Druggists are liable to make mistakes,--as are all men; but carelesness and ignorance, one or both, are usually to be found at the bottom of the fatalities so common in the dispensing of prescriptions. I know an old and experienced druggist who sold a pot of extract belladonna for extract dandelion. In the same city, on the same street, I know another who was prosecuted for dispensing opium for taraxicum, which carelesness caused the death of two children. The following mistake was less fatal, but only think of the poor lady's feelings! A servant girl was sent to a certain drug store we know of, who, in a "rich brogue," which might have caused General Scott's eyes to water with satisfaction, and his ears to lop like Bottom's after his transformation by the mischievous fairy, she asked for some "caster ile," which she wished effectually disguised. "Do you like soda water?" asked the druggist. "O, yis, thank ye, sir," was the prompt reply; "an' limmun, sir, if ye plaze; long life to yeze." The man then proceeded to draw a glass, strongly flavored with lemon, with a dose of oil cast upon its troubled waters. "Drink it at one swallow," said he, presenting it to the smiling Bridget. This she did, again thanking the gentlemanly clerk. "What are you waiting for?" he inquired, seeing that she still lingered. "I'm waitin' for the caster ile, sir," said the girl. "O! Why you have just taken it," replied the soda-drug man. "Och! Murther! It was for a sick man I wanted it, an' not meself at all." [Illustration: THE WRONG PATIENT.] While there have been great changes in the drug trade during the last fifty years, necessary to the increasing demand for drugs, the establishment of wholesale houses and some specialties, and in cities, the substitution of cigars, soda water, patent medicines, etc., for groceries and provisions, the dispensing apothecary is nearer to what he was hundreds of years ago, as we asserted at the commencement of this chapter, than any other professional we know of. The paraphernalia of the shop is nearly the same. There is no improvement in pot, in jar, in tables, in spatula; the old, ungainly mortar is not _substituted_ by a mill; the signs of ounces and drachms remain the same, though so near alike that they are easily and often mistaken one for the other, and the prescription before the dispenser is prefixed by a relic of the astrological symbol of Jupiter,--"the god of medicine to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians,"--as a species of superstitious invocation. In our largest cities even, in the shop windows, the mammoth flashing blue bottles, "a relic of empiric charlatanry," still brighten our street corners, and frighten our horses at night, as in the days of our forefathers.