skinned pods enclosing the black and brown seeds wrapped in juicy pulp, quite unlike the appearance they present when dried or withered.
There is only a small trade done in Guinea grains now, George III. (Cap. 58) having declared that no brewer or dealer in wine shall be found in possession of grains of Paradise without paying a fine of £200, and that if any druggist shall sell them to a brewer that druggist shall pay a fine of £500 for each such offence.
The reason of this enactment was the idea that the grains were poisonous, and that the brewers in using them to give fire to their liquors were destroying their consumers, His Majesty's lieges. As far as poison goes this idea was wrong, for Meleguetta pepper or grains of Paradise are quite harmless though hot. Perhaps, however, some consignment may have reached Europe with poisonous seeds in it. I once saw four entirely different sorts of seeds in a single sample. That is the worst of our Ethiopian friends, they adulterate every mortal thing that passes through their hands. I will do them the justice to say they usually do so with the intellectually comprehensible end in view of gaining an equivalent pecuniary advantage by it. Still it is commercially unsound of them; for example for years they sent up the seeds of the Kickia Africana as an adulteration for Strophantus, whereas they would have made more by finding out that the Kickia was a great rubber-producing tree. They will often take as much trouble to put in foreign matter as to get more legitimate raw material. I really fancy if any one were to open up a trade in Kru Coast rocks, adulteration would be found in the third shipment. It is their way, and legislation is useless. All that is necessary is that the traders who buy of them should know their business
