indigenous botanic drugs and work up into finished products its crude chemical resources.
Each country has problems of its own as relates to the collection, cultivation, and pharmaceutical manipulation of its botanic crudes. In the United States the high labor costs militate against competition with countries producing crude botanic remedies on a basis of cheap labor. The logical solution of this difficulty is that of skilled propagation, in which strains of medicinal plants will be developed of high proximate principle content and easy extraction. These will crowd out of the better markets the rather indifferent quality of crude medicinal plants commonly imported. When this much-to- be-desired consummation is realized, botanic drugs will come into their own again.
The growing use of alkaloids and other proximates calls for an increased production, and it is probable that chemical houses will be able to use, in alkaloid production, and profitably therein, the ordinary grades of plant crudes, leaving the better grades for the making of tinctures and extracts. This will make a stable market and encourage production on a large scale.
As between the empiricism of much which passes muster as "clinical experience," and the dogmatism of the more militant school of laboratory pharmacologists, much untilled ground lies in the field of botanic remedial agents. This book will make an effort to till that ground, so far as one book may. Avoiding the encyclopedic generalizations illustrated in the multi-remedy plan of China on one hand, and the paucity of resource of the Massachusetts General Hospital on the other hand, the
