No. 5.— 1850.] 



SUGAR MANUFACTURE. 



231 



ON THE SAP OF THE COCOANUT 

 TREE, AND ITS MANUFACTURE INTO SUGAR. 

 By W. S. Taylor, Esq. 

 {Read February 9, 1850.) 



At a time when there are complaints made of decreased 

 production of sugar in our West Indian Colonies, of the 

 failure of cane planting in the Madras Presidency, and of 

 the ill success which has attended some speculations of a 

 like nature in this colony, — when the futility of the means 

 adopted by the English for the abolition of slavery has been 

 gravely announced, whereby the sugar growers of Cuba and 

 Brazil are likely to acquire too great a predominance in the 

 market, and well nigh a monopoly of the article,-— it will 

 prove encouraging to many who are interested in the general 

 welfare and prosperity of Ceylon to hear that its far famed 

 cocoanut palms are calculated to yield a large amount of 

 excellent sugar, the manufacture of which it is to be hoped 

 we shall ere long see established. Wben, too, it is con- 

 sidered what thousands of tons of sugar must be destroyed 

 by the distillation of the sweet sap of this palm into alcohol, 

 and the moral pestilence which this baneful liquor occasions, 

 it must be ardently desired by every philanthropic mind 

 that the sap, if taken at all, should be converted into a 

 blessing in the form of sugar, instead of being perverted 

 into a curse in the shape of arrack. By this means we 

 should be entering the list against vice, and not only the 

 vice of intemperance and its concomitant evils of crime and 

 suffering, but we should also be active rivals of the 



