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284
1913]
roasted peas, beans or parsnips to coffee was passed. Then fourteen years
later there was legislation to prevent brewers, dealers, or retailers of beer or
porter possessing or mixing with worts or beer, liquor extract or other
preparations other than ground or unground brown malt, for the purpose of
darkening their colour, and it also ordained that no molasses, honey, liquorice,
vitriol, quassia, coculus indiae, grains of paradise, guinea pepper, or opium, or
an extract of these or any articles or preparation whatsoever should be used
as substitute. In this case the penalty was £200 for the brewer and £500
for the druggist who sold to him any colouring matter or malt substitute.
From this period onwards adulteration in England seems to have been
rampant, and if it attracted any notice very little was said about it until 1820,
when F. C. Accum, F.L.S., a well-known chemist and technologist, published
his "Treatise on Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons," which attracted
very marked attention to the subject, which was followed ten years later (1830)
by a volume with the sensational title, "Deadly Adulteration and Slow
Poisoning unmasked, or Disease and Death in the Pot and the Bottle, in
which the blood empoisoning and life destroying adulterations of wines,
spirits, beer, bread, flour, tea, sugar, spices, cheesmongery, pastry, confectionery,
medicines, etc., etc., are laid open," and published anonymously
by John Dingwall Williams, who wrote under the pseudonym "An Enemy of
Fraud and Villany." A biblical quotation in the preface of Accum's book
attracted immediate attention, "There is death in the pot" (2 Kings iv. 40),
as did also the following paragraph:—
"Devoted to disease by baker, butcher, grocer, wine merchant, spirit
dealer, cheesemonger, pastry cook and confectioner, we call in a physician to
our assistance. But here again the pernicious system of fraud, as it has given
the blow, steps in to defeat the remedy. The unprincipled dealer in drugs
and medicines exerts a most potent and diabolical ingenuity in sophisticating
the most potent and necessary drugs—peruvian bark, rhubarb, ipecacuanha,
magnesia, calomel, castor oil, spirits of hartshorn, and almost every other
medicinal commodity and chemical preparation used in pharmacy."
As regards the quotation, "There is death in the pot," the Medical
Officer of Health recollects its common use when a boy of ten, that is, some
40 years after the book was published. These books, as well as other publications
by Henry (1836), Mitchell (1848), and Normandy (1850), had this great
merit, that they prepared people for the far-reaching investigations of Dr.
Arthur Hill Hassall, who, in 1850, after examining samples of coffee sold in