On Faulty Rum and its Alleged Cause. g 
due to the cause which they allege, this supplies a very 
strong point against it, and, in fact, goes far to prove our 
case that " faultiness" is usually caused by the presence 
of substances of varying solubility in solution in the rum. 
Having found that the presence of ten per cent of 
'* faulty" rum in good rum did not render it ^'faulty," we 
proceeded to ascertain whether larger proportions would 
do so. We found that we could add the rum, in which 
Mr. and Mrs. Veley had demonstrated the presence of 
their microbe, to good rum in the proportion of over 
fifty per cent without rendering the mixture " faulty." 
This furnishes an explanation of the fa6l that some par- 
cels of a shipment of rum may be " faulty" while others 
are not : — the obje6lionable substances are not quite in- 
soluble in the weaker spirit, and in consequence while 
all of a shipment may contain more or less of the dele- 
terious matters, only those in which it is present be- 
yond a certain amount will show '* faultiness." 
Mr. and Mrs. Veley, up to the present, have produced 
no proof that their microbe is the cause of '* faulti- 
ness" in rum other than the coincidence that they found 
it in all the samples of *^ faulty" rum which they have 
examined but not in the good ones ; (we have reason to 
believe that in one case they did discover it in a sample 
of rum which was not " faulty," a fa6l which was ex- 
plained away by the convenient assumption that the 
sample had been placed in a dirty bottle). The fa6l that 
with one exception, the organism was only found in 
*' faulty" rum does not in any way amount to proof that 
it had anything whatever to do with the '* faultiness," but 
only to proof that the microbe was there. Any person 
acquainted with the interiors of distilleries in the tropics 
B 
