At a recent meeting of the Botanical Section of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Mr. Thomas Meehan read the following extract from a letter of Miss Adele M. Fielde, a missionary in China. The letter is dated from Swatow: "My attention has lately been called to an error, existing apparently in many minds, concerning the plant from which sugar is made in China. A late consular report from Canton, says the plant is a species of sorghum, and in the American Cyclopaedia , Appleton, 1863) the article on sorghum appears to me to convey the same idea. I send you to-day flowers of the plant cultivated very extensively for the sugar in the neighborhood of Swatow, and which is the source of the chief export of this treaty- port. It seems to me no sorghum, but by the description in botanical works, the true Saccharum officinarum. Tell me whether it differs from the plant from which sugar is made in the Southern United States. Propagation is from cuttings, a section of the culm a foot long, being set out at each planting. This is done in February, and is ready to be cut for pressing out the juice eleven months later. In the fourth year the stubble is removed, and new cane is planted.

It is not allowed to flower, as the cultivators say it spoils it for use in sugar making." Mr. Meehan said he could scarcely understand how the idea should get currency that sorghum yielded the sugar of China, for though the native country of the true sugar cane is unknown, the civilized world is indebted to China for the first knowledge that what we know as sugar could be extracted from the cane. Manufactured sugar from this cane was known in China before it was known in Europe. As for sorghum, though sugar could be made from it, it had been found so unreliable for that purpose, depending apparently more on some chemical accident than vital power, that it was doubtful if sugar in any quantity had ever been made from it in China or anywhere else. Certainly the specimens sent by Miss Fielde were of the true sugar cane, as grown by us in the Southern States.