The white powder of tea was formed in the leaf, when that leaf was stretched out in the Chinese sunshine, as the plant grew on the side of the warm Chinese hills. It was made out of the food which the plant sucked in from its native soil and its native winds, in the little chambers of its living structure, at a great expense of wise effort and skill. No human artist can make a grain of that white powder, if he spend a lifetime in the trial. In the little tea-leaf, as it grows on its sunshiny hillsides, the most subtle and cunning powers are set to work by the wisdom which knows everything, and by the hand which holds and directs all things in man’s wonderful world. The result is, that out of coarse earth, and thin vapors, and fostering sunshine, the ingredients of the white powder are gathered together, and mixed, each in its proper proportions, and in the right manner, in the hidden recesses of the growing plant. God, in his own sublime language, says to the Chinese soil, and atmosphere, and sunshine, “_Let the white powder of the tea plant be_,” and there it is. In a world that is so overflowing with perfect contrivance as this one, which serves as man’s dwelling place, it is not at all likely that this curious white powder is made by the tea plant in such abundance—twenty-five thousand tons of it at least turned out on the Chinese hills every year, and scattered thence to the four corners of the world—without having some very good work appointed it to do. You will not wonder, therefore, that inquiring men, who know that all these thousands of tons get mixed in the ordinary course of ordered events with the flesh and blood of human bodies, should be very curious to find out what they are capable of doing there. Another very surprising fact also tends greatly to strengthen this curiosity. The coffee tree grows not in China, but in Ceylon, in Arabia, and in the West Indies. The cocoa tree flourishes on the other side of the American continent, in Mexico and Peru. Yet the coffee and cocoa plants make out of the East and West Indian, the Arabian, and the South American soils, vapors, and sunshine, exactly the same kind of white powder that the tea plant manufactures on the Chinese hills. Plants so unlike in external appearance, and living in districts so remote from each other, first get to be used in similar ways in the preparation of beverages for millions of the human race. Then curious and prying inquirers find that there is one principle present in all these beverage-yielding plants. The common-sense inference is plain. It is most likely that it is this one substance present in all the three different plants, which has led to their being employed so generally in the preparation of drink.