CHAPTER VII. ADULTERATIONS AND SUBSTITUTES. It is said that in Thuringia, over 1000 tons yearly of dried beetroot-leaves are passed off as tobacco. These leaves, and those of chicory and cabbage, are similarly employed in Magdeburg and the Palatinate. Many of the _Vevey_ cigars of S. Germany are entirely composed of cabbage- and beetroot-leaves which have been steeped in tobacco-water for a long time. Other leaves, such as rhubarb, dock, burdock, and coltsfoot are also used. These are all principally for cigars. For smoking-tobacco, chamomile flowers, exhausted in water, then dyed and sweetened with logwood and liquorice, and dried, have been mixed with tobacco in such proportions as 70–80 per cent. In America, a specially-prepared brown paper, saturated with the juice expressed from tobacco-stems and other refuse, is most extensively used, not only for the “wrappers” of cigars, but also for “filling.” Various ground woods, starches, meals, and pigments are introduced into snuff. A New York paper mentions that a great quantity of brown straw paper lately reached Havana, which was to be employed in the manufacture of Havana cigars. Straw paper impregnated with the juice of tobacco stalks is wound up with the leaf in such a way that it is often impossible to detect the adulteration. Dr. Jacobson, writing in the _Industrie Blätter_, remarks that there is no difficulty in escaping detection, if the paper be specially prepared for the purpose out of suitable raw materials. It has long been known that cigar paper soaked in a solution of soluble glass gives forth no smell of paper on being burnt. Patent No. 210,538, issued from the United States Patent Office, December 3, 1878, states the ingredients of a “substitute” to be—spikenard, red clover, hyssop, hops, slippery-elm bark, tarred rope, pennyroyal, mullein leaves, kinnikinic, wild cherry bark, and ginseng. This is an ingenious combination intended to approach in effect, appearance, and aroma, tobacco; and in so far it might be said to be a success: as mullein leaves are reputed to be feebly narcotic, hops are known to possess anodyne properties, clover and hyssop are pectoral in effect, and slippery-elm febrifuge. Ginseng is aromatic and pungent, and has a great reputation among the Chinese as a stimulant and restorative. The tarred rope, we presume, is intended to add to the pyrognostic value of the mixture. The great point in selecting material for the fabrication of a mixture of this description is to get leaves containing a fair percentage of nitrate of potass, as does tobacco; on this depends its pyrognostic value, and that, next to aroma, is everything.