262 THE ARDS: FLAX AND POTATOES 



sold, the buyers making a tour of the mills in order to 

 see the quality and quantity of the grower's crop 

 before dealing with him. For some years previously 

 the price of flax had been very low and the acreage 

 decreasing, but in 1910 there was a sudden rise of 

 price which bids fair to be maintained, so that a con- 

 siderably greater area was sown to flax in 1911. The 

 continental area seems to have been reduced, for every 

 farmer knows how scarce linseed is becoming, and how 

 in consequence the price of linseed cake has risen to 

 an abnormal level. 



In Ireland we noticed that the seed was not allowed 

 to ripen, the flax being pulled just when the seed 

 heads were swollen but green ; this valuable part of 

 the plant is therefore sacrificed to the claims of the 

 fibre, and the retting ponds are covered with the 

 immature flax seeds. In the eastern counties of 

 England flax used to be grown to a certain extent for 

 seed ; the ripe plant was cut by a reaper instead of 

 being pulled, threshed, and the fibre roughly retted 

 and sold as an admittedly inferior product. There 

 seem to be two weak spots in the flax business : the 

 seed all comes from Russia (sometimes after a year's 

 acclimatization in Holland), and is a mixture of strains 

 and varieties not so divergent perhaps as the different 

 varieties of wheat which will be found on growing a 

 handful of exported Russian wheat, but still, as one 

 can see in the field, possessed of no uniformity. Side 

 by side will be found short stems and long, some 

 possessed by a tillering habit or a tendency to branch, 

 others forming only a single clean stem. Then the 

 retting process is very crude ; there are no means of 

 regulation ; its duration and character are entirely 

 at the mercy of the weather and the judgment of the 

 farmer, yet the colour and strength of the fibre upon 



