rially enhanced the interest of those who reside at a distance and are unable to attend the meetings. We hope for the same result in this Association.

4. The Faculty to become Honorary Members: As the objects of this Association are to promote social and friendly relations among the Alumni of Boston University School of Medicine, and to co-operate with its Faculty in advancing the cause and maintaining a high standard of medical education, it has seemed to your executive committee that this step should be taken.

The faculty is composed of fifty-eight instructors; of these forty are graduates of the Boston University School of Medicine. Of the eighteen who were graduated elsewhere, seven were practicing physicians before this school was incorporated; four are laymen. It will therefore be seen that this change in the by-laws will add only seven physicians to the Alumni Association, and those as honorary members.

In closing, I wish to emphasize as forcibly as in my power this, the object of the Association. It is not expected that the graduates of a professional school will ever be linked as closely to their Alma Mater as is the case in academic institutions where large bodies of students are domiciled in a college campus, where community of interests and especially of pleasure, the pursuit of which is favored by a less arduous life, indissolubly cements bonds of loyalty to each other and their Alma Mater. What medical school has ever inspired a song like "Fair Harvard," or "Here's to Good Old Yale?"

Life in the medical school is too strenuous, the mind too definitely set upon the goal, the whole subject too serious for the cultivation of enduring attachments to either friends or institution. It is more one long, hard struggle for the fitting of one's self for a serious life work, than for those jollities of comradeship which last in the memory forever. It is the good times that we have that endear us to each other and our surroundings rather than the struggles of life. The aged

alumnus of Harvard or Yale comes back to reunions as to

the fountain of perpetual youth, and drinking deeply therefrom of the memories of the past is refreshed and made young again. Not so with the medical graduate. He may acknowledge the benefits which his school has bestowed, may be gratefully appreciative of her welfare, but never rejuvenated and rarely enthused.

We formed ties in the Boston University School of Medicine which will never be broken, friendships which will last, admiration and respect for professors and instructors which endures, affection for our beloved Dean Sutherland, which, although we live a thousand years, will never die.

These are

the ties which bind us to our Alma Mater and keep her memory perpetually green.

TINCTURES OR "FLUIDS"

BY JOHN M. WYBORN, F. C. S.,

(London, England.)

WHICH?

A recent writer in The Hahnemannian Monthly (Edward A. Bender, Ph. G., Philadelphia), discredits the "almost superstitious belief in the superior efficacy of the old pharmaceutic products," including, of course, fresh-plant tinctures. "At present," he asserts, "the tendency on the part of leading therapeutists is towards the use of alkaloids, active principles, rather than continued use of the inexact, often faulty, solutions of the drug."

The "new class of liquid preparations called fluids" are the ideal representatives of the vegetable drug, not the greendrug tinctures; so he would have us infer. These "fluids" are solutions of dried plants in 95 per cent. alcohol, in the proportion of one part of the plant to two parts of alcohol.

Dr. So-and-So "tells" him that a tincture of digitalis prepared according to the method of the homoeopathic pharmacopoeia, is utterly unreliable when given for its physiological effect; and in the case of gelsemium, Messrs. So-and-So,

themselves manufacturers of a green-drug tincture (and, it may be added, specialists in the preparation of the new fluids), made a careful investigation into the matter, and it was proven to their satisfaction that a preparation made from the dried drug was not only quite as active, but was more uniform in its strength and results.

Are these statements entirely borne out by the facts? Let us first take a familiar example of a drug universally employed in the dry state, though as a seed, possessing the vital germ, with its albumen and other ingredients, provided for its sustenance, unimpaired.

The fluid (liquid) extract of nux vomica prepared as directed in the British Pharmacopoeia, 1898, will yield, without the shadow of a doubt, when submitted to chemical action, 1.5 gramme of strychnine from each 100 cc. of liquid at 15° 5 c., showing that one gramme is dissolved in, or is obtainable. from 67 cc.

