DR. WETHERILL’S ANALYSES. 181 
these circumstances were regarded as merely preliminary 
to future investigations of a more extended and valuable 
character. 
The discordant results of the different analyses, how- 
ever, after making due allowance for all assigned influences, 
as well as those peculiarities induced by differences of cli- 
mate and soil, reveal the unwelcome fact of which there 
was previously some evidence, that the great bulk of the 
sorghum now grown in this country is of an inferior qual- 
ity to that first introduced. This misfortune is the result 
of the hybridization of the cane with broom corn, and de- 
terioration by improper culture, the consequences in most 
cases of ignorance of the nature and wants of the plant. 
This discovery is of itself sufficient to impair the value 
which these analyses would otherwise have possessed as 
affording a fair index of the saccharine quality of the cane 
in its native purity. While there is yet in this country un- 
deteriorated cane, the juice of which uniformly contains 
not less than 16 per cent. of saccharine matter, which is 
cane sugar almost exclusively, none of the specimens sent 
to the laboratory at Washington contained more than 10 
per cent. of cane sugar, and some of them not more than 
2 or 38 per cent.; the whole amount of sugars of both 
kinds rarely equaled 15 per cent., and in some canes it 
fell as low as from 5 to 7. 
The report upon the canes examined is valuable as an 
exhibit of the present condition of the plant in this coun- 
try, but as an index of its true value for the production of 
sugar, itis not to be relied upon. Nor for the determina- 
tion of this important point are the analyses of sugars and 
syrups there presented of much greater consequence, how- 
ever skillfully and conscientiously they may have been made. 
Nearly all the samples of syrup exhibited a precipitate of 
crystals of cane sugar in the vessels which contained them. 
16 
