News You Can Bruise for 2008 February 13

I've been on a writing tear after work this week, and I'm pleased to report that I have only 10 more Future Stuff entries to review and then I can just run out the clock. I'm a little worried that I've been using Future Stuff as an excuse to avoid doing real writing, but we'll see once I'm done.

The Natural History of Chocolate. The sort of book you might see today (except it would be called Chocolate: The Natural History of an Obsession), but published in 1719. Might be the earliest book I've read that had footnotes, but I don't exactly read a lot of eighteenth-century books. Did you know that "The Fruit of the Cocao-Tree is the most oily that Nature has produced"?