Conrade Celtes, who in the year 1491 was first crowned in Germany as a poet, gives in his panegyric on Nuremberg some information respecting the adulteration of wine, from which we learn that he considered it as a new invention, and ascribed it to a monk called Martin Bayr; but his expressions are so figurative, that little can be gathered from them[742]. We are however told by Zeller, that it was believed that this dangerous fraud was invented in France[743]. Martin Zeiler, in his Chronicle of Swabia (p. 65), says, “In the year 1453, the citizens of Augsburg began to observe this fraud in the wine-market; for during four years before, Martin Bayr, at Schwarzen-Eychen in Franconia, first taught the German tavern-keepers and the waggoners to preserve new wine from becoming sour; to clarify wine by sulphur; and likewise to counterfeit it by spices, to the great prejudice of people’s health.” In this passage there is no mention of litharge, but of other mixtures. The oldest account of the poisonous sweetening of wine is that which occurs in the French ordinance of 1696[744]; and Zeller’s conjecture that it was invented or first remarked in France, seems to me the more probable, as it appears that it was practised at Wurtemberg about the same period. In the year 1697 it was known there that some wine-merchants, particularly Hans George Staltser at Goppingen, used litharge for refining wine, and by these means deprived many persons of life, and occasioned the loss of health to others. Staltser pleaded in excuse, that he considered the process he had employed as harmless, and that Masskosky, physician to the town of Goppingen, who was accounted a man of knowledge, had employed the same for his wine. Brugel also, physician to the town of Heidenheim, had declared that litharge was not prejudicial; and as he was a person of reputation, his opinion had tended not a little to establish the use of that practice. This report was so hurtful to the wine-trade of Wurtemberg, which at that time brought a great deal of money into the duchy from other countries, that the wine at Ulm remained unsold; and duke Everhard Louis was obliged to cause experiments to be made to ascertain the nature of the substances mixed with it. Solomon Keysel, the duke’s physician, and J. Gaspar Harlin, physician to the court, both declared that litharge was noxious, but that sulphur besprinkled with bismuth was still more so. They strongly advised, therefore, that both these substances should be forbidden to be used, under the heaviest penalties; and this prohibition was put in force with the greater severity as some persons of the first rank had for several years before caused their spoiled and sour wine to be made sweet and clear in this manner by a weaver of Pforzheim, who resided at Stutgart. An order was issued on the 10th of May 1697, forbidding this adulteration under pain of death and confiscation of property, as well as of being declared infamous; and