TEA AS A CONSOLER.

Colonist, Volume LXI, Issue 14959, 6 January 1919, Page 3

TEA AS A CONSOLER.

As regards the female sex at any rate, tea is (says tlie "Saturday Review") the great consoler in grief and trouble, and an eminent physician has truly said that many a poor woman has been saved from suicide by a timely cup of it. Against suicide tea would seem to be a protective in some special sense, for in former times, wherever the slave trade prevailed—in fliet West Indies, Mauritius, Brazil/- and Mexic<i—the Kola tree was introduced and cultivated because its fruit, the principle of which is theme, not only gratified an intense predilection of the negroes and sustained them under overwork, preventing the sense of fatigue, but warded ofr a predisposition to epidemic suicidal mania which not infrequently depopulated considerable districts, it is to its stimulating and restorative action on the central nervous system that tea owes its world-wide popularity. It is not a food, for it neither builds up the i tissues nor provides them with potentij.l energy, it does not diminish waste, but rather increases it. It gives a trifling fillip to the heart, and dilates the, superficial* blood vessels, thus imparting a feeling of warmth; "But it is not this property that has commended It to' universal favour, lor other beverages posses? it in ampler degree. No, it is its still mysterious influence on the brain and its appendages, quickening their operations, ana freeing them from* 'frictional impediments, thaf has made it the, prince of potations and a sovereign remedy in most of the minor and in many "of the major ills that flesh, and especially female flesh, is iieir to.