The ancients put bitter herbs in beer, and the present use of hops is in imitation. Modern beer was born at the time of Charlemagne, an epoch at which hops were first cultivated. The earliest writing in which one finds mention of hops as an aroma to beer is in a parchment of St. Hildegarde, abbess of the convent of St. Rupert, at Bingen on the Rhine. The art of fabricating beer remained for a long time a privilege of convents. The priests drank Pater's beer, while the lighter or convent beer was used by the laity. Although beer has been manufactured of all the cereals, barley only can be called its true and legitimate father. Bavaria and Franconia were already in the fourteenth century celebrated for their excellent beer, and the German cities, of which each one soon had its own brewery, vied with their predecessors. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Upper and Lower Saxony breweries became well known. The Braunschweiger, Einbeker, Göttinger, Bremer, and Hamburger beer, as well as the breweries of the cities of Würzen, Zwickau, Torgau, Merseburg, and Goslar, were far and wide celebrated. Bavarian beer has long made the tour of the world. Bock beer from Bavaria and from the Erzgebirge is exported to Java and China. German lager beer, as a healthy and lightly stimulating beverage, is welcome in both hot and cold countries. It is liked as well by the Russians and Scandinavians as by the inhabitants of the tropics. It is brewed by Germans in all parts of the globe--in Valenciennes, Antwerp, Madrid, Constantinople, and even in Australia, Chili, and Brazil. The English commenced later than the Germans to make beer. In 1524, however, they not only brewed beer, but used hops in its fabrication. The Greek and Latin races, which drank wine, had but little taste for beer, which divided them from the Germanic races as a sharp boundary. Beer and wine seem to have had an influence in forming the temperament of these widely differing races. While wine excites the nervous system, beer tranquillizes and calms it. The action of a particular kind of daily drink, used for centuries, must in this respect have been more or less potent. Hence, perhaps, the Teuton's phlegm and the Gaul's excitability.