1060 FOODS AND FOOD ADULTERANTS. 



color which the customers insist upon, although it adds nothing to the nutritive 

 quality of vegetables. The others have preferred to defy the law, alleging that con- 

 formity to it would ruin a national industry. This argument, which must necessa- 

 rily have weight with the statesmen in charge of commerce and industry, ia a fla- 

 grant error which we can not leave uncorrected. In our previous report (April, 

 1881) we have indicated processes now in use by manufacturers by which they are 

 able to produce, without employing a particle of copper, legumes of a green color, 

 apparently as well preserved as those containing copper. These canners, whose 

 efforts the Government is desirous of encouraging, are as well worthy of considera- 

 tion as those who have refused to conform to the law, and it would be as beneficial 

 to the industry of the country to make their process general as it would be to remove 

 the prohibition resting upon copper. The use of copper is not so beneficial as might 

 be supposed to our trade. London merchants selling Parisian coppered preserves 

 have been prosecuted in the police courts. The suspicion placed upon our products, 

 if perpetuated, will work more injury to our foreign commerce than a prohibition 

 which is known to be based upon so important a concern as that of the public health. 



From this point of view neither commerce nor industry is especially interested as 

 to whether the prohibition stays or goes. It remains to be seen whether the ques- 

 tion is equally indifferent from a hygienic standpoint. The time is past, it is fair to 

 say, when copper, still regarded as a violent poison, was charged with various mis- 

 deeds ; when one could not suffer from colic or indigestion without blaming an im- 

 perfectly tinned copper saucepan ; when pathologists described copper colic along 

 with lead colic and regarded the effects of the two metals as analogous and equally 

 dangerous. We know now that poisoning with copper is so difficult to realize that 

 it may bo regarded as practically impossible, and that in any case to cause death or 

 even serious illness, extremely large doses are required. It is also established beyond 

 the possibility of question that preparations of copper ingested in small doses cause 

 no injury to health. The case of workers in industries which employ large quanti- 

 ties of copper or its compounds, and of the canners, who almost daily use the greened 

 vegetables, leaves no room for doubt on the latter point. 



But on the other hand it is also equally well known that copper salts administered 

 in sufficient doses have a decided physiological action, which may under favorable 

 circumstances become serious. The action is confined to the digestive organs, causes 

 vomiting and diarrhea, and is invariably temporary. Copper could imperil life only 

 when taken in excessive doses often repeated at short intervals. It is absolutely 

 impossible that any dangerous result should follow from the small quantity of cop- 

 per necessary to green legumes, a dose estimated at from 16 to 20 nig per kilo. 

 However this limit, which is that given by partisans of the absolute innocuousness 

 of copper salts aud by the interested canners, can not be relied upon. In the anal- 

 yses of Galippe the quantity of copper found varied from 14 to 18 mg per kilo, but 

 Riche and Magnier de la Source found as little as 16 mg for petits pois and as high 

 as 35, 40, and 45 mg in green beans. According to Pasteur the quantity is from 80 

 to 100 mgof copper per kilo. I myself received a sample prepared as follows: 



Forty-five liters of small peas were plunged into about 120 liters of boiling water, 

 to which had been added 45 grams of copper sulphate. I submitted this sample to M. 

 Chatin,who, having analyzed it with the assistance of M. Personue, declared that it 

 contained the enormous proportion of 270 mg of copper per kilo of peas taken with- 

 out the juice. Chatin persisted in his statement, although it was doubted by some 

 members of the commission. I should add that using M. Chatin's figures for the 

 copper remaining in the coppering bath and the 270 ing number, the entire amount 

 of copper sulphate used can bo recovered by calculation. In other samples from 

 the same house furnishing the one just cited, the proportion was not so groat, falling 

 as low as 170 or 180 ing per kilo, amounts, however, still much ia excess of that 

 reported by Galippe and by the canners in their statement to the minister. In the 

 samples from the same source, analyzed in the laboratory of Wurtz, the amounts 



