Sugar Canes.

While these varieties were being grown wholly for their enormous yield of nutritive grain, and yearly improved in this respect, there was another equal demand to be supplied, that was for sugar or its equivalent—syrup. Selection of seed through many years developed this quality in one variety, and this grown for that purpose, and improved by centuries page 52 of care and culture by the skillful Chinese, gives us the Chinese sugarcane of to-day, a plant very valuable for forage and for syrup and sugar production. A like want and a like prolonged effort among the half-civilized people of Nubia and Abysinnia resulted in producing the Imphee or African cane, the most luxuriant-growing and best sugar-producing, and best forage plant in our State at the present time. Perhaps, however, it will divide the forage merits with Amber cane, a hybred between Imphee and Chinese sorghum. They both give an immense yield of sweet, tender, rapid-growing stalks and leaves, of which all kinds of stock are very fond, and which possess superior food qualities, while their enormous growth after the plants are permanently rooted, is almost independent of wet or drouth, not being affected by excess of either; and in our climate making succeeding growths year after year from the same roots.