261 
Opium in Great Britain, 
would only be 5 11). 11 oz. and 1 dr. per acre. If Mr Ball’s as- 
sertions with respect to the probable produce had been correct, 
there can be no doubt that opium would have been prepared in 
this country to a considerable extent. 
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 ob- 
tained the premium of fifty guineas for the largest specimen. 
He collected his opium according to the Bengal method : but 
some of his poppies, 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 consider- 
ed as the reason why he obtained so little from five acres. In 
another place he says, that the largest quantity which his man, 
seven children and himself, were able to procure in one morn- 
ing from 5 to 9 o’clock, was one pound and a half. This hap- 
pened when the dew was remarkably great, and succeeded one 
of the warmest days of the summer. And as he admits in an- 
other 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 allowance for the evaporation of 
its w^atery part, I conclude that he gathered only in one morn- 
ing, after a warm day, in the same ratio that they gather opi- 
um 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 So- 
ciety of Arts, should be kept in view, as they may help to illus- 
trate one of the objects of this essay, and confirm the superiori- 
ty of my method of collecting opium in Britain. 
Dr Howison, who was some time inspector of opium in Ben- 
gal, is the only other person, so far as I know, who has ^vep 
an account of the result of his experiments for making opium in 
this country. Although he was not the first who collected j:he 
milky juice of the poppy in a fluid state, it is- supposed he is 
the first who, in this country, has given the preference to that 
^ode. Dr Alston collected the milky juice in the fluid stafc 
