The various salts of mercury and potash have been to some extent replaced by salvarsin and copavia, nitre, menthelene blue seem about to be effected by gonococcous vaccine and anti-gonococcic serum. Your gargles, douches, sprays, external and internal medication have to a considerable extent been supplanted some time ago by anti-toxin, and so on, but the unfortunate side of it is that in cities such as ours much more of these products are supplied through the health department and the hospitals than through the legitimate channel of trade, the druggist, and oftentimes to many undeserving people. Some family physicians, who are nothing more than diagnosing agents for the specialists, and who, when called in to see the sick, immediately consult a specialist, with the result that in about 50 per cent. of the cases the subject generally finds his or her way into the hospital. The great number of dispensaries in our community, with their indiscriminate service and consequent unbridled abuse, is another cause for the falling off in the prescription business. The surgeon, the X-ray, radium, etc., all play their individual part in the decline of prescriptions. These are a few of the reasons for a more or less elimination of prescription writing, for which we may say that science is either directly or indirectly the contributing cause. THE COMMERCIAL SIDE. Several times agents for tablet houses have called on me and said: “Dr. So and So has just given me a little order, or intends to increase his line of our goods; of course, we don’t sell doctors direct, so if you will let me send these goods through you I will bill them straight, subject to a 10 per cent. discount to you; this means business for me and 10 per cent. on the doctor’s purchase for you. In other words, I was to guarantee their bill, wait for my money until the doctor was ready to pay, and act as their collecting agent, for all of which the above traveling man most magnanimously offered the above highly remunerative 10 per cent. and this for the worst enemy the druggist has--the dispensing doctor. That gentleman who pays no taxes on his stock and fixtures, needs no traders’ license, is subject to no drug inspection, who is insincere with his patients, and needs but the occasion to discredit druggists, as a whole, in furthering his schemes of diverting from the proper channels that which rightfully does not belong to him.” Another reason is the mistake made at times by the druggists, as a body, of often plunging headlong, and with the purest motives possible, into any vortex created by a few overzealous men, both physicians and pharmacists, who are more often theorists than practical druggists, and to illustrate my point I recall an incident of more or less recent occurrence that tended to inspire little confidence of thoughtful physicians in them as a whole.