Europe only discovered her possession of a sweet tooth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before the great production of sugar from the New World began to be carried to Spain and Portugal, and by them distributed at high prices and in small quantities to the rest of Europe, the only sweetening known to the masses of the population was honey, and this was a luxury. There was no taste for sweets until sweets became common. The real taste of the Middle Ages was for spices; it is not generally realized today to what extent the food of Europe was at this period saturated with cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and other spices brought from the Orient. It was for the “Spice Isles” that the early navigators searched the wide seas, spices that they ate with a gusto almost incomprehensible today: they flavoured their beverages and scented their clothes with spices. The most flourishing centres of sugar production in Brazil are in the State of Rio de Janeiro, where Campos is the focus of sugar deliveries, and Pernambuco, a thousand miles farther north; São Paulo has also an increasing sugar industry, as may be seen from the following list of large sugar mills; small factories, of which there are hundreds in Brazil chiefly turning out _rapadura_, a brown sugar-brick, and _cachaça_, the native rum, are not included:— Alagôas 9 Bahia 7 Maranhão 3 Minas Geraes 7 Parahyba do Norte 2 Pernambuco 46 Rio de Janeiro 31 Santa Catharina 2 São Paulo 20 Sergipe 15 Piauhy 1 Rio Grande do Norte 3 ——— 139