TEA DRINKING.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1873, 5 September 1918, Page 1

TEA DRINKING.

The habit of tea drinking-has now become common in every part of the world. In no place has it taken a greater hold of the people than in New Zealand. Here it is no uncommon thing for men and women to partake of tea half a dozen times in a day. The excessive indulgence in tea is productive of many ills, not the least of which is dyspepsia, which brings much unhappiness and suffering in its train. Probably when alcoholic stimulants have been banished from the land, a crusade will be started against tea drinking, and legislative assistance will be sought to restrict the consumption of this article. Tea drinkers may he interested to know that the habit originated in China. According to Professor King, in his “Farmers of Forty Centuries,” the Chinese first drank tea as a sanitary measure, having found (hat boiling their water saved them from typhoid, and afterwards adding tea leaves to make the hoik'd Water palatable, Professor King says: — “Throughout these countries boiled, water, as tea, is the universal drink, adopted no doubt as a preventive measure against typhoid fever and allied diseases. The drinking of boiled water has been universally adopted in these countries as an individually available and thoroughly efficient safeguard against that class of deadly disease germs which it has been almost impossible to exclude, from the drinking water of tiny densely populated country.” Dr. R. A. Gortner, of America, in discussing these statements by Professor King, says “To my mind, cause and effect were somewhat as follows; (1) The drinking water was undoubtedly polluted, and typhoid, cholera, dysentery, etc., were endemic. (2) Certain families or clans found that a pleasing beverage could be made by steeping the leaves of the tea plant in hot water, with (he result that they drank very little if any of the polluted waters without previously boiling it. (3) Their neighbours or neighbouring communities observed that these families or clans who drank tea had relatively little disease its compared, with the non tea drinkers, and as a result the custom of tea drinking spread throughout the land, not because of the belief that boiled water prevented disease and tea leaves modified the insipid taste of the boiled water, but because the infusion of, (he tea leaves per sc was looked upon as a medicine specific for the prevention of the prevalent diseases.” In this eouneetion, it may ho mentioned (hat in (he early days of New Zealand (he Maoris made a beverage, or tea, from the leaves of a well known shrub. They also had a stimulating beverage, which they drew from certain trees.