Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

105

  • Thick mantles o’er the boiling wave, do thou
  • The skum that mantles carefully remove.

  • FROM bloating dropsy,1 from pulmonic ails,2
  • Would’st thou defend thy boilers, (prime of slaves,) [335]
  • For days, for nights, for weeks, for months, involv’d
  • In the warm vapour’s all-relaxing steam;
  • Thy boiling-house be lofty: all atop
  • Open, and pervious to the tropic breeze;
  • Whose cool perflation,3 wooed through many a grate, [340]
  • Dispells the steam, and gives the lungs to play.

  • THE skill’d in chemia, boast of modern arts,
  • Know from experiment,4 the fire of truth,
  • In many a plant that oil, and acid juice,
  • And ropy mucilage,5 by nature live: [345]
  • These, envious, stop the much desir’d embrace
  • Of the essential salts,6 tho’ coction bid
  • The aqueous particles to mount in air.

  • ‘MONG salts essential, sugar wins the palm,
  • For taste, for colour, and for various use: [350]

VER. 339. Open, and pervious] This also assists the christallization of the Sugar.

  1. An accumulation of fluid in the soft tissue of the body. The modern term is edema (or oedema). ↩︎

  2. Lung infections or diseases. ↩︎

  3. Ventilation provided by air blowing through a space. ↩︎

  4. Experience. ↩︎

  5. A viscous liquid made from plant material. ↩︎

  6. Eighteenth-century scientists studying the composition of plants posited that they contained essential salts or acids and minerals obtained by the crystallization of plant juices. ↩︎