a story that the Chinese Emperor,
Tai Tsung (627-650 A.D.) sent people to Behar, in India, to learn the art
of sugar manufacture. The Arabs and the Egyptians soon learned how to
purify sugar by re-crystallization, and to manufacture sweetmeats from the
purified sugar. Marco Polo, who visited China during the last quarter of
the 13th Century, refers to "a great many sugar factories in South China,
where sugar could be freely bought at low prices." The Mohammedan records
of that period also show the manufacture, in India, of crystallized sugar
and candy. The area of production at that time covered, generally, the
entire Mediterranean coast. The crusaders found extensive plantations in
Tripoli, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Syria, and elsewhere. The plant is said to
have been introduced in Spain as early as the year 755. Its cultivation is
said to have been a flourishing industry there in the year 1150. Through
China, it was early extended to Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines. The
records of the 14th Century show the production and distribution of sugar
as an important commercial enterprise in the Mediterranean region. The
Portuguese discoveries of the 15th Century carried the plant to the Azores,
the Cape Verde islands, and to possessions in the Gulf of Guinea. The
Spaniards took it to the Western Hemisphere in the early years of the 16th
Century. The Portuguese took it to Brazil at about the same time. While a
Chinese traveller, visiting Java in 424, reports the cultivation of sugar
cane, it was not until more than twelve hundred years later that the
island, now an important source of sugar supply, began the production of
sugar as a commercial enterprise. By the end of the 18th Century there
was what might be called a sugar belt, girdling the globe and extending,
roughly, from thirty-five degrees north of the equator to thirty-five
degrees south of that line. It was then a product of many of the countries
within those limits. The supply of that time was obtained entirely from
cane.

The early years of the 19th Century brought a new experience in the sugar
business. That was the production of sugar, in commercial quantities,
from beets. From that time until now, the commodity has been a political
shuttlecock, the object of government bounties and the subject of taxation.
In 1747, Herr Marggraf, of the Academy of Sciences, in Berlin, discovered
the existence of crystallizable sugar in the juice of the beet and other
roots. No p