The catalogue of frauds and enormities exhibited in the following pages will, no doubt, excite the abhorrence and indignation of every honest heart. Its author is, however, convinced that he will find that he has undertaken a very unthankful office—that his book will be the dread and abhorrence of wicked and unprincipled dealers and impostors of all kinds; and himself exposed to their utmost rancour and bitterest maledictions. But the die is cast: he has discharged a public duty, and sincerely hopes that the Public may be benefited by his disclosures. It has been justly said, that all attempts to meliorate the condition of mankind have, in general, been coldly received, while the artful flatterers of their passions and appetites have met their eager embraces. And it is no less true, that it has always been the fate of those who have attempted any great public good, to be obnoxious to such as have profited by the errors of mankind. The divine Socrates, whose life was a continued exertion to reprove and correct the overweening and the vicious, died a victim to the Heathen Mythology, on account of his maintaining the unity and perfections of the Deity, and exposing the doctrines and pretensions of the heathen priesthood and the Sophists, and their mercenary views; and, in later times, Galileo would have met a similar fate, had he not bowed to error, and renounced a sublime truth, clear as the glorious orb that was the object of it, and which, soon after, was universally acknowledged. Even the Divine Founder of our Faith and Religion was stigmatized as the broacher of false opinions, and one who misled the people, by his ignorant and malicious accusers, whose frauds and delusions it was the object of his mission to confound and overthrow, as well as to free mankind from the bondage of their errors. But without having the presumption or impiety to compare himself with those benefactors of mankind, or to put his humble endeavours in competition with their godlike attempts, or to expect a similar result from them, it will be a great consolation to the Author of this book, when life is departing the frail tenement of his body, to reflect that he has brought “deeds of darkness to light,”—that he has been the humble means of unmasking to public view the frauds and villanies that are daily and hourly practised on the Public Health and Welfare; and in that “trying hour” his most grateful feeling and homage to English Law will be, that it secures to every man the liberty of expressing his honest indignation and abhorrence of palpable and disgusting fraud and imposture.