20 SUGAR AND SUGAR PLANTS. 
of sugar from the beet, although successful in Europe, has 
not been fully tested in this country; but on account of the 
great expensiveness of the machinery, the high degree of 
skill necessary, the radical changes which it would inaugu- 
rate in the means and methods of agricultural labor already 
existing, the inferior quality of the secondary products (no 
molasses being made from the beet which is fit for human 
use), and especially the great length of time necessary to 
establish it upon a solid basis, place it beyond our reach, 
and render it unsuited to meet our wants. 
It is just at this juncture that our attention has been 
called to a plant which seems as adequate to supply us in 
future with sugar, as, in the few years that have elapsed — 
since its introduction into our midst, it has proved itself to 
be capable of providing for half the tables in the land an 
abundance of rich and palatable syrup. This plant is the 
sorghum. It is called in botanical terms Sorghum sac- 
charatum ; all the different kinds being now recognized as 
varieties of one species. 
The Chinese sorghum was imported into France from 
the north of China about the year 1851. Through the 
agency of the Patent Office it was obtained from France in 
1854, and during the spring of the following year the seeds 
were distributed to different parts of the Union. The suc- 
cess which attended the first efforts to make a palatable 
article of syrup from the juices of this plant awakened at- 
tention, and in 1857, when public curiosity was at its 
height, Mr. Leonard Wray arrived in this country, bringing 
with him the seeds of fifteen varieties of South African 
sorghum, orimphee. These he first found growing in the 
country of the Zulu Caffres, near Cape Natal, in the year 
1851. 
Subsequent experiments made upon these canes, grown 
by him in South Africa, were rewarded with success in the 
