WHEAT IN WESTERN CANADA 137 



the wooden stand into some receptacle provided to collect 

 it. The quern is now naught but a relic of the past and 

 reminds one of the fossils of extinct animals which add 

 so much fascination to the pages of the great book of 

 the geological record. Since the hey-day of the quern 

 several centuries ago, the milling industry has been sub- 

 jected to progressive evolution and, did not history tell 

 us of its details, we should find it almost as difficult to 

 realize that the modern roller mill has developed from the 

 old hand-stone as it is to realize that the swallow and the 

 seagull have sprung from a cold and slowly creeping 

 reptile. In contrast with the quern, how complex and 

 wonderful seems the great Lake of the Woods mill at 

 Keewatin, with its mighty elevator for storing wheat, its 

 great warehouse filled with bags and barrels for holding 

 the mill's end-products, its loading and unloading facili- 

 ties, its turbine for tapping the giant strength of the river, 

 its power house, its driving belts, its appliances for clean- 

 ing and preparing the grain, and above all, in the mill 

 proper, its automatic machinery which, ever humming at 

 its work, seems to enjoy its task of reducing the grain into 

 the finest flour. So continuously, so delicately, so gradu- 

 ally, and yet withal so irresistibly is the reduction process 

 carried out, and so many are its stages, that one is in- 

 voluntarily reminded of the reduction and assimilation of 

 food that goes on in the digestive tract of one of the 

 higher animals. As one observes the succession of cor- 

 rugated chilled-iron rollers for breaking open the wheat 

 berry, the gyrating boxes or plansifters for sifting the 

 break flour, the dunst, the middlings, and the semolina from 

 the broken wheat and bran, the purifiers in which the 

 breath of the mill removes the fine branny particles from 

 the middlings, the silk bolting cloth of finer and ever finer 

 mesh for grading the middlings, the. smooth rollers, pair 



