Am.  Jour.  Pharm.  ) 
September,  1911.  J 
Teaching  of  Pharmacognosy. 
431 
in  the  examination.  Partly  because  the  subject  of  the  examination 
is  so  lifeless,  the  student  has  never  been  stimulated  in  his  studies. 
Furthermore  because  the  examination  is  so  perfunctory  the  stu- 
dent's thoughts  are  seldom  carried  beyond  these  parallel  columns, 
and  he  can  truthfully  say  that  the  whole  subject  is  dry  and  unin- 
teresting. Besides  on  this  account  the  general  inference  is  that  the 
subject  is  of  little  or  minor  importance. 
Occasionally  we  find  teachers  who  dilate  upon  the  subject  of 
the  history  of  drugs  and  the  countries  in  which  the  plants  are 
indigenous,  but  say  practically  nothing  more  of  the  drug  than  is 
contained  in  the  Pharmacopoeia.  We  find  students  who  have  had 
a  good  preparatory  education  who  believe  that  in  this  knowledge 
they  have  valuable  information  to  fit  them  to  become  retail  pharma- 
cists and  usually  they  are  very  easily  confused  when  it  comes  to 
the  identification  of  specimens.  Sometime  ago  I  heard  a  judge  of 
one  of  our  city  courts  make  some  remarks  in  the  course  of  an 
after  dinner  address  that  impressed  me  very  much.  He  said :  "  The 
fact  that  you  know  that  a  certain  drug  is  gathered  in  the  Himalayas 
is  not  going  to  make  you  either  a  safe  or  successful  druggist,  you 
must  know  the  nature  and  property  of  the  substances  you  are 
handling  and  how  safely  to  fill  prescriptions  and  a  good  many 
other  things  that  you  only  learn  by  experience."  Any  practical 
pharmacist  knows  this  and  yet  the  burden  of  most  examinations  in 
Materia  Medica  are  upon  questions  that  few  teachers  and  examiners 
would  pass  an  excellent  examination  upon  without  considerable 
study  beforehand. 
While  the  aim  of  an  examination  before  a  Board  of  Pharmacy 
appears  to  be  to  test  a  candidate's  knowledge,  the  college  examina- 
tion should  be  with  an  additional  object,  viz.,  to  round  out  the 
knowledge  gained  during  the  course  and  give  the  student  self- 
reliance  and  confidence  in  himself.  It  should  not  be  with  the  object 
of  getting  him  ready  to  pass  the  Board  of  Pharmacy  examinations 
as  now  conducted. 
Now  that  the  Boards  of  Pharmacy  are  seriously  considering 
improving  the  methods  of  examination  it  seems  to  me  that  we 
might  well  ponder  upon  the  subject  and  try  to  look  at  it  from  the 
point  of  view  of  testing  a  candidate's  fitness  to  practice  pharmacy. 
In  my  judgment  we  must  eliminate  the  idea  that  because  a  pro- 
fessor gives  an  interesting  historical  lecture  upon  certain  drugs  it  is 
expected  that  the  student  will  have  all  of  this  information  at  his 
