Am'ji ner'i9ih5arm' }     Commercial  Glucose  and  its  Uses.  271 
What  is  commercial  glucose  ?  In  general  appearance  it  is  a  trans- 
parent, very  viscous  syrup,  often  practically  colorless,  but  usually 
of  a  light  straw  color,  sweet,  but  with  little  if  any  other  flavor.  For 
this  reason,  glucose,  like  sugar,  has  been  termed  a  "  neutral  sweet  " 
— not  neutral  in  the  chemical  sense — although  such  products  are  al- 
ways chemically  neutral  within  practical  limits  of  testing — but  so 
called  because  when  pure  they  have  no  characteristic  flavor  other 
than  sweet  and  will  take  any  added  flavor  unchanged. 
Glucose  is  not  made  by  use  of  oil  of  vitriol  and  chalk,  nor  is 
glucose,  in  the  ordinarily  accepted  sense  of  dextrose,  its  characteristic 
ingredient.  The  trade  name  "  glucose,"  while  well  established  by 
custom  of  years,  is  no  more  suited  to  the  present  product  than  is 
"  chloride  of  lime  "  to  bleaching  powder  or  "  hyposulphite  of  soda  " 
to  the  commercial  salt  sold  under  that  name.  It  is  true  that  the  basic 
process  by  which  glucose  is  made  from  starch  is  on  the  lines  of  Kir- 
choff's  original  experiments,  but  the  methods  are  quite  different.  The 
"  starch  milk,"  a  suspension  of  the  granules  in  water,  is  pumped  into 
large  pressure  boilers  of  gun  metal,  and  is  cooked  for  about  ten 
minutes  with  a  few  tenths  of  a  per  cent,  of  hydrochloric  acid  (com- 
mercial muriatic  acid)  under  a  pressure  of  about  50  pounds  of 
steam.  The  starch  is  not  treated  long  enough  by  this  process  to  con- 
vert it  entirely  into  "grape-sugar  (true  glucose),  only  about  20  per 
cent,  being  produced.  There  is,  in  fact,  less  of  the  glucose  sugars, 
properly  so  called,  in  commercial  glucose  than  occur  as  natural  in- 
gredients of  cane-sugar  molasses,  and  far  less  than  in  honey,  which 
is  composed  almost  entirely  of  glucose  sugars,  nearly  half  of  which  is 
dextrose  (grape-sugar),  this  being  the  sugar  which  separates  out 
when  the  honey  granulates. 
Commercial  glucose  as  now  made  contains  less  than  20  per  cent, 
of  true  glucose  sugars,  the  rest  being  a  mixture  of  malt-sugar  (mal- 
tose) and  dextrins,  more  or  less  in  chemical  combination  in  the  ap- 
proximate proportion  of  nine  parts  of  maltose  to  seven  of  dextrin. 
In  percentages,  of  total  sugars  and  dextrins,  there  are,  in  round 
numbers :  maltose,  45  per  cent.,  dextrose,  20  per  cent.,  dextrin,  35 
per  cent.,  the  proportions  varying  somewhat  in  different  lots. 
These  three  carbohydrates,  dextrose,  which  is  a  true  glucose 
sugar,  maltose,  belonging  to  the  cane-sugar  family,  and  making 
up  nearly  half  of  the  total,  and  dextrin,  a  gummy  ("  colloidal  ")  sub- 
stance closely  related  to  starch  paste,  compose  over  99  per  cent,  of 
the  solid  matter  of  refined  commercial  glucose.    This  composition 
