Am.*  Jour.  Pharm.  \ 
March,  1919. 
Ballota  Hirsuta. 
147 
the  menstruum,  we  will  again  have  produced  a  solid  mass  which  it 
will  be  found  presents  quite  a  different  appearance  from  the  other 
extraction.  In  short  in  subjecting  the  vegetable  drug  extractive  to 
prolonged  heat  we  change  its  character — we  cook  it,  and  the  delicate 
vegetable  principles  all  become  changed  during  the  process  of 
evaporation  and  concentration.  Lloyd  says  that  in  these  drugs  the 
so-called  alkaloids  are  m  a  colloidal  form.  Undoubtedly  prolonged 
heating  will  produce  a  change  in  vegetable  colloids,  but  as  related  to 
medicinal  substances  no  one  has  fully  investigated  these  changes. 
To  the  younger  men  of  the  profession,  let  me  suggest,  there  is 
much  yet  to  be  developed  in  the  chemistry  and  the  pharmacy  of  our 
best  known  drugs.  Let  us  be  pharmacists  and  devote  our  most 
earnest  attention  to  the  study  of  drugs. 
BALLOTA  HIRSUTA,  A  RECENT  ADULTERANT  FOR 
MARRUBIUM  VULGARE. 
By  Heber  W.  You'ngken,  Ph.D. 
The  writer  recently  secured  a  sample  of  a  shipment  labeled 
"horehound  herb"  that  had  been  sent  from  a  Greek  port  to  a 
Philadelphia  firm,  but  which  was  condemned  by  the  government 
on  the  ground  that  it  contained  an  adulterant.  A  cursory  macro- 
scopic examination  failed  to  reveal  the  presence  of  any  foreign  leaf 
or  stem,  but  critical  observations  showed  it  to  contain  a  number  of 
suspicious  looking  calyxes,  much  broader  and  more  velvety  in  ap- 
pearance than  those  common  to  Marrubium  vulgare.  He  imme- 
diately set  out  to  identify  the  foreign  calyx,  which  presented  char- 
acteristics of  some  Ballota  species,  and,  after  a  lengthy  search,  came 
upon  a  single  specimen  in  the  herbarium  of  The  Academy  of  Natural 
Sciences  of  Philadelphia,  that  was  found  identical  with  the  calyx  in 
question  and  which  was  labeled  " Ballota  hirsuta  Benth."  Upon 
looking  up  the  characteristics  of  this  species  in  Bentham's  "Labia- 
tarum  Genera  et  Species,"  p.  595,  he  found  the  macroscopic  aspects 
of  the  calyx  identical.  Through  the  courtesy  of  Professor  Steward- 
son  Brown,  of  the  academy,  he  procured  a  leaf  and  calyx  from  a 
herbarium  sheet,  and  these  were  studied  comparatively  with  the  for- 
eign calyxes  and  fragments  of  leaves  found  in  the  sample.  These 
agreed  in  every  detail.    Later  the  herbarium  sheet  of  Ballota  hir- 
