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THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. [April i, 1890. 
sometimes as much rain falls in one day as during 
a fortnight in Deli. The deteriorating effect of 
these heavy downpours on the tobacoo plants may 
be easily imagined. Still it is not safe to rate 
Oeylon too low as tobacco producer. Labour is so 
cheap and readily available there that the expense 
of cultivating the leaf comes to a mere nothing. 
Henoe growers can make a profit at prices which 
would prove ruinous to Deli competitors. 
In Dili itself, tobacco cultivation on the moun- 
tains has not turned out a success owing to lessened 
heat and greater moisture in the air. Scarcity of 
labour prevents utilising the mountain region for 
other produce articles more suitable to a colder 
climate. Tobacco still remains the only resource 
and standby of the planting community, who, under 
the ciroumstances, cannot help putting their eggs all 
in one basket. 
A SUGARLESS WORLD. 
A world without sugar can hardly seem a place 
worth living in to the juvenile mind. Farewell to 
jam in limited or unlimited allowances, to school- 
boy raids upon the pantry, to savoury puddings 
and dainty cakes, to lollipops, rhubarb tart and 
gooseberry fool ! Blessings on the man who dis- 
covered the art of extracting sugar says the 
housewife who dare not contemplate the cuisine 
of a world literally without sugar. Blessings 1 
reiterates the boy, with his mind dwelling on 
the preserve pots of Egypt. By his discovery he 
has diminished the sum total of wry faces among his 
fellow creatures. He has added a certain charm to 
the juvenile drug ; at least, he robbed it of more 
than half its terrors. The aged crone of three 
generations ago who chewed her soaked tea-leaves, 
not knowing how tj use them, must have longed, 
like Faust, for a new lease of life when she became 
initiated into the real luxury of the tea-pot, and 
the sweetening influence of sugar upon her new 
beverage. The raw school-miss, whose swollen 
cheek would suggest a bad attack of neuralgia, 
were it not that she has just paid a flying visit 
to the nearest confectioner's has reason also to 
bless him. And yet the world neither knows 
his name nor his native land. It is probable 
that he was some nude Indian or some lightly 
clad Chinese who lived hundreds of years before 
the march of Alexandria. But, whoever he was, 
he went with his painted face or his pigtail to 
his flaming pyre, or humble six feet of earth, 
"unwept, unhonored and unsung." Had he been 
a Greek, he would have been the theme of as 
many legends as Heroules ; had he been a 
Roman Emperor, he would have been turned into 
a constellation or a god. Had he been an 
Englishman, he would have got £5 for his dis- 
covery, somebody else would have walked off with 
the profits of his inventions, and he himself 
would have been allowed to die of starvation. 
His epitaph might have been some bootless 
question in the House of Commons as to whether 
he had not a right to a memorial slab at least, 
if not a grave, in Westminster Abbey. 
One might be sometimes tempted to wonder if 
Shakespeare ever really tasted sugar, were it not 
that he has a very few references to it. Most 
of them point to its sweetness. Chaucer also 
uses ths world ; so does the author of Piers 
Plowman. We do not know if it can be traced 
much farther back in English literature. One 
of the very earliest, if not the earliest known 
referenoe to it in connection with this country 
is made by a Venetian merohant who, in 
1319 shipped 100,000 pounds of sugar which had 
been brought from the Levant, and 10,000 pounds 
of sugar-candy to England to be exchanged 
for wool. This was about forty years before 
the dreaming Monk of the Malvern Hills 
had satirised in Pier's immortal vision*, the vices 
of his time. The English Crusaders made its 
acquaintance in Sicily, Crete and Syria, into the 
two former of which places at least, the Saracens 
had introduced the sugarcane. Then Venice, which 
had been importing a little sugar from the tenth 
century, became the centre of trade in the costly 
luxury, and remained the headquarters of such trade 
as there was until the Spaniards introduced the 
cane into the West Indies. It was by means of 
the tax which Charles V. levied on the sugar im- 
ported into Spain from San Domingo that he 
was enabled to build his palaces at Toledo and 
Madrid. All this means that except at a few 
, favored points, sugar was utterly unknown all over 
Europe. Celt and Saxon, Englishman and Dane, 
Scandinavian and Norman, all had stormed their 
way into this little island of ours without ever 
having seen or heard of sugar. They had left 
their Aryan home before the sugarcane was first 
munched between Aryan teeth amid wah-wahs of 
delight and enjoyment by their Aryan brothers in 
tUe valley of the Ganges. They brought no name 
for sugar with them ; the thing was unknown. The 
name does not seem to come into existence till 
that unknown man of genius to whom we have 
referred, discovered the art of squeezing the juice 
out of the cane and boiling it, and giving the 
product the name of sutar — that is " granules," or, 
as a scientific age would now say crystals. Not 
till after many ages did the names given to it by 
their remote brothers in the Gangetic valley oome 
to the European peoples through the Persian and the 
Arabic— shakar, sakkar, Anglice sugar. In mHr.y 
parts of Scotland it is at this moment called sukkur. 
The earliest mention of sugar in the whole literature 
of Europe occurs in the year 320 B C., when 
Theophrastus describes it as a honey extracted from 
canes or reeds. He had not heard of it as "granules," 
but as a syrup or juice merely, Strabo, on the 
authority of one of Alexander's Admirals, tells that 
certain reeds in India yielded honey without the 
aid of bees. Here again, Alexander's Admiral had 
only known of it as a syrup. Seneca had heard a 
story that honey was found in India on the leaves 
of reeds, but the story was quite wrong, as the juice 
does not exude naturally, but must be crushed out 
of the cane. Again, he also had heard only of the 
syrup. Pliny also had got hold of the wrong story — 
that it exuded as a gum— and he fancied that the 
gum hardened on the stalks into pale and brittle 
lumps— large " granules " — about the size of a hazel 
nut. This, however, was sugar-candy, not a naturally 
hardened exudation, but a work of art. The 
grand old man's discovery of boiling the juice of his 
Eugarcanes had at last penetrated into the Greek 
and Roman world. What had the Greek housewife 
done all this time without it ? If she had 
had it, would the Greek poets have sung of it in 
the same lofty strains in which they have im- 
mortalized the honey of Hymettus ? 
The only sweetener before the introduction of 
sugar was honey, and our Scandinavian fathers, 
like th e Greeks, have embalmed its glories in 
legend and song. But unless bees were infinitely 
more numerous than they are now-a-days, honey 
also must have been a rare luxury. That it was 
a luxury is evident from our Teutonic word 
" honeymoon," which is derived from the custom 
* The writer here commits a common mistake- 
The vision is that of William, the subject there 
being Piers the Plowman, i, e. Christ.— Ed. T. A, 
