cient grounds for its being reprobated. At any rate this metallic addition is of no use in any point of view, as the most experienced dealers in wine have long since acknowledged.

In an old Imperial ordinance, milk also is mentioned as an article used in the adulterating of wine. This method was known to and practised by the ancient Grecians. But in the opinion of Von Rohr milk cannot be employed for that purpose. "One can scarcely comprehend," says he, "how the framers of laws should ever imagine that a wine-dealer would be so simple as to adulterate wine with milk; and those who do so, deserve not to be punished for their folly. As they will find no purchasers to wine adulterated by so strange a mixture, that punishment will be sufficient." The effects of milk however may be easily comprehended. It causes the wine to throw up a scum, which carries with it every impurity; and this being taken off along with it, the wine must of course be rendered much clearer. However, though this mixture cannot be called an adulteration, it is certain that wine may be refined much better by isinglass, and that method is followed at present.

I shall observe in the last place, that in the year 1472, Stumwine, as it is called, was prohibited as a bad liquor prejudicial to the health. By this term is understood wine, the fermentation of which has been checked, and which on that account continues sweet; seldom becomes clear; and, even when it clarifies, turns muddy when exposed to the air, because the fermentation, which has been stopped, again commences1. Wines of this kind are allowed at present. They are called vina muta or suffocata, and have a great resemblance to a sort of wine made principally at Bordeaux, to which the French give the name of vin en rage.

[In no country of the world has the adulteration and brewing of wines attained to such a pitch of perfection as in this "tight little island." So impudently and notoriously are these frauds practised, and so boldly are they avowed, that there are books 1 Geopon. p. 486, 502.-Lemnius de Miraculis Occultis Naturæ, Coloniæ, 1581, 8vo, p. 291.

2 See Haushaltungs-Recht, Leipsic, 1716, 4to, p. 1393.

3 Von Lersner, Chronica der Stadt Frankfurt, ii. p. 683. Wine seasoned with mustard, and which was sold as boiled wine, was forbidden at the same time. See p. 684. In the year 1484 wine mixed with the herb mugwort was prohibited also. 4 Anleitung, ut supra, p. 93, 128.

published called 'Publican's Guides' and 'Licensed Victuallers' Directors,' in which the most infamous receipts imaginable are laid down to swindle their customers. One of these recommends port wine to be manufactured, after sulphuring a cask, with twelve gallons of strong port; six of rectified spirit; three of cognac brandy; forty-two of fine rough cider ; making sixty-three gallons, which cost about eighteen shillings a dozen. Another receipt is forty-five gallons of cider; six of brandy; eight of port wine; two gallons of sloes stewed in two gallons of water, and the liquor pressed off. If the colour is not good, tincture of red sanders or cudbear is directed to be added. This may be bottled in a few days, and a tea-spoonful of powder of catechu being added to each, a fine crusted appearance on the bottles will quickly follow. The ends of the corks being soaked in a strong decoction of brazil-wood and a little alum, will complete this interesting process, and give them the appearance of age. Oak-bark, elder, brazilwood, privet, beet, turnsole, are all used in making fictitious port wine.

The wines of Madeira are in like manner adulterated or wholly manufactured in England, which from these devices may justly claim the title of a universal wine country, where every species is made if it be not grown. The basis of the adulteration of madeira is vidonia, mingled with a little port, mountain, and cape, sugar-candy and bitter-almonds, and the colour made lighter or deepened to the proper shade, as the case may require. Even vidonia itself is adulterated with cider, rum, and carbonate of soda to correct acidity. Bucellas, cape, in short every species of wine that it is worth while to imitate, is adulterated or manufactured in this country with cheaper substances. Common Sicilian wine has been metamorphosed so as to pass for tokay and lachryma christi; even cape wine itself has been imitated by liquids, if possible inferior to the genuine article.

Gooseberry wine is often passed off for champagne; the very bottles are bought up for the purpose of filling with gooseberry wine, and are then corked to resemble champagne. It has also been made from white and raw sugar, citric or tartaric acid, water, home-made grape wine or perry and French brandycochineal or strawberries have been added to imitate the pink. 1 See Redding's History and Description of Modern Wines.

VOL. I.

S

In fact vegetation has been exhausted, and the bowels of the earth ransacked to supply trash for this most vicious practice.

Redding observes, in his valuable and most interesting work on the History and Description of Modern Wines, that the clumsy attempts at wine-brewing made a century ago would be scorned by a modern adept. It is said that when George the Fourth was in the "high and palmy" days of early dissipation, he possessed a very small quantity of remarkably choice and scarce wine. The gentlemen of his suite, whose taste was hardly second to their master's, finding it had not been demanded, thought it was forgotten, and, relishing its virtues, exhausted it almost to the last bottle, when they were surprised by the unexpected command that the wine should be forthcoming at an entertainment on the following day. Consternation was visible on their faces; a hope of escaping discovery hardly existed, when one of them, as a last resource, went off in haste to a noted wine-brewer in the city, numbered among his acquaintance, and related his dilemma. "Have you any of the wine left for a specimen?" said the adept; "O yes, there are a couple of bottles." "Well then, send me one, and I will forward the necessary quantity in time; only tell me the latest moment it can be received, for it must be drunk immediately." The wine was sent, the deception answered; the princely hilarity was disturbed by no discovery of the fictitious potation, and the manufacturer was thought a very clever fellow by his friends. What would Sir Richard Steele have said to so neat an imitation, when in his day he complains that sinister fabrications were coarsely managed with sloe-juice? the science of adulteration must then have been in its infancy.]

