Rensselaer Union, Volume 3, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 March 1871 — A Lump of Brown Sugar. [ARTICLE]

A Lump of Brown Sugar.

Do you ever eat brown sugar because it is cheaper ?” If you do, buy a microscope and examine a lump of the next you take home. “Astonishment” will be hardly the word to express the feelings you will have at then result. Lest you may not get the microscope, allow us to describe wluit you will see. Under a,‘powcrful glass there will be seen myriads of horrible monsters as large as beetles, and having the appearance of crabs. Four dreadful legs, with claw-pincers at the ends of them, jointed in four parts as with armor and bristling with sharp-pointed spears, are in front of the monster, and his head has a long pyr amidal form in two 1 joints, with five fingertips at the terminus where the mouth should be. Tliq body is oval-shaped, and marked almost exactly like that of a crab, only upon the rims of an inner circle upon the back there are twelve more of those long, sharp spears, with two at the tail, and four snake-like tenacula, exceedingly fine in the articulation, and no doupt intended, like puss’s whiskers, to be feelers, to warn it of danger. The reverse side shows the'ugliness of the beast even more than the obverse, but it also shows the wonderful mechanical genius of the maker of it Each limb is padded with a mass of muscles at the base of it, which gives the impression of immense power, and over tlje muscle there is a case of armor through which it shows. These creatures are eager restive, and ravenous; always falling foul of each other, or attacking great clumps of .sugar, as large in reality as a mathematical point- With the pincers attached to the end of each proboscis they take hold of and tear each other, repeating in there small way the enormous tragedies of Tennyson’s primal monsters. A spoonful of this raw, coarse sugar was dissolved in about three times its quantity of water, when, as with a conjuror’s rod, animalcules sprang to the surface and floated there, swimming ab ut, and up and down, like the beasts that wriggle in soft water tubs, and finally turn into musquitoes. They can be seen with the naked eye, but not in their entire hideousness. It has been proved that in every pound of unrefined raw sugar there are a hundred thousand of these acari.— Bee Keeper’s Journal. John V. Farwell * Co.’s new mammoth Dry Goods Store, at 106, 108, 110 and 112 AVabash avenue, daily swarms with customers, like a vast beehive. Their elevators, with a third more working power than those of any house in Chicago, are run all day, to their full capacity.