SMOKING MIXTURE.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2066, 7 October 1880, Page 3

SMOKING MIXTURE.

Tobacco, like those who smoke it (remarks an English paper), is credited with many sins of which it is guiltless. The “loss of health” so often laid at its door is probably due in many instances not to tobacco itself, but to some villainous compound bearing its name. A story told by the principal of the laboratory of the Inland Revenue Department in hie report for the past year shows how easily this may happen. The supervisor at Birmingham, observing that an article was being sold at a very cheap rate in packets, under the name of “smoking mixture,” sent a sample to the Inland Revenue laboratory for examination, and it being found to contain a largo proportion of vegetable matter resembling the broken-up heads of camomile flowers, further inquiry led to the discovery of the manufactory. The process of manufacture consisted in exhausting the bitter principle of camomile flowerheads with water, and then dyeing and and sweetening them with a solution of logwood and liquorice, which brought them, when dried, somewhat to the color of tobacco. The beads, when broken up, were then mixed with from 20 to 30 per cent, of out tobacco, according to the price at which the mixture was to be sold. The mixture was supplied to retailers in packets labelled “ The New Smoking Mixture, Analysed and Approved j" and as agencies had already been established in several towns, an extensive trade would no doubt soon have arisen had the manufactory not been suppressed at an early stage of its existence.