Bread to be good, should be made of wheat flour; but the adulteration trade in this prime article of human consumption display no less ingenuity in the art of fraud and deception than their rivals in iniquity do in the wine and spirit and beer sophistications: convictions are on record of bakers having used pulverised gypsum or plaster of Paris, whiting, slacked lime, chalk, finely powdered granite, pipe-clay, particularly the white Cornwall clay, the flour of garden peas and horse beans, potatoes, bone-ashes, alum, spirits of vitriol, ammonia, magnesia, &c. They allege that, as they are often supplied by the mealmen with flour made from the worst kinds of foreign damaged wheat, and which is frequently mixed with a variety of other cereal grains in the course of grinding, they cannot produce bread of a sufficient degree of whiteness, lightness, and porosity, to please the caprice of the London palate, without having recourse to the conjoint aid of alum, ammonia, and potatoes.[L] This is the allegation made by the _respectable_ part of the trade, and those who, with sufficient disposition to wickedness, are deficient in the knowledge of the art of slow and imperceptible poisoning. What excuse the _irrespectable_ part of the trade can make for their nefarious traffic in the remaining portion of the enumerated articles must be left to the tender and honest consciences of those gentry. “The baker,” says Mr. Accum, in his Preliminary Remarks, p. 11, “asserts that he does not put alum into bread; but he is well aware that, in purchasing a certain quantity of half spoiled flour, he must take a sack of _sharp whites_, (a term given to flour contaminated with a quantity of alum,) without which it would be impossible for him to produce light, white, and porous bread, from a half spoiled material. “The wholesale mealman frequently purchases this spurious commodity, (which forms a separate branch of business in the hands of certain individuals,) in order to enable himself to sell his decayed flour. “Other individuals (namely, the “_gentlemen_” druggists) furnish the baker with alum mixed up with salt, under the obscure denomination of _stuff_. There are wholesale manufacturing chemists, whose sole business is to crystallize alum in such a form as will adapt this salt to the purpose of being mixed with crystals of common salt, to disguise the character of the compound. The mixture called _stuff_ is composed of one part of alum, in minute crystals, and three of common salt.” I omit to object to the adulteration of flour produced by the sand, which is unavoidably occasioned by the rubbing of the mill-stones together. The author of the “History of Inventions,” vol. i. p. 98, estimates that every person swallows 6lbs. yearly, in the quantity of flour and bread which he consumes.