One of the causes most fatal to West Indian prosperity, is that exuberance of advantages which they enjoy from serenity of climate and fertility of soil--causes which, in the absence of proper stimulus to industry and improvement, have led to an improvident system of cultivation, and to a blind and ignorant adherence to wasteful methods of manufacture. The cane is believed to contain from 90 to 95 per cent. of its own weight of saccharine juice; and yet (as Mr. Fownes, a Professor of Practical Chemistry in University College, London, informs us, in an excellent paper "On the Manufacture of Sugar in Barbados,"[17] from which much of what follows has been borrowed) owing to the defective construction of the mills, hardly so much as 50 per cent. is obtained, although he believes it practicable, by an improvement in the mills, to obtain from 70 to 75 per cent.; and of the remaining 10 or 15 per cent. which he regards it as impossible to extract, much, if not the whole, might, I conceive, be obtained, by macerating the pressed canes or megass, as it issues from the mill, and repassing it through the rollers; and, be it remembered, that from 40 to 45 per cent. of saccharine juice is nearly, if not altogether, equivalent to a similar per centage of sugar; so that by these initiatory improvements alone, and with little additional trouble, the produce of sugar might be nearly doubled from any given quantity of canes. From the action of lime-water when added in a slight excess to the cane juice or raw liquor, as it is vernacularly termed, immediately on issuing from the mill, as well as from the effect produced by ammonia or potash, this liquid appears to contain a considerable quantity of cane sugar, mixed with much glucose, or that saccharine matter which is found in fruits; gum or dextrine, phosphates, and probably malates of lime and magnesia, with sulphates and chlorides, potash and soda, and a peculiar azotised matter, allied to albumen, which forms an insoluble compound with lime, is not coagulable by heat or acids, and runs readily into putrefactive fermentation.