it seems to me, are a little ashamed of the drug part of their occupation.  Their places of business appear to be news-agencies, refreshment parlors, stationery stores—­the drugs are “on the side,” or rather in the rear.  Sometimes, I am told, the proprietors of these places know nothing at all about pharmacy, but employ a prescription clerk who is a capable pharmacist.  Here the druggist has stepped down from his former position as the manager of a business and has become a servant.  All of which looks to me as if the pharmacist himself might be beginning to accept the valuation that some people are putting upon his services to the community.

Now these things affect me, not as a physician nor as a pharmacist, for I am neither, but they do touch me as a student of physics and chemistry and as one whose business and pleasure it has been for many years to watch the development of these and other sciences.  The fact that I am addressing you this evening may be taken, I suppose, as evidence that you may be interested in this point of view.  The action of most substances on the human organism is a function of their chemical constitution.  Has that chemical constitution changed?  It is one of the most astonishing discoveries of our age that many, perhaps all, substances undergo spontaneous disintegration, giving rise to the phenomena now well known as “radio-activity.”  No substances ordinarily known and used in pharmacy, however, possess this quality in measurable degree, and we have no reason to suppose that the alkaloids, for instance, or the salts of potash or iron, differ today in any respect from those of a century ago.  How about the other factor in the reaction—­the human organism and its properties?  That our bodily properties have changed in the past admits of no doubt.  We have developed up to the point where we are at present.  Here, however, evolution seems to have left us, and it is now devoting its attention exclusively to our mental and moral progress.  Judging from what is now going on upon the continent of Europe, much remains to be accomplished.  But there is no reason to believe that if Caesar or Hannibal had taken a dose of opium, or ipecac, or aspirin, the effect would have been different from that experienced today by one of you.  This is what a physicist or a chemist would expect.  If the action of a drug on the organism is chemical, and if neither the drug nor the organism has changed, the action must be the same.  If we still desire to bring about the action and if there is no better way to do it, we must use the drug, and there is still need for the druggist.  As a matter of fact, the number of drugs at your disposal today is vastly greater than ever before, largely owing to the labor, and the ingenuity, of the analytical chemist.  And there are still great classes of compounds of whose existence the chemist is assured, but which he has not even had time to form, much less to investigate.  Among these may lurk remedies more valuable than any at