h we experience
sensations of taste proper--that is to say, of sweetness and bitterness.
In a healthy, natural state all sweet things are pleasant to us, and all
bitters (even if combined with sherry) unpleasant. The reason for this
is easy enough to understand. It carries us back at once into those
primaeval tropical forests, where our 'hairy ancestor' used to diet
himself upon the fruits of the earth in due season. Now, almost all
edible fruits, roots, and tubers contain sugar; and therefore the
presence of sugar is, in the wild condition, as good a rough test of
whether anything is good to eat as one could easily find. In fact, the
argument cuts both ways: edible fruits are sweet because they are
intended for man and other animals to eat; and man and other animals
have a tongue pleasurably affected by sugar because sugary things in
nature are for them in the highest degree edible. Our early progenitors
formed their taste upon oranges, mangoes, bananas, and grapes; upon
sweet potatoes, sugar-cane, dates, and wild honey. There is scarcely
anything fitted for human food in the vegetable world (and our earliest
ancestors were most undoubted vegetarians) which does not contain sugar
in considerable quantities. In temperate climates (where man is but a
recent intruder), we have taken, it is true, to regarding wheaten bread
as the staff of life; but in our native tropics enormous populations
still live almost exclusively upon plantains, bananas, bread-fruit,
yams, sweet potatoes, dates, cocoanuts, melons, cassava, pine-apples,
and figs. Our nerves have been adapted to the circumstances of our early
life as a race in tropical forests; and we still retain a marked liking
for sweets of every sort. Not content with our strawberries,
raspberries, gooseberries, currants, apples, pears, cherries, plums and
other northern fruits, we ransack the world for dates, figs, raisins,
and oranges. Indeed, in spite of our acquired meat-eating propensities,
it may be fairly said that fruits and seeds (including wheat, rice,
peas, beans, and other grains and pulse) still form by far the most
important element in the food-stuffs of human populations generally.

But besides the natural sweets, we have also taken to producing
artificial ones. Has any housewife ever realised the alarming condition
of cookery in the benighted generations before the invention of sugar?
It is really almost too appalling to think about. So many things that we
now look