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Rousseau to the abbé Guillaume-ThomasFran çois Raynal1 I believe, Sir, that it will give you pleasure to see the enclosed extract from a letter from Stockholm which the person to whom it is addressed charged me to ask you to insert in the Mercury. Its object is of the utmost importance for men’s lives; and the more excessive the public’s negligence is in this respect, the more enlightened citizens ought to redouble their zeal and activity to overcome it. All the Chemists of Europe have been warning us for a long time about the deadly qualities of copper, and about the dangers to which one exposes oneself in making use of this pernicious metal in sets of kitchen utensils. M. Rouelle,2 of the Academy of Sciences, is the one who has demonstrated the fatal eVects of this most tangibly, and who has raised the most vehement complaints about it. M. Thierri,3 Doctor of Medicine, has gathered together in a learned Thesis, which he defended under the presidency of M. Falconet,4 a multitude of proofs capable of frightening any reasonable man who attaches some importance to his life and that of his fellow citizens. These Physicists have caused it to be seen that the verdigris or dissolved copper is a violent poison, whose eVect is always accompanied by horrible symptoms; that even the vapor of this metal is dangerous, since the Workers who work with it are subject to various fatal or chronic maladies; that all solvents, fats, salts, and even water dissolve copper and make it into verdigris; that the most precise plating only causes this dissolution to diminish; that the tin that is employed in this plating itself is not exempt from danger, in spite of the indiscriminate use that has been made of this metal up to the present, and that this danger is greater or lesser in accordance with the diVerent sorts of tin that are employed, in proportion to the arsenic that enters into their composition, or the lead that enters into their alloy;* that, even assuming an adequate precaution in the plating, it is an unpardonable imprudence to make men’s life and health depend on a very slender plate of tin that *That dissolved lead is a poison is proved only too well by the fatal accidents caused every day by wines adulterated with litharge. Thus to use this metal safely it is important to know well which solvents attack it. 130 wears away very quickly,* and on the precision of Servants and Cooks who ordinarily reject recently plated vessels because of the bad taste that the materials used in plating give. They have caused it to be seen how many horrible accidents produced by copper are attributed every day to entirely diVerent causes; they have proven that a multitude of people die, and that an even greater number are attacked by a thousand diVerent maladies by the use of this metal in our kitchens and in our fountains, without them suspecting the genuine cause of their illnesses. Nevertheless although the manufacturing of utensils of beaten and plated iron, which is established at the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, oVers easy ways to substitute in kitchens less costly sets of utensils, as convenient as those of copper, and perfectly healthy, at least as to the principal metal, men’s usual laziness about things that are genuinely useful to them, and the little maxims that laziness invents about established practices, above all when they are bad, have so far allowed only a little progress to the wise warnings of the Chemists, and have proscribed copper from only a few kitchens. The repugnance of Cooks for using other vessels than the ones they know is an obstacle whose whole force is felt only when one is acquainted with the laziness and gluttony of the masters. Everyone knows that society abounds in people who prefer indolence to rest and pleasure to happiness; but one has trouble conceiving that there are people who prefer to expose themselves and their whole family to perishing in horrible torments, rather than to eat a burnt stew. One must reason with wise men and never with the public. The multitude has been compared to a flock of sheep for a long time; it is necessary to give it examples instead of arguments, for everyone fears being ridiculed much more than being foolish or wicked. Moreover in all things that concern the common interest, since almost all people judge...

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