THE  AMERICAN 
JOURNAL  OF  PHARMACY 
JANUARY,  1898. 
v 
DR.  PETER  SMITH  AND  HIS  DISPENSATORY.1 
By  John  Uri  Li,oyd,  Ph.M.,  Ph.D. 
Close  following  the  frontiersmen,  whose  footprints  were  scarcely 
rubbed  out,  and  whose  rifles  had  not  yet  been  silenced  in  the  territory 
embracing  the  Ohio  Valley,  came  a  band  of  men  who  cleared  away 
the  forest  and  founded  their  homes  among  the  stumps.  The  subject 
of  this  sketch  may  be  numbered  among  these  people.  He  was  a 
typical  Puritan,  an  educated,  stern  man,  of  indomitable  will,  and 
religious  to  the  utmost  degree. 
The  end  of  the  War  of  the  Revolution  had  been  consummated  be- 
fore the  Indian  had  departed  from  the  Miami  lands,  where  this 
man  lived.  John  Filson  tramped  from  Lexington  to  the  Ohio  River, 
laid  out  the  village  of  Losantiville,  afterward  Cincinnati,  and,  ven- 
turing too  far  from  the  fort,  left  his  bones  somewhere  among  the 
adjacent  hills.  This  happened  several  years  after  the  subject  of  this 
sketch  was  married.2    David  Schcepf,  the  talented  scientist,  that 
1  Read  at  the  December  meeting  of  the  Cincinnati  Section  of  the  American 
Chemical  Society. 
2  John  Filson  was  a  surveyor  and  school  teacher.  September  6,  1788,  he  pub- 
lished, in  connection  with  Mathias  Denman  and  R.  Patterson,  in  the  Kentucky 
Gazette,  of  Lexington,  Ky.,  a  call  for  men  to  make  a  road  to  the  mouth  of  the 
Lacking,  where  Judge  Symmes  expected  to  lay  out  a  town  opposite  the  mouth 
of  the  Licking.  Filson  was  made  surveyor  for  the  proposed  village,  and  coined 
for  it  the  name  L-os-anti-ville,  making  the  name  from  ville  (town),  anti 
(opposite),  os  (mouth),  and  L  (Licking) .  The  place  went  by  the  name  Losanti- 
ville until  January  2,  1790,  when  Governor  St.  Clair  changed  it  to  Cincinnati . 
John  Filson  did  not  live  to  complete  this  work.  In  company  with  Symmes  and 
(1) 
