  asked  to,  meet  too 
rigid  requirements. 
Conclusion. — In  closing,  the  writer  will  state  that  he  believes  that 
while  in  behalf  of  the  druggist  a  scale  of  reasonable  variations 
should  be  affixed  by  the  pharmacopceial  committee  to  every  phar- 
macopceial  preparation,  it  is  no  less  a  matter  of  justice  in  behalf  of 
those  whose  duty  it  is  to  enforce  the  food  and  drugs  laws.  These 
men  should  not  be  required  to  determine  this  question.  To  place 
this  responsibility  upon  them  is  to  establish  as  many  different  stand- 
ards as  there  are  officers,  or  else,  if  any  so  insist,  to  demand  that 
these  preparations  be  kept  exactly  according  to  the  pharmacopceial 
standard,  which  means  to  require  of  apothecaries  more  than  mortal 
man  can  accomplish. 
A  METHOD  OF  ASSAY  FOR  SANGUINARIA  AND  ITS  - 
PREPARATIONS. 
By  Charges  H.  LaWai^i,. 
The  recent  introduction  of  standardized  drugs  and  their  corre- 
sponding preparations  has  stimulated  investigation  along  lines  which 
are  practically  new,  and  the  Pharmacopoeia  of  twenty  years  hence 
will  probably  have  a  standard  for  each  drug  which  contains  some 
characteristic  and  therapeutically  valuable  constituent,  together  with 
the  process  of  estimation  best  suited  to  the  particular  case  at 
hand. 
At  the  present  time  many  investigators  are  devoting  their  time  to 
this  work,  and  scarcely  a  month  passes  but  some  new  drug  has  a 
process  proposed  for  the  estimation  of  its  active  constituent  (gen- 
erally an  alkaloid),  together  with  the  results  obtained  by  the  applica- 
tion of  the  process  to  a  number  of  commercial  samples  of  the  drug 
for  the  purpose  of  fixing  a  standard. 
Already  many  drugs  have  been  studied  in  this  manner,  with  the 
result  that  a  number  of  manufacturers  of  pharmaceutical  prepara- 
