DISCOVERY OF MARQUIS WHEAT 201 



no one of his selections to which he attaches any value has 

 failed to pass the most rigorous milling and baking tests. 

 That Marquis gives so much satisfaction to millers and 

 bakers is therefore not due to any accident but to the 

 careful work of Dr. Saunders who, as the first miller and 

 the first baker of the new wheat, appreciated the good 

 qualities of its flour several years before it became an ar- 

 ticle of commerce. 



When beginning the task of re-selecting all the more or 

 less mixed wheats assembled at Ottawa in 1903, which led 

 to the discovery of Marquis, Dr. Saunders had not a mill, 

 or a fermenting cupboard, or an oven in his laboratory; 

 and, in the absence of this apparatus, he judged the quality 

 of the wheat flour from his different wheat plants by 

 means of the chewing test. In the art of applying this 

 test he soon became a veritable master, and thereby con- 

 siderably hastened the work of selection. It had long 

 been known to practical wheat buyers that some rough 

 idea of the baking strength of flour can be obtained by 

 chewing for about four or five minutes a few kernels of 

 the wheat from which the flour is to be made, and by then 

 examining in the fingers the elasticity of the little pellet of 

 gluten taken from the mouth. Dr. Saunders, after carry- 

 ing out this simple test for a large number of times, found 

 that it was thereby possible to acquire considerable facil- 

 ity for judging flour quality, and since then he has used 

 the test extensively. To obtain sufficient gluten for a test, 

 he usually chewed about ten or a dozen kernels from the 

 crop of each individual plant which was being considered 

 as a possible progenitor of a new variety of wheat. He 

 found it to be a general rule that the strongest flour is ob- 

 tained from those wheats which produce gluten having the 

 greatest ability to recover its shape. '^^ 



72 Charles E. Saunders, loo. oit., p. 9. 



