millinery girls, induced to drink it instead of the innutritious
beverage called "tea," its nutritive qualities would soon develop
themselves in their improved looks and more robust constitution. The
price, too, is in its favour, cacao being eight-pence per pound; while
the cheapest black tea, such as even the Chinese beggar would despise,
drank by milliners, washerwomen, and the poorer class in the
metropolis, is three shillings a pound, or three hundred and fifty per
cent, dearer, while it is decidedly injurious to health.

The heads of the naval and military medical departments in England
have been so impressed with the wholesomeness and superior nutriment
of cocao, that they have judiciously directed that it shall be served
out twice or thrice a week to regiments of the line, and daily to the
seamen on board Her Majesty's ships, and this wise regulation has
evinced its salutary effects in the improved health and condition of
the men. Indeed, this has been most satisfactorily established in
Jamaica among the troops; and the same may be asserted of the seamen
in men of war on the coast.

But the excellent qualities of chocolate were known not only to the
Mexicans and Peruvians, from whom, as a matter of course, the
Spaniards acquired a knowledge of its properties; but European nations
also acknowledged its virtues. The Portuguese, French, Germans, and
Dutch, considered it an exceedingly valuable article of diet, and
Hoffman looked upon it both as a food and a medicine. In his
monograph, entitled _Potus Chocolati_, he recommends it in all
diseases of general weakness, macies, low spirits, and in
hypochondrial complaints, and what since his time have been termed
nervous diseases. As one example of the good effects of cacao, he
adduces the case of Cardinal Richelieu, who was cured of eramacausis,