A learned Dutchman's opinion of tea--Two hundred cups a day recommended--Tea the universal panacea--Tea-merchants greedy as hell--Degeneracy of the race through tea-drinking--Appeal to women--Tea a slow poison--Experiment upon a dog--John Wesley's attack upon tea--Why he preached against it--Dr. Lettsom's thesis--Accuses tea of leading to intemperance--The essential principle of tea--The value of experiments upon animals--Tea-drinking among women--The Anti-Teapot Society--The benefits of tea-drinking--Dr. Richardson's condemnation--The Dean of Bangor as a joker--Life without stimulants--Dr. Poore's description of the good and bad effects of tea-drinking--Injurious to children--A properly controlled appetite the safest guide. Like tobacco, tea received on its introduction very different treatment by different people. It was extravagantly praised by some, and extravagantly denounced by others. "Some ascribe such sovereign virtues to this exotic," remarks one author, "as if 'twas able to eradicate or prevent the spring of all diseases.... Others, on the contrary, are equally severe in their censures, and impute the most pernicious consequences to it, accounting it no better than a slow but efficacious poison, and a seminary of diseases." A learned Dutchman pronounced it the infallible cure for bad health, and declared that "if mankind could be induced to drink a sufficient quantity of it, the innumerable ills to which man is subject would not only be diminished, but entirely unknown." He went so far as to express his conviction that 200 cups daily would not be too much. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, to find the Dutch East India Company liberally rewarding this eloquent apostle of the new drink. Scarcely less enthusiastic was the professor of physic in a German University, who declared tea "the defence against the enemies of health; the universal panacea which has long been sought for." This opinion, indeed, prevailed very extensively in the East. The following notice is copied from the "Relation of the Voyage to Siam by Six Jesuits, in 1685:"--"It is a civility amongst them to present betel and tea to all that visit them. Their own country supplies them with betel and areca, but they have their tea from China and Japan. All the Orientals have a particular esteem for it, because of the great virtues they find to be in it. Their physicians say that it is a sovereign medicine against the stone and pains of the head, that it allays vapours, that it cheers the mind, and strengthens the stomach. In all kinds of fevers they take it stronger than commonly, when they begin to feel the heat of the fit, and then the patient covers himself up to sweat, and it hath been very often found that this sweat wholly drives away the fever." A similar belief in the virtues of opium existed until very recently in the minds of the people of the Fen counties. [Illustration: DRYING THE TEA-LEAVES.]