Café au lait[4] is an excellent drink and easily prepared. Make in the usual way a pint of strong coffee, and into your table urn or a pitcher pour a cup and a half of fresh milk, scalding hot; to this add the coffee and let the whole stand for five minutes in a hot place, or in a kettle of hot water.
Chocolate is a most delicious drink if properly prepared; it is, however, so often raw, muddy and strong that we have not been able to educate ourselves to its peculiar disagreeableness. Make it by the following rule and you will find it both nutritious and pleasant: Select with care the best make of chocolate, and into a little cold water rub smooth five tablespoonfuls of grated chocolate; be sure that it be rubbed in smoothly, a hard particle of chocolate is as unwelcome a visitor in your cup as floating tea leaves or black bobbing bits of coffee berries. So rub it smooth and stir it slowly into five cups of boiling water. Let it boil for about five minutes, and in the meantime heat two cups of milk; this must be stirred into the boiling chocolate and the whole allowed to simmer for a few minutes longer. You may sweeten it on the fire or in the cup.
HUXLEY ON SCIENCE.[C]
All the time that we are awake we are learning by means of our senses something about the world in which we live and of which we form a part; we are constantly aware of feeling, or hearing, or smelling, and, unless we happen to be in the dark, of seeing; at intervals we taste. We call the information thus obtained sensation.
When we have any of these sensations we commonly say that we feel, or hear, or smell, or see, or taste something. A certain scent makes us say we smell onions; a certain flavor, that we taste apples; a certain sound, that we hear a carriage; a certain appearance before our eyes, that we see a tree; and we call that which we thus perceive by the aid of our senses a thing or an object.
Moreover, we say of all these things, or objects, that they are the causes of the sensations in question, and that the sensations are the effects of these causes. For example, if we hear a certain sound, we say it is caused by a carriage going along the road, or that it is the effect, or the consequence, of a carriage passing along. If there is a strong smell of burning, we believe it to be the effect of something on fire, and look about anxiously for the cause of the smell. If we see a tree, we believe that there is a thing, or object, which is the cause of that appearance in our field of view.
In the case of the smell of burning, when we find on looking about, that something actually is on fire, we say indifferently either that we have found out the cause of the smell, or that we know the reason why we perceive that smell; or that we have explained it. So that to know the reason why of anything, or to explain it, is to know the cause of it. But that which is the cause of one thing is the effect of another. Thus, suppose we find some smouldering straw to be the cause of the smell of burning, we immediately ask what set it on fire, or what is the cause of its burning? Perhaps we find that a lighted lucifer match has been thrown into the straw, and then we say that the lighted match was the cause of the fire. But a lucifer match would not be in that place unless some person had put it there. That is to say, the presence of the lucifer match is an effect produced by somebody as cause. So we ask, why did any one put the match there? Was it done carelessly, or did the person who put it there intend to do so? And if so, what was his motive, or the cause which led him to do such a thing? And what was the reason for his having such a motive? It is plain that there is no end to the questions, one arising out of the other, that might be asked in this fashion.