deceitfully or sell any musty or corrupted meal, which may
be to the hurte and infection of man's body, or use any false
weight, or any deceitful wayes or meanes, and so deceive the
subject, for the first offence he shall be grievously punished,
the second he shall loose his meale, for the third offence he
shall suffer the judgment of the pillory and the fourth time
he shall foreswore the town wherein he dwelleth.'' Vintners,
spicers, grocers, butchers, regrators and others were subject
to the like punishment for dishonesty in their commercial
dealings--it being thought that the pillory, by appealing to
the sense of shame, was far more deterrent of such crimes than
fine or imprisonment. In the reign of Edward the Confessor
a knavish brewer of the city of Chester was taken round the
town in the cart in which the refuse of the privies had been
collected. Ale-tasters had to look after the ale and test it
by spilling some on to a wooden seat, sitting on the wet place
in their leathern breeches, the stickiness of the ``residue
obtained by evaporation'' affording the evidence of purity or
otherwise. If sugar had been added the taster adhered to
the bench; pure malt beer was not considered to yield an
adhesive extract. In 1553, the lord mayor of London ordered
a jury of five or six vintners to rack and draw off the
suspected wine of another vintner, and to ascertain what
drugs or ingredients they found in the said wine or cask
to sophisticate the same. At another time eight pipes of
wine were ordered to be destroyed because, on racking off,
bundles of weeds, pieces of sulphur match, and ``a kind
of gravel mixture sticking to the casks'' had been found.
Similar records have come down from the continental European
countries. In 1390 an Augsburg wine-seller was sentenced
to be led out of the city with his hands bound and a rope
round his neck; in 1400 two others were branded and otherwise
severely punished; in 1435 ``were the taverner Christian
Corper and his wife put in a cask in which he sold false
wine, and then exposed in the pillory. The punishment was
adjudged because they had roasted pears and put them into
new sour wine, in order to sweeten the wine. Some pears
were hung round their necks like unto a Paternoster.''
In Biebrich on the Rhine, in 1482, a wine-falsifier was
condemned to drink six quarts of his own wine; from this he
died. In Frankfurt, casks in which false wine had been
found were placed with a red flag on the knacker's cart,
``the jailer marched before, the rabble after; and when they
came to the river they broke the casks and tumbled the stuff
into the stream.'' In France successive ordonnances from
1330 to 1672 forbade the mixing of two wines together under
the penalty of a fine and the confiscation of the wine.
Modern British Legislation.--In modern times the English
parliament has dealt frequently with the subject of food
adulteration. In 1725 it was provided that ``no dealer in
tea or manufacturer or dyer thereof, or pretending so to
be, shall counterfeit or adulterate tea, or cause or procure
the same to be counterfeited or adulterated, or shall alter,
fabricate or manufacture tea with terra-japonica, or with any
drug or drugs whatsoever; nor shall mix or cause or procure
to be mixed with tea any leaves other than the leaves of
tea or other ingredients whatsoever, on pain of forfeiting
and losing the tea so counterfeited, adulterated, altered,
fabricated, manufactured or mixed, and any other thing or
things whatsoever added thereto, or mixed or used therewith,
and also the sum of L. 100.'' Six years afterwards, in
1730-173i, a further act was passed prescribing a penalty for
``sophisticating'' tea; it recites that several iii-disposed
persons do frequently dye, fabricate or manufacture very great
quantities of sloe leaves, liquorice leaves, and the leaves
of tea that have been before used, or the leaves of other
trees, shrubs or plants in imitation of tea, and do likewise
mix, colour, stain and dye such leaves and likewise tea with
terra-japonica, sugar, molasses, clay, logwood, and with other
ingredients, and do sell and vend the same as true and real
tea, to the prejudice of the health of his majesty's subjects,
the diminution of the revenue and to the ruin of the fair
trader. This act provides that for every pound of adulterated
tea found in possession of any person, a sum of L. 10 shall be
forfeited. It was followed by one passed in 1768-1767, which
increased the penalty to imprisonment for not less than six
nor more than twelve months. As regards coffee, an act of
1718 recited that ``divers evil-disposed persons have at the
time or soon after the roasting of coffee made use of water,
grease, butter or such-like materials, whereby the same is
rendered unwholesome and greatly increased in weight,'' and
a penalty of L. 20 is enacted. In 1803 an act refers to the
addition of burnt, scorched or roasted peas, beans or other
grains or vegetable substances prepared in imitation of coffee
or cocoa, to coffee or cocoa, and fixes the penalty for the
offence at L. 100, but subsequently permission was given to
coffee or cocoa dealers also to deal in scorched or roasted
corn, peas, beans or parsnips whole and not ground, crushed or
powdered, under certain excise restrictions. An act passed
in 1816 relating to beer and porter provides that no brewer
of or dealer in or retailer of beer ``shall receive or have
in his possession, or make or mix with any worts or beer,
any liquor, extract or other preparation for the purpose
of darkening the colour of worts or beer, other than brown
malt, ground or unground, or shall have in his possession
or use, or mix with any worts or beer any molasses, honey,
liquorice, vitriol, quassia, coculus-indiae, grains of
paradise, guinea-pepper or opium, or any extracts of these, or
any articles or preparation whatsoever for or as a substitute
for malt or hops.'' Any person contravening was liable to a
penalty of L. 200, and any druggist selling to any brewer or
retail dealer any colouring or malt substitute was to be fined
L. 500. It was only in 1847 that brewers were allowed to
make for their own use, from sugar, a liquor for darkening
the colour of worts or beer and to use it in brewing.
