and of preparing Opium from it. 167 



would have been prepared in this country to a considerable ex- 

 tent. 



It is probable that Mr. Thomas Jones, who was a candidate 

 for the premium offered by the Society of Arts, was misled by the 

 speculations of Mr. Ball. ' Mr. Jones only collected 21 lb. 7 oz. 

 of opium from five acres and upwards of poppies, and obtained 

 the premium of fifty guineas for the largest specimen. He col- 

 lected his opium according to the Bengal method ; but some of 

 his poppiesj he says, became stunted, and others were entirely 

 destroyed by remarkably dry weather, which continued six weeks 

 from the beginning of May. This may be considered as the rea- 

 son why he obtained so little from five acres. In another place 

 he says, the largest quantity which his man, seven children, and 

 himself, were able to procure in one morning from 5 to 9 o'clock, 

 was one pound and a half. This happened when the dew was 

 remarkably great, and succeeded one of the warmest days of the 

 summer. And as he admits, in another place, that the opium 

 (which appeared upon the heads in a soft ash-coloured substance), 

 when first collected, is, from its union with the dew, much too soft 

 to be formed into a proper consistence ; making a proper allow- 

 ance for the evaporation of its watery part, 1 conclude that he 

 gathered only in one morning, after a warm day, in the same 

 ratio that they gather opium in the East Indies. They have no 

 rain in India during the season of gathering opium, and Mr. Kerr 

 says, that there one acre of poppies yields 60 lb. of opium. 



These observations, collected from Mr. Jones's paper to the 

 Society of Arts, should be kept in view, as they may help to il- 

 lustrate one of the objects of this essay, and confirm the superio- 

 rity of my method of collecting opium in Britain. 



Dr. Hovvison, who was for some time inspector of opiurn in 

 Bengal, is the only other person, so far as I know, who has given 

 an account of the result of his experiments for making opium in 

 this country. Although he was not the first who collected the 

 milky juiceof the poppy in a fluid state, it is supposed he is the 

 first who, in this country, has given the preference to that mode. 

 Dr. Alston collected the milky juice in the fluid state according 

 to Dioscorides *, and also in the Persian way described by Kaemp- 

 fer, from several varieties of the poppy. He also collected the 

 true tear, as he calls it, by cutting off the star from several of the 

 heads, bending them down, and suffering the milk to drop into 

 a tea-cup; yet he says that he collected more by the Persian way 

 than by that described by Dioscorides. 



The' instrument used by Dr. Howison for wounding the poppy- 

 heads, consists of a brass ring, made to fit the middle fingtr of 



• De Ptipavere tatho et tykettr't, lib. iv. cup. 05, p. 127. 



L 4 ili^ 



