64 
THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
of trees as the date palm and sugar maple; in almost all 
sweet fruits and in the nectar of flowers; but only in a few 
of these is the proportion of cane sugar large enough to make 
profitable its separation from the other substances which these 
juices hold in solution. 
The manufacture of sugar as at present known is an 
art that has developed from crude beginnings. Sugar is a 
staple article of food, just as is bread or meat, but few people 
realize that unlike meat and bread it has been a staple food 
for but a few generations. Only indeed in the last half 
century has it been produced in such quantities and at such a 
price as to bring it within the reach of all classes of people. 
Sugar from the sugar cane was probably known in China 
2,000 years before it was used in Europe. When merchants 
began to trade in the Indies it was brought westward with 
spices and perfumes and other rare and costly merchandise 
and it was used for a long time exclusively in the preparation 
of medicines. An old saying to express the loss of some 
thing every essential was ''Like an apothecary without sugar." 
Greek physicians several centuries before the Christian era 
speak of sugar under the name of 'Tndian salt." It was called 
"honey made from reeds" and said to be ''like gum, white 
and brittle." Not until the middle ages did Europeans have 
any clear idea of its origin. It was confounded with manna 
or Avas thought to exude from the stem of a plant where it 
dried into a kind of gum. 
The sugar consumed in this and other countries up to 
1850 was nearly all derived from the sugar cane, but at the 
present time two-thirds of the sugar crop is from the sugar 
beet. It would once have seemed incredible that the kitchen 
garden should furnish a rival for the "noble plant" that had 
made the fortunes of Spanish and English colonists, but the 
cultivation of the beet has in one generation shifted the 
center of the sugar industry from the tropic to the temperate 
