A store mixt, various, universal.

O N October 11, 1784 Smith, Moore & Co., "a store mixt, various , universal," advertised for sale, in the New York Packet, a general collection of materia medica and related items. The advertisement was separately issued as a broadside, reproduced here, and the Rutgers University Library has recently acquired the only known copy of it. The broadside has certain distinctive features. Although the eighteenth century polemicist resorted to versification at the lifting of a quill (and despite assonance, arrhythmy, and other faults produced a most entertaining body of doggerel), the rendering of a catalogue of the materia medica into verse, no matter how "fractured," was a much rarer feat of composition. It was, in fact, something of a heroic achievement, for our eighteenth-century copywriter managed to knead no fewer than 120 names, most of them exotic, into his poetics. He must be forgiven for running out of space and rhyme, for leaving "numerous names untold," and for resorting to the excuse that 'Twould poze a Swift the whole t'express Such crabbed terms in flowing verse.