July, 1911.] 



39 



Edible Products, 



thumb, is generally known by all 

 persons in this state who are interested 

 in the growing of cane and its conver- 

 sion into marketable sugar, and most 

 fully known and emphatically appre- 

 ciated by the most of those experts who 

 were not permitted to continue their 

 work under the guidance of their own 

 unhampered resourcefulness. 



Chemistry promptly stopped the ex- 

 cess of sulphuration which bleached the 

 cane juices to the degree desired for the 

 manufacture of fancy grades of sugar, 

 in which it demonstrated that quality 

 was gained at too great a sacrifice of 

 quantity. It increased the liming of 

 cane-juices almost to or entirely up to 

 the point of acid-neutralization tinting 

 the formerly clear and colourless clari- 

 fied juice with a touch of straw colour, 

 and darkening it progressively and 

 steadily in concentration and ultimate 

 concreting into massecuite. until its 

 dried product bore the dull gray colour 

 due to alkalinity, and its final molasses 

 was made to figure commercially as 

 black-strap. 



The surviving experts of that epoch of 

 the rule of thumb in our local sugar 

 industry mostly charge that the modern 

 deterioration in the grades of the major 

 portion of our Louisiana sugar crops is 

 due to that struggle for quantity at the 

 cost of quality ; thus reversing the 

 charge made against them by chemists 

 that their excellence of quality was 

 gained at the wasteful sacrifice of 

 quantity. 



To an experienced observer both those 

 charges and counter-charges were and 

 are based on reasonable grounds. Had 

 the former sugar-making experts been 

 more familiar with chemistry, and its 

 actions and reactions, probably they 

 would have done much better in their 

 particular line of business. Perhaps if 

 the modern chemical managers who have 

 supplanted them in the control of the 

 operations of our central factories would 

 cultivate and acquire, more of that in- 

 comprehensible seventh sense founded 

 on practical experience which our out- 

 of-date sugar making experts appeared 

 to possess, it would be to the marked 

 advantage of general chemical control 

 of the sugar factories. 



Whatever be the case and condition it 

 is a fixed and incontrovertible fact that 

 the certainty of chemical principles is 

 more to be depended on than the vari- 

 ations of human judgment. Those prin- 

 ciples are guided and governed by the 

 immutable laws of natural physics, as 

 fixed and unchangeable as the grand 

 universal law of gravitation which 

 guides the movement of every known 



solar and planetary system ; while erra- 

 tic human judgment might be just not 

 sufficiently erratic to be governed by 

 the laws of a lunatic asylum. 



With this known certainty and reli- 

 ability of chemistry and its principles, it 

 is up to chemistry in a mechauical art in 

 which it plays so important a part to do 

 far better than the mere guesswork of 

 human ignorance and unlearned human 

 judgment. That is it is up to it under 

 erudite and intelligent direction. If a 

 plantation darkey could guess how much 

 sulphur and lime to use on the express- 

 ed product of a ton of cane and make a 

 quality of sugar which levee-buyers 

 would scrap over to purchase, but do it 

 at the cost of quantity of product, 

 then chemistry or chemical control 

 of the same sugar manufacture 

 should surely be able to achieve the 

 first desirable result, and at the same 

 time remedy the evil which made cr 

 makes such rule-of-thumb work sacri- 

 ficial. 



That chemical control since its instal" 

 lation has very largely increased the 

 average yield per ton of cane in our 

 Louisiana sugar factories goes without 

 saying. The writer of this article remem- 

 bers the time about twenty-five years 

 since that when an able chemist who had 

 charge of one of our Louisiana sugar 

 houses claimed to have obtained 150 

 pounds of sugar per ton from a cane 

 crop whose manufacture he had superin- 

 tended, he was considered by many of 

 our leading planters as being very 

 largely lacking in veracity. A year or 

 two later Mr. Thompson's noted Calu- 

 met plantation pulled the sugar yield 

 from an entire crop to about 200 pounds 

 per ton of cane. And to-day the factory 

 that does not get more than 150 pounds 

 of sugar per ton of cane ground is 

 deemed out of the running and doomed 

 to ultimate failure. 



Chemical control has done wonders in 

 increasing our sugar yields beyond the 

 utmost aspirations of the experts who 

 strove after quantity in their departed 

 epoch; Now it is promising to give us 

 generally a co-equal gain in quality, 

 which as an exact science it should be 

 able to do better than the inexact direc- 

 tion it generally supplanted two or three 

 decades since. 



