34  Peppers  of  Commerce.  {^"•/arx875r'"' 
ation  is  facilitated,  and  the  loss  diminished.  So  that  with  the  ordinary- 
conveniences  and  appliances  of  the  laboratory,  that  are  always  at  hand 
to  be  mounted,  I  can,  with  fifteen  or  twenty  minutes  of  personal  atten- 
tion and  manipulation^  obtain  a  litre  or  two  of  absolute  alcohol.  Of 
course,  the  time  for  the  reaction  of  the  materials  and  the  distillation 
is  not  referred  to,  as  this  requires  little  or  no  supervision. — Am.  Chemist^ 
Oct.^  1874. 
CHEMICAL  STUDIES  OF  THE  PEPPERS  OF  COMMERCE. 
BY  A.  WYNTER  BLYTH,  M.R.C.S.,  L.S.A.,  A.K.C., 
Analyst  to  the  County  of  Devon,  Medical  Officer  of  Health,  &c. 
It  will  be  indispensable  for  some  time  to  come  to  accumulate  facts 
on  the  properties  of  articles  of  food  in  the  pure  state.  The  exact 
amount  of  ash,  the  solubility  of  substances  in  different  liquids,  the  spe- 
cific gravity  of  the  aqueous  infusion,  &c.,  many  of  them,  when  applied 
to  foods,  wholly  uninteresting,  to  the  ordinary  chemist,  become  of  great 
value  in  the  technical  examination  of  articles  suspected  of  adulteration. 
However  unimportant  some  slight  variation  in  solubility,  for  example,, 
may  be  in  a  purely  chemical  sense,  yet  if  that  variation  be,  within  cer- 
tain limits,  constant,  it  is  of  the  greatest  utility  to  the  Public  Analyst. 
The  peppers  I  have  examined  were  obtained  from  the  importers  in 
the  berry,  and  ground  by  myself ;  they  are,  I  believe,  specimens  of 
pure  pepper.  The  following  are  the  methods  adopted  in  the  examina- 
tion :  .  . 
The  ash  was  burnt  at  a  very  low  temperature  in  a  platinum  dish, 
supporting  a  chimney  to  increase  the  draught ;  the  soluble  ash  was  ob- 
tained by  boiling  the  ash  with  water,  filtering,  evaporating  the  soluble 
ash  down  in  a  platinum  dish,  heating  to  dull  redness,  and  weighing  ; 
the  aqueous  extract  by  putting  4  grams  of  pepper  in  a  large  flask  with 
500  c.c.  of  water,  distilling  over  200  c.c,  returning  these  into  the 
flask,  when  cool  filtering,  weighing,  and  evaporating  jgth  ;  the  ammo- 
nia, by  taking  5  c.c.  of  the  last  liquid  and  distilling  it  with  50  c.c.  of 
alkaline  permanganate  by  Wanklyn's  method  ;  and  the  alcoholic  ex- 
tract by  treating  about  i  grm.  of  the  dry  pepper  with  repeated  quanti- 
ties of  alcohol,  and  boiling  for  some  time  in  a  flask  connected  with  a 
reversed  Liebig's  condenser.  I  have  not  yet  estimated  the  piperin  in 
the  peppers  j  indeed,  although  it  can  be  extracted  with  comparative 
ease,  the  crystallization  of  the  alkaloid  and  the  separation  of  the  resin 
