MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 163 



period of ten or fifteen years, a yield comparing favorably witti that of sugar 

 cane. Elsewhere (") he calculates the yield from the palm at twice that 

 from cane. Sixty, eighty, or a hundred trees to the acre can be planted. Each 

 tree yields from five to eleven liters of juice twice a day, of which the sugar 

 content is 15% to 16%%. Opposed to this estimate for the Philippines is 

 that of Tschirch, (•) for Java. This writer estimated the yield at about four 

 tons per hectare per year, and concluded that Arenga would be an unprofitable 

 crop. But quite regardless of the future of the palm sugar industry, it can- 

 not fail to be of interest to us on account of its antiquity. It has existed for 

 centuries among peoples whom we are accustomed to look upon as having a 

 very low cultui-e. Nevertheless, these same peoples of southeastern Asia and 

 the adjacent islands doubtless invented the art of making sugar. The evidence 

 points to Cochin-China, India, or Indonesia for the original home of the 

 sugar cane, which is known only in cultivated forms, and of which the almost 

 complete sterility affords presumptive evidence of a long history since it 

 originated from an unknown wild prototype. The art of sugar manufacture" 

 spread westward, first through the agency of the Arabs, during the Middle 

 Ages, and then of the Portuguese and Spanish, to whom we owe its wide 

 dissemination through the American tropics. Aside from honey, however, the 

 northern European races developed no source of sugar of their own until beet 

 sugar was discovered by Marggrav in 1747, and it was nearly a century before 

 this discovery led to the firm establishment of the flourishing beet sugar 

 industry of today. 



University of Michigan. 



