The solubilities of the pharmacopœial organic acids and their salts / by Atherton Seidell.

  • Atherton Seidell
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The solubilities of the pharmacopœial organic acids and their salts / by Atherton Seidell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Of reference books for this class of data, the pharmacopceias of the various countries are particularly subject to differences in the values quoted. This fact was very forcibly demonstrated by a compilation made by me “ some two years ago of the solubilities and other physical constants reported by the latest pharmacopoeias and phar- maceutical reference books. The extent of the variations for some of the compounds, especially the inorganic salts, was not very great; for many others, however, there was no way of deciding which of the reported values were nearest the truth. This was especially the case with the alkaloids, and to a large extent with the other organic com- pounds of the pharmacopoeias. The matter was still further com- plicated by the fact that very concordant results were sometimes reported, although the standards of temperature, purity, etc., indi- cated that such good agreement was not justified, thus showing that the compilers of these works of reference frequently borrow from one another without giving the information which would enable the reader to consult the original source of the data. These difficulties and many others made it impossible to gather from the compiled solubility values the particular ones which might be considered the most reliable; in fact, the great number of different figures only added to the uncertainty and made it apparent that the publication of the compilation could serve no other purpose than to call atten- tion to the need for renewed investigations of the solubilities of the pharmacopoeial compounds. The original, intention of publishing this compilation as a bulletin from this laboratory was therefore abandoned in favor of publishing only such values as we might be able to determine with accuracy or select from the chemical literature as of undoubted reliability. Although, as has been pointed out above, the solubility data for alkaloids and their salts are perhaps most in need of careful revision, the lack of a sufficient amount of material and of satisfactory methods for their accurate determination made it advisable to leave this class of substances for a later study and take up first a group which offered less difficulties and for which, after the alkaloids, there appeared most need for careful investigation. This group is that of the organic acids and their salts, and is composed of about 40 com- pounds, the solubilities of very few of which, in the solvents pre- scribed by the Pharmacopoeia, have been reported in recent chemical literature. For this group of compounds, therefore, original deter- minations were required for practically every member. In the present bulletin the arrangement is alphabetical according to the names of the acids, with the salts of each immediately follow- «For a more complete description of this compilation, with comments, see Proc. Am. Pharm. Assoc., 56, 473^79, 1907.
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