570  Pharmacopceial  Convention  of  igio.  {A£;c;Xrfi9o? 
any  one  of  the  many  special  interests  that  are  necessarily  involved. 
In  time  we  will  no  doubt  recognize  the  far  sightedness  of  the 
originators  of  the  Pharmacopoeia  and  readopt  their  proposed  sys- 
tem of  district  or  State  conventions  at  which  the  several  questions 
can  be  thoroughly  discussed  and  a  limited  number  of  delegates  in- 
structed to  attend  and  intelligently  take  part  in  a  national  convention 
at  which  all  possible  interests  will  be  properly  represented.  This  is, 
however,  for  the  future.  In  the  meantime  many  if  not  all  of  the 
shortcomings  of  the  present  Pharmacopoeia  can  be  avoided  in  the 
next  if  the  coming  convention  will  agree  upon  a  plan  of  revision 
somewhat  along  the  lines  delineated  by  Dr.  Sollmann  (/.  Am.  M. 
Assoc.,  1908,  v.  51,  p.  2013  and  Ibid.,  1909,  v.  53,  p.  1543)  and 
essentially  similar  to  that  followed  in  some  of  the  Continental  coun- 
tries, Switzerland  for  instance.  This  plan  would  involve  restricting 
the  Committee  of  Revision  to  a  comparatively  small  board  of  edi- 
tors, or  an  executive  committee,  consisting  of  the  responsible  Chair- 
men of  the  several  subcommittees  or  departments,  who  are  em- 
powered to  select  their  own  assistants  but  are  required  to  submit 
all  of  their  decisions  for  public  discussion  before  final  adoption  or 
publication  in  the  Pharmacopoeia. 
That  the  desirability  of  full  and  free  publicity  in  connection  with 
the  proceedings  of  the  Committee  of  Revision  has  been  frequently 
discussed  is  of  course  well  known  to  all  of  you;  that  the  present 
Committee  of  Revision  has  been  liberally  criticized  for  its  evident 
secretiveness  is  also  a  well  known  fact,  but  it  is  probably  not  so  well 
known  that  even  after  the  final  publication  of  the  Pharmacopoeia 
the  present  committee  has  failed  to  give  the  same  degree  of  publicity 
to  the  proceedings  that  was  given  to  the  proceedings  in  former 
decades,  so  that  even  now,  nearly  a  decade  after  the  election  of  the 
committee  and  on  the  very  eve  of  the  Pharmacopoeial  Convention, 
it  is  not  definitely  known  abroad  who  is  to  be  blamed  or  credited 
in  connection  with  the  shortcomings  and  the  advances  manifested  in 
the  U.S.P.  VIII. 
From  my  point  of  view  this  is  clearly  unjust  to  the  members 
of  the  Revision  Committee,  for  if  any  one  member  has  done  less 
than  his  share  of  the  work  or  has  delayed  progress  in  any  way,  it 
should  be  known  and  the  re-election  of  that  particular  member 
avoided.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  any  one  member  of  the  committee 
has  done  more  than  another  it  should  also  be  known  to  the  dele- 
gates, before  they  attend  the  convention,  so  that  the  suggestions  that 
