What we eat : an account of the most common adulterations of food and drink : with simple tests by which many of them may be detected / by Thomas H. Hoskins.

  • Hoskins, Thomas H.
Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: What we eat : an account of the most common adulterations of food and drink : with simple tests by which many of them may be detected / by Thomas H. Hoskins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    14/236
    in most common use as articles of food, have been carefully and repeatedly examined and tested, by means of the appliances known to science, and the results which will be laid before the reader, cannot fail to produce conviction. Many of the tests are such, that the statements which will be made can be verified by every one, with but little trouble; others are somewhat recon- dite and complicated, and require the aid of a more or less extensive apparatus, and a certain amount of experience and skill; but in every case, so far as practicable, the processes will be explained, and sim- plified to as great an extent as is consistent with that accuracy which is essential to trustworthy results. Modern science has been furnished, in investiga- tions of this character, with a most powerful auxil- iary in the microscope, the wonderful power of which, in the discrimination of minute organic forms, reaches into a field where, before, the great- est powers of the chemist's armory of tests and reagents afforded but a feeble and uncertain guide. It was for a long time the fashion, even among men of acknowledged attainments in science, to depreciate the microscope, as an aid to chemistry, and to characterize its teachings as valueless and de- ceptive. Doubtless this opinion, in the infancy of the