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 perén- 
nial species, Levuim augustifolium, which is yet wild in the 
Mediterranean region, but was later displaced by the annual 
species, Linum usttatisstmum, 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 sativa). 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, A/wsa 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. 
