90 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
It is administered dissolved in milk or in water. During the last 
fifteen or twenty years large quantities of malt extract have been 
made in this country on the manufacturing scale for the use of 
physicians and for compounding pharmaceutical preparations 
which are sold under various names and contain aetive medica- 
ments of one kind or another beside the mere extract of malt. 
We have met with one variety of malt extract that is sold as a 
‘‘health food” under the name of malt-honey. It is a rather 
dark-colored, viscid syrup, less sweet than honey, and appears 
to be an extract of malt boiled down as such, and to contain 
unchanged the albuminoids and carbohydrates of the malt. 
Probably these constituents have purposely been left in the ex- 
tract in order that the product may be more palatable and the 
better serve as a tolerably complete food, whereas the midzu ame 
has manifestly been made from a fairly pure starch upon which 
malt has been made to act in very small quantity and merely as a 
hydrolyzing agent. ‘This so-called malt-honey on being tested as 
to its specific rotation and reducing power gave the following 
figures : [p54 — 138.7 = [#]j 153.43 Kegg,-465, Ash 0.8, water 
about 21%. 3 
These figures, however, are merely approximate, and are not 
readily interpreted because of the presence of albuminoids, sugary 
and extractive matters, for which no corrections can be made. 
As a question of folk lore or of archzeology — not to say of the 
influence of governmental intermeddling —it would be a highly 
interesting study to determine, if possible, how it happened that 
the use of evaporated barley wort in domestic economy came to 
be so thoroughly superseded in western Europe when imported 
sugar had become comparatively cheap and abundant. It is not 
improbable, perhaps, that the prevalence of stringent excise laws 
relating to malt may have prevented everyone but the brewers 
from making this material. It is true at all events that, until 
the recent revival of malt extracts for medicinal use, it is not 
easy to find in books any explicit references to the use of worts 
as such. One trouble is that in early times it often happened 
that writers did not take pains to distinguish clearly between 
simple sweet extract of malt (wort) and the ale which results 
from the fermentation of the malt extract. Thus, the definition 
