LINSEED. The seed of the common flax (q.v.) or lint, Linum usitatissimum, a native of Central Asia. Linseed is chiefly grown to yield oil seeds in Argentina, India, the United States, Canada and Russia. The seeds, the linseed of commerce, are of a lustrous brown colour externally, of an elongated oval form with a slight beak or projection at one extremity. The brown testa contains, in the outer of the four coats into which it is microscopically distinguishable, an abundant secretion of muci laginous matter; and it has within it a thin layer of albumen, en closing a pair of large oily cotyledons. The seeds when placed in water for some time become coated with glutinous matter from the exudation of the mucilage in the external layer of the epi dermis; and by boiling in sixteen parts of water they exude sufficient mucilage to form with the water a thick pasty de coction. The cotyledons contain the valuable linseed oil referred to below. (See LINSEED OIL.) Linseed grown in tropical coun tries is much larger and more plump than that obtained in tern perate climes, but the seed from the colder countries yields a finer quality of oil.
Linseed formed an article of food among the Greeks and Romans, and it is said that the Abyssinians at the present day eat it roasted. The oil is to some extent used for food in Russia and in parts of Poland and Hungary. The still prevalent use of linseed in poultices for open wounds is entirely to be reprobated. It has now been abandoned by practitioners. The principal ob jection to this use of linseed oil is that it specially favours the growth of micro-organisms. There are numerous clean and ef ficient substitutes which have all its supposed advantages and none of its disadvantages. There are now no medicinal uses of this substance. Oil cake (q.v.), the mass left after the ex pression of the oil, is a most valuable feeding substance for cattle.