Pharmacographia : a history of the principal drugs of vegetable origin, met with in Great Britain and British India / by Friedrich A. Flückiger and Daniel Hanbury.

Friedrich August Flückiger

Date:: 1874

Credit: Pharmacographia : a history of the principal drugs of vegetable origin, met with in Great Britain and British India / by Friedrich A. Flückiger and Daniel Hanbury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

682/736 page 656

$])e Vry1 has advocated the manufacture of sugar from the palm as the most philosophical, seeing that its juice is a nearly pure aqueous solution ot sugar: that as no mineral constituents are removed from the soil in this juice, the costly manuring, as well as the laborious and destructive processes required to eliminate the juice from such plants as J the sugar cane and beet root, are avoided. And finally, that palms are j perennial, and can many of them be cultivated on a soil unsuitable for : any cereal. Maple—In America, considerable quantities of sugar identical with ■ that of the cane, are obtained in the woods of the Northern United States and of Canada, by evaporating the juice of maples. The species chiefly employed are Acer saccharinvm Wang., the Common Sugar Maple] and its variety (var. nigrum) the Black Sugar Maple. A. PcnnsylvanicurrA L., A. Ncgundo L. (Fegundo aceraides Moench.) and A. dasycarpum Ehrli. are also used ; the sap of the last is said to be the least saccharine. As the juice of these trees yields not more than about 2 per cent, of sugar, it requires for its solidification a large expenditure of fuel. The \ manufacture of maple sugar can therefore be advantageously carried on ■ only in countries remote from markets whence ordinary sugar can be procured, or in regions where fuel is extremely plentiful. In Northl America, it flourishes only between 40° and 43° N. lat. We are not aware of any estimate of the total production of maple sugar. The ■ Census of Pennsylvania of 1870, gave the following figures as referring to its manufacture in that State:— 1 t s h a jl < ti ft I ea: te Sv 1850 1860 1870 2,326,525 It. 2,768,965 ft. 1,545,917 ft.2 Sorghum—Another plant of the same order as Saccharum, is Sorghum saccharatum Pers. (Holcus saccharatus L.) a native of Northern China,3 which has of late been much tried as a sugar-yielding plant both in Europe and North America; yet without any great success, as the purification of the sugar is accomplished with peculiar difficulty! As in the sugar cane, there are in sorghum, crystallizable and uncrystal- lizable sugars, the former being at its maximum amount when the grain reaches maturity. The importance of the plant however, is rapidly increasing on account of the value of its leaves and grain, as food for horses and cattle, and of its stems which can be employed in the manu- facture of paper and of alcohol. Commerce—The value of the sugar imported into the United Kingdom is constantly increasing, as shown by the following figures 1868 1870 1872 Unrefined . . £13,339,758 £14,440,502 £18,044,898 Refined . . . £1,156,188 £2,744,366 £3,142,703 The quantity of Unrefined Sugar imported in 1872, was 13,776,6961 cwt., of which about 3,000,000 cwt. were furnished by the Spanish West India Islands, 2,700,000 cwt. by the British West India Islands, 1,800,000 cwt. by Brazil, 1,100,000 cwt. by Prance, and 960,000 cwt. by Mauritius. . Hi; SiV otl 1 Journ. de Pliarm. i. (1865) 270. 2 Consul Kortright, in Consular Reports presented to Parliament, July 1872. p. 988. ■Introduced into Europe in 1850, by M. dc Montigny, French Consul at Shanghai. —Sicard, Monographic dc la Canne a sucT& dc la Chine, elite Sorgho-a-sucre, Marseille, 1856 ; Joulie, Journ. dc Pliarm. i. (1S6»B| 188.$