86 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
made its own ale at frequent intervals and put it to immediate 
use. Thorold Rogers,* in writing of medieval agriculture in 
England, has explained that ‘‘ The largest part of the land under 
the plough was occupied by crops of wheat, barley, and oats. 
Wheat was the customary food of the people of this country 
from the earliest times. Even if the evidence were not abundant 
on this point, the breadth sown annually would be conclusive 
proof. Barley was sometimes mixed with wheat in the allowances 
made servants, but its chief use was in the manufacture of beer, 
which seems to have been continually brewed in small quantities 
and for immediate consumption.” 
It was at a later period, manifestly, when cane sugar came to be 
imported freely from abroad that the custom arose of adding 
some of the colonial product to the malt extract to increase its 
sweetness, and it was at that time doubtless that the name 
‘¢ hbarley-sugar”’ came in, for the word sugar had previously been 
unknown. It is in some sort by error that the dictionaries nowa- 
days describe barley-sugar as ‘sugar boiled (formerly in a 
decoction of barley) till it becomes brittle and candied,” 7 for 
this statement fails to describe adequately the original article 
(sweet wort) and does not convey a just idea of its successors. 
During the larger part of the nineteenth century the product 
known, in New England at least, as barley candy, though doubt- 
less a descendant of barley-sugar, was far enough from being a 
legitimate blood relation. In: point of fact, this barley candy 
had not the least connection with barley, unless perhaps in respect 
to color, for it was simply cane sugar melted, together with a 
little water, until it had been converted to the glassy modification, 
while a small portion of it had been changed to caramel which 
imparted to the candy a tint of straw color. Sometimes traces 
of flavoring matters were added to make the candy more palat- | 
able. It is said, however, nowadays, that in the preparation of 
barley candy some 380 to 60 per cent. of glucose are habitually 
melted together with the cane sugar, so that, practically speak- 
ing, there has been an actual reversion to that early method of 
making barley-sugar where maltose and sucrose were commingled. 
* J. E. Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices in England 
from 1259 to 1793, Oxford, 1866, 1. 26, 27. 
t Century Dictionary, New York, 1889, 1. 454. 
