SUGAE. 245 



sugar-cane had gradually been extending its dominion west- 

 ward, even so far as Syria. 



In tracing the European historical sugar-chart, the Sara- 

 cenic conquests in Europe next merit attention. Sugar-canes, 

 pomegranates, and the date palm are three chief members of 

 the vegetable kingdom which the Moslem conquerors brought 

 with them from the East, and naturalised in certain favoured 

 parts of Europe. 



It is a fact, though one either little known, or, if known, 

 remembered, that various parts of Southern Europe, espe- 

 cially Andalusia, Valencia, Cyprus, and Sicily, grew their 

 own sugar-canes, and produced their sugar long before even 

 the discovery of the West Indies and America. Nor has 

 Europe ceased to grow sugar-canes, and produce sugar from 

 them even at the present day. In Southern Andalusia, be- 

 tween the Sierra Nevada range and the Mediterranean, occurs 

 a narrow slip of land, perhaps having no more than an 

 average width of five or six English miles, by sixty or seventy 

 long. This tract, though small in area, is remarkably fertile 

 as to soil, and favoured as to climate. The ' tierra caliente ' 

 is what the Spaniards call this region ; and hot enough a 

 northern stranger finds it in the summer. The tierra caliente 

 produces sugar-canes and cotton shrubs ; not as mere curiosi- 

 ties either, but in good commercial quantities. 



If some future Chancellor of the Exchequer should desire 

 to brush away from his financial vision the last floating veil 

 of cobweb mystification which the home refiners have tepun 

 out of their long-drawn yarns if in applying himself to this, 

 he should deem a sight of sugar-canes, and the process of 

 getting sugar out of sugar-canes advisable then, in that 

 case, he need not dare the malice of yellow Jack, or raise the 

 expectation of Jamaica land crabs. He need not steam or 

 sail away to the Mauritius though once there, he would see 

 the process of sugar extraction conducted more neatly and 

 philosophically than elsewhere. A far easier tour would be 



