FOOD AND FEEDING 207 



fairly said that fruits and seeds (including wheat, rice, peas 

 beans, and other grains and pulse) still form by far the 

 most important element in the food- stuffs of human popula- 

 tions generally. 



But besides the natural sweets, we have also taken to 

 producing artificial ones. Has any housewife ever realised 

 the alarming condition of cookery in the benighted gene- 

 rations before the invention of sugar ? It is really almost 

 too appalling to think about. So many things that we now 

 look upon as all but necessaries cakes, puddings, made 

 dishes, confectionery, preserves, sweet biscuits, jellies, 

 cooked fruits, tarts, and so forth were then practically 

 quite impossible. Fancy attempting nowadays to live a 

 single day without sugar ; no tea, no coffee, no jam, no 

 pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before one goes 

 to bed ; the bare idea of it is too terrible. And yet that 

 was really the abject condition of all the civilised world up 

 to the middle of the middle ages. Horace's punch was 

 sugarless and lemonless ; the gentle Virgil never tasted 

 the congenial cup of afternoon tea ; and Socrates went 

 from his cradle to his grave without ever knowing the 

 flavour of peppermint bull's eyes. How the children 

 managed to spend their Saturday as, or their weekly obolus, 

 is a profound mystery. To be sure, people had honey ; but 

 honey is rare, dear, and scanty ; it can never have filled 

 one quarter the place that sugar fills in our modern affec- 

 tions. Try for a moment to realise drinking honey with 

 one's whisky-and-water, or doing the year's preserving 

 with a pot of best Narbonne, and you get at once a common 

 measure of the difference between the two as practical 

 sweeteners. Nowadays, we get sugar from cane and beet- 

 root in abundance, while sugar-maples and palm-trees of 

 various sorts afford a considerable supply to remoter 

 countries. But the childhood of the little Greeks and 



