514 
COPPER. 
should contract more of this taste by standing cold 
in vessels of this metal, than if boiled in the same 
for an equal length of time. For this reason, too 
much care cannot be taken of coppers used for 
culinary purposes, which ought always to be care- 
fully tinned ; or whatever is left to stand in them 
will acquire, in some degree, the poisonous qualities 
of the copper. 
As a fact of so much consequence to all ranks of 
people cannot be too strongly enforced, we shall in 
this place subjoin the remarks which M. Magellan 
has made on the subject. “ Examples,” says this 
gentleman, £C are too frequent of the fatal conse- 
quences from eatables that have received a taint 
from copper vessels, and even from silver ones that 
were largely alloyed with copper, whether on ac- 
count of the acid nature of the food itself, which 
dissolves and corrodes the surface of the metal it 
touches ; or from the vessel having contracted the 
copperish green rust, called verdigris , by laying ex- 
posed to the air; a poison which is so readily formed 
as to baffle the common attention of the scullions 
and cooks. I saw at Paris the melancholy spectacle 
of a middle-aged man, of a stout bodily complexion, 
but who laboured under a paralytic disorder, and 
was deprived of the use both of his limbs and of his 
intellectual powers during the last four or more 
years of his lingering life : his disorder was occa- 
sioned by eating a fricassee, that remained the pre- 
ceding night in the copper stewing-pan, in which it 
