Wheat 



17 



PLOUGHING WITH OXEN 



The Americans, whose immense farms produce enormous quantities of wheat, often store away 

 their harvests in such siloes to await the hour when it is likely to fetch the highest price in the 

 old world. In Chicago large storehouses have been built where the corn is stored until the 

 large steamers come to the quay to be loaded. These vast storehouses are often provided 

 with special machines to transfer the grain quickly into the holds of the cargo-boats. The 

 wheat of the south of Russia is stored at Odessa, and this port owes a great deal of 

 its activity to the exportation of corn. 



Wheat is used for other purposes besides bread-making. In the industrial world it plays 

 an important part in the manufacture of spirits and of beer. Starch is also prepared from 

 it, and a special variety is grown for the purpose. 



Manufacture of Flour. — -To be of value for human food, the grains of wheat must be 

 ground to flour. In olden times, when the men did nothing but go out hunting or wage war 

 against one another, the women and slaves diligently pounded the wheat in a hollowed-out 

 wooden block, which served them as a mortar. As people's tastes became more and more 

 refined, however, the millers' tools were improved. Millstones, made out of hard round 

 stones, and describing circles on a circular surface, also hollowed out in hard stone were used, 

 and later the invention of the watermill and the windmill reduced the labour. 



To this day we see mills in the country moved either by water or by the wind. But the 

 windmills, which looked so picturesque with their big vanes, are now fast disappearing, even in 

 the Netherlands, where they used to be one of the chief characteristics of the landscape. The 

 running water of a brook or a small river is a more regular motive power than the wind. But 

 whatever may be the motive power, a mill which works by means, of millstones consists 

 essentially of a flat circular stone, about two yards in diameter, horizontally fixed on a wooden 

 frame. The centre of this stone is pierced by a firm iron or steel. bar, which is the pivot 

 on which a second millstone, resembling the first, freely turns. Formerly each millstone 

 was in one piece, hewn out of a very hard kind of stone. They are now often cast out of 

 gravel and sand, and are of an extraordinary degree of hardness.. A series of radial grooves 

 is, as a rule, cut out in the surfaces of the millstones, in which the meal collects and is 

 driven away from the centre by the revolving motion of the upper stone.; in this way the grains 

 are gradually ground to meal. There are several pairs of millstones in one mill ; the distance 

 between the stones of each pair differs, and the grinding is repeated several times in order to 

 obtain the largest quantity of flour. The number of small millers is becoming less and less ; the 

 small mills are gradually being replaced by large factories where tons of corn are daily 



3-C.P. 



