SUGAR AND SYRUPS. 671 
kitchen table; then each person would sip his tea, chocolate, 
or coffee, and bite a bit off the dependent Sugar-lump which 
they swung from one to the other. The Sugar of acorns is 
Quercite. Barbery Sugar is the finest quality, it being formerly 
thought to come from Barbary, before the West Indian trade 
was fully established. Cane Sugar is an antiseptic; if heated 
sufficiently with water, or a dilute mineral acid, it breaks up 
into equal parts of dextrose, and levulose. A certain Sugar- 
mite (acarid) infests some of the unrefined commercial Sugars, 
and is said to be the cause of grocers’ itch. Saccharose, or Cane 
Sugar, is chemically a solid crystalline body, soluble in water, 
but less so in alcohol; it does not directly undergo when in 
solution either lactic, or alcoholic fermentation, but in the 
presence of certain ferments it is resolved (as already said) into 
dextrose, and levulose, each of which is readily fermentable, 
and apt to provoke gout. But that this infirmity will sometimes 
arise spontaneously, without being personally incurred, or 
immediately inherited, seems to be certain. An instance in 
point is that of the noted Horace Walpole, with whom, as he — 
relates, ‘‘ gout began before he had reached his fortieth year.” 
His chief reason for objecting to this aldermanic distemper was 
that he could show no title to it. “If either my father, or my 
mother had suffered from it, I should not dislike it so much ; 
but it is an absolute upstart with me, and, what is more provoking, 
I had trusted to my great abstinence for keeping me from it. 
If I had any gentleman-like virtue, as patriotism, or loyalty, 
I must have got something by them. I had nothing but that 
beggarly virtue—temperance,—and she had not interest enough 
to keep me from a fit of the gout.” Again, after rallying 
from an attack in December, 1784, he said: ‘“*‘ My recoveries 
surprise me more than my fits; but I am quite persuaded now 
that I know exactly how I shall end; as I am a statue of chalk, 
I shall crumble to powder, and then my inside will be blown 
away from my terrace, and hoary-headed Margaret will tell 
the people who come to see my house, ‘One morn we missed 
him from the ’customed hill.’ ” 
From the scarcity of Sugar on the Continent which was caused 
by Napoleon’s system during the Peninsular War, came the 
discovery of its manufacture from beetroot, also the practice of 
adding chicory to coffee. It seems certain that the Romans were 
not acquainted with Sugar as an article of common, or daily use, 
