If the unhappy victims of mud-juice had constant access to the solar
microscope, and there was occasionally in London a little sunshine to set
off the animated bedevilments which are crowded into the composition, and
could see thousands of animals, generated in filth, and living in the
highest spirits and the greatest abundance, in the stuff destined for
their stomachs, they would go mad. Boiled down in tea (for which, in
the midst of _starvation_, a cockney pays five hundred per cent. beyond
its value, and a tax of five hundred per cent. more than that,) these
centipedes, toads, small alligators, large worms, white bait, snails,
caterpillars, maggots, eels, minnows, weeds, moss, offal in detachments,
gas-juice, vinegar lees, tallow droppings, galls, particles of dead men,
women, children, horses, and dogs, train-oil, copper, dye-stuff, soot,
and dead fish, are all, according to the chemistry of the washerwomen,
neutralized, mollified, clarified, and rectified--but this we doubt; and
if any of the unhappy persons who imbibe nastiness fourteen times a week,
under the idea that it is good and wholesome because it is hot, will
take the trouble to look at the agreeable deposit in the bottom of the
"slop-basin," they will find that independent of all the muddy, fishy,
oily, gaseous, animal and vegetable stuff, introduced into their stomachs
under the guise of that most poisonous of all herbs, tea, they are in the
habit of swallowing mud, earth, stones, sand, and gravel, in quantities
sufficient to establish in less than three months spaces of land as big
as Cornish freeholds in their insides.--_John Bull_.
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