CHAPTER XXIV: 
THE COMMON METHOD BY HEAT. 
Extent to which Defecation takes place by this Means without the 
use of Other Agents—The Advocacy of Erroneous Opinions con- 
cerning the Action of Heat productive of much Mischief—Sugar 
cannot ordinarily be made by such Means. 
SEVERAL modifications of a single method of manufac- 
ture have been applied for the production of sorghum 
syrup; the merits of these are made to depend solely upon 
different forms of evaporating surface in order to secure 
certain real or fancied advantages from the application of 
heat. The principle of rapid evaporation in shallow pans 
is certainly correct, but rapid evaporation and the separa- 
tion of such impurities only as heat can remove, are but a 
part of the means requisite to success in the manufacture 
of merely a fine syrup, not to mention sugar. If boiling 
and skimming alone could do the work, sorghum sugar 
would now be found upon every table in the land, and the 
fact that this is not so, but on the contrary that not more 
than one operator in a hundred has produced it, under any 
circumstances, is directly chargeable to the essentially im- 
perfect mode of treatment which sorghum producers have 
been induced to adopt; for nothing is more certain than 
that the saccharine matter in the best varieties of sorghum 
is almost wholly cane sugar, which may readily be crystal- 
lized when the jnice is properly defecated, and that the 
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