All the laws hitherto referred to were mainly passed in the
interest of the inland revenue, and their execution was left
entirely in the hands of the revenue officers. It was but
natural that they should look primarily after the dutiable
articles and not after those that brought no revenue to the
state. About the middle of the 19th century many articles,
however, paid import duty; butter, for instance, paid 5s.
per hundredweight; cheese from 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d.; flour
or meal of all kinds, 4 1/2d.; ginger, 10s.; isinglass, 5s.;
and so on. Sensational and doubtless largely exaggerated
statements were from time to time published concerning the
food supply of the nation. F. C. Accum (1769-1838) by his
Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons
(1820), and particularly an anonymous writer of a book
entitled 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,
cheesemongery, pastry, confectionery, medicines, etc.,
etc., are laid open to the public (1830), roused the public
attention. In 1850 a physician, Dr. Arthur H. Hassall,
had the happy idea of looking at ground coffee through the
microscope. Eminent chemists had previously found great
difficulty in establishing any satisfactory chemical distinction
between coffee, chicory and other adulterants of coffee;
the microscope immediately showed the structural difference
of the particles, however small. The results of Hassall's
examinations were embodied in a paper which was read before the
Botanical Society of London and was reported in The Times,
1850. A paper on the microscopic examination of sugar,
showing the presence in that article of innumerable living
mites, followed and attracted much attention. Hassall was
in consequence commissioned by Thomas Wakley (1795--1862),
the owner of the Lancet, to extend his examination to other
articles of food, and for a period of nearly four years reports
of the Lancet Analytical Sanitary Commission were regularly
published, the names and addresses of hundreds of manufacturers
and tradesmen selling adulterated articles being fearlessly
given. The responsibility incurred was immense, but the
assertions of the journal were so well founded upon fact that
they were universally accepted as accurately representing
the appalling state of the food supply. As instances may be
cited, that of thirty-four samples of coffee only three were
pure, chicory being present in thirty-one, roasted corn in
twelve, beans and potato flour each in one; of thirty-four
samples of chicory, fourteen were adulterated with corn,
beans or acorns; of forty-nine samples of bread, every one
contained alum; of fifty-six samples of cocoa, only eight
were pure; of twenty-six milks, fourteen were adulterated; of
twenty-eight cayenne peppers, only four were genuine, thirteen
containing red-lead and one vermilion; of upwards of one
hundred samples of coloured sugar-confectionery, fifty-nine
contained chromate of lead, eleven gamboge, twelve red-lead,
six vermilion, nine arsenite of copper and four white-lead.
Act of 1860.
In consequence of the Lancet's disclosures a parliamentary
committee was appointed in 1855, the labours of which resulted
in 1860 in the Adulteration of Food and Drink Act, the first
act that dealt generally with the adulteration of food. The
first section of this enacted ``that every person who shall
sell any article of food or drink with which, to the knowledge
of such person, any ingredient or material injurious to the
health of persons eating or drinking such article has been
mixed, and every person who shall sell as pure or unadulterated
any article of food or drink which is adulterated and not
pure, shall for every such offence, on summary conviction,
pay a penalty not exceeding L. 5 with costs.'' In the case of
a second offence the name, place of abode and offence might
be published in the newspapers at the offender's expense.
1872.
As the act, however, left it optional to the district authorities
to appoint analysts or not, and did not provide for the
appointment of any officer upon whom should rest the duty of
obtaining samples or of prosecuting offenders, it virtually
remained a dead letter till 1872, when the Adulteration of
Food and Drugs Act came into force, prescribing a penalty
not exceeding L. 50 for the sale of injurious food and, for a
second offence, imprisonment for six months with hard labour.
Inspectors were empowered to make purchases of samples to be
submitted for analysis, but appointment of analysts was still left
optional. The definition of an adulterated article given in
that act was essentially that still accepted at the present
time, namely, ``any article of food or drink or any drug mixed
with any other substances, with intent fraudulently to increase
its weight or bulk, without declaration of such admixture
to any purchaser thereof before delivering the same.'' The
adoption of the act was sporadic, and, outside London and a
few large towns, the number of proceedings against offenders
remained exceedingly small. Nevertheless complaints soon
arose that it inflicted considerable injury and imposed heavy
and undeserved penalties upon some respectable tradesmen,
