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from a book by Mr. Dixon, stating that the Society of Arts in Ilnglanctj 

 had actually offered a reward of fifty guineas for the best machine for 

 the preparation of New Zealand flax ; and also that from a sample of 

 50 lbs. tested at home, 17 lbs. of long fibre were pi-oduced and 6 lbs. of an 

 inferior soi't, but 23 lbs. in all of valuable fibre. No description, however, 

 of the kind of flax experimented upon was given, biit he supposed it to 

 be dry leaf. Because New Zealand flax was connected with gummy 

 matter, to get rid of which was our main desire, it must not be supposed 

 that other fibres had no gumn^y substance ; all were affected more or less 

 in that way. Mr. Travers then related an anecdote of flax dressing. 

 The first Napoleon, anxious to counterbalance the decided lead England 

 had taken in the cotton manufacture, sought to encourage the manufac- 

 ture of flax, and offered a reward of two million francs for the best 

 process. This reward stimulated the ingenuity of a M. Girard, who 

 produced a machine ; but after doing so he could find no one in France 

 with sufficient enterprize to put his plans in motion ; however, he was 

 at length lucky enough in finding what he wanted in the town of 

 Leeds. He (Mr. Travers) had heard of an exploding process with 

 carbonic acid gas being tried, but it had not been very successful. 

 The people of New Zealand should not be anxious so much to produce 

 a large quantity of fibre, as to produce a quality that would be suit- 

 able for the finer textile fabrics, and that could only be done by removing 

 the gum in the leaf before the fibre was sent home to Europe. New Zea- 

 land flax, he thought, had no advantage over Irish flax ; and that, if we 

 were forced to cultivate, the latter would perhaps be found preferable, as 

 it was not an exhausting crop — at least not more than crops of any kind 

 usually were. It yielded, it was true, a long fibre, if that was of any particular 

 value, and it was perennial. New Zealand flax must be cut at its proper 

 season to obtain it in its greatest strength. In flax manufacture he 

 thought the returns might be made much larger if attention were turned 

 to that portion of the leaf which yielded the best fibre ; weight of 

 material should not be looked to so much as excellence of quality. And 

 to show the enormous importance of the flax trade in England, returns 

 proved that tl^e imports of flax from foi-eign countries, in 1853^ amounted 

 to 94,000 tons, which at an average price of £110 per ton, showed that 

 for that year the large sum of £10,000,000 had been paid to foreign 

 producers for a single article. 



Mr. Charles Graham, M.H.R., explained the modus oj^erandi of the 

 Booth machine, which he said consisted of a double set of rollers, formed 

 of yielding segments resembling the key board of a piano. By that 