Now let us try and re-dissolve this strychnine in cold alcohol of any strength. We shall find that 67 cc. are utterly incapable of effecting the solution of one gramme, and according to Squire, its solubility will be 1 in 160 of alcohol, 90 p. c.; about 1 in 400 of alcohol, 60 p. c.; 1 in 300 of absolute alcohol.

Hence, it is clear that the strychnine did not exist as such, or uncombined, in the fluid extract. Other substances must have been united with it to render it soluble to the extent of I in 67.

In the case of bitter almonds, or the fresh leaves of cherry laurel, similar combinations exist, and it is only by means of heat or chemical action that prussic acid, their supposed active principle, can be separated from them. It would be easy to separate hydrochloric acid by similar chemical means from salt beef, and as well might this acid be declared to contain the virtues of that article of food.

Such being the case we may fairly infer that the medicinal action of the active principles supposed to represent the pro

perties of the seeds of nux vomica and of other trees, varies in a corresponding degree, when thus artificially obtained, from that of the natural group from which they are extracted. So much for the alkaloids as representatives of the drugs they are derived from.

It is, however, between fresh living plants and their dead and dried substitutes that the difference becomes most marked. In the animal organism, the formation of cadaveric alkaloids and poisonous albumose quickly follows death, and it is, therefore, not surprising that similar changes, and the loss of volatile acids and active ingredients, should occur after death and during the drying of the fleshy roots, stems, etc., of plants.

To cite only one instance, that of the genus anemone, including pulsatilla.

Beckhurts (Chem. Centr., 1885, 776-778, and Arch. Pharm. 230, 182-206), has shown that several species of anemone owe their acrid taste to the presence of anemone-camphor, which has a powerful irritating odor and a vesicant action.

This readily decomposes during the drying of the plant into anemonin (anemonic anhydride) and isoanemonic acid, the latter being insoluble in water, alcohol and ether. Το this decomposition he ascribes the loss of acridity in the plant when kept, and in the pharmaceutical preparations of pulsatilla. Other volatile constituents of the plants were obtained, which, when recovered from the distillate, took the forms of anemonic and anemoninic acids. The experience of those who have carefully studied and compared the results obtained respectively from the fresh-plant and dried-plant tinctures of pulsatilla tallies with these researches of Beckhurts, and were it necessary to multiply instances of the kind, numerous examples are available.

The question for the homoeopathic physician must always be-not "What is the most active and definite preparation?" but "What is the best representative of the substance used in the proving which yielded certain groups of symptoms?"

It has been evidently shown that this is not usually the alkaloid, "fluid," or dried-plant tincture in cases where the fresh living plant or its essence or fresh-plant tincture has been so employed.

EDITORIALLY SPEAKING.

Contributions of original articles, correspondence, etc., should be sent to the publishers, Otis Clapp & Son, Boston, Mass. Articles accepted with the understanding that they appear only in the Gazette. They should be typewritten if possible. To obtain insertion the following month, reports of societies and personal items must be received by the 10th of the month preceding.

SPITTING AS A MENACE TO HEALTH.

When, comparatively recently, the subject of promiscuous spitting as a menace to health began to be agitated, the extremist rejoiced exceedingly. On the one hand he "poohpoohed" the whole matter as of trifling importance, insignificant to the verge of absurdity; or, if contrary-minded, he seriously affirmed that disability or death awaited an appallingly large proportion of the population, through the germladen sputa deposited so freely in public buildings and

streets.

While all will admit that the extremist is not a person to be taken too seriously, all will at the same time grant that he is a really valuable member of society. For where the extremist is there is no apathy, and apathy is more fatal to progress than misdirected or excessive activity.

His work, however, is not ours and concerns us but indirectly, merely to the extent, indeed, of renewedly impressing upon our minds the fact that every new problem or question should be considered on its merits without prejudice; that none should be cavalierly dismissed as unworthy of attention; that no sweeping assertions should be made, no line of conduct adopted incapable of adequate justification and support. Whatever our own habits of thought and deed may be we