PILL, a form of prepared medicine con sisting of a small globule convenient in size for swallowing. The ordinary weight of a pill is five grains. Some vegetable substances used as medicines may be made into pills without the addition of any other material, hut.usually the substances having medicinal properties are not of the proper consistence to be made into pills by themselves and require the addition of some other material, which is called an excipient. The usual excipients are bread-crumbs, hard soap, extract of licorice, syrup, molasses, muci lage, castor-oil, honey and conserve of roses. The last-named of these is especially valuable, as it preserves for a long time the proper con sistency of the pills. The materials of which pills are made are mixed together until they are peffectly homogeneous and are afterward separated into pills with instruments or ma chinery devised for the purpose. To prevent
them from adhering to one another, as well as to some extent to conceal the taste, they are covered with some fine powder, suet as licor ice-powder, wheat-flour, fine sugar and lycopo dium. Immense numbers of pills are made by machinery and it is very common to coat them with sugar, gelatin and other substances, which are flavored and colored in various ways. Pills also sometimes receive a thin coating of gold or silver. The pill is a highly suitable form for administering medicines which operate in small doses, or which are intended to act slowly, or not to act at all until they reach the'lower in testines and especially convenient in the case of substances which are strongly offensive to taste or smell. So common has the pill be come for the administering of a cathartic, that pill is often synonymous for cathartic or physic.