In hardly any article of merchandise so many adulterations occur as in the stronger alcoholic liquids. And to these falsifications it is due that the use of alcohol so often shows its most detrimental effect on the health, especially on the brain of man.

Spirits may be adulterated with water, sugar, capsicum, cinnamon or cassia, various sulphates, free sulphuric acid and lead. Water has been added to them in such a degree that their commercial value was reduced to the enormous extent of more than one-half. This lack of body was covered partly by sugar. Hassall says in his Adulteratioyis of Food, etc.: "It is impossible to conceive of more scandalous adulterations of spirits than those by cayenne pepper or grains of paradise, for they are almost equally hot and pungent. The introduction into the stomach of raw spirits is sufficiently destructive of itself, but the addition of such powerful and acrid substances as cayenne pepper and grains of paradise forms a compound which no human stomach or system, however strong, could long withstand."

The different kinds of spirits are obtained in a comparatively crude state from the grain by the distiller. They are afterward submitted to purification by the rectifier, as well as procured of a higher strength. The impurity of raw spirits arises principally from the presence of a peculiar volatile oil, termed fusel oil, and possessing very deleterious properties. Dr. Taylor remarks of this oil, "that in small quantities it produces intoxication. I have experienced the effects of the vapour and found them to be giddiness, accompanied with a feeling of suffocation and a sense of falling. Headache followed which lasted half an hour." Two drachms of the oil killed a rabbit in two hours, three drachms in an hour, half an ounce in a quarter of an hour, and one ounce in four minutes. Much of the unwholesomeness of spirits imperfectly rectified arises from its contamination with fusel oil.

To show what infernal concoctions are served to the public we put down only one recipe out of a great number, taken from a book that is said to be the best on the market.

To manufacture whiskey, the following Bourbon Oil recipe is given:

Place them all in a glass percolator and let them rest for twelve hours. Then percolate and put into a glass still, and distill half a gallon of the Bourbon Oil.

Sapienti sat !