38 ANALYSIS AND ADULTERATIONS OF BUTTER. 



adulterations is concerned, the method to be described has 

 been found all that can be desired. 



Urgent as was the necessity to work out a method by 

 which the presence of foreign fats in butter could with 

 certainty be determined ; unwilling as were all public 

 analysts, appointed under the Adulteration of Food and 

 Drugs Act, to risk their reputation in pronouncing an 

 opinion upon samples of suspected butter submitted to them 

 for analysis, because they confessed the absence of a trust- 

 worthy method ; and great as must have been the injustice 

 to dealers, who were convicted and heavily fined for selling 

 adulterated butters, though no one could tell in what the 

 difference between genuine and adulterated butter consisted, 

 yet no serious attempt was made to solve the problem. It 

 was by some chemists considered capable of solution, whilst 

 others insisted upon the impossibility of distinguishing 

 between bodies apparently identical in composition. 



Thus Mr. Wanklyn, in his treatise on milk, declares that 

 he had no doubt that, if only some one would take the 

 trouble to investigate the subject carefully, he would have a 

 good chance of finding characteristic tests ; and Dr. Muter, 

 as far back as 1870, states in the Food Journal that he 

 himself hoped to be able to publish a plan which would lead 

 to the desired end. As late, however, as 1874, before the 

 Adulteration Committee of the House of Commons, the 

 most eminent witnesses emphatically stated that no method 

 was then known. That such was the fact also abundantly 

 appears from all the treatises on food, the authors of which 

 either do not venture upon any statements at all as regards 

 the detection of foreign fats in butter, or, like the late Dr. 

 Smith, they declare that "there are no chemical means." 



A saponification test indeed had been employed by Mr. 

 Anderson, founded upon the difference of colour of butter- 

 soap and the soaps of other fats; but this test, like its 



