which, in the absence of proper stimulus to
industry and improvement, have led to an improvident system of
cultivation, and to a blind and ignorant adherence to wasteful methods
of manufacture.

The cane is believed to contain from 90 to 95 per cent. of its own
weight of saccharine juice; and yet (as Mr. Fownes, a Professor of
Practical Chemistry in University College, London, informs us, in an
excellent paper "On the Manufacture of Sugar in Barbados,"[17] from
which much of what follows has been borrowed) owing to the defective
construction of the mills, hardly so much as 50 per cent. is obtained,
although he believes it practicable, by an improvement in the mills,
to obtain from 70 to 75 per cent.; and of the remaining 10 or 15 per
cent. which he regards it as impossible to extract, much, if not the
whole, might, I conceive, be obtained, by macerating the pressed canes
or megass, as it issues from the mill, and repassing it through the
rollers; and, be it remembered, that from 40 to 45 per cent. of
saccharine juice is nearly, if not altogether, equivalent to a similar
per centage of sugar; so that by these initiatory improvements alone,
and with little additional trouble, the produce of sugar might be
nearly doubled from any given quantity of canes.

From the action of lime-water when added in a slight excess to the
cane juice or raw liquor, as it is vernacularly termed, immediately on
issuing from the mill, as well as from the effect produced by ammonia
or potash, this liquid appears to contain a considerable quantity of
cane sugar, mixed with much glucose, or that saccharine matter which
is found in fruits; gum or dextrine, phosphates, and probably malates
of lime and magnesia, with sulphates and chlorides, potash and soda,
and a peculiar azotised matter, allied to albumen, which forms an
insoluble compound with lime, is not coagulable by heat or acids, and
runs readily into putrefactive fermentation.

To free it from these constituents, and enable it to yield pure and
crystallisable sugar, the liquor, on entering the boiling-house, is
received into the first of three clarifiers, of the capacity of from
three hundred to a thousand gallons each. Here it is subjected to the
action of lime-water, which checks the tendency to fermentation, and
neutralises any free acid which it may contain. "The common defection
process," says Mr. Fownes, "in careful hands, seems susceptible of
little improvement. Many other substanc