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The World's Commercial Products 



Whilst modern milling is very much more efficient than the old, it must be recognised 

 that no method of crushing alone can extract all the juice from the cane. The practice 

 is not infrequently adopted of moistening the megass with hot water at the moment that it 

 leaves the first mill. On passing this moistened megass through the second mill, a much 

 weaker solution of juice is left in it, and more sugar is correspondingly extracted, but longer 

 evaporation, i.e., more expenditure of fuel is required to boil down this diluted juice, and 

 unless care is exercised the increased expense in fuel may more than balance the increased 

 value of the sugar gained. 



In the manufacture of beet-sugar, as is described later, maceration, or the extraction of the 

 sugar with water, is solely practised, and efforts have been made from time to time to apply 

 this process to the sugar-cane. The first experiments appear to have been made in the French 

 West Indies, Martinique and Guadeloupe, about the middle of the last century, but they were 

 not successful. The essential difficulty is that the sugar-cane planter has practically to rely 

 •on his megass for his fuel, coal is too dear in the tropics to use, and the megass left after macera- 

 tion is inferior to that obtained by crushing, and at the same time the greater dilution of the 

 juice necessitates a larger amount of fuel. Maceration methods, pure and simple, have been 

 generally abandoned for sugar-cane. An interesting process known as the Naudet Patent 

 Process has recently been devised, and is being worked in Egypt, and Madeira, and at Porto 

 Rico, Trinidad, and other parts of the West Indies. The canes are first crushed in an ordinary 

 mill, and the megass is passed on to one cell in a battery of eight, whilst the juice is limed and 

 heated. The hot juice is then added to the megass in the cell, and drawn off through it, so 

 that the megass is macerated and has its residual sugar to a great degree extracted, and at 

 the same time is employed as the filtering agent for the juice. The megass is subjected to 

 successive washings, and finally crushed again in another mill and used in the ordinary way 



CRUSHING, SHOWING THE RIPE CANES ON THE CAXE-CARRIERS 



