Report of Society's Meetings. 201 
show are altogether wrong ; to begin with, he does not make a correft 
comparison between the fuels ; a given weight of canes yields a certain 
percentage of green megass ; which when dried in a logie loses all its 
sugar, (I presume,) and a large quantity of water, reducing its weight 
to about one-half, so it is this lesser weight of logie megass that has to 
be compared with the original weight of green megass ; let us take Mr. 
Russell's examples thus : 
No. 1 Green. No. 2 Logie. 
Fibre .... 42-95 . . remains . . 42-95 . . or . . 8i'i4 per cent. 
Sugar .... 9'02 nil 
Water . . . 48-03 . reduced to . io'i8 . . or . . i8'86 per cent. 
100 53-13 100 
Here we see the 100 green megass is reduced to 53*13 in the logie, 
and the experiments conducted at " Leonora" show that 100 lbs. logie 
megass evaporated 156 lbs. feed water, that is, every 53-13 lbs. would 
only evaporate 82-87 lbs. against 114 lbs. by its equivalent 100 lbs. 
green megass. Mirabile dictu, an evaporation of 37 per cent, in favor 
of the green megass ! This to my mind is utterly preposterous, and 
compels me to be very sceptical as to the value of making such experi- 
ments ; we are further told, lib. of carbon in the green and logie 
megass evaporated 6'4 and 4-3 lbs. respectively ; now, I appeal to com- 
mon sense, how is it possible for a pound of carbon to do 49 per cent 
more work in one case than in the other ! From being in contact with an 
excess of water one would naturally expecl to find a decided inferiority, 
in this respeft, with the use of green megass, and my calculations, 
given in the lower portion of the table, show the logie megass as 
superior to the green by 16 per cent. 
In this table I have compared the resultants from " Leonora" cane, 
under different circumstances, in the same way as I treated the ideal 
cane. The first line gives the maximum possible fuel value of the fibre 
alone, and the last line the relative value of the megass from an expres- 
sion of 71-83 per cent., then we have the logie megass carrying i8"86 
per cent, water and a supposed example of green megass theoretically 
equivalent to the logie megass, which shows an expression of 82 per 
cent, is necessary for the production of a green megass equal in 
fuel value to logie megass. The practical question then comes in, 
at what lesser percentage of expression would it pay to burn the megass 
cc 
