230 TiMEHRI. 



solution of the problem, how to reduce the cost of 

 making sugar in proportion as the prices go down, before 

 the sugar industry of this country has gone to ruin. 



The necessity for progress in this dire6lion is perhaps 

 even greater than many of those who suffer from the 

 present distress realize, some mistaking the low state of 

 the sugar market for a temporary calamity. 



Gentlemen, there has been one enormous step already 

 made to meet the increased necessity of cheapening the 

 methods of sugar making — this is diffusion. 



To enable you to recognise diffusion as an improve- 

 ment I shall try in the course of this paper, to give you 

 a standard by which to judge for yourselves whether 

 diffusion is a progress or not. 



The standard by which diffusion should be measured 

 differs from the one customary in this colony. Here the 

 returns of an estate are measured in the first place by the 

 number of tons of first sugar per acre, which figure com- 

 prises the results of the field and the building mixed up 

 in such a manner as to make it impossible to recognize 

 whether they are due to a good or bad field crop ; or 

 whether to quality and quantity of the cane or to more or 

 less rational work in the buildings. The next item by 

 which the estate's yield is judged, consists in the recovery 

 of first sugar derived from the indicated sugar in the clari- 

 fier juice, which figure rests on the sugar already obtained 

 by the clarifier juice, and therefore such judgments lose 

 sight of the most important recovery in the buildings which 

 is the recovery of juice from loo tons cane. 



You finally go by the number of gallons of clarifier 

 juice required for one ton of sugar. Gentlemen, this 

 standard, though not wrong in itself, is altogether in- 



