The reason for this painstaking is that there are dozens of different
sugars, so much alike that they are difficult to separate. They are all
composed of the same three elements, C, H and O, and often in the same
proportion. Sometimes two sugars differ only in that one has a
right-handed and the other a left-handed twist to its molecule. They
bear the same resemblance to one another as the two gloves of a pair.
Cane sugar and beet sugar are when completely purified the same
substance, that is, sucrose, C_{12}H_{22}O_{11}. The brown and
straw-colored sugars, which our forefathers used and which we took to
using during the war, are essentially the same but have not been so
completely freed from moisture and the coloring and flavoring matter of
the cane juice. Maple sugar is mostly sucrose. So partly is honey.
Candies are made chiefly of sucrose with the addition of glucose, gums
or starch, to give them the necessary consistency and of such colors and
flavors, natural or synthetic, as may be desired. Practically all candy,
even the cheapest, is nowadays free from deleterious ingredients in the
manufacture, though it is liable to become contaminated in the handling.
In fact sugar is about the only food that is never adulterated. It would
be hard to find anything cheaper to add to it that would not be easily
detected. "Sanding the sugar," the crime of which grocers are generally
accused, is the one they are least likely to be guilty of.

Besides the big family of sugars which are all more or less sweet,
similar in structure and about equally nutritious, there are, very
curiously, other chemical compounds of altogether different composition
which taste like sugar but are not nutritious at all. One of these is
a coal-tar derivative, discovered accidentally by an American student
of chemistry, Ira Remsen, afterward president of Johns Hopkins
University, and named by him "saccharin." This has the composition