MISCELLANEOUS PLANTS 297 



and as stock food. Flax has been grown from the greatest an- 

 tiquity. It was a great crop with the Hebrews and the ancient 

 Hindus. The mummy wrappings of the Egyptian tombs were 

 of linen. Flax has been found in a tomb of ancient Chaldea, 

 older than the city of Babylon. The lake dwellers of Switzer- 

 land made use of it, and all evidence goes to show that it is one 

 of the oldest of cultivated plants, hoary with age as it is heavy 

 with honors. 



The flax of the lake dwellers appears to have been the peren- 

 nial species, Linunt angiistifolium, which is yet wild in the 

 Mediterranean region, but was later displaced by the annual 

 species, Linum usitatissimum, which has been cultivated for at 

 least four or five thousand years, and is yet wild in the regions 

 lying between the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea. Manifestly 

 this is a species that has been so long cultivated, and one that 

 so easily maintains itself in the wild, that its present range would 

 be little guide to its original habitat, so that we cannot say with 

 confidence to what country we owe the debt for flax. 



Hemp (Cannabis satiua). This strongest of the fiber plants 

 exists in two distinct forms, the male and the female, each a 

 separate plant. This, too, is an old friend, dating as a culti- 

 vated plant from at least 1500 b.c, or before the Trojan War. 

 Hemp is wild from southern Russia in the neighborhood of 

 the Caspian, eastward to the desert of Kirghiz, beyond Lake 

 Baikal. 1 



Besides the cotton, flax, and hemp we have jute, an old but 

 not ancient fiber plant, widely scattered over the world ; also 

 manila, which is the trade name for the product of a fibrous 

 banana of the Philippines, Musa textilis. Besides these, the 

 coconut palm yields a fiber much used in the manufacture of 

 matting, and that of another palm is used for the coarser quali- 

 ties of brushes, and occasionally for brooms. 



1 The student is referred to " Origin of Cultivated Plants " and to con- 

 temporaneous literature for further information upon our fiber plants, whose 

 history is one of the most interesting chapters in the development of the wild. 



