TEE AGBIGULTUBAL JOURNAL. 



135 



The Characteristics of Demerara Sugar ; Seeding 

 Sugar Canes and Faulty Rum, 



AT a meeting of the West India Com- 

 mittee on January 24, 1901, Professor 

 J. B. Harrison, the Government Analyst 

 of Britisli Guiana, made some important 

 remarlvs on subjects relating to the in- 

 dustries of the West Indies. These are 

 reported in the Demerara "Argosy" for 

 February 23, 1!)01. In referring to a 

 prosecution at Tredegar, which he had at- 

 tended, when a grocer was fined for sell- 

 ing a sugar coloured with aniline dye as 

 Demerara sugar, he said that the analyst 

 for the defence admitted the presence of 

 aniline dye in the sugar, but thought 

 that Demerara sugars were commonly 

 dyed with aniline dyes, and that sugars 

 so dyed were in consequence known 

 by the trade as " Demerara " 

 sugar. Professor Harrison most care- 

 fully impressed on the bench that 

 the colour of the sugar was a minor point, 

 the value of true Demerara crystals being 

 dependent on the flavour and aroma, or 

 ''bouquet," retained by the sugar from 

 the cane juice from which it was made ; 

 the colour being used by the purchasers 

 merely as an indication of the sugars pos- 

 sessing these characteristics. 



Hopes have been entertained of im- 

 proving the sugar cane by growing seed- 

 lings, the result of cross fertilization. On 

 this subject Professor Harrison said tliat 

 when they were first successful in raising 

 seedlings of the sugar cane, he considered 

 that much of the success was due to 

 natural cross fertilization ; but that his 

 colleague, Mr. Jenman, doubted the 

 correctness of this view. They planted 

 panicles taken from an unopened arrow, 

 and succeeded in raising plants from 

 them, thus proving the " possibility of 

 self-fertilization taking place. A Java 

 investigator had previously come to the 

 conclusion that, mainly on account of the 

 marked tejidency to vai'iation which 

 characterises the seminal offspring of the 

 sugar cane, the method was not a practic- 

 able one, as it would, in the majority of 

 cases, be quite impossible to decide 

 a'hether the plants raised for seed were 

 true crosses or merely sports. Their pre- 

 sent stanciard varieties of canes appeared 



to be mongrels, with a remarkable ten- 

 dency to throw back in their seedlings 

 towards an unknown ancestry. 



The faultiness of rum has been as- 

 cribed by Mr. V. H. Veley and Mrs. 

 Vcley to a micro-organism capable of 

 living in a liquid containing over 70 per 

 cent, of alcohol (" Nature," Vol. 5G, p. 

 197, and Vol. 59, p. 339), but this is not 

 contirmed by the investigations of Pro- 

 fessor Harrison and Mr. Scard. They 

 found that the microbe was common in 

 tropical sugar factories and distilleries, 

 and could be obtained not only from the 

 bottoms of vats in which faulty rum had 

 been shipped, but also and far more 

 Jrequentiy Irom those which had con- 

 tained rum about which no allegations of 

 faultiness had been made ; and they not 

 only failed to produce faultiness in sound 

 rum by adding this organism, but also in 

 no instance were they able to get the 

 organism to grow, increase or multiply in 

 rum. They succeeded in growing the 

 organism in suitable sugar solutions, but 

 when they added rum in quantity to the 

 solutions containing the organisms in 

 active and apparently vigorous growth, it 

 proved fatal to them. Their investiga- 

 tions showed that, apart from defects in 

 the making of the rum, the main cause of 

 the complaint usually lay in the varying 

 nature of the staves used in making up 

 the packages. Eum from the same vat 

 had been shipped in casks made respec- 

 tively of relatively uncured and thor- 

 oughly cured staves, and on arrival 

 in England that from the packages 

 made of less cured staves had been con- 

 demned as faulty, whilst that shipped in 

 packages of cured wood was passed as 

 sound. But even in the case of appar- 

 ently thoroughly cured wood, when the 

 casks had been kept in bond in Demerara 

 for some weeks before shipment, instead 

 of being shipped soon after having been 

 filled, in some cases the rum was com- 

 ])lained of on arrival as being more or less 

 faulty. He urged the necessity of in- 

 vestigating each case of faultiness on its 

 own merits, and of not assigning all 

 cases to any one cause. 



