36o 
Editorial. 
Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
June,  1920. 
members  have  been  so  vociferous  in  proclaiming  for  higher  pro- 
fessional pharmacy,  should  have  been  so  slow  in  recognizing  the 
necessity  for  a  more  thorough  collegiate  education  as  a  basis  for 
professional  status  and  still  more  strange  that  having  come  to  such 
a  realization  that  a  public  acknowledgment  was  required,  they 
should  still  persist  in  delaying  for  five  more  years  a  reform  that 
should  be  inaugurated  at  once.  The  arguments  used  as  a  justifi- 
cation for  this  postponement  are  not  at  all  consistent  with  the  ideals 
that  have  been  professed. 
The  first  general  session  of  the  American  Pharmaceutical  Asso- 
ciation was  opened  on  Thursday,  May  6,  at  3  p.m.,  in  the  small 
ballroom  on  the  tenth  floor,  and  without  unnecessary  formalities. 
Local  Secretary  Hilton  announced  that  the  policy  of  the  American 
Pharmaceutical  Association  was  to  receive  the  credentials  of  the 
delegates  from  the  Government  Departments  and  from  other  Asso- 
ciations and  to  refer  these  to  the  House  of  Delegates  and  in  the  meet- 
ings of  this  House  these  delegates  would  have  the  privilege  of  pre- 
senting whatever  messages  they  had  to  convey. 
President  L.  E.  Sayre  called  Vice-President  T.  J.  Bradley  to  the 
chair  and  read  his  presidential  address.  In  this  the  various  topics 
that  are  at  this  time  demanding  consideration  of  pharmacy  and 
several  internal  problems  of  the  Association  were  discussed  in  a 
manner  that  demonstrated  that  the  President  had  deliberated  on 
these  and  had  a  clear  conception  of  their  importance  and  had  arrived 
at  a  definite  conclusion  on  a  number  of  them. 
The  efforts  of  the  A.  Ph.  A.  to  interest  veterans  of  the  World 
War  in  the  work  of  the  Association  through  the  medium  of  an 
"Advisory  Committee"  and  later  the  creation  of  a  War  Veterans' 
Section  was  recounted.  His  reference  to  the  centennary  of  the  U.  S. 
Pharmacopoeia  and  the  discussion  of  the  vexing  question  of  what 
should  be  included  in  the  U.  S.  P.  and  the  N.  F.,  was  thoughtful 
and  consistent  and  the  conclusions  quoted  such  as  we  can  endorse 
as  to  the  best  interests  of  the  professions  which  these  volumes  serve. 
"As  long  as  medicine  is  both  a  science  and  an  art,  and  so  long 
as  clinical  therapeutics  is  able  to  produce  results  by  the  use  of  remedial 
agents  whose  worth  cannot  be  demonstrated  by  the  pharmaco- 
dynamic experiment,  we  will  be  forced  to  admit  drugs  and  prepara- 
tions of  both  classes.  To  do  otherwise  would  be  tantamount  to 
destroying  the  work  of  centuries  of  experience  and  dogmatically 
asserting  the  value  of  scientific  method  which  has  not  yet  been  able 
