440  American  Pharmaceutical  Association.  {A£p£™ter*im' 
4.  The  preparation  and  sale  of  medicines  is  provided  for  by 
special  regulations  exempting  druggists  from  the  payment  of  special 
tax. 
5.  At  the  present  time  the  Internal  Revenue  Department  ade- 
quately provides  means  by  which  the  consumer  can  assure  himself 
of  the  identity  and  nature  of  the  whiskey  he  buys,  and  the  same 
department  could,  if  necessary,  extend  this  provision  over  other 
branches  of  the  liquor  trade,  and  thus  assure  a  much  more  uniformly 
pure  and  reliable  article  than  can  be  secured  by  any  possible  collec- 
tion of  physical  and  chemical  tests. 
In  brief  the  official  descriptions  for  brandy,  whiskey,  and  red 
wine  are  incomplete,  misleading,  unnecessary,  and  tend  to  debase 
pharmacy  into  an  adjunct  of  the  liquor  trade.  Their  presence  has 
never  been  a  credit  to  the  Pharmacopoeia,  and  the  sale  of  liquors 
for  medicinal  use  has  never  been  anything  but  a  curse  to  the  indi- 
vidual druggist  or  to  the  profession  as  a  whole. 
The  Materia  Medica  of  Perak. 
By  E.  M.  Holmes. 
This  is  an  interesting  paper  dealing  with  the  medicinal  products 
employed  by  the  denizens  of  the  State  of  Perak  in  the  Malay  Penin- 
sula. A  collection  illustrating  these  products  was  recently  for- 
warded to  the  Museum  of  the  Pharmaceutical  Society  of  Great 
Britain  by  Mr.  A.  P.  Machado,  a  planter  residing  on  Kemuning 
Estate,  Sungei  Siput. 
Notes  on  the  Chinese  Materia  Medica  of  San  Francisco. 
By  Albert  Schneider. 
This  is  a  valuable  paper  dealing  with  the  drugs  used  by  the 
Chinese  in  San  Francisco.    The  work  is  to  be  continued,  the  writer 
being  now  engaged  in  a  macroscopical  and  microscopical  study  of 
the  more  important  Chinese  drugs  of  San  Francisco. 
Elixir  of  Lactated  Pepsin. 
By  W.  A.  Pearson. 
The  author  has  tried  digestions  with  elixir  of  lactated  pepsin  in 
several  concentrations  at  many  temperatures,  and  under  various 
degrees  of  acidity  and  alkalinity  without  any  more  action  than  the 
corresponding  blank  experiment  under  the  same  conditions. 
