Mr. George Phillips, when giving evidence before Mr. Scholefield’s Parliamentary Committee on Adulteration, in 1855, stated that, prior to the year 1832, little was heard of the use of chicory in this country, but in the subsequent three years its use had gradually so increased that the Board of Inland Revenue was obliged to take steps against the sale. “I have no doubt (he adds), from my own experience, that a very large bulk of the public prefer the mixture. That, however, is a matter of taste. The trade contend that good coffee, mixed with one-eighth part of chicory, and sold at a moderate price, makes a better beverage than ordinary coffee would do at the same price, and the great mass of the public prefer it. Chicory sold as coffee yields a certain profit, but probably it equalises itself in the general competition of trade. There is a large quantity of chicory sold by itself, and drank as a beverage in the neighbourhood of Manchester and Liverpool. I believe the price of a pound of the cheapest kind of coffee, purchased by the bulk of the poor people, and a pound of the mixture, is about the same. The trade say, when we use a portion of chicory we use a better coffee. I do not know the fact of my own knowledge. Whether the coffee sold in mixtures is of a superior quality to that sold as a pure article would be very difficult to ascertain; it depends upon the question of taste and aroma. The chicory itself is not always pure.” On the first introduction of chicory into Great Britain a nominal duty of 20 per cent. was levied on it, which, owing to the representations of the coffee-planters, was afterwards increased to the same rate as that then payable on British plantation coffee. The high duty thus levied on foreign-grown chicory soon led to its cultivation in England, but so little was known of the plant that the farmers required the rent to be paid in advance for the use of their land. In the autumn of 1853 we find chicory grown in Kent, Surrey, and Essex, where the article was prepared, and met with a large sale. With the increasing demand for the root, its culture spread to Bedford, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire. At first the price realised was as high as 50_l._ per ton ground, and 20_l._ per ton in the root. But as the growth extended the price receded. The admission, duty free, of foreign-grown chicory, in 1854, led to the abandonment of much of the home culture.