Food and its adulterations : comprising the reports of the Analytical sanitary commission of "The Lancet" for the years 1851 to 1854 inclusive, revised and extended being records of the results of some thousands of original microscopical and chemical analyses of the solids and fluids consumed by all classes of the public ... / by Arthur Hill Hassall.
- Arthur Hill Hassall
- Date:
- 1855
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Food and its adulterations : comprising the reports of the Analytical sanitary commission of "The Lancet" for the years 1851 to 1854 inclusive, revised and extended being records of the results of some thousands of original microscopical and chemical analyses of the solids and fluids consumed by all classes of the public ... / by Arthur Hill Hassall. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![And the cheroots were landed in the lighter ? — Yes ; the way it is done is this : there are two lighters ; as soon as the goods go out of dock in the lighter there is another lighter waiting for them with the dummies, and those boats go alongside, and immediately the officer who is in charge of the cheroots is trans- ferred from one boat to the other, and the dummies go on board ship, and the cheroots to the nearest wharf. In every case of this kind must the officer be bribed? —I believe it is necessary that there should be an officer bribed. Is the officer bribed who allows the change of the chests for the dummies ? — The officer is bribed to go from one lighter to the other; the dummies go along- side and are regularly shipped, and after that no man whatever can take them. Another very common practice is to sell British-made cigars and cheroots as foreign ones; this deception is carried into effect by making, branding, and labelling boxes in exact imitation of the different foreign boxes in which cigars are imported. This practice prevails extensively with English-made Havannah cigars and Manilla cheroots ; although in the case of Manilla cheroots the fraud is easily detected since it is scarcely possible to imitate these cheroots so closely as not to allow of the discrimination between the British and foreign-made article. So generally is this piactised, that probably not one-third of the cigars sold in boxes are what they profess to be — namely, foreign-made cigars. There is a kind of cheroot called Chinsurah; this was commonly sold in the shops for some years, although it was known that but two or three cases had been entered at the Custom House, and paid duty, during the whole time. In one year alone, twenty thousand pounds weight of these cheroots found their way into the market, in addition to from eighteen thousand to twenty thousand pounds of Manilla cheroots, without having paid duty. The cheroots known as Bengal, notwithstanding their East Indian name, are all British-made, having originally been prepared in imitation of Chinsurah cheroots. Thus we see, what with smuggling and the passing off inferior English-made cigars as foreign, by the imitation of the form, manufacture, branding, and labelling the boxes, &c., there still remains a wide scope for fraud and adulteration in the articles of cigars and cheroots. Great difficulty is experienced in the detection of opium in cheroots, and when the examination is limited to a single cigar it is almost impossible to pronounce upon the presence of that drug with absolute certainty. Although from the results of the analyses made there is much reason for believing that several of the cheroots did really contain a proportion of opium, yet the reactions obtained were not sufficiently marked to waiTant a definite conclusion. We therefore repeated the analyses of Manilla cheroots for opium, operating on a large scale. The results, together with the method of examination pursued, are given below. OPIUM IN MANILLA CHEROOTS. In the preceding Report on Cigars and their Adulterations we referred to the suspected presence of opium in Manilla cheroots, and we stated generally the results of certain analyses. These results were of an indecisive cha- racter, but appeared to favour the belief generally entertained, that opium is sometimes contained in this kind of cheroots, so much esteemed by smokers; this result was mainly attributable to the fact that tobacco itself contains a principle, probably nicotine, which gives nearly the same reactions with nitric acid as morphia. It was therefore necessary to make out a property of morphia or narcotine that could not be confounded with anything present in tobacco. This was found in the action of concentrated sulphuric acid and per-oxide of manganese on morphia, a characteristic violet tint being produced. The question whether Manilla cheroots do really contain opiurn or not being one of considerable ini])ortancc to tobacco smokers, we resolved to institute other analyses, and to opei-ate on a larger quantity of cheroots. The results of these analyses are given below. The process adopted for the detection of opium was as follows : — Four cheroots from each sample were cut up and infused for twelve hours in](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20385419_0638.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
