Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 November 1894 — Early Usd of Sugar. [ARTICLE]

Early Usd of Sugar.

The sugar cane and its uses have been known in India, its native home, from time immemorial It is, perhaps the earliest source from which sugar was produced, and ail other modes of manufacture have been borrowed from ana based on it. The early classical writers knew sugar vaguely as “honey of canes.” Tothe Greco-Roman world the sugar cane was the reed which the swarthy Indians delighted to chew, and from which they extracted a mysterious sweetmeat. It was the Arabs—those great carriers between the East and the West —who introduced the cane in the Middle Ages into Egypt, Sicily and the south of Spain, where it flourished abundantly until West Indian slavery drove it out of the field for a time and sent the trade in sugar to Jamaica and Cuba. Naturally you can afford to undersell your neighbors when you decline to pay any wages to you,r laborers. Egyptian sugar was carried to London in Plantagenet times by the Venetian fleet, waere it was exchanged for wool, the staple product of mediaeval England. Early in the sixteenth century the cane was taken from Sicily to Madeira and the Canaries, Thence it found its waj’ to Brazil and Mexico, to Jamaica and Hayti. Cane sugar waswell known in Italy about the second century, and has been common in England since the Tudor period. The spacious days of great Elizabeth had sugar for their sack; and ginger was hot in the mouth, too, as we all well remember.—[New York. Ledger. . WOE FOR COMING GENERATIONS. ■ Tommy—What you cryin’ about, crybaby? Jimmy—Aw! You’d cry, too, if your tmrits was made outer yer sister’s old bicycle bloomers!—[Cincinnati Tribune.