This is not a temperance lecture. I have only to tell you of impure
liquors. Excepting alcohol I know of no pure liquors. I can find none. I
have offered one hundred dollars for an ounce of pure brandy.
_Wines._--The following articles are used to make or adulterate wine:
water, sugar, arsenic, alum, cochineal and other coloring matter, chalk,
lime, sulphur, lead, corrosive sublimate, etc.
To detect arsenic, put some pure lime-water in a glass, and drop the
wine,--say a teaspoonful,--into it. If white clouds arise, expect that it
contains arsenic. A positive test of arsenic in liquids is the
ammonio-nitrate of silver, which precipitates a rich yellow matter, the
_arseniate of silver_, and this quickly changes to a greenish-brown color.
No elder or deacon should use wine, unless domestic, without having a
sample of it analyzed by a disinterested chemist. The thought to me is
perfectly shocking, that the villanous concoctions sold by even honest and
Christian druggists, and used for communion purposes, to represent the
blood of Christ, should be composed of _alum, arsenic, and bugs_!
(cochineal). Of bread I say the same. A deacon's wife, not a hundred miles
from Lowell, buys baker's bread, _sour and yellow_, for communion
purposes. A lady showed me a sample of it, very unlike what my old
grandmother, a deaconess, used to make for that purpose. It requires too
much space to give tests of the various poisons in wines. I have no
confidence in _any_ foreign wines.
Alcohol has been distilled from the brain and other parts of the dead body
of drunkards.