ARTIFICIAL PEARLS.

THOSE round calcareous' excrescences found both in the bodies and shells, especially on the nacreous coat, of several 1 It was because pearls are calcareous that Cleopatra was able to dissolve hers in vinegar, and by these means to gain a bet from her lover, as we are told by Pliny, l. ix. c. 35, and Macrobius Saturn. 1. ii. c. 13. She must,

kinds of shell-fish', have been much used as ornaments since the earliest ages. The beautiful play of colours exhibited on their surface has raised them to a high value3; and this they have always retained on account of their scarcity and the expense arising from the laborious manner in which they are collected. By the increase of luxury among the European however, have employed stronger vinegar than that which we use for our tables, as pearls, on account of their hardness and their natural enamel, cannot be easily dissolved by a weak acid. Nature has secured the teeth of animals against the effects of acids, by an enamel covering which answers the same purpose; but if this enamel happen to be injured only in one small place, the teeth soon spoil and rot. Cleopatra perhaps broke and pounded the pearls; and it is probable that she afterwards diluted the vinegar with water, that she might be able to drink it; though dissolved calcareous matter neutralizes acids and renders them imperceptible to the tongue. We are told that the dissipated Clodius gave to each of his guests a pearl dissolved in vinegar to drink :-"Ut experiretur in gloria palati," says Pliny, "quid saperent margaritæ ; atque ut mire placuere, ne solus hoc sciret, singulos uniones convivis absorbendos dedit." Horace, lib. ii. sat. 3, says the That pearls are soluble in vinegar is remarked in Pausanias, b. viii. ch. 18, and Vitruvius, b. viii. ch. 3.

same.

1 That pearls are not peculiar to one kind of shell-fish, as many believe, was known to Pliny. I have a number of very good pearls which were found by my brother in Colchester oysters. It is more worthy of remark, and less known, that real pearls are found under the shield of the sea-hare, (Aplysia), as has been observed by Bohadsch in his book De Animalibus Marinis, Dresdæ, 1761, 4to, p. 39.

In the time of Job, pearls were accounted to be of great value. Job, chap. xxviii. ver. 18.

3 [When the surface of pearl is examined with a microscope, it is found to be indented by a large number of delicate grooves, which by their effect upon the light give rise to the play of colours; and if impressions of them be taken upon wax, fusible metal, lead, balsam of Tolu, &c., the impressed surface exhibits the prismatic colours in the same manner as the pearl. This principle has been applied by Mr. Barton and others to the making of ornaments, in the form of buttons, artificial jewels, &c., by grooving the surface of steel with a very fine cutting machine. The theory of the production of the colours is this: the surfaces of the grooves, from their varied inclinations, reflect the incident white light at various angles, hence the correspondence of the luminous undulations is interrupted and some of them check or interfere with one another, others continue their course. Now, ordinary white light being a mixture of coloured rays, when some of these are checked or interfered with in their progress, the remainder continue their course and appear of that colour which results from the ocular impression communicated by them.]

[One of the most remarkable pearls of which we have any authentic account, was bought by Tavernier at Catifa in Arabia, a fishery famous in the days of Pliny, for the enormous sum of £110,000. It is pear-shaped,

nations, the use of pearls has become more common; and even in Pliny's time they were worn by the wives of the inferior public officers, in order that they might vie in the costliness of their dress with ladies of the first rank. It is probable, therefore, that methods were early invented to occasion or hasten the formation of pearls; and as at present those who cannot afford to purchase gold, jewels, and porcelain, use in their stead pinchbeck, artificial gems, and stone-ware, so methods were fallen upon to make artificial pearls.

The art of forcing shell-fish to produce pearls was known, in the first centuries of the christian æra to the inhabitants of the coasts of the Red-sea, as we are told by the philosopher Apollonius, who thought that circumstance worthy of particular notice. The Indians dived into the sea, after they had rendered it calm and more transparent by pouring oil into it. They then enticed the fish by means of some bait to open their shells; and having pricked them with a sharp pointed instrument, received the liquor that flowed from them in small holes made in an iron vessel, in which they hardened into real pearls '. Olearius says that this account is to be found in no other author: but it has at least been copied by Tzetzes 2.

We are as yet too little acquainted with shell-fish to be able to determine with certainty how much truth there really may be in this relation: but there is great reason to conjecture from it that the people who lived on the borders of the Red-sea were then acquainted with a method of forcing shell-fish_to produce pearls; and as the arts in general of the ancient Indians have been preserved without much variation, the process employed by the Chinese at present, to cause a certain kind of mussels to form pearls, seems to confirm the account given by Philostratus. In the beginning of summer, at the time when the mussels repair to the surface of the water and open their shells, five or six small beads, made of mother-of-pearl, and strung on a thread, are thrown into each of them. At the end of a year, when the mussels are drawn up and opened, the beads are found covered with a pearly crust, in such a regular, and without blemish. It is rather more than half an inch in diameter at the largest part, and from two to three inches in length.-Waterston's Encyclopædia of Commerce.]

1 Philostrat. in Vita Apollon. lib. iii. cap. 57, edit. Olearii, p. 139. Conrade Gesner, in his Hist. Nat. lib. iv. p. 634, gives a more correct translation of the passage. 2 Tzetzes Variorum, lib. ii. segm. 373.