es had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and
flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who could
invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said
Jurgis' informant; but it was hard to think of anything new in a
place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men
welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it made
them fatten more quickly; and where they bought up all the old rancid
butter left over in the grocery stores of a continent, and "oxidized" it
by a forced-air process, to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim
milk, and sold it in bricks in the cities! Up to a year or two ago
it had been the custom to kill horses in the yards--ostensibly for
fertilizer; but after long agitation the newspapers had been able to
make the public realize that the horses were being canned. Now it was
against the law to kill horses in Packingtown, and the law was really
complied with--for the present, at any rate. Any day, however, one might
see sharp-horned and shaggy-haired creatures running with the sheep and
yet what a job you would have to get the public to believe that a good
part of what it buys for lamb and mutton is really goat's flesh!

There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might
have gathered in Packingtown--those of the various afflictions of
the workers. When Jurgis had first inspected the packing plants with
Szedvilas, he had marveled while he listened to the tale of all the
things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the
lesser industries that were maintained there; now he found that each one
of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as
horrible as the killing beds, the source and fountain of them all.
The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. And the
wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he
could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence
of them about on his own person--generally he had only to hold out his
hand.

There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas
had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of
horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a
truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him
out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the
acid, one by on