Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 March 1887 — Sugar Among the Ancients. [ARTICLE]

Sugar Among the Ancients.

It seems almost impossible to imagine life without sugar, so absolutely essential is its use to the comfort of living. There is no mention of sugar among the ancient Greeks and Romans, althogli sugar or “sweet” cane was made known by the conquests of Alexander the Great, whose Admiral, Nearchus, found it in the East Indies. It is mentioned as a remedial agent a few' years before the birth of Christ—“a honey called saccharon, having the appearance of salt.” It is known, also, that Galen often prescribed it as a medicine. The juice of the sugar-cane was used by some of the Oriential nations as an intoxicating drink. The Arabians used sugar in large quantities, and it is related that at the marriage of Caliph Maskadi Benrittale 80,01)0 pounds of the sugar were required to prepare the comfitures and ornamental sweets for the wedding banquet at Bagdad. Sugar was introduced into Europe by the crusaders. In 1166 the King of Sicily gave the monks of St. Benedict’s cloister a mill for expressing the juice from the cane and granted them the right of manufacture and sent them skilled workmen. In Germany, even as late as the seventeenth century sugar was so costly that only the wealthiest families could afford to use it. In 1745 Marggraf, a celebrated chemist, read a paper before the Berlin Academy of Sciences concerning the juices of certain native plants, especially the beet, in which was a substance identical with cane sugar. He showed by samples of his own preparation that the manufacture of sugar from the beet was not only possible but profitable. The chemist’s colleagues, however, laughed the project to scorn, saying that sugar wa3 never produced from beets, and it came to naught. When Marggraf died, in 1788, it seemed as if Ins discovery would die with him. A chard, his pupil, at the close of the century, being director of the academy, found the treatise of his master and determined to establish a manufactory in Silesia for the production of beet-root sugar. In spite of the ener gy of the chemist and the assistance of the crown, the project was not succes - ful, although the suganwas perfectly satisfactory. It was nft until 1> 41, near v one hundred years after Marggrat’s first essay, that the production of beet sugar was an accomfilished fact. At the present time beet sugar is the sugar of Europe. It is scarcely distinguishable from tlie cane sugar. It s perhaps less brilliantly crystalline, and is by many thought to be sweeter than its Indian rival. —New York Commercial Advertiser.