94 PROCESS OF MANUFACTURE. 
ferent from those of any other plants from which sugar has 
been extracted. Hence the necessity for a new and special 
_mode of treatment adapted to these peculiarities. Many 
' persons also have been slow to accept the fact that the 
saccharine matter in ripe sorghum consists almost exclu- 
sively of cane or crystallizable sugar, and that previous to 
~~ the maturity of the plant, this kind of sugar is present, if at 
all, only in very small quantity—grape or fruit sugar (practi- 
cally unerystallizable, and of lower grade) being abundant. 
The nature of the other constituents of the juice has also 
been misunderstood. Lack of information upon these and 
other points, has led some persons whom a little investiga- 
tion would have taught better, to adopt expensive methods 
borrowed from the beet and cane sugar manufacture in 
France and Louisiana, which, in the end, they have been 
compelled to abandon after much disappointment and loss. 
The want of success which has attended these experiments, 
has repressed investigation, and the popular mind, except 
when excited by some accidental example of a successful 
crystallization, seems to have gradually adopted the con- 
clusion that the production of sugar requires the use of 
some incomprehensible and extraordinary means too ab- 
struse and diificult for ordinary practice. And the extreme 
facility with which a tolerably palatable article of syrup 
can be prepared for domestic purposes, has increased this 
apathy, and perhaps more than anything else, checked the 
progress of discovery. The inventive genius of the country 
responding to a temporary want, yet not rising above it, 
has produced a score of evaporators, adapted in a greater 
or less degree to the production of crude syrup; but these, 
in the main, embracing only various modifications of a single 
idea, can serve no higher purpose than that for which 
they were originally designed. Rapid evaporation, and 
the constant removal of the scum by skimming, constitute 
