674 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
bulk, found Sugar to be the most fattening of all foods; five 
ounces of it in a week caused his weight to rise one pound. He 
called milk, “Sugar”; butter, and beer, “ human beans,” because 
these matters of diet have the same effect on the human subject 
which beans exercise in the case of the horse; and he regarded 
such items as constituting the most insidious dietary which an 
elderly man with the tendency to become fat can adopt (though 
it would be “‘ eminently friendly to youth’). He adds: ‘I can 
conscientiously assert that I never lived so well as under my 
reformed plan of feeding.” His obesity had been such as to 
render him unable to tie his own shoes, and to compel his going 
downstairs backwards. On a regimen of abstinence, chiefly 
from bread, milk, butter, Sugar, and potatoes, he lost thirty-five 
pounds of weight in thirty-eight weeks. In 1598 Hentzer, a 
German traveller, described Queen Elizabeth of England, then 
sixty-five years of age, in the following terms: “ Her nose is a 
little hooked, her lips narrow, and her teeth black,—a defect 
the English seem subject to from their great use of Sugar.” 
Most probably, if Sugar really impairs the teeth, it does so 
indirectly by lingering in the crevices of the mouth, and leading 
to the production of acids which are destructive to the enamel. 
In clarifying Sugar the first boiling proceeds to the thread degree 
only ; the second boiling to the small! pearl degree; the third 
to the great pearl degree, (when the bubbles forming on the 
surface of the boiling liquor lie close together like round pearls) ; 
the fourth, and fifth, to degrees of “ eracking’’; and in the sixth, 
boiling caramel is produced, with the Sugar slightly burnt, and 
of a dark-brown colour. 
Sydney Smith, when writing to Lady Holland (1807), from 
Bath, informed her that “a dreadful controversy has broken 
out in this city as to whether tea is more effectually sweetened 
by lump, or by powdered Sugar, and the worst passions of the 
human mind are called into action by the pulverists, and the 
Jumpists. I have been pressed by ladies of both sides to speak 
in favour of their respective theories, at the Royal Institution, 
which I have promised to do.” Quite recently, however, a much 
more important issue concerning Sugar is engaging the attention 
of scientists at that Institution. The discovery has been lately 
made that this substance can be chemically produced by passing 
_ an electric current through water impregnated with carbonic 
acid gas; this ready manipulation promising to bring about 
