GRAMINEÆ.
SACCHARUM.
Sugar, Cane-Sugar, Sucrose; F. Sucre, Sucre de canne; G. Zucker, Rohrzucker.
Botanical Origin—Saccharum officinarum L., the Sugar Cane. The jointed stem is from 6 to 12 feet high, solid, hard, dense, internally juicy, and hollow only in the flowering tops. Several varieties are cultivated, as the Country Cane, the original form of the species; the Ribbon Cane, with purple or yellow stripes along the stem; the Bourbon or Tahiti Cane, a more elongated, stronger, more hairy and very productive variety. Saccharum violaceum Tussac, the Batavian Cane, is also considered to be a variety; but the large S. chinense Roxb. introduced from Canton in 1796 into the Botanic Gardens of Calcutta, may be a distinct species; it has a long, slender, erect panicle, while that of S. officinarum is hairy and spreading, with the ramifications alternate and more compound, not to mention other differences in the leaves and flowers.
The sugar cane is cultivated from cuttings, the small seeds very seldom ripening. It succeeds in almost all tropical and subtropical countries, reaching in South America and Mexico an elevation above the sea of 5000-6000 feet. It is cultivated in most parts of India and China up to 30-31° N. lat, the mountainous regions excepted.
From the elaborate investigations of Ritter,[2660] it appears that Saccharum officinarum was originally a native of Bengal, and of the Indo-Chinese countries, as well as of Borneo, Java, Bali, Celebes, and other islands of the Malay Archipelago. But there is no evidence that it is now found any where in a wild state.
History[2661]—The sugar cane was doubtless known in India from time immemorial, and grown for food as it still is at the present day, chiefly in those regions which are unsuited for the manufacture of sugar.[2662]
Herodotus, Theophrastus, Seneca, Strabo, and other early writers had some knowledge of raw sugar, which they speak of as the Honey of Canes or Honey made by human hands, not that of bees; but it was not until the commencement of the Christian era, that the ancients manifested an undoubted acquaintance with sugar, under the name of Saccharon.
Thus Dioscorides[2663] about a.d. 77 mentions the concreted honey called Σάκχαρον found upon canes (ὲπὶ τῶν καλάμων) in India and Arabia Felix, and which in substance and brittleness resemble salt. Pliny evidently knew the same thing under the name Saccharum; and the author of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a.d. 54-68, states that honey from canes, called σάκχαρι, is exported from Barygaza, in the Gulf of Cambay, to the ports of the Red Sea, west of the Promontorium Aromatum, that is to say to the coast opposite Aden. Whether at that period sugar was produced in Western India, or was brought thither from the Ganges, is a point still doubtful.
Bengal is probably the country of the earliest manufacture of sugar; hence its names in all the languages of Western-Asiatic and European nations are derived from the Sanskrit Sharkarā, signifying a substance in the shape of small grains or stones. It is strange that this word contains no allusion to the taste of the substance.