54 ENVIRONMENT AND MILLING QUALITIES. 



Provinces of India. In durum wheats particularly it was found that 

 the effect of excessive watering was to increase the percentage of 

 soft and spotted grains and to lower the nitrogen content. The 

 number of waterings given was nine and, in consequence, the crops 

 often did not ripen till a month after the normal date. The treat- 

 ment given was quite exceptional as in India it is not usual to water 

 wheat nine times. Even in the Canal Colonies of the Punjab, where 

 the land was previously a desert, three waterings only is the rule. 

 Speaking generally, irrigation for wheat on the black soil of the Cen- 

 tral Provinces is not common as the soil usually contains sufficient 

 moisture for the wheat crop. In these experiments the absolute 

 weight of the sample is not stated so that it is impossible to inter- 

 pret the figures for the nitrogen content with accuracy. 



Leather ' has published a preliminary note on the effect of 

 manures on the composition of wheat and other grains but no 

 details of the experiments are given. 



As in the older work on this subject the recent investigations 

 referred to are all characterised by the absence of milling and baking 

 tests. In order to obtain accurate information on the effect of 

 environment on the behaviour of the same sample in the mill and 

 subsequently in the bakehouse it is, in the present state of knowledge, 

 unsafe to rely on chemical data only and on the appearance of the 

 samples. Such important matters as strength of flour and the 

 freemilling nature of the wheats might easily be masked by changes 

 in consistency and nitrogen content. That this is so is proved by 

 the results described in the present paper. 



The agricultural conditions under which wheat is grown in 

 India have been referred to in detail in the previous paper on this 

 subject. India possesses two great wheat tracts which differ from 

 each other both as regards soil and as regards the source of moisture. 

 The more important of these regions is the alluvium of the Inclo- 

 Gangetic plain, stretching from Bihar on the East through the 

 United Provinces and the Punjab to Sincl on the Western coast. 



l Leather, Seventh International Congress of Applied, Chemistry, Section VII, 1901), p. 157. 



