a client. In legal actions the matters at stake mostly relate to property; in medical affairs, health and life are involved. Can anything better be said of the wisdom of him who, without adequate training, undertakes to settle questions in which his very existence is concerned, than of the sagacity of the man who, with no competent knowledge of law and the methods of the courts, presumes to manage a case in which merely a sum of money may be lost? But undesirable as is the custom of pharmacists in this respect, it is unreasonable in physicians to grumble at it, until they reform a habit of their own, which encourages the practice which they deprecate. When a physician finds a sick man improving with a certain plan of treatment, and wishes the same medication continued, usually he simply tells the patient to have his bottle refilled at the apothecary’s. The latter, knowing that this is the usage of the medical profession, is accustomed to suppose—constructively, at least—that, when the bottle is returned to be replenished, it is brought at the desire of the doctor; and he again compounds the medicine, as he would not be justified in doing, if the method of physicians was different. If the latter would habitually rewrite their prescriptions, or indite orders for repetition, whenever they wish a continuance of treatment, apothecaries would have the best possible sanction for supplying medicines to patients a second or a thousandth time, and would have no moral warrant for such action without the written direction of the authors of the recipes. When the doctors adopt the plan suggested, a violation of their request that their prescriptions shall not be repeated without their written order will furnish abundant ground for complaint; until such change of method is established, the consistency of their protest does not conspicuously appear. By the practice proposed, the apothecaries would lose some business, indeed, but the community would experience an immeasurable gain.