6i 4 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



ground by hand labour. This is due to the fact that no satis- 

 factory machine has yet been devised for pulling it and it is 

 strenuously maintained to be a bad practice to cut it. Why 

 exactly this ban should be put upon cutting is not easy to 

 understand, because an examination of the root end of flax straw 

 shows it to carry very little fibre indeed up to at least one inch 

 or an inch and a half above soil level, so that little fibre would 

 be wasted by close cutting the crop. Flax easily gets tangled 

 and cutting would certainly present difficulty for that reason 

 but this does not appear to be the reason for the statement that 

 flax must not be cut. The explanation seems to centre around 

 the belief that the cut ends of the fibres do not come together 

 kindly when being spun. The main advantage of pulling over 

 cutting seems to lie in getting up the crop more or less free 

 from weeds. Under certain conditions this certainly may be an 

 advantage but seeing that at a later stage, when the seed is 

 separated from the straw, an equally good opportunity is afforded 

 of getting rid of weeds and grading the straw into bundles of 

 uniform length, it seems to be doubtful economy to hand-pull 

 the crop. 



Flax is pulled only during dry weather. It is grasped rather 

 low down on the stem in small handfuls and is pulled up with 

 as few weeds as possible, the earth is knocked off from the roots 

 against the puller's boot and, keeping the root ends level, a large 

 handful is accumulated until no more can be held. These 

 large handfuls are laid down on the ground for women to collect 

 together, " even up " and tie into larger bundles or sheaves 

 by twisting a few of the straws round them just below the 

 seed bolls. 



The practice in the Russian flax-growing districts is to pull 

 the crop greener than in Holland and it is less carefully handled. 

 In the Baltic provinces, as the bundles are tied up they are 

 collected in a part of the field where a large knife is erected for 

 cutting off the seed bolls and for trimming up the sheaves 

 by slashing them down on to the knife. 



In Ireland a somewhat different practice obtains ; the pullers 

 themselves lay the uprooted flax neatly across twisted rush 

 bands, until sufficient has been collected to tie up to form a 

 sheaf or as it is called locally, a " beet." As no attempt is made 

 to save the seed, there is no opportunity for " evening up " the 

 sheaves after they are once made up, so it becomes of the greatest 



