manufactured the cheese: he declared that he had bought the anotta of a
mercantile traveller, who had supplied him and his neighbours for years
with that commodity, without giving occasion to a single complaint. On
subsequent inquiries, through a circuitous channel, unnecessary to be
detailed here at length, on the part of the manufacturer of the cheese,
it was found, that as the supplies of anotta had been defective and of
inferior quality, recourse had been had to the expedient of colouring
the commodity with vermilion. Even this admixture could not be
considered deleterious. But on further application being made to the
druggist who sold the article, the answer was, that the vermilion had
been mixed with a portion of red lead; and the deception was held to be
perfectly innocent, as frequently practised on the supposition, that
the vermilion would be used only as a pigment for house-painting. Thus
the druggist sold his vermilion in the regular way of trade, adulterated
with red lead to increase his profit, without any suspicion of the use
to which it would be applied; and the purchaser who adulterated the
anotta, presuming that the vermilion was genuine, had no hesitation in
heightening the colour of his spurious anotta with so harmless an
adjunct. Thus, through the circuitous and diversified operations of
commerce, a portion of deadly poison may find admission into the
necessaries of life, in a way which can attach no criminality to the
parties through whose hands it has successively passed."

This dangerous sophistication may be detected by macerating a portion of
the suspected cheese in water impregnated with sulphuretted hydrogen,
acidulated with muriatic acid; which will instantly cause the cheese to
assume a brown or black colour, if the minutest portion of lead be
present.

FOOTNOTES:

[103] Repository of Arts, vol. viii. No. 47, p. 262.

_Counterfeit Pepper._

Black pepper is the fruit of a shrubby creeping plant, which grows wild
in the East Indies, and is cultivated, with much advantage, for the sake
of its berries, in Java and Malabar. The berries are gathered before
they are ripe, and are dried in the sun. They become black and
corrugated on the surface.

This factitious pepper-corns have of late been detected mixed with
genuine pepper, is a fact sufficiently known.[104] Such an adulteration
may prove, in many instances of household economy, exceedingly vexatious
and prejudicial to those wh