138 [Assembly 



Professor Mayes — Feed a child on arrow root, which has no 

 phosphate, and no proper bone can be formed, the infant will be- 

 come rickety. Cattle understand this. You put ph<isphate on 

 parts of your grass land and the cattle will stay there and bite as 

 long as the least bite can be bitten ; they never leave it for the 

 long grass in the fields, where there is no phosphate, until all the 

 other is gone, and then, with reluctance, they eat the long grass. 



Mr. Ross — Can you then deprive the si'gar cane of its sugar 1 



Professor Mapes — Yes, sir. It can be made, by improper cul- 

 ture, to }ield imperfect sugar, what we term weak sugar, the crys- 

 tals of which are all truncated, and the sugar approaches grape 

 sugar. Lavoisier, Braconnet and others have made sugar, you 

 know, from linen rags. I have made it from starch and linen. 

 The Professor here described the chemical operation. From six- 

 teen ounces of linen we can make seventeen ounces of grape su- 

 gar, the Same as that exuding from raisins, not crystalizable. 

 You can carry crystalized sugar back by churning it for fifty 

 hours, and it will never crjstalize again : you make molasses of 

 it. The color brown, assumed by light-colored juice, is owing to 

 the rapid oxygenation when it is exposed to the air. Take 

 and squeeze it quickly in a powerful toggle joint, and the juice 

 is, for a few moments, white, and of a diiferent taste from cider 

 flowing from ap{)]es crushed in a mill, slowly turning brown by 

 the oxygen. No crop of vegetables can be perfect unless the land 

 where they grow gives them all the ingredients which they re- 

 quire; and modern chemists can now give them -all they demand. 



Mr Scott asked the Professor if a plant will take too much of 

 an ingredient. 



Professor Mapes — Yes, sir, they do when we stimulate them, 

 but where all is right in and ab(»ut the })lant, you may use the 

 whip, and yet the plant will keep all right. 



Mr. Solon Robinson remarked, that our practice of hilling up 

 corn came irom England, v\here the wet climate renders if useful 

 to plants, while in our own clear, dry, hot seasons the plants do 

 far better by being, at least, on the general level of the soil if not 

 below it, so that a diametrically opposite practice to that of Eng- 



