This beautiful prayer,[155] of which only the roughest sketch has been given here, has been said by pious Hebrews at every meal in which wine has been drunk from time immemorial. But upon wine alone has this honour been conferred. Those who drink _Shecar_, or water, or any other beverage except wine, say before their draught thus much only: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, universal King, by whose word all things were made;” and after it, “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, universal King, the Creator of many souls, and their needs, for all which Thou hast created, to keep alive the soul of every living thing. Blessed art Thou who livest everlastingly.” But these two prayers have no especial and necessary relation to drinks. They are also used where aught is eaten which has not grown originally and directly out of the earth, as, for example, the flesh of some beasts, and birds, and fishes, and cheese, milk, butter, and honey. In the present work particular attention has been given, in the case of alcoholic drinks, to wines, spirits, liqueurs, and beers, and in the case of non-alcoholic, to mineral waters, tea, coffee, and other beverages usually considered non-intoxicant; but under both these widely extended categories a large number of drinks must enter of which no mention whatever has been made in the preceding pages. It remains for us, therefore, to consider in the present chapter the most interesting and important of these drinks which have been hitherto excluded. Of the curious and, in many cases, repulsive liquids which have from time to time been taken, either to assuage the pangs of human thirst, or to gratify the taste of the human palate in health or in disease, the reader who has not devoted some little time and attention to the investigation of this subject will probably have but a very faint conception. To go no farther back on the pathway of time than to the age of John Taylor, the water poet, we find so strange a drink as women’s tears. But at a date far earlier than that of the water poet, the date of the Babylonian Talmud, in _Machshirin_, vi. 64, there are seven liquids comprehended under the generic term _drink_ (Lev. xi. 34, and therefore liable to ceremonial defilement), dew, water, wine, oil, blood, milk, and honey. Upon every one of these seven liquids something curious and interesting might be written.