Waste products and undeveloped substances, or, Hints for enterprise in neglected fields / by P.L. Simmonds.

  • Peter Simmonds
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Waste products and undeveloped substances, or, Hints for enterprise in neglected fields / by P.L. Simmonds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    35/448 page 23
    through his hands daily, however, emphatically asserts, in contradiction, that the great bulk of the tea imported into this country during the last ten years has been unadulterated. Imports of spurious tea had been tried ; but this description of adulteration had long since ceased, because there was no market for such an article. These imitation teas consisted of such rubbish as may become mixed with the sweepings of the Canton packing warehouses, certain and sundry teas damaged during land or junk transit in China, &c., together with such odds and ends as accumulate from time to time at the said port, and are then broken down by mills into dust, rolled into large shot-like particles by means of a preparation of gum or starch, and coloured and scented as either Canton gunpowders or* capers ; but these occasional adaptations and imita- tions, however, only serve to prove the result of a false economy, wrongly based on the maxim of gathering up the fragments ; since such consignments have sel- dom if ever paid, when brought here, the bare expenses of manufacture and transit. The same has been the ultimate fate of all other grades, of whatever kinds, which have really been of the class of spurious sorts, as on such parcels, even when they have sold at a profit on first arrival, profit has never resulted to the purchaser, but invariably a fearful loss. No sort of leaf is so abundant in the tea districts of China as the leaf of the genuine tea-plant; and as any other leaf (even here, where the means of manufacture are at hand) would entail as much, or more, trouble and ex- pense in the gathering and preparation, where or in what can exist the motive for substitution 1 I alto-
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