BINDER TWINE 



721 



BINGEN 



would become stable. The total output of the 

 precious metals might fluctuate as much as 

 the output of one alone. 



Bimetallism was for a century a political 

 issue in France and other European countries. 

 In the United States it was a burning issue 

 only during the last quarter of the nineteenth 

 century. This was an era of falling prices, of 

 industrial depression and lack of work. The 

 industrial and agricultural classes seized on 

 bimetallism as a remedy, not because they were 

 sure it was right but because they felt that the 

 gold standard was wrong. The discovery of 

 new sources of gold supply in various parts of 

 the world was followed by a gradual rise in 

 prices which removed the causes of complaints. 

 Bimetallism is now a dead issue, not because 

 its theories were entirely disproved, but be- 

 cause there is no need for it. E.D.F. 



BINDER TWINE, the string with which 

 grain in the harvest fields is fastened into bun- 

 dles by mechanical binders, is an article of 

 an importance which few people realize. Be- 

 cause of the almost universal employment of 

 machinery in the wheat fields of the United 

 States and Canada and its growing popularity 

 in Russia and Argentina, a failure in the supply 

 of twine at any harvest would mean the loss 

 of millions of bushels of the grain from which 

 the world's bread is made. 



About ninety per cent of all binder twine is 

 made from the leaf fiber of the sisal, a plant 

 described in another volume of this work, 

 which grows mainly in Yucatan. Most of the 

 rest is spun from the fiber of the manila tree, 

 a banana-like plant of the Philippines. Though 

 twine manufacturing companies have spent 

 time and money on agricultural experiments in 

 the attempt to find a substitute for manila or 

 sisal which will grow in the United States or 

 Canada, they have not yet found one which 

 resists insects. About 200,000 tons of sisal are 

 needed each year for the twine of Canada and 

 the United States. 



Almost all binder twine is made entirely by 

 machinery. Combs traveling on a belt pick out 

 the foreign matter and straighten the fibers, 

 delivering them in a loose but continuous coil. 

 A length of this coil is placed in a receptacle 

 in front of each spinning machine, to which it is 

 automatically fed, and which takes just enough 

 fibers to form the proper size strand, and twists 

 them into a firm twine. The balling machines 

 then finish the work. 



BINDWEED, the name of a group of plants 

 of the morning glory family, the creeping, 

 46 



twining stems of which cling so tightly to other 

 plants as often to cause their death through 

 suffocation. Thus they are aptly named. One 

 of the most familiar 

 bindweeds is the hedge 

 bindweed, or wild morn- 1 

 ing glory, found com- 

 monly along the road- 

 side, trailing over walls 

 or on the edge of the 

 woods, both in Europe 

 and throughout the 

 Middle and Eastern 

 United States and lower 

 Canada. The stem is 

 somewhat hairy and 

 grows from three to ten 

 feet long. The bios- FLOWER AND FRUIT 

 soms are beautiful in color, pink with white 

 stripes, and have the shape of a funnel with a 

 flaring mouth. The tubes of these flowers are 

 so long that only long-tongued bees and other 

 insects can reach the stores of nectar within, 

 and the blossoms remain open only in the 

 sunshine or on bright moonlight nights. 



The field bindweed is a troublesome weed 

 that came from Europe and now grows from 

 Nova Scotia and Ontario southward to New 

 Jersey and westward to Kansas. Its stem is 

 rarely more than two feet in length, but it 

 trails along the ground in the fields of the 

 farmer with a persistency that makes it any- 

 thing but a welcome visitor. If the weed is 

 kept from going to seed and the land is culti- 

 vated in the late fall, the plant may be con- 

 trolled in a few seasons. Kerosene oil applied 

 to the roots will kill the plant. 



BINGEN, bing' en, a town of Germany 

 which has attained a place in literature and in 

 legend. Mrs. Caroline Norton's world-famous 

 ballad has made the name a household word; 

 it begins as follows: 



A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers, 

 There was lack of woman's nursing, there was 

 dearth of woman's tears, 



and closes with the refrain 



For I was born at Bingen, fair Bingen on the 

 Rhine. 



Also the legend of the Mouse Tower, on a rock 

 in the Rhine, is one of the most famous tales 

 which has come down from the Middle Ages. 

 According to this tale the hard-hearted Bishop 

 Hatto, having caused hundreds of poor people 

 to be burned to death in a barn to avoid 

 feeding them, fled to the Mouse Tower and 



