The mother liquor includes generally more or less of nickel, cobalt, zinc and other heavy metals, which, as Wailer showed, can be removed as insoluble sulphides by the addition of ammonium sulphide; uranium, under the circumstances, is not precipitated by this reagent.
It is insoluble in water and in nitric acid and apparently so in hydrochloric acid; but if heated with this last for some time it passes into a compound, which, after the acid mother liquor has been decanted off, dissolves in water.
On other estates the second sugars, or sugars produced from boiling molasses alone, are not purged to dryness, but when sufficiently separated from their mother-liquor are mixed with the defecated juice, thereby increasing its saccharine richness, and after being converted into syrup in the usual manner are treated in the vacuum pan as first sugars, which in fact they really are.
The crystallized sugar from the vacuum pan has now to be separated from the molasses or mother-liquor surrounding the crystals.
Thus also the crystals already formed come in contact with fresh mother-liquor, and so go on adding to their size.
