lead, commonly called sugar of lead, red lead, litharge, and white lead.

Red earthen ware is usually glazed with melted oxide of lead. This is the reason why so many people have been poisoned by eating pickles, sauces, &c., which had been kept in these vessels. The acid. oftentimes the acetic acid acted upon the lead, and combined with it to form a new and poisonons sub

stance.

The most remarkable instance of this kind of poisoning I have ever known, took place at Elizabethtown, in Pennsylvania, in the year 1814. The people had just supplied themselves with red earthen vessels from a new pottery, into which they put what they called their apple butter. The acid in it united with the oxide of lead in the glazing, and produced acetate of lead. A severe colic prevailed in the neighborhood, to which many fell victims before the cause of the disease could be finally traced out, and its progress fully arrested.

Many people set their milk-or formerly did-in red earthen pans. This is highly dangerous; for the slightest change in the milk will generate acidity, a portion of the lead of the glazing will be dissolved, and a diseased state of the stomach and bowels will be the inevitable consequence. The mother of a child seven days old, in a family with which I was intimately acquainted, having drank water from a pail just painted on the inside with a paint prepared from white lead, the child was taken the following night with nausea, pain, and vomiting, and suffered severely.

Red lead is an oxide of lead, is much used in painting, and is a component part of some of our red wafers. I have known clerks and others made sick by eating these wafers; and have not a doubt that the stomachs of many knights of the quill become diseased in this very way.

The London Lancet states that the secretary of a wellknown institution in England was twice attacked with a violent salivation, so severely as to render medical aid indispensable, from his having wafered five hundred circulars with red wafers, which he had wetted with his mouth. I have known some of our American clerks suffer in the same way.

Litharge is an orange-red substance prepared also from lead, by oxidizing it, and is equally poisonous. It is used in making confectionery. Indeed, red lead, and another leading substance called massicot, are both used for the same purpose. Whether our confectioners know that they are using poison, in these cases, I have not the means of determining.

Many a time have individuals, and sometimes a whole family, been so poisoned by the frosting, as it is called, of our confectionery, as to be sick, several of them at once. In general, the quantity used in coloring small toys is so inconsiderable, that the poisonous effects are not immediately obvious, especially in children who are so tenacious of life.

A family of five persons, in New York, were all severely sick, and some of them came very near dying, in the year 1835, in consequence of eating the frosting of a confectionery cake. Drs. Hosack and Rogers analyzed the colored ornaments of the part of the cake that remained of it, and found one fifth of it rank poison.

There has been great trouble in our country from lead pipes. Some of these cases have come under my own observation. Many attempts have been made to explain the matter, but they are not wholly satisfactory. One thing, however, all are agreed in, viz., that lead pipes are very

unsafe.

Poisonous substances are sometimes developed during the process of cookery. Thus I have many times seen vegetables taken from a common iron pot or kettle, almost as black as if they had been boiled in ink. What was the cause? I have suspected the presence of a little sulphuric acid and a little oxide of iron, or iron rust, in the kettle, which being united, produce sulphate of iron, or common copperas.

Passing through Hartford, in Connecticut, one day in my early life, I saw at a corner some maple sugar. It was dark colored, unusually so. I bought and ate a few ounces of it; but it poisoned my mouth and œsophagus so that I could scarcely speak or swallow for several days.

There are two kinds of verdigris. We are more or less exposed to them both in modern cookery, and they are both extremely poisonous. One is, in chemical language, the carbonate of copper, the other the subacetate of copper. The last will dissolve in water, and is very poisonous, in every shape and form.

Too much care can hardly be taken to prevent the forma tion of this substance in kitchen utensils; and yet, through the neglect of housekeepers, hardly any thing is more common. Saucepans, whether of copper or brass, for brass contains much copper, if well tinned and kept perfectly clean, are not at all dangerous, whatever may be cooked in them. But when they are badly tinned, or not well cleaned, not only wine, cider, vinegar, currant and gooseberry juice, but oil, and all greasy substances, cause the formation of verdigris, and may occasion the most fatal accidents.

When the substances of which I have been speaking, especially oily or greasy food, are not only prepared in copper vessels, but also left to cool in them, the quantity of verdigris formed is apt to be considerable. It is, therefore, of

the utmost importance to pour off whatever we cook in these vessels while it is still boiling.

It is stated in our more elaborate works on poisons, that people are sometimes made sick by eating salads seasoned with vinegar, in consequence of the previous exposure of the vinegar, in some way, to copper.

In the Boston Journal for January 1, 1852, is an account of poisoning with copper, which, though taken from an English paper, seems to bear the marks of authenticity. A female cook, about to die, confessed that she had carelessly sent a stew to a table, a part of which had stood some time in copper, till it was green. The mixture was eaten, and several died. Afraid she should be held accountable as a murderer, though without intending to be so, she had not dared to confess the fact till she lay on her death bed.

What is

Pure tin is not much used for culinary utensils. usually called tin is an alloy of tin and iron. To form it, very thin plates or sheets of iron are dipped into melted tin, which not only coats the iron plates, but penetrates them. There is no danger in the use of this substance as long as it does not rust or oxidate. But the moment either this tinned ware, or the genuine tin, or britannia, becomes rusted or oxidated, it is extremely poisonous.

But I must close. Should any housekeeper, who considers well this whole subject, longer doubt of the usefulness to her profession of a knowledge of chemistry and the laws of life, she must be differently constructed, at least mentally, from most persons who possess a thinking apparatus. Her scepticism or her stupidity must be beyond the reach of hope. (See Appendix, Note H.)

LECTURE IX.

EXERCISE AND REST.

I. ACTION OR EXERCISE.

POPE has said that "order is Heaven's first law; 99 but I have sometimes been inclined to question his "orthodoxy." Action or motion confused and chaotic though it should be

seems to me, in the divine arrangement of things, to be first. Order, indeed, comes next, and is the wise and appropri ate direction of that action, so that it may tend to "universal good."

To what part of the Creator's vast domain shall we repair to find no action no motion in a word, absolute quiescence? Shall we turn our eyes to the everlasting hills? Not, surely, to the granite hills of New England; for these are by no means stationary. They are continually changing -crumbling away with the action of the sun, air, and rain -to say nothing of any internal changes. Their surfaces are wasting here, or gaining, by accretion, there. Are not the beds of our rivers and oceans hourly receiving, from the firmest rocks on the globe, fresh deposits?

What is crystallization, that curious and wonderful process, but a motion of the parts of solids, directed by law? Nay, does not the geologist tell us of changes mightier than these, perpetually going on? Are not many of our firmest solids resolvable, in the crucible of the chemist, to liquids, and even to gases; and our liquids and gases to solids? But how much more frequently do these results take place in Nature's