BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 93 
As is well known to chemists, Proust in Spain studied the ques- 
tion of making sugar from grape juice with the view of checking 
the waste of large quantities of grapes that could not be made 
into wine in that country. He obtained a coarse, solid sugar, 
but found that the cost of getting it was at that time larger than 
the cost of importing cane sugar from the colonies. During the 
Napoleonic wars the process was taken up seriously under Par- 
mentier’s * guidance, and put to practical use. For a time it was 
encouraged so strongly by the French government that consid- 
erable quantities of thick syrup thus prepared were actually dis- 
posed of in commerce. 
After the foregoing article had been written out, as here printed, 
we noticed in the Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon 
General’s Office in Washington (volume 8, page 559, column 1), 
that a Japanese physician had published a paper on the same sub- 
ject, in his native language. ‘Through the courtesy of the library 
custodians at Washington and at Cambridge we have had oppor- 
tunity to see the paper in question and to have it translated, as 
set forth on the next page. 
Still later, after the types of this article had actually been set 
up, one of us happened to stumble upon a reference to a paper by 
Wiley and McElroy, entitled ‘‘ Midzu Ame, or Japanese Glucose, 
which was read at a meeting of the Washington Chemical Society 
on January 14, 1892, and published in February, 1892, in the 
journal, now gone out of existence, called ‘‘Agricultural Science,” 
volume 6, No. 2, pp. 57-62. Had we known betimes of this 
work our own paper would have been written on somewhat differ- 
ent lines. We would have refrained, for example, from present- 
ing the unnecessary repetition of the technical description of the 
Japanese processes of manufacture. But in the main our own 
point of view has been widely different from that of the authors 
now in question. The reader will have noticed that the chief 
purpose of our essay has been to call attention to a remarkable 
invention, which deserves to be classed in the list of oriental dis- 
coveries together with such items as the art of printing and the 
mariners compass, and particularly with chemical inventions, such 
* Annales de Chimie, 1811, 80. 313, and 1813, 88, 104. 
