REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER. 21 



bill the pails as 3s, 5s, or los, and if there is any complaint they 

 say, "That is not a five pound pail, that is not five pounds of 

 lard, that is a 'five'." The butcher or grocer does not know 

 that, — he sells it for five pounds. 



Then we have the practice of using the liquid measure for 

 the dry. If you buy beans or small onions or cranberries in 

 some localities, the man will take a liquid measure and fill it up. 

 There is not a person in a hundred who knows the difference 

 outside of people who are interested in weights and measures. 

 They say a quart is a quart. As a matter of fact, there are 

 two kinds of quarts and the liquid quart is 14 per cent short 

 of the dry quart. If a man bought a bushel of cranberries and 

 sold them out by liquid measure, he could sell them at the same 

 price per quart and make 52 cents on a bushel, at 10 cents per 

 quart, because he could get over 37 quarts out of a bushel by 

 selling by liquid measure. That is one of the commonest forms 

 of fraud. Unfortunately we have both dry and liquid measure 

 and there is always a temptation to use the smaller measure 

 for drv commodities. All fruits, berries and drv vegetables 

 should be sold by dry measure. Cranberries, peanuts, etc. are 

 a good many times sold by liquid measure instead of by dry 

 measure. 



We have a great many milk bottles in the State of Maine. 

 When a person goes to buy milk bottles from the manufacturer, 

 the manufacturer always asks him what kind of a milk bottle 

 he wants, a full quart or a 30 ounce quart, or a 28 ounce quart. 

 The sealer of weights and measures has the job of trying to 

 check up those milk bottles. I do not doubt that in the city of 

 Portland alone four or five hundred thousand are used every 

 year, and a good part of the time of the sealer of weights and 

 measures is consumed by working in the ofiice and testing milk 

 bottles. XMiat is being done in Massachusetts and other states 

 is that the manufacturers are bonded to the State to make 

 nothing but a standard bottle. In Massachusetts, for instance, 

 the manufacturer blows into the jar the words "Massachusetts, 

 sealed," and also a check letter which identifies him as the 

 maker of that jar. Then if any of those jars are found short, 

 there is a penalty of fifty dollars against him. So you see that 

 puts it right back to the manufacturer. Unfortunately, here in 

 Maine the loss falls directly on to the milk dealer or the farmer 



