Report of Society's Meetings. iqi 
Why should this not be obtained all round ? If we assume 77 instead 
of 70 per cent as the amount of juice obtainable from the canes, it 
brings up the loss through crushing of the colony crop of 130,000 tons, 
to the sum of $2,000,000, and this after deducting the cost of manufacture. 
Mr. Russell also joins issue with me on the question of double versus 
single crushing, and to illustrate his views he compares the cane to a 
bloom taken from the iron worker's furnace which requires shaping 
down. I do not think he could have chosen a more unfortunate illus- 
tration for himself. The iron-worker with his bloom must keep several 
definite results in view from the moment he takes his iron from the 
furnace ; he must work it not only to express all the slag and other 
impurities, but to arrange the fibres all in a proper direction, having in 
view all the time the shape which his bloom must assume in passing to 
the finished bar. With the cane we have only the idea, to crush the 
juice out of it, and Mr. Russell has failed to prove theoretically or 
practically, that this cannot be done as well at one operation as at two. 
At his own estate of La Bonne Intention, where double crushing and 
maceration has long been practised, and where perfection in crushing 
may be looked for if it is to be looked for anywhere, he manages to get 
the insignificant result of 66' 2$ per cent of the weight of the canes, 
while at the neighbouring estates of Success, Le Resowvenir and Vryheid's 
Lust, where only single crushing is practised, very much better results 
are obtained. I will not attempt anything like a review of the stagger- 
ing array of figures which Mr. Russell presents us with in his very 
valuable paper, but would like to say a word or two on the part of it 
which treats on the subjeft " Sugar cane as a fuel." This is a subject 
that must have occupied the minds of intelligent planters from a very 
early period, and year after year it has been forcing itself to the front. 
The present attempt of Mr. Russell to place the subject on a thoroughly 
scientific basis is worthy of all praise, and will, it is to be hoped, end in 
clearing away some of the mist and fallacies which surround it, and 
although the conclusions arrived at are not very different from those 
come to by some of us who have only used the rule of thumb mode of 
studying the connection between cause and effect, yet the experiments 
which for the most part have been most admirably conducted show the 
absurdity of the attempts which have lately been made to effeft a saving 
in fuel by burning wet megass rather than dry. 
I believe that on a former occasion Mr. Russell undertook to prove 
that water would not run up-hill, and although the demonstration cost 
