Color and flavor are often given to inferior grades by artificial means. No leaf is known which will counterfeit the tobacco leaf outright. Snuff, however, lends itself readily to debasement by colored powder, and lime and chromate of lead have been found in it.
The most usual form of adul teration is thinning down with water, then re storing the lost acidity with sulphuric, muriatic, nitric or other cheap mineral acids. The first is easily detected by the considerable precipi tate when barium chloride is added; the second by a white flocculent precipitate on adding a few drops of solution of silver nitrate. Nitric acid needs special chemical tests only to be performed by an expert. Imitation vinegars are made by the acetic fermentation of malt sugar, cane sugar and alcohol, all diluted with water to a degree where the ferment will work. These vinegars, of course, derive their acidity from acetic acid. They lack the flavor of ap ple-juice. However, this is sometimes added, together with a proportion of pulp from the cider-mills, to counterfeit the body and taste of pure cider-vinegar.
Naturally their chief adulterants are water and alcohol, to increase bulk or strength; colors and flavors, astringents, etc.— caramel, logwood, glycerine, syrups, etc.,— to give artificial qualities resembling wines of re pute; salicylic acid to prevent souring; gyp sum to precipitate organic matters that muddy the wine (the latter injurious as likely to turn into acid potassium sulphate); sugar in the must, to increase the alcohol, etc. Natural
colors like fruit juices and cochineal are harm less; aniline colors not always. The chemical tests are too special to be detailed in a popular work. It should be said, however, that by far the leading adulteration consists in the wine not being real fermented grape-juice at this applies only to foreign wines, the American being generally pure and practically the only pure wines at moderate price on the market. Real wine from foreign vineyards is a costly article and the better grades are pledged years ahead to the great foreign courts, noble houses and private European buyers. Cheap foreign wines should be understood from the outset to be made either from exhausted grape-skins or raisins treated with alcohol and water (it is not for dessert use that the great majority of the California raisin crop is exported to France) or from pear-juice (much the greater part of the so-called French "champagne° in America being perry).
Leach, 'Food Inspection and Analysis' (1913) ; Olsen, 'Pure Foods; Their Adulteration, Nutritive Value and Cost) (1911); Vacher, 'Food Inspector's (1913); Wiley, 'Foods and Their Adultera tions) (1912) ; Wiley, '1001 Tests of Foods, Beverages and Toilet Acceisories) (1914); also the United States Chemistry Bureau's Bulletins 41, 80, 100 and 147, and Circulars 25, 63, 113 and 180; and the Animal Industry Bureau's Circular 203.