This is not a temperance lecture. I have only to tell you of impure liquors. Excepting alcohol I know of no pure liquors. I can find none. I have offered one hundred dollars for an ounce of pure brandy.
Wines.—The following articles are used to make or adulterate wine: water, sugar, arsenic, alum, cochineal and other coloring matter, chalk, lime, sulphur, lead, corrosive sublimate, etc.
To detect arsenic, put some pure lime-water in a glass, and drop the wine,—say a teaspoonful,—into it. If white clouds arise, expect that it contains arsenic. A positive test of arsenic in liquids is the ammonio-nitrate of silver, which precipitates a rich yellow matter, the arseniate of silver, and this quickly changes to a greenish-brown color. No elder or deacon should use wine, unless domestic, without having a sample of it analyzed by a disinterested chemist. The thought to me is perfectly shocking, that the villanous concoctions sold by even honest and Christian druggists, and used for communion purposes, to represent the blood of Christ, should be composed of alum, arsenic, and bugs! (cochineal). Of bread I say the same. A deacon’s wife, not a hundred miles from Lowell, buys baker’s bread, sour and yellow, for communion purposes. A lady showed me a sample of it, very unlike what my old grandmother, a deaconess, used to make for that purpose. It requires too much space to give tests of the various poisons in wines. I have no confidence in any foreign wines.
Alcohol has been distilled from the brain and other parts of the dead body of drunkards.
A Wine Bath.
An American traveller in the streets of Paris, seeing the words, “Wine Baths given here,” exclaimed,—
“Well, these French are a luxurious people;” when, with true Yankee curiosity and the feeling that he could afford whatever any one else did, he walked in and demanded a “wine bath.”
Feeling wonderfully refreshed after it, and having to pay but five francs, he asked, in some astonishment, how a wine bath could be afforded so cheaply. His sable attendant, who had been a slave in Virginia, and enjoyed a sly bit of humor, replied,—
“O, massa, we just pass it along into anudder room, where we gib bath at four francs.”
“Then you throw it away, I suppose.”