_Olivier de Serres_] [Illustration: DAN SWEENEY _Andreas Marggraf_] The original home of the sugar beet (_Beta vulgaris_) is not definitely known. The plant was found in a wild state in southern and middle Asia and it is said to have been cultivated in southern Europe and northern Africa in olden times. According to Professor Griffin,[19] Herodotus mentions the sugar beet as one of the plants that served to nourish the builders of the pyramids. Dr. von Lippmann cites the same instance and also quotes Voltz as authority for the statement that the Romans first brought the beet into Gaul. When the beet was originally grown in southern latitudes it was an annual, but when it was taken north it became a biennial, storing sugar the first year and not developing its seed until the second. Jules Hélot, an eminent French authority, in his “Histoire Centennale du Sucre de Betterave,” says: “A great French agronomist, called the father of agriculture, Olivier de Serres (1539-1619), was able to find out that the beet-root contained sugar, long before Marggraf set about to extract sugar from this root. Olivier de Serres wrote: ‘The beet-root, when being boiled, yields a juice similar to syrup of sugar, which is beautiful to look at on account of its vermilion color’.” Dr. von Lippmann, however, contends that Olivier de Serres never claimed in his writings that he discovered the sugar content in the beet, and that the statement “that the boiled juice of the red beet was similar in appearance to sugar syrup” cannot be construed as evidence that de Serres actually recognized the presence of sugar in the beet-root. In the year 1747 Andreas Marggraf, a chemist and a member of the Royal Academy of Science and Literature of Berlin, demonstrated that various kinds of beet-root contained sugar and that the sugar could be extracted and crystallized. This discovery, however, was regarded for many years as being merely a laboratory determination and without practical value. In 1786 Franz Karl Achard, a pupil of Marggraf, attacked the problem of beet-root cultivation and succeeded in extracting sugar from beets on a scale hitherto unknown. He issued a report of the methods employed and the results obtained and stated that a good muscavado sugar should be made from beets for six cents per pound. His claims met with incredulity and no little ridicule, but the French Institute made a careful investigation of what he had done and found that the sugar content of the beets was over 6 per cent. From a number of tests of Achard’s process, they estimated that the cost of producing refined sugar from beet-roots on a commercial basis would be eighteen cents per pound.