9 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and fixed the export bounty at two cents and two and a half 

 cents per pound on raw and refined sugar respectively. 



During the past year large capital has been attracted toward 

 the development of the sugar-beet industry in the United States 

 on the Pacific coast. Although that section of the country, with 

 its peculiar surroundings, does not generally present the mete- 

 orological and climatic conditions necessary to secure the best 

 results in the cultivation of the beet-root for sugar-making pur- 

 poses, yet a factory was started last October , with equipment 

 and machinery capable of reducing three hundred and fifty 

 tons of beets per diem, and has proved a great financial success. 

 A full supply of beets, cultivated by the wheat-growers of Cali- 

 fornia, kept the works fully employed, and a boom was given to 

 the town of Watsonville. The factory consumes seven tons of lime 

 daily in the chemical processes of extracting the sugar, which is 

 distributed pro rata to the grower of beets free, and can be re- 

 turned to the soil. Besides, the farmers averaged over eighty 

 dollars per acre for their beet products, while the recent report of 

 the Agricultural Bureau estimates the returns from the total pro- 

 duction of the five principal crops — oats, corn, rye, barley, and 

 wheat — in the United States to be less than twelve dollars per 

 acre as an average. 



The beet-root, deriving its fertilization from previous crops 

 of annuals, can not rotate effectually with the cereals, except 

 in the third season ; and of course the comparative estimate of 

 increased profit over wheat is not as large as it would be if 

 the plant admitted of continuous culture, and thus may be mis- 

 leading. 



When we take into consideration the elements — organic and 

 mineral — of which all plants are composed, and that each variety 

 requires for its perfect development certain meteorological con- 

 ditions, peculiar characters of soil, and combinations of the vari- 

 ous leading constituents of plant-food, which have enlisted the 

 energies of scientists for years in continued investigation, we are 

 struck with admiration and wonder at the progress of agricultural 

 chemistry — not only in revealing the chemicals as they exist, re- 

 placing them in the soil when exhausted by cultivation, but in 

 transforming a root and making almost a new creation, by extract- 

 ing the noxious minerals which had retarded its development, 

 with simply special culture. 



It is admitted that the new appliances of steam and electricity 

 and the inventions of the past quarter of a century have changed 

 the commerce of civilization, but, as economic factors, these can 

 scarcely prove more far-reaching in their influence than those 

 discoveries of science, in the same period, which have made it 

 possible to open a new industry in a northern latitude for the 





