524 
The Extraction of Sugar from the [September, 
owing to their absence it would not ferment. The inorganic 
impurities also act injuriously, as they prevent a certain 
amount of sugar from crystallising out ; and the larger the 
quantity of these impurities, the larger the quantity of the 
sugar kept in solution. 
The kind of vegetable impurities present in the juice of 
the beet are not only more detrimental in the manufacture 
of the sugar than those existing in the cane by reason of 
their greater quantity, but they are also more detrimental by 
reason of their quality ; for if the same simple and imperfect 
purification were adopted for purifying the juice of the beet 
as has been employed for purifying the juice of the cane, the 
sugar produced would be unsaleable except for refining pur- 
poses, and even for these purposes it would command, com- 
paratively with cane sugar, but a small price ; and the 
relative quantities of sugar capable of being obtained by this 
mode of clarifying the juice would be very much less in the 
case of the beet than would be obtainable from the juice of 
the cane, and, further, the molasses from the beet-juice 
would be unsaleable, except for the purpose of being manu- 
factured by the process of fermentation into raw spirit. 
And the advantages rest with the cane with respedt to the 
quantities of the vegetable impurities ; for although I am 
not going to advocate or recommend the purification of cane- 
juice by means of charcoal, as I believe it can be purified 
more perfectly by a much cheaper and more speedy method ; 
nevertheless if the juice of the cane and that of the beet 
were purified by charcoal under the same conditions, a much 
larger quantity would not only be required to purify a quan- 
tity of beet-juice containing, say, ioo tons of sugar, than it 
would to purify to an equal extent a quantity of cane-juice 
containing the same amount of sugar, but the charcoal em- 
ployed in purifying the beet-juice would also become much 
sooner exhausted than it would in purifying the juice of the 
cane, because the animal charcoal would become sooner 
coated with vegetable carbon in the former than in the latter 
case, and, as is well known, vegetable charcoal is very 
inferior, in decolorising and in other absorbing powers, to 
animal charcoal. 
It appears almost an opprobrium to chemical science that 
no manufacturing process for perfectly, speedily, and cheaply 
removing the o‘20 per cent of vegetable impurities in the 
cane-juice has been discovered, as the result would be so 
important, viz., white sugar direct from the juice, with an 
increase at least of 50 per cent in the quantity of sugar 
obtained from a given quantity of juice. 
