THE BEVERAGES OF THE WORLD.

Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 2, 2 July 1887, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE BEVERAGES OF THE WORLD.

Aucient Egypt had a species of wine and aho a liquor called zythos, drawn from barley by fermentation, resembling beer. That the people did not escape from intoxication is shown by drawings which have been preserved of .'•laves carrying their masters home and the like ; but the effects of the two drinks were noticed to be different. Grecians used wive from the earliest period, and history gives many tokens that they did so to cxcccjb. Bub the statement tha . they wero fond of pouring salt water into it to improve the flavor raises a gentle suspicion that it differed from modern wive. The like inference is suggested by reading that among the Romans the low-priced grades of wive sold at threepence for ten gallons and that the magnates drank it by the gallon. But both the Grecians and the Homans imported wine from Egypt: who knowß but this may have been the chiet cause of intemperance among them 1 Julius Caesar's troops seemed to have carried perhaps not the original idea of wino and malt liquor but improved ways of making them, to Gaul and Britain ; and grape culture and wine-making throve in France because natural to the soil and climate while ale and beer were so suited to English conditions, and were so easily mode by a people raising an abundance of grain, that they soon became the national beverages in preference to the mead and cider with which the ancient Britons had been wont to regale thenselves. Barley is the basi3 of several drinks made in different parts of the world by processes analagous to modern brewing, but they are totally different in their intoxicating effects. The discoverers of America found maize iv use among the native tribes in making a species of beer called chica ; and history indicates that the natives would have suffered less from intern! perance if they bad clung to their own drink than they have since adopting the strong liquors introduced by the whites. There are some unexpected sources of these beverages. In Eugland, spruce, fir, birch, maple and ash trees have in former ¦yeurs beecn tapped and the sap ferj raeuted for a drink. The willow, j poplar, sycamore, and walnuts are said to yield palatable beverages. Koumiss, of which descriptions were published during President Garneld's illness, ia

fermented milk and is the basis of what may be called the Koumiss cure administered to individuals at establishments maintained among the Tartars; but doctors differ as to whether the treatment when tried by Englishmen effects a radical cure or only causes a temporary fattening. The drink is a favorite one among the Tartars and Circassians, and they have a legend that the angel who succoured Hagar in the desert showed her how to to make it, and the recipe has been banded down from that time. The Chinese make liquors and mischievovis ones — to indulge them freely in their native driuks would uot be a hopeful experiment — from rice, from the palm, aud even from mutton. Saki is a beer which has been long and widely used in Japan, and though strong, is called wholesome ; and the Japanese make other d links from plums, from the Bap of the palm or the birch, and from the flowers of the motherwort and the peach The Russians delight in quuss made from barley and rye flour. Several varieties of grasH, herbs, or flowers, roots of sundry plants, the juices of the sugarcane, the aloe or the cavassa, and even of the potato and beet, are used among various tribes or nations as the basis of some favourite driuk.