The Egyptians make several conserves composed of hellebore, hemp, and opium, and several aromatic drugs which are in much more common use than the simple opium. One of these conserves is called “magoon,” and the person who makes or sells it, is called “magoongee.” The most common kind is called “barsh” or “berch.” There is one kind which, it is said, makes the person who takes it manifest his pleasure by singing, another which will make him chatter, a third which excites to dance, a fourth which particularly effects the vision in a pleasurable manner, and a fifth which is simply of a sedative nature. These are sold at certain kind of shops called “mahsheshehs,” solely appropriated to the sale of intoxicating preparations. Thus, in different countries, we find opium used in different ways. In Great Britain, for instance, it is either used in the solid state, made into pills, in which form it is somewhat extensively employed in certain of our manufacturing districts, where druggists are affirmed to keep a supply of these pills ready made to meet the demand, or it is used in the form of tincture in the common state of laudanum, in which form it is not only used medicinally, but to our knowledge, somewhat largely as a means of indulgence, or, we should rather say, with somewhat of qualification, largely for a country in which many are fain to suppose that it is not used for those purposes at all. It is also used in the form of Paregoric elixir, and is given insidiously to children under a variety of quack forms, such as Godfrey’s cordial, &c. On the authority of a reverend gentleman, it is stated that in the town of Preston, in 1843, there were upwards of sixteen hundred families in which Godfrey’s cordial was habitually employed, or some other equally injurious compound. Professor Johnston has noticed a communication which appeared in the “Morning Chronicle,” describing the effects of opium upon the health of children, says—“The child sinks into a low torpid state, wastes away into a skeleton, except the stomach, producing what is known as pot-belly. One woman said, ‘The sleeping stuff made them that they were always dozing, and never cared for food. They pined away; their heads got big, and they died.’”