208 Singing Valleys 



diately Napoleon saw new futures for the vineyards of Cham- 

 pagne. He offered a large sum of money to establish the 

 industry, and ordered that all state institutions should use 

 grape sugar. About the same time, another French scientist, 

 Bouillon Legrange, observed that when starch is submitted 

 to a high temperature, it undergoes a change, and when mixed 

 with water makes a viscous, gum-like solution. Actually, what 

 Legrange made was dextrin. 



His discovery was employed by a German chemist then 

 working at the Academy of Science in St. Petersburg, in the 

 manufacture of porcelains. He needed gum arabic for his work, 

 and lacking this, substituted Legrange's dextrin. In order to 

 avoid the discoloration due to high temperatures, he subjected 

 the suspension of starch in water to the action of sulphurous 

 acid. He must have continued his treatment for too long a 

 time, for after neutralizing the acid and filtering off the 

 gypsum and evaporating the solution, he found that what he 

 had was a sweetish syrup instead of a gummy one. Through 

 accident, he hit on the way to refine starch into sugar. 



The discovery startled Europe. What it offered politically 

 was freedom from British trade domination. Every nation grew 

 wheat and other cereal grains. If these could be separated into 

 starch and the starch refined into sugar, then no one need 

 pay England for sugar from the West Indies. The Jenarsche 

 Literaturzeitung exclaimed editorially, 



All hail to our wheat fields! In the future they will give us not 

 only flour and starch, but also they will satisfy one of our most 

 refined needs sugar. 



All over Europe companies began to build starch-sugar 

 refineries. Only the defeat of Napoleon's hopes at Waterloo, 

 and the strengthening of England's power in world affairs as 

 the French empire crumbled, held back the new sugar-from- 

 grain industry, and re-established the trade of the West Indies. 



But in America, where the farms continued to yield enor- 

 mous corn harvests, the chemists kept at work endeavoring 



