138 TiMEHRI. 
etc. Experiment has shown to us that this is true, espe- 
cially with regard to the extra6live matters yielded by 
the wood of the staves to alcohol, some kinds vieldinsf 
much, others less, while specially prepared staves, such 
as have been used to a considerable extent in Demerara 
during the past year or eighteen months, give up pra6li- 
cally inappreciable amounts. This latter property of 
steamed staves is well known to distillers of silent spirit. 
We may point out that where Mr. and Mrs. Veley 
have failed to obtain evidence of the presence of resins in 
rum, the tests used were quite inadequate to reveal their 
presence, save in comparatively large quantities, and the 
fa6l of their not finding them in one sample of faulty rum 
does not prove their general absence. 
On page 21 there is an attempt to insinuate that one 
of us (Mr. Harrison) has been guilty of the contemptible 
a6l of suppressing the results of the examination of 
*' large masses of the organism " received by him. This 
statement he indignantly denies; it is absolutely false 
and without the slightest foundation. No such masses 
have been received by either of us, and we referred in our 
recent paper to all samples of faulty rum examined by 
us before writing it. The only samples examined since 
and not referred to in the Sugar Cane have been from 
rums from distilleries under the control of one of us, the 
cause of the faultiness in them has been discovered, 
traced to its source, and the trouble remedied. As in 
these cases the cause of the faultiness was volatile and 
distilled over with the spirit — it is scarcely necessary to 
assure Mr. and Mrs. Veley that it was not their microbe. 
The introdu6lion of such baseless charges into their 
monograph clearly shows the spirit in which the earlier 
part of the work has been written. 
We have to thank Mr. and Mrs. Veley for the kindly 
advice offered to one of us in the concluding paragraph 
of chapter III, on page 21, but as it has a strong family 
likeness to the pen-ultimate paragraph of our paper 
p. 416 of the Sugar Cane and p. 10 of Timehri and is, 
we submit, advice of a purely tu quoque nature. 
With regard to the later portions of their work (pages 
22 to 58 inclusive) we have nothing beyond admiration 
