This estimate of the total amount paid by the public must be too high. In the first place it will be seen that the stamp duty does not rise by regular increments _ad valorem_. An article, the nominal price of which is 1s., must bear a stamp of 1½d., but if the nominal price be 1s. 6d., the stamp is 3d., and for an article of the nominal price of 2s. 6d. it is the same. In the second place, a large proportion of all the articles, probably the great majority of those at 1s., are sold at a discount, “store prices.” In the above table the maximum price for each rate of stamp duty and the full nominal prices are assumed. If a deduction of 25 per cent. is made to meet these sources of error, we have a sum of £2,422,800 19s. 1½d., as an estimate of the amount spent by the public on patent medicine in the financial year ending March 31, 1908. At one time some of the vendors of nostrums took to inserting in their advertisements phrases intended to suggest that the Inland Revenue stamp upon their packages implied some sort of Government guarantee of the efficacy of the remedy. Though the Inland Revenue authorities do not as a rule display any anxiety with regard to the welfare of the public in the matter of the sale of nostrums, their efforts being confined to the collection of the duty, and the enforcement of the provisions of the Act should any vendor show a disposition to evade them, the stamp in recent years has borne the statement “This stamp implies no Government guarantee.” In spite of this vendors still sometimes contrive to convey the suggestion that the stamp conveys some sort of government guarantee; the suggestion looks the more plausible if the vendor has his name or autograph printed on the stamp by the government authorities; this will be done for him if he pays the cost of the die, and by the use of such an endorsement the incautious buyer may be led to assume that the Inland Revenue in some way shares the vendors’ responsibility for the genuineness of the article, that is to say for the genuineness of its claims. It has been suggested that the Legislature might go further and require the composition and ingredients of any secret remedy to be stated upon the label, box, or package, and looking to the nature of the facts disclosed by the analyses published in this book, it may well be believed that such publications on the labels would act to a certain extent as a warning to the public, for it would be apparent even to the least instructed that the claims in the vendors’ circulars were not quite consonant with the commonplace nature of the ingredients of the mixture, powder, pill, lotion, or ointment. INDEX.