The members of the Royal Commission which was appointed to examine and report on arsenic in food were strongly divided with regard to whether any trace of arsenic should be permitted in food. Some were in favour of absolute prohibition, while others recognised that, even if this were done, the rule could never be rigidly enforced. Hence their report bears evidence of a compromise, for it states that although the Commission had been unable to discover that such minute traces of arsenic were injurious, yet they were unwilling to admit that any quantity, however small, was permissible in food. Subsequently they recommended that a particular test should be used which would ensure that arsenic in food and drugs should not exceed an infinitesimal trace, and that frequent tests of raw and finished materials should be made. These recommendations are now widely adopted, and it is highly improbable that another epidemic of arsenic poisoning will ever occur again in this country. No better illustration of the vicious circles in which adulteration may move can be found than in the practice of certain manufacturers of jam of the cheaper kind. Apple pulp is a common constituent of jams which conceal their identity under another name. Now, in the case of raspberry jam, for example, it is necessary to have the seeds as well as fruit pulp, and these seeds may be bought very cheaply from the makers of fruit essences. The best quality of these essences is prepared by mixing the fruit with alcohol and distilling the mixture, the spirit carrying over with it the ethereal oils to which the fruit owes its characteristic odour and flavour. Cheaper fruit essences are imitated chemically by making the most important of the compounds in the genuine ethereal oils, and dissolving them in spirit; but they are usually coarse in flavour, and do not bear comparison with the real product. Where intermediate grades are wanted, mixtures of the real and synthetical essences are often blended, and these frequently imitate the natural product so closely as to be only distinguishable by a trained sense of smell and taste. In the preparation of the genuine fruit essences a residual pulp, containing the seeds and woody fibre of the fruit, but devoid of all flavour or aroma, is left behind, and it is this which the unscrupulous jam manufacturer makes use of in preparing a cheap jam, in which the seeds, at all events, are genuine. Then, in order to give more flavour to his product, he buys from the essence maker a flavouring essence, a small part of which may have originally been derived from the fruit that has given him the pulp and seeds for his jam.