highly prized. To prevent this practice it was enacted in 1770 that
the shells or husks should be seized or destroyed, and the officer
seizing them rewarded up to 20s. per hundredweight. From these a
light, but not unpalatable, table decoction is still prepared in
Ireland and elsewhere, under the designation of "miserables."

Among other beverages which have from time to time been produced from
the cacao was a fermented drink much in vogue at the Mexican Court, to
which it appears from the accounts of the conquest that Montezuma was
addicted, as "after the hot dishes (300 in number) had been removed,
every now and then was handed to him a golden pitcher filled with a
kind of liquor made from cacao, which is very exciting." One variety,
called _zaca_, drunk by the Itzas, consisted of cocoa mixed with a
fermented liquor prepared from maize; but a more harmless invention
was a drink composed of cocoa-butter and maize.

[Illustration--Black and White Photgraph: How the Cacao Grows.
(Showing Leaf, Flower, and Fruit.)]

There remain three forms in which pure cocoa may be prepared as a
beverage:

1. _Cocoa-nibs._--The natural broken segments of the roasted
cocoa-bean, after the shell has been removed, prepared for table as an
infusion by prolonged simmering.

It is strange that this ridiculous and wasteful means is still in use
at all, as next to none of the valuable portions of the nib are
extracted. The quantity of matter removed by the hot water is so
small, that close upon 90 per cent, of the nourishing and feeding