grape sugar, for it is commonly found in grapes and other ripe fruits.
It forms half of honey and it is one of the two products into which
cane sugar splits up when we take it into the mouth. It is not so sweet
as cane sugar and cannot be so readily crystallized, which, however, is
not altogether a disadvantage.

The process of changing starch into dextrose that takes place in the
great steam kettles of the glucose factory is essentially the same as
that which takes place in the ripening of fruit and in the digestion of
starch. A large part of our nutriment, therefore, consists of glucose
either eaten as such in ripe fruits or produced in the mouth or stomach
by the decomposition of the starch of unripe fruit, vegetables and
cereals. Glucose may be regarded as a predigested food. In spite of this
well-known fact we still sometimes read "poor food" articles in which
glucose is denounced as a dangerous adulterant and even classed as a
poison.

The other ingredients of commercial glucose, the maltose and dextrin,
have of course the same food value as the dextrose, since they are made
over into dextrose in the process of digestion. Whether the glucose
syrup is fit to eat depends, like anything else, on how it is made. If,
as was formerly sometimes the case, sulfuric acid was used to effect the
conversion of the starch or sulfurous acid to bleach the glucose and
these acids were not altogether eliminated, the product might be
unwholesome or worse. Some years ago in England there was a mysterious
epidemic of arsenical poisoning among beer drinkers. On tracing it back
it was found that the beer had been made from glucose which had been
made from sulfuric acid which had been made from sulfur which had been
made from a batch of iron pyrites which contained a little arsenic. The
replacement of sulfuric acid by hydrochloric has done away with that