Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE ENFORCEMENT OF THE FOOD AND DRUGS ACT Pure food law labels were in existence in 900 B.c. according to a discovery made by Prof. George A. Keisner of Harvard. Inscriptions excavated in the ancient city of Samaria in Palestine, are labels which were employed as seals on jars of wine and oil. They mention the years in which the wine was laid down in the cellar of the palace storehouses and they state the vineyard from which the wine came. These labels, about seventy-five in number, have been dug up on the ruins of the storehouse attached to the palace of King Shab, over 3000 years ago, and the names of the owners as given indicate that not only the king himself, but other men stored their wines and oils there. Thus it will be seen that pure food labels are not new, as is generally supposed by the majority of people. Many instances may be cited in the Bible as to the penalties inflicted on those who adulterated the food supply. History tells us of drastic and novel measures against food adulterations which were taken by Jacques de Tourzel, seigneur of Ambert. In a decree issued in 1148 he directed that "a funnel shall be placed in the mouth of any man or woman convicted of having sold watered milk and the said watered milk shall be poured down the funnel until such time as a doctor shall declare that the culprit cannot be made to swallow any more without danger of death." The seller of impure butter was to be put in the pillory, "when the butter shall be crushed down over his head and shallremain there until the sun shall have melted it." The first food inspection work done in an official way in the United States was inaugurated in the District of Columbia in 1871. Massachusetts was the first State to make preparations for official food inspection and enacte...