show an affection for any person by whom
they often have it indulged, and they find out
with surprising accuracy what they must do to
get more. It is thus that horses are taught
to go through many of the  wonderful performances
exhibited at amphitheatres. The love of
cattle for sweet fodder is most  amusing;
it is hardly possible to keep them out of a field
in which some of the sweeter varieties of
Indian corn or Chinese sugar grass is growing,
should they have had one taste of its quality,
and the use of sweetened food is one of
the means by which cattle are induced lo eat to the
limits of repletion in order to produce that
maximum of fat desired by agricultural societies.
Of the delight taken by that eminent mammal—
man—for sugar, nothing need be said.

The practice of sweetening food is far more
ancient than the knowledge of actual sugar.
It is almost certain that the Greeks and Romans
knew sugar only as honey; and, as this had to be
employed for nearly all sweetening of their food,
bee-keeping was as great a business then, as
sugar-baking is now.

That accounts for the frequent citation by
ancient writers of names of places famous for
the quantity and fineness of the honey they
produced, as Hybla, Hymettus, Canaan, " a land
flowing with milk and honey." At a later date
cane honey became known to the Romans.
Dioscorides, a writer in the first century,
mentions that a kind of honey was found on canes
which grew in India and Arabia which was
called sugar, and which, we are informed by
Pliny, was only used in medicine, as we use
manna, though without the laxative properties
of manna. Sugar appears to have been first
introduced into Europe at the time of the
Crusades, when it was used as a rare kind of
sweetmeat; the art of boiling down the juice of the
sugar cane not having any commercial importance
until the middle of the fifteenth century.
But the general domestic use of sugar dates
only from the discovery of America, and the
subsequent establishment of plantations of sugar
canes in the West Indies.

Sugar belongs to a class of substances closely
akin to one another, called in chemistry the
glucic group. Glucic is only a Greek way of
saying sweet. The members of his family are
made of carbon, with the addition of oxygen and
hydrogen in the proportions to form water.
Sugar is charcoal and water in another shape,
established by another way of blending the three
elements. The names of the principal members
of the sweet group in the order of the quantity
of water they may be supposed to contain are,
vegetable or woody fibre, gum tragacanth, starch,
gum arabic, cane sugar, fruit sugar, grape sugar,
milk sugar, and inosite or the sugar of animal
muscle. The kinds of sugar mentioned in the
foregoing list will all ferment, and are called
fermentable or true sugars. There is a class of
sugars also characterised by a very sweet taste,
which will not ferment, and which seem,
moreover, to be somewhat different in constitution.
Manna sugar and liquorice sugar are the most
familiar examples, It must, also be borne in
mind, when considering the properties of all
these varieties, that though called by one generic
name, and nearly related in constitution, they
are in each case perfectly distinct bodies, each
with its own properties and its own way of
composition.

Though the sweetness of all substances forming
the food of man and animals is caused by
the presence of one of these sugars, yet we know
of other sweet compounds, some of them sweeter
than sugar, that are anything but eatable: sugar
of lead, for instance, very sweet, though
nauseously metallic in its taste; glycerine also is
sweet, and so is chloroform; while a solution
of chloride of silver in hyposulphite of soda
is probably the sweetest compound known;
its excessive sweetness when a drop is placed on
the tongue being almost intolerable.

Cane sugar, which is the sweetest of all true
sugars, is contained in the juices of the sugar
cane, in beetroot, in the sap of many kinds of
palm and of the sugar maple; in the stalks of
Indian corn, the juice of gourds; and from all
these sources it is got, for man's use as an
article of trade, being identically the same
substance in each case. It is also contained in
some stage of their growth in most fruits, in
the stalks of grasses, in the leaves of certain
plants, as the red cabbage; in the roots of
many others, as the carrot; in the sap of trees,
as birch, hazel; and is, in fact, common in the
plant world. The way of getting sugar from
the above sources is in principle the same in
all cases, and is so well known that we need not
repeat it here. Cane sugar is nearly pure in
the finer varieties of lump sugar, which, like
snow, owes its dazzling whiteness to the
innumerable refractions and reflexions of the light
fallen upon it. Its sweetening power is very
great; a property in part due to its great
solubility in water, which will take up three times its
own weight when cold, and almost any quantity
when boiling. When a strong solution of sugar
is allowed to congeal slowly it forms the large
crystals known as sugar candy, which, of course,
differs from ordinary sugar in nothing but
form. When heated to a temperature of three
hundred and twenty degrees sugar melts, and on
cooling solidifies to the glassy transparent
substance known as barley-sugar. This clouds by
keeping, because the sugar has been slowly
assuming the crystalline form, a change that is
the cause of that delicious crust which some of
us recollect as encasing acid drops or other
transparent sweetmeat, after a long storage
in the schoolroom desk. When a boiling
saturated solution of sugar is poured on a cool
plate or in a mould, it solidifies on cooling to
an opaque concrete mass. These two forms of
cane sugar are the foundation of all the arts of
sweetmeat manufacture. When sugar is
carefully heated to a temperature of about four
hundred and fifteen degrees it loses water and is
changed into an intensely dark brown fusible
matter called caramel, but more commonly
known as burnt sugar. This  substance is very