696 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



Xlie "Wiley lL,ie has assumed a 

 new phase. This time it comes by way 

 ot the printing office of "the United 

 States Department of Agriculture, 

 Division of Chemistry, Bulletin No. 13." 



It is a pamphlet of 250 pages, on 

 "Foods and Food Adulterants," and 

 purports to be the reports of investiga- 

 tions made under direction of H. W. 

 Wiley, Chief Chemist, by assistants in 

 different parts of the country. 



The whole thing is an ingenious 

 method invented (apparently at least) 

 to injure the pursuit of bee-culture, and 

 pay off the Amekican Bee Journal for 

 the righteous war waged upon the Pro- 

 fessor, which finally wrung from him 

 the apologetic letter to counteract the 

 influence of the so-called " scientific 

 pleasantry," eight years after he had 

 perpetrated that huge joke upon the 

 world ! 



The pamphlet is full of blunders, mis- 

 statements, misrepresentations, and ill- 

 concealed spite. 



He persists in calling comb-founda- 

 tion " artificial comb," and gives a list 

 of " manufacturers of comb," in which 

 he enumerates : T. G. Newman, Chicago, 

 Ills., though that person never manu- 

 factured an ounce of "comb" in his 

 life, nor even comb-foundation, which, 

 of course, the wily Professor would have 

 us believe that he was writing about! 

 But if he meant "comb-foundation," 

 why does he omit any mention of such 

 large manufacturers as A. I. Root, J. 

 Van Deusen & Sons, and many others ? 

 Simply because he tries to mislead and 

 vent his spite upon those who have dared 

 to defend the pursuit against his "scien- 

 tific pleasantries " and his oft-repeated 

 misrepresentations ! 



On page 740 of the pamphlet, the 

 wily Professor remarks as follows : 



Perhaps there is no other article of 

 food which has been so generally adul- 

 terated in the United States, during the 

 last 20 years, as honey. The ease with 

 which sophistication could bo practiced, 

 the, cheapness of the mat(irial vised, and 

 the high price of the genuine product 

 have pres(inted temptations which the 



manufacturer, producer, and dealer 

 have not been able to withstand. 



As long as honey was sold wholly in 

 the comb, the difficulties in the way of 

 successful sophistication were so great 

 as to practically preclude its practice. 

 The popular impression to the effect 

 that comb-honey is adulterated was 

 probably produced rather by ingenious 

 attempts to manufacture the spurious 

 article than by the commercial success 

 of the enterprise. Artificial comb-honey 

 has been regarded as a possible article 

 of commerce by many scientific men. 



The last sentence is worthy of the 

 man who invented the story about 

 "artificial comb being made by machin- 

 ery, filled with glucose, and capped by a 

 hot iron !" 



But hold ! He admitted that it was a 

 falsehood, and suffered a " retraction " 

 to be published ; and he must now in- 

 vent a new way to injure honey-pro- 

 ducers. So the book is published, and 

 allowed to be copied into thousands of 

 newspapers, with this re-vamped "Wiley 

 lie" — that "artificial comb" IS "a pos- 

 sible article of commerce !" Then, a 

 week afterwards, comes a little slip of 

 paper by mail, containing five lines of 

 corrections, one of which is to insert 

 "not" after "artificial comb-honey has," 

 etc. That slow correction, he well 

 knows, will NEVER overtake the false 

 assertion in the official document itself ! ! 



The Professor then takes another 

 tack. He says : 



Although not a matter of national 

 legislation the standard of pure honey 

 is not hard to fix. By universal consent 

 it may be stated that a pure honey is 

 the nectar of flowers and other saccha- 

 rine exudations of plants, gathered by 

 bees, and stored in cells built at least in 

 part by the bees themselves. 



Honey nuide by feeding bees glucose, 

 sugar, invert-sugar, or other saccharine 

 substances, is not pure honey. Nor is 

 that pure honey which is made by ad- 

 ding to an empty or partially filled 

 honey-comb glucose, or any other sac- 

 charine substance. 



Just as we have before intimated ; the 

 unfortunate blunder of publishing the 

 Hasty Sugar Honey article, last Winter, 

 has been seized upon to give color to 



