presence of other vegetable principles in the wine.[1] I may add, that I have found the citric acid to possess the same property with the acetic and malic acids. It dissolves so much of the tartrate of lead as to acquire a pleasant sweetness, unmixed with metallic astringency.
The practice of adulterating wine with lead does not seem to have been ever pursued to any material extent in Britain. Home-made wines may be adulterated in this way, as may be inferrred from the receipt formerly quoted for preventing acescency. But I have never heard that any such adulteration has been suspected in the foreign wines usually drunk in this country. Considering, indeed, the nature of these wines, and the class of people who alone make use of them, it is not likely that adulteration with lead could be practised with success. If the foreign wines used in Britain should become acescent, lead could hardly restore their taste so thoroughly as to impose on the consumer.
Sometimes spirituous liquors and preserves have been adulterated with lead, in consequence of sugar of lead having been used to clarify them, or to render them colourless. Cadet de Gassicourt says it is a common practice in France to clarify honey and sugar of grapes, and to make brandy pale in this way; and M. Boudet has detected lead in many samples of these articles in Paris.[2] Hollands has likewise been poisoned in the same manner. Dr. Shearman mentions his having detected an extensive adulteration of smuggled Geneva by an excise officer, which had been sold and dispersed over an extensive tract of country, and which committed great ravages among the inhabitants.[3]
The adulterations hitherto noticed take place through means of the chemical action of the adulterated articles on lead or its oxide. Some other substances are occasionally contaminated by its compounds being merely mechanically mixed with them. There is no end to the number and variety of adulterations of this kind. But the following will serve as examples. Gaubius once detected an adulteration of butter with white lead at a time when it was very scarce in Flanders, owing to a dreadful mortality among cattle.[4] An instance of poisoning with lead, in consequence of cheese having been mixed with red lead, is mentioned in the Repertory of Arts.[5] This variety deserves to be remembered. Red lead was at one time a good deal used to communicate the peculiar reddish-yellow colour, which is supposed to characterize the finer qualities of certain kinds of English cheese. In the Transactions of the Medical Society of London, a singular instance has been related by Mr. Deering, of lead colic attacking a whole family, and proving fatal to two of them, in consequence of the insidious introduction of white lead into the body. Although the nature of the symptoms in the several cases left no doubt that
