. Jour. Pharm , evening May 19th, of erysipelas. Dr. James was born August 27, 1841, in Mobile, Alabama. His ancestry was of the New England type on his mother's side, and of English yeomen on the paternal side. He early manifested his exceptional qualities of mind, and we take the following from the National Druggist for June: "His facility in the acquirement of languages was little short of marvelous. There is hardly a language that has a literature with which he was not more or less familiar, and most of them he could read and translate with ease." Dr. James received his chemical education in the laboratory of Baron Justus von Liebig, who was his friend as well as teacher. He graduated in medicine in Paris on the eve of the breaking out of the Civil War in the United States, and, coming home, was appointed a member of the Secret Service of the Confederacy by President Davis. Dr. James was at one time president of the American Microscopical Society, and was the author of a book entitled "Elementary Microscopical Technology." He had been connected with the National Druggist for eighteen years, and for his place it will be difficult to choose a successor. David Hooper, F.L.S., F.I.C., F.C.S., who was Quinologist to the Madras Government for thirteen years, and who is now acting as Curator of the Industrial Section of the Indian Museum, at Calcutta, has this year been chosen Hanbury Medallist. Mr. Hooper's services as Quinologist, his investigations on the chemical constituents of a large number of Indian drugs, and his share in the preparation of the following works: " Pharmacographia Indica," "Materia Medica of Madras," and "An Introduction to Materia Medica for India," leave no question as to his fitness for the honor which is to be conferred upon him. JOSEPH HELFMAN, editor of the Bulletin of Pharmacy for the past thirteen and a half years, announced his withdrawal from pharmaceutical journalism in the May number of that journal. Perhaps during the whole course of his editorial career, Mr. Helfman has not given expression to a more significant saying than is contained in the following paragraph taken from his concluding editorial: "Mindful of my own great debt to American pharmacy, I would fain express the deep conviction that its future welfare will be assured only in the degree that it fosters a rising sense of responsibility in its followers. Neither among individuals nor among whole classes of men can success abide unless they invite and seek and court responsibility. The true measure of a man is his readiness to bear it. What lasting success can pharmacists expect if they shirk their accountability to the medical profession and to the sick, if they skulk behind laws and associations and manufacturers?" Mr. Harry B. Mason, formerly associate editor of the Bulletin, now becomes the sole editor. Mr. Mason is a student, a forceful speaker and writer, and possessed of an original turn of mind-all which help to fit him for his responsible duties. THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHARMACY SEPTEMBER, 1907. THE BEGINNINGS OF PHARMACY IN AMERICA. Apothecary at the German Hospital, Philadelphia, Pa. Looking back over the three centuries of time that have elapsed since the foundation of the first English settlement in the territory that now constitutes the United States, one cannot fail to be impressed with the far-reaching influences of what might otherwise be regarded as trivial occurrences. In our own occupation, as in others, these happenings may be considered as the stepping-stones that have contributed to the more or less gradual evolution of an important and altogether indispensable part of our present-day existence. The first settlers in the English Colonies of North America were usually accompanied by men who, if not regularly graduated physicians, made some pretense to having a superior knowledge of the healing art. If we review the meagre records and traditions of the lives, doings and accomplishments of these early pioneers in American medicine, we must be impressed by the fact that many, if not all, of these early medical practitioners occupied honorable and honored positions in their respective colonies and were a credit to themselves and also to the profession they chose to follow. Owing largely perhaps to the outdoor life and regular habits of the early colonists, the lives of these medical men, from the Gentleman Barber or Chirurgeon of the Jamestown Colony to the highly cultured and erudite Thomas Wynne, who came to the Pennsylvania colony with William Penn in the Welcome, were largely devoted to other vocations than that of physician or surgeon. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in speaking of the early medical men of the Massachusetts Colony, says that at least six or seven, if not a larger number, of the early physicians were also ministers of the gospel; one was a school-teacher and also a doctor; one practiced medicine and kept a tavern, and at least one of these early medical men of the Massachusetts Colony was a genuine butcher. In other colonies, particularly in Pennsylvania, several of the early physicians occupied public positions in the various departments of the Colonial Gov ernment. The general good health of the early colonists is commented on by a number of the contemporaneous writers. Among others, Gabriel Thomas, in his "Historical Account of the Province and Country of Pennsylvania," published in 1698, says: "Of lawyers and physicians I shall say nothing, because this country is very peaceable and healthy; long may it so continue, and never have occasion for the tongue of the one nor the pen of the other, both equally destructive of men's estates and lives!" Similar conditions appear to have prevailed in the Massachusetts Colony, for Giles Firmin, an apothecary, and one of the first medical practitioners to teach anatomy in this country, is quoted as having written to Governor Winthrop: "I am strongly sett upon to studye divinitie, my studies else must be lost, for physic is but a meene helpe." In one particular, however, all of these early practitioners were the same; they invariably dispensed their own medicines, or at most directed the relatives or friends of the patient to prepare such potions from indigenous or cultivated herbs or roots as they thought necessary for the needs or wants of the sick individual. The apothecary shop, as it existed at a later period in the larger cities of the American Colonies, was usually the dispensary of a more or less progressive or successful medical practitioner who occasionally deigned to enlarge on his otherwise meagre income by the sale of sundry articles, like spices or tea, which at that time were counted among the luxuries of the more settled portions of the country. The first record we have of the appointment of an apothecary to fill prescriptions other than his own or those of his preceptor, is to be found in the "Account of the Pennsylvania Hospital, from Its Rise to the Beginning of the Fifth Month, called May, 1754," written by Benjamin Franklin, then the clerk or secretary of the Board of |