39§ 
Book  Reviews. 
(Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
I      August,  1909. 
BOOK  REVIEWS. 
Principles  of  Pharmacy.  By  Henry  V.  Amy,  Dean  and 
Professor  of  Pharmacy  in  the  Cleveland  School  of  Pharmacy,  De- 
partment of  Pharmacy,  W estern  Reserve  University,  Cleveland,  Ohio. 
With  246  original  illustrations.  Philadelphia  and  London :  W.  B. 
Saunders  Company,  1909.    Cloth,  $5.00. 
There  are  one  or  two  good  books  on  pharmacy  written  by  Amer- 
ican authors,  but  another  one  would  be  acceptable.  The  trouble 
with  most  writers  on  pharmacy  is  that  they  do  not  work  hard 
enough  at  pharmacy,  i.e.,  the  pharmaceutical  part  of  the  Pharma- 
copoeia. One  wonders  at  this  when  one  sees  the  mass  of  material 
at  their  command  and  realizes  the  amount  of  needful  work  that 
could  be  done. 
Professor  Amy  says  of  his  book  that  "  the  frank  intention  of 
this  book  is  to  explain  the  Pharmacopoeia  from  its  pharmaceutical 
standpoint,  and  if  that  standard  says  that  a  certain  chemical  is  a 
dextrogyrate  ketone,  or  that  a  certain  drug  is  a  '  sclerotium,'  the 
writer  believes  that  the  average  student  should  be  able  to  learn 
what  such  terms  mean  without  having  to  search  through  a  dozen 
books." 
Now  this  is  exactly  what  a  work  on  pharmacy  is  hardly  likely 
to  accomplish,  and  the  best  illustration  of  this  is  seen  in  Professor 
Amy's  own  -book.  We  fail  to  see  how  a  student  can  form  an 
intelligent  conception  of  the  definition  of  camphor  from  the  work 
in  hand.  Again  the  half  page,  which  is  devoted  to  giving  the 
student  an  idea  of  the  definition  of  ergot,  had  better  be  eliminated, 
as  some  of  the  statements  are  erroneous,  and  the  student  had  better 
consult  a  good  modern  botany  where  fewer  words  and  a  few  figures 
would  illustrate  this  subject. 
The  sooner  authors  of  text-books  on  pharmacy  abandon  the.  idea 
that  these  works  should  be  commentaries  on  the  Pharmacopoeia,  and 
that  a  text-book  on  pharmacy  should  be  a  treatise'  on  botany  and 
chemistry  as  well  as  pharmacy,  the  better  it  will  be  both  for  teacher 
and  student.  The  student  needs  and  should  have  that  systematic 
training  in  chemistry  which  will  enable  him  to  understand  what  is 
meant  by  the  term,  ketone,  and  that  training  in  botany  which  will 
enable  him  to  understand  what  part  of  the  plant  and  what  group  of 
p1ants  is  meant  by  the  term,  sclerotium.  He  is  a  poor  student  indeed 
if  he  does  not  learn  enough  about  both  botany  and  chemistry  to  be 
