T GHE world's sugar supply was drawn chiefly from the canegrowing countries of the tropics until the middle of the last century. No special interest was attached to the sugar beet till the publication, in 1747, of Marggraf's pamphlet in which he set forth his discovery that the beet contained sugar. In 1799 Archard, a pupil of Marggraf, presented the king of Prussia with a few pounds of sugar which he had produced from beets, with the result that in 1801 the king financed, for him, the erection of a small factory in Silesia, the first beet sugar factory in the world. It was to Napoleon, however, that the development of the beet sugar industry was largely due. During the European wars of 1800-1815 there was a great shortage of sugar in Western Europe owing to the embargo on the West Indian product. Napoleon offered the first government bounty on beet sugar in 1806; in 1811 he issued a decree to put 79,000 acres of French land into beet cultivation and started the industry off on large-scale operation. The production of beet sugar increased so that its proportion of the world's sugar crop rose from 14 per cent in 1853 to 65 per cent in 1900. In 1853 the beet sugar production was only 202,000 tons as against 1,260,000 tons of cane sugar. At the beginning of the World War the production of sugar beet was 8,908,000 and the cane production 9,879,000 tons.' Early in its history beet sugar became an important rival of the cane product. The race between the luxuriant perennial cane of the tropics and the carefully cultivated beet of the middle latitudes has been an interesting contest during the past 80 years (see Fig. 1). The leading place was won by beet sugar in 1883. Occasionally after this cane sugar forged ahead but did not hold the lead before the World War. The chief European governments used bounties, drawbacks on exports, and other measures to encourage the producers of beet sugar and thus enabled it to supersede cane sugar in Britain-the largest import market. The effect on the West Indian industry was disastrous. Finally, the principal Western European governments agreed, under the terms of the Brussels Convention of 1902, to do away with the artificial aids to beet production and the industry was forced to stand alone. Figure 1 shows the trend of sugar production. Beet sugar, stimulated by bounties and tariffs, was approximately equal to cane production from 1884 to 1914. Since 1914 cane sugar has continued to increase while beet declined in relative importance to less than one-third of the total sugar supply of the world in 1922. It