^ General View of the Distillery
Indeed pure ethanol, boiling at 79°, evaporates from the lungs almost as soon as it is ingested; it only traverses the body, so to speak; amyl acohol, on the contrary, stops at 140°, so that at human body temperature, it almost never evaporates. Once introduced into the body, it remains there and accumulates there, the daily amount added to that of the day before and two days before that, as those have been added to previous amounts. No matter how weak the quantity taken each day, the body ends up accumulating a considerable quantity of this toxic alcohol. (The Time of September 21, 1894.) Those are the unhealthy effects of bad alcohols, especially the amyl essences contained in all the potato, grain, and beet alcohols, which are absent in spirits distilled from wine such as are exclusively used in the House of Pernod Fils.To summarize this chapter, we thus can, without hazard to ourselves, venture the following propositions: If the absinthe is distilled carefully, it constitutes a tonic and refreshing drink; its abuse can become a problem, because it contains much alcohol, but the people who make moderate use of this drink represent proof of its salutatory effects. The absinthe made by certain distillers is a simple mixture, cold-processed, using duplicated alcohol and essences, the whole colored by chemical means.