30 THE CUBA REVIEW 



garden should furnish a rival for the "noble plant" that had made the fortunes of Spanish and 

 English colonies, but the cultivation of the beet for sugar has in one generation shifted the 

 center of the sugar industry from the Tropics to the Temperate Zone. This growth has been 

 fostered by strange vicissitudes in the fortimes of nations, such as the commercial embargoes 

 and sugar bounties of the Napoleonic wars, and the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, 

 giving, as it did, a temporary check to the growth of the cane, aided in the creation of the beet- 

 sugar industry. The real creators of the new industry, however, were men of scientific training 

 who solved certain botanical and chemical problems. 



In 1747 Marggraf, a chemist of Berlin, chscovered that beets and other fleshy roots con- 

 tain a crystallizable sugar identical wuth that of the sugar cane. In 1799 the subject was 

 before the French Academy, and in 1801 the first manufactory for beet sugar w^as erected. 

 It had been manufactured as early as 1797, but the 2 or 3 per cent of sugar that could be ex- 

 tracted by the methods then in use was too little for commercial success. A new stimulus 

 was given by the sugar bounties of Napoleon in 1806, and methods improved rapidly, especially 

 in France. Two great difficulties still remained : the percentage of sugar present in the beet 

 was small (5 per cent), and it was only with great diffi.culty that it could be separated from 

 the many other constituents, some of them acrid and having a very unpleasant flavor. Science 

 now came to the aid of the industry, and a beet was gradually developed with a larger per- 

 centage of sugar and a smaller percentage of the undesirable impurities. Eighteen tons of 

 beet roots were necessary in 1836 to produce 1 ton of sugar; in 1850, this quantity was reduced 

 to 13.8 tons; in 1860, to 12.7 tons, and in 1889, to 9.25 tons. From 5 per cent of sugar, as found 

 by Marggraf, the sugar beet of good quality, thanks to the scientific work which has developed 

 it, now contains 15 per cent and more, at least 12 per cent being considered necessary for 

 profitable manufacture. 



SUGAR FROM THE SUGAR MAPLE 



The sugar maple of North America is also a source of sucrose, the trees being tapped 

 in the early spring to obtain the sap as it flows upward through the trunk on the way to the 

 branches. This sap on boiling yields its 2.5 per cent of sucrose and a few nonsugars in a more 

 or less moist, brown, crystalline mass, which can be refined until it is like other pure sucrose. 

 However, on account of the pleasant flavor the product in its crude form sells for a better 

 price than would the refined sugar. Five gallons of sap yield about a pound of sugar. Equally 

 popular is the maple sirup; that is, the sap which has been boiled down, but not enough to 

 crystallize. 



It is said, apparently on good authority, that maple sugar was made by the American 

 Indians for an untold time before Europeans came to this continent. It is interesting to 

 read a paragraph from a book written by the eminent Robert Boyle and printed at Oxford 

 in 1663: 



There is in some parts of New England a kind of tree * * * whose juice that weeps 

 out of its incisions, if it be permitted slowly to exhale away the superfluous moisture, doth 

 congeal into a sweet and saccharin substance, and the like was confirmed to me by the agent 

 of the great and populous colony of Massachusetts. 



Maple sugar was also appreciated in colonial times for making sweets as well as for use 

 as a staple article of diet, for early records mention a "nut sweet" made from maple sugar, 

 butter, and nuts, the sugar being melted and shghtly browned in order to impart a caramel 

 flavor in addition to the maple flavor. 



Occasionally, by a method similar to that by which maple sugar is obtained, sugar is 

 made, or was made in colonial times, from the sap of the butternut tree, and, it is said, from 

 the birch also. 



According to the Preliminary Report of the United States Census for 1910, the total 

 quantity of maple sugar produced in this country in 1909 was 14,060,206 pounds and the total 

 amount of maple sirup was 4,106,418 gallons. 



QUALITY OF SUGAR FROM DIFFERENT SOURCES 

 The methods used in the manufacture of sugar are all devised to separate the sugar from 

 the other constituents of the juice. The juice containing the sugar is expressed or extracted 



