Questions.—What things are made from sap? Mention some things very different from each other that are made from the same sap. Give the comparison about brick and cloth. What is said about the orange? What about the sugar-cane? How is sugar made from the sugar-cane? Of what use is the boiling? Tell how one way of purifying sugar was discovered. What does this discovery show?
CHAPTER XXX.
MORE ABOUT WHAT IS MADE FROM SAP.
Maple-sugar.
You have eaten maple-sugar. This comes from a tree called the sugar-maple. The sugar is in the sap, just as it is in the case of the sugar-cane. The sap is obtained early in the spring by tapping the trees, and then it is boiled down, as it is called. In this boiling the water goes off in steam and the sugar remains. The sugar-maple, then, is a sugar-factory as well as the sugar-cane.
There are many roots in which there is sugar. Sugar has often been obtained from a kind of beet called the sugar-beet. There is sugar in many fruits, making them sweet to the taste.
The sugar-cane.
Now where does the sugar in the sugar-cane, the maple, the beet, etc., come from? The sap in which the sugar is comes up from the roots. You will say, then, that the little mouths in the roots suck up sugar from the ground. But there is no sugar in the ground. No one ever found any there. Take up a handful of earth, smell of it, and taste of it. There is no sweetness in it.
Some plants sugar-factories.
Though there is no sugar in the ground, what the sugar is made from is there. This the little mouths in the root drink up, and it is made into sugar in the plant. You see, then, how true it is that the plant is a sugar-factory.