If the starch in your mother's starch-box at home should be changed into sugar, you would think it a very strange thing.
Every year, in the spring-time, many thousand pounds of starch are changed into sugar in a hidden, quiet way, so that most of us think nothing about it.
STARCH AND SUGAR.
All kinds of grain are full of starch.
If you plant them in the ground, where they are kept moist and warm, they begin to sprout and grow, to send little roots down into the earth, and little stems up into the sunshine.
These little roots and stems must be fed with sugar; thus, in a wise way, which is too wonderful for you to understand, as soon as the seed begins to sprout, its starch begins to turn into sugar.
If you should chew two grains of wheat, one before sprouting and one after, you could tell by the taste that this is true.
Barley is a kind of grain from which the brewer makes beer.
He must first turn its starch into sugar, so he begins by sprouting his grain.