Forty years ago the sugar-cane was drawn in a cart close to the single set of crushing rollers, flung on the ground, and then fed, stick by stick, through the rollers, emerging with less than half the juice extracted. The crushed sticks were taken out and spread on the ground in the open, until dry enough to be collected and brought to the furnaces for use as fuel. In the modern factory the cane arrives by tram or train, is mechanically placed on a long endless carrier, and passes, at the rate of twenty tons or more per hour, through several sets of rollers, the refuse, caught by strainers, returning to the rollers, while the megass, or exhausted fibre, goes direct to the furnaces. The old mill crushed enough cane during six months to make two or three hundred tons of sugar. The modern factory deals with sufficient to produce anything from six to ten thousand tons, and in some cases more. Steam has taken the place of fires at the boiling stations, and boiling _in vacuo_ has been as fully adopted in Queensland as in other parts of the sugar-producing world. In the old mill the _masse cuite_, the last stage of the product before the sugar is dried off, had to be dug out from tanks, men standing up to their knees in the sticky substance, and handling it in buckets. Now, the _masse cuite_ goes direct from the vacuum pans to the receivers, and thence into the centrifugals. There the molasses is separated, and the sugar is carried automatically to the bags standing on weighing machines only a few feet from the railway trucks which are waiting to take the product to the ship's hold. The old-style factory carried on its operations solely by day. The present-day factory is lit throughout with electric light, and works day and night (Sunday excepted) for five or six months, employing, according to its capacity, from 100 to 150 men. Around each factory has sprung up a small settlement of artisans, storekeepers, and others, while, under a statute passed by the Queensland Parliament, the employees are decently housed, fed, and assured of good sanitation, their mental, moral, and financial welfare being provided for by the institution of reading and recreation rooms, and the establishment of branches of the Government Savings Bank. Turning to the agricultural operations, similar evidence of the evolution of the industry is to be found. Time was when a visitor could stand on some slight eminence and look over vast areas of cane, the vista unbroken save for a few trees, or the plantation roads running like ribbons through a sea of waving green. Now the prospect discloses the homes of farmers standing out amongst the cane, with all the evidences of a closely settled and thriving population. The large gangs of labourers tending the cultivation have for the most part disappeared. Instead, the farmer and his sons, with possibly one or two labourers, work side by side in the fields.