The roots, stems, and leaves were boiled ten hours, strained, and the decoction concentrated to a sirup, poured, while hot, into a hot flask, corked and set away. At the end of ten days the sirup had separated into two layers--the upper a blackish liquid, the lower a brownish sediment. The liquid was poured into a flask and covered with six times its volume of very dilute alcohol, 30 per cent (the sediment also was washed with dilute alcohol, to insure a complete removal of the liquid), corked, and let stand three days; agitated occasionally, then filtered, and the filtrate slowly evaporated in the air, when crystals were formed. It was found important not to hurry the evaporation, for when this took place too rapidly the crystals did not form. These crystals are microscopic in size, blue-white in color, and of a variety of forms. The most characteristic are slender and pointed, arranged in rosettes or grouped in various ways. They are soluble in distilled water and very dilute alcohol, very sparingly soluble in strong alcohol, not soluble in chloroform or ether. The evaporated mass containing the crystals, when dissolved in distilled water, is slightly acid in reaction. A small amount of this fed to a kitten produced the train of characteristic toxic symptoms--sleepiness, loss of appetite, retching, and diarrhea--that is produced by quite large amounts of the decoction. The crystals Sayre[106] claims to have already seen. He says that they gave no precipitate with Mayer's reagent, platinum chlorid, or with ammonia, but that barium chlorid and ammonium oxalate gave a precipitate, and he believes that they were in reality an inorganic combination of calcium, so that while Doctor Day may have obtained an extract which produced characteristic symptoms she certainly has not isolated any pure active principle. Later she admitted that it was not possible "to make positive statements as to the chemical character of the active principle."[107]