sugar is made, though the production is no
trifling matter as it stands.  France alone
consumes one hundred and fifty thousand tons
yearly, and the rest of the European countries
half as much more.  Still more might be made.
Mr. Freedley tells his readers a few secrets in
beetroot sugar-making, which he thinks they
ought to know: he is liberal of all sorts of
manufacturing secrets, allowing no close guilds
anywhere.  The white, or Silesian beet, he says, yields
the most saccharine matter—from two to ten
and a half per cent.—allowing a somewhat wide
margin for differences; the yellow beet comes
next, then the red, and, last of all, the common
field beet.  Count Chaptal says that, in his
manufactory, five tons of clean roots produced four
and a half hundredweight of coarse sugar,
which, in its turn, gave one hundred and sixty
pounds of double-refined, and sixty pounds of
inferior lump sugar.  The residue was in the
form of molasses, yielding a good spirit.  Achard,
the principal sugar manufacturer in Silesia, says
that from one ton of roots he gets one hundred
pounds of raw sugar, fifty-five pounds of refined,
and fifteen pounds of treacle.  Beetroot sugar
is like cane sugar in sweetness and nutritious
qualities, and even refines more easily.
Consumers do say that beetroot sugar would be
perfect, if it were only a little sweeter.

The manufacture of maple sugar offers
many advantages to the modern seeker after
money; and the extensive cultivation of the
sorghum, or Chinese sugar-cane, would give a
fortune to the cultivator. Dr. Sicard, of
Marseilles, has manufactured an excellent sugar
from the sorghum.  By grinding the seed, he
has obtained flour, of which he has made
delicious bread and chocolate.  Alcohol, too, he
has got in large quantities from the same plant;
as well as paper, gamboge, ginseng, and carbon,
and dyes, by which he has dyed silks, woollens,
and cottons in those delicate and varying shades
which have hitherto been found only in native
Chinese manufactures. The cultivation of the
sorghum would seem to promise a new race of
Monte Christos.

The world wants hemp: some among us think
that hemp should be a perpetual institution
among us: a universal order of the national
garter.  Mr. Freedley recommends the cultivation
of the New Zealand flax, a vegetable
described as three times as strong as the Agave
Americana, twice as strong as ordinary flax,
and stronger even than Russian hemp.  He does
not say that New Zealand flax is already
used in this country; but speaks of it as
a novelty.  A single three-inch leaf of the New
Zealand flax, split into strips, will, when
knotted together, form a flat green cord
fifty feet long, which no slight strain will break.
The natives use it for girths, halters, measuring-
tapes, boot-laces, and strings; and if a pig or
sheep has to be tied, a couple of leaves split, or
whole, form a cord as strong as fate and
vengeance.  It can also bear hackling out to an
almost inconceivable fineness; and altogether is
a most valuable member of the vegetable
fraternity, cheap to buy, easy to rear, and with
capabilities by no means reduced to their
ultimate.  The sisal hemp, which is the product
of the Agave Americana, is also very enticing to
the speculator.  It grows on the poorest kind of
land, even on barren, stony islands and waste
places, requires no kind of cultivation, and after
the fourth year will yield one thousand dollars
annually per acre. All that is needful to be done
is to drop the seed in ground, leave it to nature
and itself for the first four years, and after that
go in, cut, clean, and sell.  Money is to be made
by importing foreign growths, and raising them
on our home soils. Turkish flint-wheat is one
of those recommended as "a hardy, full variety,
with a dark-coloured chaff, a very heavy
beard, and a long, flinty, light-coloured berry."
It stands cold well; its beard saves it from
insects, and its flinty seed does not get mouldy
or weevily in the stack or bin. Other wheats
are recommended, of fabulous returns and ideal
plumpness and clearness of skin; and substitutes
for potatoes are urged on consumer and
producer; the Chinese yam and the saa-ga-ban, or
glycine apios, are specially introduced as chief
candidates for the place. The Chinese yam will
remain for some years under ground without
shooting, and uninjured by the frost; and the
saa-ga-ban, as the Macinac Indians call the
glycine apios, is even more nutritious than the
ordinary potato.  This last contains about
fourteen per cent. of starch to seventy-six per cent.
of water: the saa-ga-ban is reported to make
the numbers twenty-one per cent. of starch and
fifty per cent. of water.  The starch is very
white, and closely resembles that made from
arrowroot, and the tubes contain vegetable
albumen, gum, and sugar.  The prairie turnip,
in form and size like a hen's or goose's egg; the
wild bean, with its rich and pleasant flavour;
the earth-mouse (Lathyrus tuberosus), which
the French peasant will not cultivate because,
he says, it walks underground, and leaves one
field for another, but which, like an earth-mouse
in form and colour, and like an earth-chesnut in
flavour, is a very desirable acquaintance; the
Brazilian api; the tapioca, or bay rush, which
grows in the Bahamas group, in the form of a
large beet, from twelve to sixteen inches long,
and which makes excellent bread; the koomah
plant (Valeriana edulis); the kamas root
(Camassia esculenta), like preserved quince in
flavour; the seeds of the arancanian pine, of
the nut pine, and the Australian pine; and the
singhara, or water-nut, are all highly
recommended by Mr. Freedley to the notice of
producers, as substitutes for potatoes, or as garden
vegetables of excellent properties.

Grasses, again, offer means for the investment
of capital and the employment of industry
superior to many other more favourite speculations.
The wonderful flavour of the Philadelphia
spring butter has been proved to result from the
sweet-scented vernal grass, of which the cows are
immoderately fond.  Why not import the sweet-
scented vernal grass into English meadows?
Failing this, why not make it artificially? Its