A  March*  Si™' }       Pharmacy  Hundred  Years  Ago.  185 
incorporated  city  of  10,000  inhabitants;  when  Cleveland  was  a 
frontier  post  of  500  souls;  when  Chicago  was  merely  a  few  shacks 
around  Fort  Dearborn  ;  when  San  Francisco  was  "a  vast  solitude" 
as  found  by  Dana  in  1835,  with  its  Presidio  six  miles  from  the 
landing  place  of  occasional  ships  and  with  its  nearest  mission  four 
miles  away. 
Eighteen  Twenty-One,  when  it  took  two  days  and  a  good  part 
of  one  night,  by  stage  and  boat  and  a  night  of  rest  en  route,  to 
travel  from  New  York  to  Washington;  and  when  the  "Fast  Post 
Coach"  from  New  York  to  Philadelphia  meant  taking  a  steam  ferry 
at  the  former  city  at  6  A.  M.,  riding  over  to  Elizabethtown,  and 
from  thence  across  New  Jersey  and  down  the  Delaware  to  Phila-. 
delphia,  which  was  reached  at  4  P.  M.;  when  steamboat  traffic  was 
only  fourteen  years  old;  when  the  Erie  Canal  (a  marvel  in  those 
days)  was  being  constructed;  when  the  only  railroad  in  America 
was  a  short  gravel-carrying  concern  near  Boston;  when  the  first 
passenger  railroad  in  America  (Baltimore  &  Ohio,  1829)  was 
merely  dreamed  of ;  when  illuminating  gas  was  merely  an  experi- 
ment in  private  establishments,  such  as  the  Gas  Light  Tavern,  Sec- 
ond and  Walnut,  Philadelphia,  some  years  before  the  New -York 
Gas  Company  (1823)  and  the  Philadelphia  Corporation  (1836) 
obtained  their  franchises. 
Eighteen  Twenty-One,  when  Washington  Irving,  aged  38  years, 
was  sojourning  abroad  after  the  successful  publication  of  "The 
Sketch  Book";  when  George  Bancroft,  just  back  from  the  famous 
Georgia  Augusta  University  in  Gottingen  (the  first  American  to 
win  a  Ph.D  degree  from  that  institution),  had  started  in  as  tutor 
in  Greek  at  Harvard;  when  Cooper  had  just  published  his  first 
novels,  the  now  forgotten  "Precaution"  and  the  still  famous  "The 
Spy" ;  when  the  youngster  Poe  was  at  school  in  Baltimore ;  when 
Longfellow,  a  lad  of  14,  entered  Bowdoin  College,  after  the  pub- 
lication of  his  first  poem  (1820)  ;  when  another  boy  of  14,  Whit- 
tier,  was  attending  district  school  in  New  England  and  had  been 
introduced  to  the  beauties  of  poetry  by  his  teacher,  Joshua  Coffin, 
through  the  medium  of  a  volume  of  Burns  ;  when  Emerson  had 
just  graduated  from  Harvard. 
Eighteen  Twenty-One,  when  Daniel  Webster  was  at  the  begin- 
ning of  his  brilliant  career,  the  orator  of  the  two  hundredth  anni- 
versary of  the  Landing  of  the  Pilgrims ;  when  Henry  Clay  had 
temporarily  stepped  out  of  the  speakership  of  the  House  of  Repre- 
