86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion of France — forced Germany to rehabilitate her agricultural 

 industries, from which the armies of the empire were chiefly sup- 

 plied. Her lands were worn under a thousand years of tillage 

 without rotation of crops, and had more recently become unprofit- 

 able and valueless under the vain attempt to produce the staple 

 crops of grain in competition with the rich prairies of our North- 

 west, and her farmers were emigrating to America. The soil 

 was not exhausted, as many have supposed, but, like our own 

 farms in New England, laboring at present under the same diffi- 

 culties, required a diversity of culture and new fertilization. 

 Their previous experiments had shown that the beet-root, depend- 

 ing largely for its growth upon the atmosphere, did not exhaust 

 the soil, as was the case in the cultivation of grain, but, in rota- 

 tion with the staple crops, like wheat, barley, and rye, it left the 

 land richer for the following crop. Besides, the beet-root was 

 peculiarly a product of the temperate zone — indigenous to the 

 latitude of northern France and Germany, requiring fair skies, 

 sunlight, and long seasons, for the full perfection of its growth 

 for sugar -making purposes. It could not be raised profitably 

 for saccharine extraction on the sea-coast, as it easily absorbed 

 saline matters, or in the dark and damp places of England, or in 

 the higher latitudes, where the season is too short to ripen the 

 plant to perfection, any more than it would thrive in the hot cli- 

 mate of the South. 



A new system of excise duties was established which induced 

 the farmer to enter into the growing of beets on a larger scale, 

 and bounties were given to attract capital into the construction of 

 factories for the manufacture of beet-sugar. This excise tax, not 

 unlike that of our own internal revenue collection on whisky and 

 tobacco — where the consumer pays the tax — was equal to two and 

 a half cents per pound on the sugar extracted from the beet. To 

 the sugar exporter the tax was returned, and there was also paid 

 a bonus which assumed the character of an export bounty. 



Under these conditions an enormous increase of sugar produc- 

 tion and a rapidly augmented exportation of sugar followed. 

 The farmer commenced a new system of fertilization that pro- 

 duced larger crops, and began with energy to develop from the 

 soil the nitrogen which the chemists had found to be so much 

 needed in the cultivation of the beet-root. He made more ma- 

 nure on the farm by feeding his cattle with the pulp, received 

 from the factories that had sprung up like magic a residuum 

 derived from the chemical processes in the extraction of sugar 

 containing all the salts and elements remaining, thus giving a 

 new impulse to cattle-raising and dairy products from its rich 

 fodder. 



Gathering from twenty to twenty-five tons of beets from an 



