Glass and British Pharmacy 1600–1900: a Survey, and Guide to the Wellcome Collection of British Glass

the annotation of the letters 45 and following dealing with the corn eelworm (Anguina tritici, Nematode) where it is not taken into consideration that there was at that time a confusion between two diseases of corn: the ergot produced by a fungus, Claviceps purpurea and the corn-cockle caused by A. tritici, above mentioned. When Saussure mentions to Bonnet Fontana's observations on 'les anguillules de l'ergot', he has evidently in mind the corn eelworm and not C. purpurea; therefore the eggs described are indeed those of the Nematode and not the spores of the fungus as Castellani writes wrongly in his footnotes p. 281. A short glance at the historical part of Davaine's monograph on the corn eelworm (Recherches sur l'anguillule du ble niellM, 1856) would have avoided this error. The editor is also wrong when he interprets (p. 279) the observations of Roffredi on A. tritici as concerning the fungus Puccinia graminis and the work of Fontana which he quotes in relation to the 'anguilles' (eelworms) is not Osservazioni sopra la rugine del grano (Lucca, 1767) but Saggio di osservazioni sopra ilfalso ergot e tremella (Firenze, 1775). Last but not least, in the indexes closing the volume (pp. 557-66) it would have been much more convenient to give the numbers of the pages than of the letters which run sometimes on ten or more pages. This important catalogue by Crellin and Scott giving details of colours, shapes and dimensions of some 1,200 examples of specie jars, carboys, storage and display jars, presents a serious study of apothecary and pharmacy vessels during the four hundred years to 1900. It is the second in the Catalogue series promised by Dr. F. N. L. Poynter, Director of the Wellcome Institute, when Dr. Crellin's Medical Ceramics appeared in 1969. The period now covered is one in which the art and practice of the apothecary, successor to the medieval spicer, became the provenance of the chemist and druggist of the eighteenth century and the pharmacist a century later. From the introduction and the informative notes the reader will appreciate the extent of the search made by the authors of any literature bearing upon the whole subject of pharmaceutical equipment, some part of which has already been published (Fluid Medicines, etc.). When did the first show carboys, those large display vessels that used to designate the pharmacy, come into use? Their forerunners, the clear storage vessels …