Bartram Bros. v. United States

Citations

• 123 F. 327
• 1903 U.S. App. LEXIS 4900

Syllabus

<p>1. Customs Duties—Sugaks—Method oe Testing.</p> <p>Paragraph 209 of the tariff act of 1897 (Act July 24, 1897, c. 11, 30 Stat. 168 [U. S. Comp. St. 1901, p. 1647]), fixing the duty on raw sugars, etc., “testing by the polariscope not above seventy five degrees,” with an increase for each degree above that shown by the polariscopic test, must be construed as meaning the polariscopic test which had at the time of the passage of the act been in commercial use for 20 years, and had been employed under prior tariff acts since 1883, by which the actual reading of the scale was taken as the value of the sugar for sale or duty purposes; and the Secretary of the Treasury was not authorized to adopt the different method of making such test which had been used for two years under the sugar bounty act of 1890 (Act Oct. 1, 1890, c. 1244, § 1, Schedule E, par. 231),. by which certain arbitrary corrections, determined mathematically and varying with the temperature at which the test was made, were added to the scale readings. While it is shown that, where the tests are made at a temperature different from that at which the polariscope is standardized, such corrections give more nearly accurate percentages of the actual sucrose in the sample tested, it also appears that the result is still inaccurate, and it must be presumed that Congress intended the use of the well-known commercial test.</p>