BEET JUICE 47 



invented in 1860 Minchin must undoubtedly have been 

 the earliest pioneer of that invention in the cane sugar 

 industry. He stuck to it bravely for more than thirty 

 years, and possibly it may be still working. 



The exhausted bset slices from the diffusion battery 

 are, of course, saturated with water which has to be 

 pressed out. They are then either at once delivered 

 to the farmer for cattle food or stored in pits till wanted. 

 In the latter case they ferment, and are said to be 

 preferred by the cattle in that state. Recently various 

 methods of artificially drying the pulp have been 

 adopted and will, no doubt, become general. The pulp 

 makes a very good cattle food if judiciously mixed with 

 chopped straw or hay. The writer has seen it mixed 

 with the molasses of the factory, which seems a very 

 natural and reasonable plan, and also a good way of 

 utilizing a by-product which fetches a very poor 

 price in the market when sold for distilling or to 

 the special factories which extract its sugar by chemical 

 process. 



The well-known inventor, Steffen, has suggested the 

 idea of extracting less than the maximum quantity of 

 sugar from the roots, and drying the resulting pulp, 

 rich in sugar, which ought to obtain a high price for 

 cattle-feeding. The suggestion has not yet been adopted 

 on any considerable scale. 



A combination of crushing the sugar cane in the 

 usual way and then treating the megass in a diffusion 

 battery, called the Naudet process, has recently attracted 

 some attention. Sixty-five per cent, of the juice is 

 first extracted in the mill, and the megass is then loaded 

 into the diffusion battery. The juice, heated and mixed 

 with lime as if it were going to the clarifiers, is then 

 poured on to the megass, and transferred from vessel 

 to vessel as in the diffusion process. This process 



