150 Transactions. 
although that name is more correctly applied to a spirit distilled 
from the palm, known also as toddy. Quass, or rye beer, made 
from common rye (Secale cercale) is a favourite drink in Russia. 
In Sikkim a kind of beer, which is in common use among the 
natives, is made from Eleusine coracana, a species of millet. 
The Tartars also prepare a kind of beer from another plant of 
the same genus, styling the beverage bouza, and the Abyssinians 
make a similar drink under the same name from Poa Abyssinica. 
Beer is of ancient origin among the northern nations. Mum, 
a word which still occurs even in modern excise acts, is the name 
of a species of that liquor still made in Germany. It was a 
favourite Anglo-Saxon drink, and probably only partially 
fermented, like that used in Orkney, which is prepared in open 
vessels. A beer, also most likely of this class, was, according to 
Tacitus, the chief beverage of the ancient Germans. When the 
Ten Thousand in their famous retreat were quartered in the 
mountain villages of Armenia, they found, Xenophon tells us, 
‘beer in jars, in which the malt floated level with the brims of 
the vessels, and with it reeds, some large and others small, with- 
out joints. These, when anyone was dry, he was to take into his 
g, when unmixed 
with water, and exceedingly pleasant to those who were used to 
it.” 
The practice of distillation is probably less ancient than that 
of fermentation ; but the Arabians, from a very early period, 
mouth and suck. The liquor was very stron 
and, later, Greeks and Romans, prepared aromatic water by 
this process. The ancient Egyptians, near neighbours of the 
Arabians, and skilled in all arts, prepared a liquor upon which a 
Roman Hmperor, the philosophic Julian, wrote an epigram,* and 
which, from the description, must have been some kind of corn 
spirit. 
* This epigram of Julian, probably written when he was Cesar in Gaul, 
is found the Anthologia Palatina, vol. ix., 368. It was given by 
Erasmus in his ‘‘ Adagia,” with a very poor Latin translation. As it has 
not been hitherto rendered into Hnglish, I here append a translation :— 
*“To wine made from barley. O Dionysus, who art thou and whence ? for 
I swear by the real Bacchus I do not recognise thee. The son of Zeus 
alone [know. Heis redolent of nectar thou of porridge. Verily, the Celts 
have made thee from ears of corn, through lack of grapes. Therefore we 
ought to call thee Demetrius, not Dionysus, Pirogenes (wheat-born), and 
Bromus (a kind of oats), not Bromius.” Evidently Julian was not a bad 
punster. To understand the puns it is necessity to remember that 
Bacchus or Dionysus, the god of wine, was called Pirogenes (fire-born), 
and that he is often called Bromius (noisy). Demetrius means belonging to 
Demeter, the Greek name ior Ceres. —Hprror. 
