2l6 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



must confess I find refreshing on a hot day — especially after I have 

 seen it gathered by means of a long-spouted tin pump and transported 

 in tin cans; and the limpid, yellowish, cidery, foamy product of its 

 fermentation in the north is more to my taste than the white, viscous, 

 odoriferous pulque of the Apam district — which alone pleases the adept. 

 With smaller production of pulque away from this center, more 

 primitive methods of transportation persist; the shipping cask of the 

 large producer, carried by a special train, may be replaced by the 

 burro-borne pig-skin; and, as I have observed in Tuxpan, the pulque 

 shop may give way to the street hawker, with an earthenware olla, the 

 contents of which from time to time are freshened up by being sucked 

 into and allowed to gush back, frothing, from a gourd of the sort used 



Fig. 



Making his Rounds. 



in gathering the agua miel — the bowls of customers being filled by aid 

 of the same convenient implement. 



Considerable medicinal virtue has been claimed for pulque, and 

 some efforts have been made to specially prepare, bottle and Pasteurize 

 it for medicinal or even table use, but, except in the region of its pro- 

 duction, where it is the common beverage, the bulk of it is used as an 

 intoxicant, pure and simple. From it is also produced a rather small 

 quantity of distilled liquor, ' mezcal de pulque.' 



Away from the central district, where the product of a single plan- 

 tation is not sufficient to keep a fermentation establishment in profitable 

 operation, it is sometimes the practise of the growers to sell their plants, 

 as they mature, one by one, to a maker of pulque, whose employees, 

 trudging from one to another, attend to cutting them and gathering 

 their sap. Under these conditions, or where the market is still less 

 certain, the plants frequently succeed in sending up their scapes. 



