It explains how to mix your own tincture of opium. The toiletries section offers recipes for perfumed waters, rouge, and lipstick. Lipstick is made from cold cream, wax, and a little carmine of vermilion. By the way, a scruple is an old word meaning a small part of an angle, a weight, or an hour. Here it means a 24th of an ounce.
Scruple comes from the Latin for a rough pebble.
So it also means a nagging pebble in the shoe of our conscience. Weights and measures weren't standardized a century ago. The book groans with drams, pennyweights, grains, and various kinds of pounds. We see how to mix paint and paint removers, how to slice steers into beef steak, how to make ink, how to etch copper, how to make pencil leads, and how to turn crude suet into oleomargarine. One item especially catches my eye.