Page:The humbugs of the world - An account of humbugs, delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in all ages (IA humbugsworld00barnrich).djvu/160



It was about eight hundred and fifty years before Christ when the young prophet cried out to his master, Elisha, over the pottage of wild gourds, “There is death in the pot!” It was two thousand six hundred and seventy years afterward, in 1820, that Accum, the chemist cried out over again, “There is death in the pot!” in the title page of a book so named, which gave almost everybody a pain in the stomach, with its horrid stories of the unhealthful humbugs sold for food and drink. This excitement has been stirred up more than once since Mr. Accum’s time, with some success; yet nothing is more certain than that a very large proportion of the food we eat, of the liquid we drink—always excepting good well-filtered water—and the medicines we take, not to say a word about the clothes we wear and the miscellaneous merchandise we use, is more or less adulterated with cheaper materials. Sometimes these are merely harmless; as flour, starch, annatto, lard, etc.; sometimes they are vigorous, destructive poisons as red lead, arsenic, strychnine, oil of vitriol, potash, etc.