238 
STATE AGRICULTUEAL SOCIETY. 
The manufacture of beet sugar, cane sugar, and any sugar 
extracted from a vegetable juice or sap containing saccharine 
matter, depends upon the following operations: 1st. The ex¬ 
traction of the sweet juice from the plant or part of the plant 
which contains it. 2d. This juice, which is never pure enough 
to produce good crystallized sugar, by simple evaporation, 
must be purified. 3d. The juice must then be concentrated, in 
order to allow crystallization to take place. 4th. It must then 
be crystallized. 5th. The crystals must then be purified. 6th. 
The sugar must then be refined. 
The following are the principal methods used in the manu¬ 
facture of beet sugar at the present time. 
The beet from which the juice is to be extracted must be 
first cut up. The beets are sometimes cooked previous to this 
operation, but the more common way is to use them raw. For 
this operation, cutters are used which cut the beets into rib¬ 
bons or slices, or the root is submitted to the action of a rasp, 
and a pulp of the proper degree of fineness obtained. The 
last method is the one generally used. 
The pul|) is then submitted to pressure^ an operation which 
is performed in various ways. The more common way is to 
put the pulp into sacks of a coarse woolen material, which are 
piled in layers upon a frame, each layer being separated by a 
plate of iron, perforated with holes, or by a grating of the 
same material, with narrow spaces between the bars. These 
sacks are submitted to pressure, which is done by an ordinary 
screw press, or by a hydraulic press, or by both. The sacks? 
after being used, are washed and soaked in a weak solution of 
tannin. 
The pressure,-no matter how effectively performed, fails to 
extract more than seventy-five or eighty per cent, of the juice. 
As the beet contains ninety-eight per cent, of water, sugar 
and soluble matter, and only two per cent, of residuum, there 
is a loss by this process of from eighteen to twenty per cent, 
of juice. To prevent this loss, the extraction of the juice by 
maceration, or the use of water instead of pressure, has been 
attempted. Various machines and processes have been used 
