30 
Furthermore, according to Mr. Mareus L. Floyd, it is a known fact 
that tobacco too long ‘in case” because of prolonged moist weather 
will sweat but very imperfectly. The poorly sweated crop of 1898 in 
Connecticut also showed much “canker” and ‘pole burn,” conditions 
favored by too moist weather. — 
When it happens that tobacco does not sweat well, or even not at all, 
it may be too acid or may have lost its oxidizing enzyms through irreg- 
ularities in the curing barn, or it may be too poor in the proper 
oxidizable material. The writer was assured by tobacco growers of 
Connecticut and Massachussetts that tobacco grown in very dry years 
is incapable of sweating; [871 was such a year. Even the transpor- 
tation of the tobacco to the West Indies and back, an experiment tried 
by Mr. Barnes, of Hatfield, Mass., to enforce a natural sweat, did not 
change the rank smell of the cured to the aromatic odor of sweated 
tobacco. 
The writer was informed in Lancaster, Pa., that the crop raised there 
in 1881 required nine years to reach the proper quality by means of the 
natural sweat. Here probably a gradual oxidation without oxidases 
has produced finally a result similar to that reached in a short time in 
presence of the oxidizing enzyms. 
Since it is the energetic oxidation in the sweating process that yields 
a cigar leaf of superior quality, it must form one of the principal aims 
ot a tobacco farmer to preserve the oxidizing enzyms while the tobacco 
is curing in the barn. In the process of sweating, however, there is 
generally a gradual decrease of oxidizing enzyms going on, the high 
temperature favoring not only the action of these enzyms on oxidizable 
material, but also the oxidation of the enzyms themselves. Practical 
experience long ago found it necessary to take apart and rebuild the 
fermenting piles as soon as the temperature reached about 60° C. 
(140° F.). Indeed, if the temperature be allowed to rise much higher 
there would be a rapid decrease of oxidase, and all the improvements 
hoped for would come to a premature end.’ The relative amount of 
water in the fermenting piles or cases will also exert an influence. The 
peroxidase suffers less than the oxidase, but the former is probably of 
very much less importance than the latter in the sweating process. 
Investigations on this point will be carried on at some later time when 
occasion offers. 
TESTS FOR OXIDASE AND PEROXIDASE IN CURED AND FERMENTED 
TOBACCO. 
In regard to the tests for these enzyms it must be pointed out that 
from the absence of oxidase in a tested sample it does not necessarily 
follow that all of the leaves from the same curing barn would be 
‘A full account of the temperature changes in fermenting piles of cigar leaf tobacco 
is given in Report No. 60, U. S. Department of Agriculture, by Milton Whitney and 
Thomas H. Means. 
