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SELECTED ARTICLES. 
the wholesale druggists, or those great retailers who unite a 
wholesale trade to their other business. By them again the 
drugs are disposed of to retailers generally throughout the 
country; but frequently another intermediate step is made in 
the case of the small retailers in country districts; who pur- 
chase, not from the wholesale dealers, but from the larger 
retailers of the nearest great towns. It must be evident then, 
that the quarters where adulterations may be practised are 
sufficiently numerous. 
There can be no doubt, in the first place, that drugs from 
foreign parts are often adulterated before they arrive in this 
country, either by those who prepare them, or by the mer- 
chants abroad, to whom they are in the first instance dis- 
posed of. Scammony and gamboge, whose adulterations have 
been inquired into above, are ascertained examples of this 
kind; and opium, cinchona bark, senna and many other arti- 
cles from distant countries, are equally well known to receive 
there the extraneous ingredients which are recognised in 
them by the European pharmacologist. 
Some of these adulterations are in all probability practised 
with a distinct purpose of fraud. Such may be assumed to 
be the object where the adulteration is of a kind which may 
deceive the British importer and wholesale druggist. In 
regard to some substances, such for example as opium and 
senna, the deception is frequently, perhaps generally, success- 
ful. In the case of opium I feel satisfied, that, so long as the 
wholesale druggist trusts to its external characters alone, he 
must be liable to be sometimes deceived. It is not easy 
otherwise to account for instances, which have come under 
my notice, of opiums widely different in real value having 
been bought and sold at nearly or absolutely the same prices, 
where the transactions took place between experienced indi- 
viduals in the highest walk of their trade. As to senna, so 
successfully is it adulterated, that some of the first members 
of the wholesale trade in London are scarcely aware, that the 
highest priced variety of this drug, the Alexandrian senna, is 
