The details of it all would be as tedious here as they are complicated
in the mill. The percentages of the different impurities vary with the
variation of the soils in which the cane is grown. The next step, following
clarification, is evaporation, the boiling out of a large percentage of
the water carried in the juice. For this purpose, a vacuum system is used,
making possible a more rapid evaporation with a smaller expenditure of
fuel. These two operations, clarification and evaporation by the use of the
vacuum, are merely improved methods for doing, on a large scale, what was
formerly done by boiling in pans or kettles, on a small scale. That method
is still used in many parts of the world, and even in the United States, in
a small way. For special reasons, it is still used on some of the Louisiana
plantations; it is common in the farm production of sorghum molasses in the
South; and in the manufacture of maple sugar in the North. In those places,
the juices are boiled in open pans or kettles, the impurities skimmed off
as they rise, and the boiling, for evaporation, is continued until a
proper consistency is reached, for molasses in the case of sorghum and for
crystallization in the case of plantation and maple sugars. There is an old
story of an erratic New England trader, in Newburyport, who called himself
Lord Timothy Dexter. In one of his shipments to the West Indies, a hundred
and fifty years ago, this picturesque individual included a consignment of
"warming pans," shallow metal basins with a cover and a long wooden handle,
used for warming beds on cold winter nights. The basin was filled with
coals from the fireplace, and then moved about between the sheets to take
off the chill. He was not a little ridiculed by his acquaintances for
sending such merchandise where it could not possibly be needed, but it is
said that he made considerable money out of his enterprise. With the covers
removed, the long-handled, shallow basins proved admirably adapted for use
in skimming the sugar in the boiling-pans. But the old-fashioned method
would be impossible today.

The different operations are too complicated and too technical for more
than a reference to the purpose of the successive processes. Clarification
and evaporation having been completed, the next step is crystallization,
also a complicated operation. When this is done, there remains a dark brown
mass consisting of sugar crystals and molasses, and the next step is