FLAX.
Flax is the oldest of cultivated fibre plants, and, until the growing of cotton became the great agricultural industry of the South, it was the most important of the world's fibre crops. Only within the last century has flax surrendered first place to cotton, though both plants have furnished clothing to civilized man ever since he began to demand something different from the skins of wild beasts. Cotton has the advantage of being cheaper than flax to raise and to prepare for weaving into cloth.
Wild flax probably grew on the hillsides of As syria and in the Nile Valley before it was brought into cultivation. Nowhere does it grow in a wild state to-day, unless we count the roadside flax escaped from fields. It was grown and cloth woven of its fibres, in ancient times, as the earliest records prove. The mummies of early Egyptian tombs were wrapped in linen cerements, and the flax plant was carved on the tombs. The Bible describes the royal splendor of kings, clothed in purple and fine linen. The strength and durability of the fabric, whether coarse or fine, and the snowy whiteness and silky lustre of the cloth when bleached, established flax as the finest fibre crop in the agricultural countries of the world.
The Lake-dwellers of Switzerland, who repre sent the Stone Age, grew the plant for its fibre, which they wove into cloth. The household in dustries have brought the growing, spinning, and weaving of flax down to the time when machinery relieved human hands of much of the labor in volved. But machines have not made better nor finer linen than the old-time hand looms produced.
A large part of the difference in cost between cotton and linen is due to the fact that machinery has not yet taken much work away from the hand laborer in linen manufacture. Cotton machinery, from the newly introduced pickers, and the gins, to all the mill machinery, is a perfect system that makes the machinery used in handling flax look crude indeed. And it is crude.
Flax is a delicate, branched plant, two or three feet high, with narrow, long leaves, set opposite, and numerous pale blue flowers, followed by globu lar capsules, each five-chambered, with two seeds in each chamber. The shiny, slippery, brown
seeds are kept by every druggist. They are in demand to make flaxseed poultices. A single seed dropped into the eye will invariably capture the cinder that no other means has been able to re move. The gum that coats the seed swells when wet so that a poultice takes up four times as much space as the dry seeds did. More commonly, the meal is used, cooked to a mush, and applied as hot as can be borne to painful swellings, which it relieves by keeping moist and warm.
The growing of flax in America to-day is chiefly for its seed; the making of linen from the fibre is not yet profitable. The farmer threshes his flax, and sells the seed to his local grain merchant, who sells it to the jobber, who sends it to the linseed mill. Here the seed is cleaned of weed seeds and refuse by screening and fanning machines; then it passes through a series of rollers that reduce it to a pasty mass of meal. Now the meal is put into camel's hair bags, and moulded into cakes, that are heated to near 200° F., then brought under pressure that extracts the oil, leaving "oil cake." The oil is drawn off and refined, after which it is ready for market. Oil cake is ground into oil meal, and sold for stock food. "Linseed" oil is used in the manufacture of the best grades of paint, and for a multitude of other purposes, includ ing the making of patent-leather shoes.
The Dakota farmer may sell his flax straw as it comes, broken and tangled, out of the thresher, to the tow mill, where it is made into stuffing for cheap mattresses, upholstered furniture, padding for refrigerator cars and cold storage warehouses, ice boxes and the like, or spun into binding twine. The highest grades of linen made in America at a profit are coarse crash towelling, carpet yarns, and fish seines.