Page 62 - Industries_of_San_Antonio

62 SAN ANTONIO-HER TRADE,

pensive grades ; silver ware, bronzes, placques, statuettes, bisques,
keravinis, etc. ; rare and costly diamonds and other precious stones, fine and
artistically wrought jewelry, spectacles, glasses, cutlery; in fact, every-
thing that can be enumerated, from the rare, luxurious and costly, to the
plain and cheaper articles for necessary use and convenience. They claim
special expertness in repairing watches and jewelry, which from general
opinion they have substantiated. They employ ten assistants—expert,
painstaking craftsmen. The members of the firm at present are David,
Powhatan and Jessup M. Bell. They carry an average stock of $50,000 in
value. Their transactions extend through this state and into Mexico, the
annual sales reaching $120,000. The Messrs. Bell are in every respect
among the most prominent and enterprising citizens of San Antonio, en-
joying in the largest degree the esteem, confidence and respect of all class-
es of their fellow-citizens.

LONE STAR 'BREWING COMPANY—Brewers of Lager Beer and Mal-
sters, Grand Avenue.
_The desire for stimulants, in the general sense of the word, is an almost,
if not absoluely universal appetite, so general, so early developed, that
we might almost call it an instinct. Alcohol is the most popular•, the most
seductive, and by far the most widely diffused ; and we may add, when
taken in homcepathic quantities, as is its perceptible percentage in pure
beer, the most innocuous of all stimulant substances. From the Euphrates
to the Straits of Dover, the vine has been, from the earliest ages, second only
to corn, in popular estimation—wine next to bread, the most prized and
most universal article of human food. The connection between Ceres and
Bacchus is found in almost every language, as in the social life of every
nation, from the warlike Assyrian monarchy, the despotism of Egypt, to
the modern American republic and German empire. Barley has furnished
stimulants second in popularity to none other, not to that fiery spirit which
delighted the fiercer, sterner races of Northern Europe, Swedish, Norwe-
gian and Danish vikings, St. Olaf and Harold Haddrada, but the ale and
beer of our own Saxon and Teutonic ancestors, the tonic beverage, which
satiates and cheers without inebriating, which neither spirit, Spanish wine
or cider can supersede among ourselves. The nation which originated the
brewing of beer is uncertain. However, it is of great antiquity and is gen-
erally ascribed. to the Egyptians, to whom it was known many centuries
before the Christian era. Herodotus, 500 B. C., wrote that the Egyptians
made their wine of barley. Pliny describes the celia and ceria the beer of
the ancient Spaniards, and the cerevisia of the Gauls made from grain,
evidently named from Ceres, the goddess of grain. In the writings of
Archilochus, the Parian poet, 700 years B. C., we find that the Greeks
were acquainted with it. But the nation which brought it nearest to per-
fection in ancient times were the Germans. Tacitus, in his history of the
manners and customs of the Germans, written during the first century of