[Illustration--Drawing: MEXICAN DRINKING-VESSELS, ROLLING-PIN AND WHISK.]

Some accounted for the assumed ill-effects of cocoa to its admixture
with sugar in the form of chocolate, for a few years earlier a London
doctor had declared that "coffee, chocolate, and tea were at the first
used only as medicines while they continued unpleasant, but since they
were made delicious with sugar they are become poison." Similarly, an
anonymous assailant in a pamphlet "Printed at the Black Boy, over
against St. Dunstan's Church, in Fleet Street," exclaims:

"As for the great quantity of sugar which is commonly put in,
it may destroy the native and genuine temper of the chocolate,
sugar being such a corrosive salt, and such an hypocritical
enemy of the body. Simeon Pauli (a learned Dane) thinks sugar
to be one cause of our English consumption, and Dr. Willis
blames it as one of our universal scurvies: therefore, when
chocolate produces any ill effects, they may be often imputed
to the great superfluity of its sugar."

[Illustration--Black and White Plate: Cacao Tree, Trinidad.]

In the New World fewer questions were raised, and the only
conscientious objection appears to have been felt by a Bishop of
Chiapa, whose performance of the Mass was disturbed by its use. The
story is told in Gaze's "New Survey of the West Indies," published in
1648, and is worth repetition. It is well to bear in mind his
information that "two or three hours after a good meal of three or
four dishes of mutton, veal or beef, kid, turkeys or other fowles, our
stomackes would bee ready to faint, and so wee were fain to support