ii 
Notes  and  Neivs, 
{  Am.  Jour.  Phaxm. 
1     October  1893. 
on  the  spot,  as  it  is  believed  that,  to  be  efficacious,  it  must  be  drunk  fresh  from 
the  animal. 
Dr.  William  Osier. — A  perfect  deluge  of  deserved  honors  seems  at  present 
to  have  fallen  to  the  lot  of  Dr.  William  Osier,  of  Baltimore,  Md.  No  medical 
name  is  more  frequently  mentioned  with  favor  at  home  or  abroad  than  his,  and 
no  one  has  done,  or  is  doing,  more  to  merit  such  pleasant  recognition.  As  a 
thinker,  medical  author,  scientific  observer  and  teacher,  he  has  few  peers  and 
no  superiors.  It  is  only  a  few  weeks  since  his  name  was  mentioned  in  connec- 
tion with  membership  in  the  Royal  Society  of  Great  Britain  ;  then  we  learned 
that  he  had  become  Dean  of  the  Medical  Department  of  Johns  Hopkins  Uni- 
versity  ;  now  we  hear  he  is  offered  the  chair  in  the  University  of  Pennsylvania 
made  vacant  by  the  death  of  Dr.  Pepper  ;  and  a  despatch  from  Edinburgh, 
Scotland,  lately  related  that  the  university  of  that  city  had  conferred  upon  him 
the  degree  of  Doctor  of  Laws.  In  his  case,  at  least,  we  have  evidence  of  the 
old  saying  that  "  it  never  rains  but  it  pours." — Am.  Med. -Surg.  Bulletin. 
Burdock  as  a  Vegetable. — What  is  even  regarded  as  a  vile  weed  can,  with  a 
little  stretch  of  imagination,  be  turned  into  an  ornamental  plant  or  delicious 
vegetable.  This  is  especially  the  case  with  the  common  Burdock,  Lappa 
major.  Schoolboys  all  know  it  from  gathering  the  burs  and  compressing  them 
into  a  ball,  they  being  held  together  by  the  curved  points  of  the  floral  in- 
volucre. This  is  all  they  know  about  it.  It  is  difficult  to  see  anything  more 
to  be  despised  in  the  Burdock  leaf  than  in  the  leaf  of  the  rhubarb.  It  appears 
that  it  is  largely  used  in  China  for  food.  But  it  is  stated  that,  if  the  stalks  be 
cut  down  before  the  flowers  expand  and  then  be  boiled,  the  taste  is  relished 
equally  with  asparagus.  The  leaves,  when  young,  are  boiled  and  eaten  as  we 
eat  spinach.  In  Japan,  it  is  in  universal  use.  Thousands  of  acres  are  devoted 
to  its  culture.  But  in  this  case,  the  root  is  the  object.  It  requires  deep  soil  to 
get  the  roots  to  the  best  advantage.  The  common  name,  in  China,  is  Gobbo 
— a  name,  however,  which  need  not  replace  our  common  one  of  Burdock. — 
Meehans"  Monthly. 
Rhodinol .— Bertram  and  Gildemeister  state  in  the  Ber.  d.  D.  Chem.  Ges., 
1S98,  that  Poleck  has  for  some  time  past  reproached  them  for  having  fixed  on  the 
use  of  the  name  geraniol  for  the  fluid  alcoholic  constituent  of  rose  oil,  which 
they  termed  rhodinol.  The  difference  of  the  results  of  Bckart  and  other 
chemists  (Markownikoff,  Barbier  and  others)  induced  Bertram  and  Gilde- 
meister to  investigate  the  question,  and  they  soon  found  that  Eckart's 
"  rhodinol  "  was  a  mixture.  From  this  mixture  they  isolated  a  primary  alcohol, 
and  found  it  identical  with  that  obtained  from  Turkish  geranium  oil  by  Jacob- 
son,  in  1870,  and  which  possessed  the  formula  C10H18O.  This  geraniol  was 
escribed  in  the  usual  text-books,  and  Semmler's  fine  work  on  the  constitution 
of  these  alcohols  was  already  published,  so  that  geraniol  was  necessarily  the 
name  applied  to  the  pure  isolated  alcohol  from  rose  oil.  The  more  recent 
work  of  Tiemann  and  Schmidt,  and  of  Barbier  and  Bonveault  demonstrated 
the  existence  of  a  second  alcohol  in  the  alcoholic  constituents  of  rose  oil, 
which  Tiemann  and  Schmidt  showed  was  identical  with  Dodge's  citronellol. 
Eckart's  rhodinol  is  a  mixture  of  about  70  per  cent,  of  geraniol,  20  per  cent, 
of  citronellol,  and  10  per  cent,  of  non-alcoholic  constituents,  and  there  is  no 
