Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
June,  1920. 
Revision  oj  the  U.  S.  Pharmacopoeia. 
377 
of  the  Revision  Committee,  I  must  remind  you  that  the  real  re- 
port, the  one  to  which  the  Convention  is  entitled,  written  by  the 
Chairman  of  the  Committee  who  occupied  that  important  post 
•  during  the  active  period  of  revision,  can  never  be  presented.  He 
who  has  borne  the  burden  and  heat  of  the  day  has  been  taken  from 
us,  and  I,  who  was  so  close  to  him  in  his  work  for  so  many  years, 
realize  more  than  ever  the  loss  that  American  pharmacy  has  sus- 
tained, and  that  no  surrogate  can  stand  before  you  and  do  justice 
to  such  a  task  or  perform  it  in  the  manner  in  which  it  would  have 
been  handled  by  our  late  Chairman  Remington. 
In  my  hands  the  report  will  necessarily  be  limited  to  a  chrono- 
logical record  of  major  events  in  the  decade  just  ending.  It  will 
lack  the  fire  and  enthusiasm  which  would  characterize  a  report  by 
the  one  who  was  Chairman  for  a  period  of  nearly  seventeen  years. 
This  period  (from  1901  to  191 8)  was  the  most  important  in  the 
history  of  this  ancient  and  honorable  book  of  standards,  for  there  is 
only  one  other  national  pharmacopoeia  in  existence  which  is  older 
than  the  United  States  Pharmacopoeia  and  none  which  is 
more  important ;  it  is  the  period  which  saw  the  United  States  Pharma- 
copoeia emerge  from  a  position  of  interest  only  to  a  limited  number 
of  practicing  physicians  and  pharmcists  who  were  bound  by  the 
ethics  of  their  respective  professions  to  heed  its  mandates,  to  the 
supreme  position  which  it  now  occupies  as  the  book  of  standards 
recognized  as  authoritative  by  both  national  and  state  govern- 
ments in  the  laws  pertaining  to  drugs. 
At  the  decennial  meeting  of  the  Convention  in  May,  1910,  a 
change  was  made  in  the  former  plan  of  having  a  Revision  Committee 
of  twenty-five,  a  larger  committee  of  fifty  members  being  selected. 
This  included  the  following : 
Joseph  P.  Remington,  C.  Lewis  Diehl, 
William  C.  Alpers,  George  C.  Diekman, 
John  F.  Anderson,  A.  R.  L.  Dohme, 
H.  V.  Arny, 
E.  H.  Bartley, 
George  M.  Beringer, 
Wilhelm  Bodemann, 
Charles  Caspari,  Jr., 
C.  K.  Caspari, 
Virgil  Coblentz, 
N.  S.  Davis, 
E.  G.  Eberle, 
C.  W.  Edmunds, 
Joseph  W.  Englamd. 
J.  M.  Francis, 
J.  M.  Good, 
H.  M.  Gordin, 
W.  G.  Gregory, 
Walter  S.  Haines, 
