Report of Society's Meetings. 291 
manual power now used for feeding mills. In India or 
the islands where the canes are brought in bullock carts 
it would be different, as a man could handle the canes 
from the cart dire6t into the machine. Everything else 
being equal, this tells seriously against our much vaunted 
water carriage. 
Mr. Owen Alexander in writing me from the U.S.. 
strongly recommends the cane chips being passed through 
a mill, when he thinks the extraction would possibly reach 
80 per cent., and if so it might be found more profitable to 
stop at this stage, and so utilize the spent chips as fuel 
and reduce the quantity of water of evaporation in carry- 
ing out the full diffusion process. Following up this 
recommendation, the chips were carefully fed through the 
mill with a ton and quarter on the hydraulic bearings, 
and while the chips came through like sawdust, strange 
to say they were quite damp, and it was observed that 
the run of juice was very small indeed, indicating about 
58 0/0 of the weight of the chips against 65 0/0 grinding 
canes. At first sight this was a puzzle, but on looking 
more closely into the operation it became manifest that 
the tight block of chips that were forced up against the 
peripheries of the top and back rollers left no space for 
the juice to escape, consequently when the chips came 
into conta6t with the final grip, the result was that the 
juice simply rolled along with the chips, being absorbed 
by them on the delivery side. 
This important behaviour of canes reduced to shavings 
in passing through a three-roller mill strengthens an 
opinion I have long held regarding the absorption of 
juice when a slow heavy feed is passed through one of 
our large mills, and of which I shall have something to 
00 2 
