No person shall sell any compound article of food or compounded drug which is not composed of ingredients in accordance with the demand of the purchaser ; penalty not exceeding twenty pounds. But no person shall be guilty of any such offence as aforesaid in respect of the sale of an article of food or a drug mixed with any matter or ingredient not injurious to health, and not intended fraudulently to increase its bulk, weight, or measure, or conceal its inferior quality, if at the time of delivering such article or drug he shall supply to the person receiving the same a notice, by a label distinctly and legibly written or printed on or with the article or drug, to the effect that the same is mixed. And this label shall not be deemed to be distinctly and legibly written or printed within the meaning of the section unless it is so written or printed that the notice of mixture given by the label is not obscured by other matter on the label ; but nothing in these Acts shall hinder or affect the use of any registered trade-mark, cit of any label which has been continuously in use for at least seven years before the 1st January 1900.
No can now be registered purporting to describe a mixture unless it complies with the requirements of these Acts. No person shall, with the intent that the same may be sold in its altered state without notice, abstract from an article of food any part of it so as to affect injuriously its quality, substance, or nature, and no person shall sell any article so altered without making disclosure of the alteration, under a penalty in each case not exceeding twenty pounds.
If at the time of sale a 163ndor of milk gives notice to the purchaser of the abstraction of cream, he is not liable ; but if no such notice has been given, absence of knowledge is no defence—unless he can produce a written warranty as hereinafter mentioned. A special contract between the vendor and purchaser as to the quality of the article to be delivered by the vendor is no bar to a conviction.