LXVI. On the State of the Manufacture of Sugar in France. 
By M. le Comte Cuaprat*. 
n gt last five-and-twenty years will form a memorable epocha 
in the annals of French industry. Most of the extraordinary 
events that have succeeded each other have concurred to fa- 
vour its progress. France, deprived of her colonies, blockaded 
at all her frontiers, found herself reduced to rely on her own in- 
ternal strength ; and by raising a contribution of the knowledge 
of her inhabitants, and of the productions of her soil, she has 
been enabled to satisfy all her wants, to create arts which be- 
fore had no existence, to improve those that were known, and 
to render herself independent of foreign countries for the greatest 
part of the articles of her consumption. Thus we have succes- 
sively seen improved the arts of refining saltpetre, the manufac- 
ture of arms and of powder, of tanning leather, of spimning cot- 
ton, wool, and flax, of weaving generally, and the execution of 
several other arts to which we were strangers; such as the de- 
composition of sea-salt for the extraction of soda; the forma- 
tion of alum and copperas ; the fixing upon woven goods several 
colours which had been previously cousidered as fugitive; the 
substitution of the sugar of beet-root for that of the sugar eane ; 
of woad in the place of the indigo plant, and of madder for the 
searlet of cochineal. We might say, indeed, that the learned 
had diverted their attention from dwelling on public calamity, 
by fixing it on the means of consoling the people and lightening 
the burthen of their misfortunes. 
Although these discoveries and manv others are now become 
regular manufactures, it is to be feared that some of them will 
fall again into oblivion, either in consequence of the facility with 
which we can resort to the former sources, or from the habit 
and prejudice which recommends in the eyes of the consumer 
those commodities that have been a long time in use, or even 
by erroneous measures of administration; I therefore think it 
an important object that all these processes be carefully de- 
seribed, in order that they may be transmitted to posterity. It 
will at least prove to them what science is capable of acco:n- 
plishing for the prosperity of a nation at a critical period, and 
they may extract from it this consolatory truth, that France has 
the means within herself of satisfying almost all her wants. 
I shall confine myself now to show how France has been en- 
abled to supply the place of the sugar of the new world by the 
products of her own soil; and if the Institute approve this wor k, 
{ shall have the honour of submitting to it successively all the 
* Annales de Chimie ct Physique. 
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