Vegetable substances used for the food of man / by Dr. Lankester. With illustrations.

  • Lankester, Edwin, 1814-1874.
Date:
[1850?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vegetable substances used for the food of man / by Dr. Lankester. With illustrations. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    123/410 (page 113)
    affords a pleasant syrup. In Mexico, fields are sown with it thick, that multitudes of small stalks may arise, which being cut from time to time, like asparagus, are served in desserts, and thin sweet Juice extracted in the mouth by chewing them. The meal wetted is excellent food for young chickens, and the old grain for grown fowls *.” In addition to the many uses enumerated by Franklin in the foregoing account, Humboldt ac- quaints us that the Mexican Indians, previous to the conquest of their country, were accustomed not only to express the sweet juice from maize-stalks for the purpose of fermenting it into an intoxicating liquor, but that they boiled down this juice to the con- sistence of syrup; giving it likewise as his opinion that they were able even to make sugar from this inspissated juice. In confirmation of this opinion, he recites a letter written by Cortez, who in de- scribing to the Emperor Charles V. the various pro- ductions in both a natural and manufactured state which he found in the new country, asserts, that among these were seen “honey of bees and wax, honey from the stalks of maize, which are as sweet as sugar-cane, and honey from a shrub which the peo- ple call maguey. The natives make sugar from these plants, and this sugar they also sell.’ There is no question that the productions here enumerated will yield saccharine matter; but crystallized sugar, properly so called, is a different preparation, and, from our present knowledge, it is difficult to believe that any such substance could have been so prepared. The Indians, at the period above alluded. to, evinced considerable skill in the preparation of fer- mented liquors, which is by no means lost by the Mexicans of the present day. ‘A chemist,” says Humboldt, “‘ would have some difficulty in preparing * Franklin’s Works, vol. ii. pp. 276-8, 4to edition, 1818, L3