SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 
Petrol is now sold in bulk at 2s. 11d. per gallon, so it would not be 
practicable to produce alcohol from wheat at 5s. 6d. per bushel to sell 
even at the same price as petrol; and, on account of its inferior thermal 
value, alcohol is worth considerably less than petrol for use in the regular 
engines, or any engine in sight. 
In the above figures no credit has been taken for the value of the 
different by-products of alcohol production from grain. If provision 
were made for the recovery of their full value, the cost of alcohol might 
be considerably reduced. In a great distillery in America which 1] 
visited, 16,500 bushels of maize are used daily for distillation. The first 
process is to extract the germ, from which an edible oil, worth almost as 
much as olive oil, is pressed, the yield being about 2 per cent. of the 
weight of*the maize. The maize is then crushed, mashed and fer- 
mented, and distilled, and the spent wash treated in filter -presses to 
extract the solid portion. The liquid from the filter press is treated in 
special type evaporators, and so reduced to a treacly fluid. This is 
mixed with the solid residue from the filter presses, and further dried. 
The resulting product somewhat resembles crushed oats in appearance, 
and is used as a cattle food, selling at a somewhat higher price per ton 
than the maize from which it is derived. The residual oileake from the 
expression of the oil is also worth more per ton than the maize. In 
this establishment, in an immense shed, 10,000 cattle were being fat- 
tened, the main food being the liquid residue from the stills, with some 
hay. The fusel oil also is a source of considerable revenue. 
From potatoes there is little prospect of alcohol being economically 
produced here, as the average market price, over a séries of normal 
years, will show. This price was, for the five years ending 1915, 85s. 
- per ton, at which price the cost of alcohol, for potatoes alone, would be 
3s. per gallon. Of course, the selling price of the farms is much lower, 
but tiot sufficiently so to make potatoes a practicable raw material for the 
manufacture. It is well known that in Germany, the great alcohol- 
producing country of the world, potatoes are practically the only raw 
material used, but they were sold there at about 20s. to 27s. per ton 
before the war, the growers receiving a considerable subsidy from the 
Government, this subsidy being provided from the duty collected on 
alcohol. When our farmers are prepared to let us have potatoes at that 
price, the cheap alcohol problem will be pretty well solved, as the raw 
material cost would then be 8d. to 10d. per gallon. Besides this low 
cost, the refuse from the stills is used for the stall feeding of cattle, 
which, in Germany, are stalled in winter, and the distillation of the 
tubers is carried on during that season. 
The special attention of our agriculturists is directed to the fact that 
in Germany and England statistics show that the average yield of 
potatoes is in excess of 200 bushels per acre, and the starch contents 
22 per cent. Our statistics give the yield at 108 bushels, and the starch 
is said to be only 16 per cent. Attention might also be given to the 
potato planting and digging machines in use in the United States of 
America. I was informed by the Department of Agriculture in Wash- 
ington that one of those digging machines will dig a load of potatoes in | 
twenty minutes, and harvest 4 to 6 acres a day, the picking up being 
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