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ADULTERATION OF VARIOUS SUBSTANCES. 
REVIEW. 
ART. LXXI . — ADULTERATIONS OF VARIOUS SUBSTANCES 
USED IN MEDICINE AND THE ARTS, AND THE MEANS OF 
DETECTING THEM, INTENDED AS A MANUAL FOR THE 
PHYSICIAN. THE APOTHECARY, AND THE ARTISAN. By 
Lewis C. Beck, M. D., Professor of Chemistry in Rutgers College 
College. New Jersey, and in the Albany Medical College, &c. 
New York, 1846. Samuel S. & William Wood. pp. 333. 
Adulteration of medicines has become a crying evil in 
this country, for a long time it has been permitted to in- 
crease in silence, darkness, and obscurity, until it has 
assumed the dimensions of a hydra-headed monster, for- 
midable because gigantic, and difficult of eradication 
because its vitality is so multiform. The community seem 
at length to have aroused from a state of apathy for its 
own protection, as foreigners, no doubt perceiving the 
facility with which home-made fraud ulency is tolerated, 
have desired to participate in the profits, and have 
commenced to glut the market with vile and worthless pre- 
parations. The whole secret of such imposition, as that 
involved in the sophistication and adulteration of drugs and 
medicines, does not lie solely in the desire to obtain large 
gains, it has also its foundation in a morbid, pernicious prac- 
tice, ultimately destructive to all trade, of cheapening 
every article to the utmost limit of reduction, and a general 
ignorance on the part of the public, and even of those 
through whose hands the public are made to suffer. There 
is a fixed standard of value for every thing genuine, which 
in some articles is known to every one, and is not to be 
deviated from, as for instance for the precious metals, and to 
expect to obtain a pure preparation of such at half the cost 
of the metal itself, is as absurd as to expect to appropriate 
the standard coins for half their value. Where nitrate or 
