basis of which is pale salt, sugar-candy; French brandy and port-wine are added to favour the deception. So impudently and notoriously are the frauds avowed, that there are books published called _Publicans’ Guides_, and _Licensed Victuallers’ Director’s_, in which the most infamous receipts imaginable are laid down to swindle their customers. The various docks on the Thames do not secure purchasers from the malpractices of dishonest dealers; in this many are deceived. It has been naturally, yet erroneously, imagined that wine purchased in the docks must be a pure article. Malaga sherry is constantly shipped to England for the real sherry of Xeres, Figueras for port, and so on. Port-wine being sent from the place of its growth to Guernsey and Jersey, and there reshipped, with the original quantity tripled for the English market, the docks are no security.” Professor C. A. Lee, of New York, informs us that “a cheap Madeira is made by extracting the oils from common whisky, and passing it through carbon. There are immense establishments in this city where the whisky is thus turned into wine. In some of those devoted to this branch of business, the whisky is rolled-in in the evening, but the wine goes out in the broad daylight, ready to defy the closest inspection. A grocer, after he had abandoned the nefarious traffic in adulterations, assured me that he had often purchased whisky one day of a country merchant, and before he left town sold the same whisky back to him turned into wine, at a profit of from 400 to 500 per cent. The trade in empty wine-casks in this city with the Custom-house mark and certificate is immense; the same casks being replenished again and again, and always accompanied by that infallible test of genuineness, the Custom-house certificate. I have heard of a pipe being sold for twelve dollars. There is in the neighbourhood of New York an extensive manufactory of wine-casks, which are made so closely to imitate the foreign as to deceive experienced dealers. The Custom-house marks are easily counterfeited, and certificates are never wanting. I have heard,” said Dr. Lee, “dealers relate instances in which extensive stores were filled by these artificial wines; and when merchants from the country asked for genuine wines, these have been sold them as such, assuring them there could be no doubt of their purity. It is believed,” he observes, “that the annual importation of what is called port-wine into the United States far exceeds the whole annual produce of the Alto-Douro.”