Herbert Spencer has pointed out, because the grape-curers
of Zante are not careful enough about excluding small stones from their
stock of currants; and we suffer from indigestion because the Cape
wine-grower has doctored his light Burgundies with Brazilian logwood and
white rum, to make them taste like Portuguese port. Take merely this
very question of dessert, and how intensely complicated it really is.
The West Indian bananas keep company with sweet St. Michaels from the
Azores, and with Spanish cobnuts from Barcelona. Dried fruits from Metz,
figs from Smyrna, and dates from Tunis lie side by side on our table
with Brazil nuts and guava jelly and damson cheese and almonds and
raisins. We forget where everything comes from nowadays, in our general
consciousness that they all come from the Queen Victoria Street Stores,
and any real knowledge of common objects is rendered every day more and
more impossible by the bewildering complexity and variety, every day
increasing, of the common objects themselves, their substitutes,
adulterates, and spurious imitations. Why, you probably never heard of
manilla hemp before, until this very minute, and yet you have been
familiarly using it all your lifetime, while 400,000 hundredweights of
that useful article are annually imported into this country alone. It is
an interesting study to take any day a list of market quotations, and
ask oneself about every material quoted, what it is and what they do
with it.
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