Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/222

218 alcohol, and, like pulque, possesses certain medicinal properties.

Like pulque, mezcal is sold cheaply. It is to be found everywhere and contributes largely to the demoralization of the native peon, who often drinks it to excess and, like many another human type, commits most of his crimes when influenced by alcohol. Those who watched for the threatened revolution of the sixteenth of September last, probably noticed that the very wise head of the republic forestalled any large demonstration by seeing that drinking places were closed throughout the country.

To supply the distilleries at Tequila, a considerable acreage is planted to mezcal agaves. Those most used there belong to a well marked, narrow-leaved species which a few years ago received the appropriate and distinctive name A. Tequilana. As with the pulque species,

a number of horticultural forms of this are recognized. The leaves are generally glaucous, and a field of these white plants produces a striking effect. If allowed to bloom, this, too, develops a striking and large candelabrum of flowers; but, like the pulque maguey, it is harvested when mature but before its saccharine food reserve has been exhausted in the production of flowers and fruit. The leaves are cut back to their thick bases and the trunks, so trimmed, are packed—usually on mules—to the distillery, where, after a preliminary roasting, still in rather primitive smoky pits, they are converted into a mash which is fermented in large wooden tanks and then distilled in modern apparatus, much as is clone in the production of liquors elsewhere. At these modern stills, the bagasse from which the mash has been squeezed by rollers is even packed away by half-naked laborers to be used to feed the furnaces.