SUGAR. 85 



and watery a state to be used with advantage for making sugar. Tin's 

 evacuation does not appear at all to injure the tree, for the same 

 process may be repeated every year for a great length of time ; and 

 the juice is even more saccharine from trees that have been previ- 

 ously wounded than from fresh trees. The juice is clear and plea- 

 sant-tasted. It is made into sugar by the farmers in the country, 

 and with a simple apparatus. It is usually clarified with lime and 

 white of egg, or milk, boiled down, grained and clayed in the man- 

 ner of the cane-juice. Another method occasionally practised is to 

 reduce the quantity of liquid by freezing, when the season will al- 

 low of it, which is preferable to entire evaporation, and at the same 

 time cheaper. The common maple sugar is clean to the eye, and 

 very sweet, but possesses a peculiar, though not an unpleasant taste. 

 It may be made into loaf-sugar probably as well as the muscovado, 

 but it is chiefly employed in a half purified state, like the common 

 moist sugars. The maple-juice will also furnish a pleasant wine and 

 a good vinegar. The saccharine quality of the juice appears to be 

 highly improved by a careful cultivation of the tree. 



Beet'Root Sugar. 



Among the vegetables indigenous to the middle and north of 

 Europe, which are sensibly saccharine, the beet-root seems to ex- 

 ceed them all in the quantity of sugar it contains. Tiie carrot and 

 parsnip have been tried, but the quantity of sugar possessed by these 

 has not repaid the trouble of working them. Marggraf, who first 

 attempted the beet-root, attempted also the skirret-root, and ob- 

 tained from this last a small proporton of a good grained sugar, 

 equal to muscovado, from which a syrup separated and dropped 

 through when the plug was withdrawn : but the process was tedious, 

 and the proportion not sufficient to justify its introduction into 

 general use. 



The most successful manufacturer of sugar from the beet-root, 

 (unless the late attempts in France, with the extent of which, 

 however, we are not much acquainted, should furnish an excep- 

 tion), is M. Achard of Berlin, who pursued the process altoge- 

 ther in the large way, and so satisfactorily, that a reward was be- 

 stowed upon him by the Prussiau government for his elaborate 

 experiments. It was hoped, incited, that this process would enable 

 Europe to supply itself with sugar from its own soil, aud to be 



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