Owing to continuous dry weather the effect of these appli- 

 cations did not appear so soon as expected. The plants all com- 

 menced to grow until they had almost reached their full growth 

 in Size, when the disease made its appearance. The plots not 

 treated with anything did not get any disease, only in some cases 

 near the borders, where the winds had drifted some of the old 

 chaff, but in all the plots treated the disease became manifest. 

 The cold solutions had the least number of diseased plants. The 

 hot solutions had caused the death of nearly one-half of all the 

 plants. The dry chaff had killed all the plants and the plants 

 were nearly denuded. As these experiments were carried on in a 

 region infested with the disease, it was prudent to make simi- 

 lar ones in a region perfectly free from it. So two plots in a 

 garden with rich soil was used by the experiment station, de- 

 voted to this purpose, the ground was thoroughly cultivated and 

 seeded to flax as soon as the young plants appeared above the 

 surface, the letters "M2" were staked out. After a strong, hot 

 extract made and perfectly cooled it was applied with the spout 

 of a sprinkling can along the lines of those letters. In this case 

 when the disease did not appear until the plants had almost 

 reached full size, but it did appear and killed every plant along 

 the lines of the letters sprinkled with extract, plainly proving 

 that we have not to deal with a disease, but that the straw of the 

 flax is the cause of the trouble. 



I give this lengthy notice of Mr. Lugger's important dis- 

 covery as being distinctly American, it is entitled to a promi- 

 nent place in an Americanized system of fiber culture and treat- 

 ment, and to explode the old country notion, that flax is hard 

 on the land. Also in part to show European readers, who think 

 they know it all, or even a little more than it all, that it takes 

 progressiveness of American character to exploit facts hidden for 

 centuries. 



While on the subject of work done at the Minnesota Experi- 

 ment station, I cannot pass over Prof. H. Snyder, chemist of 

 that station, who has carried on an exhaustive and elaborate series 

 of chemical investigation on flax, in its chemical aspects. A re- 

 port of which is published in Bulletin No. 47 for 1896 of that 

 station, I will say here by way of parenthesis, that the Minne- 

 sota Experiment Station is rapidly taking "a front rank" for the 

 work done there. Mr. Snyder, as a result of his investigations 

 which brings the subject down to the latest dates, says, "In 

 comparing the amount of fertility removed in the flax crop with 

 that in other farm crops, it must be remembered that the figures 

 given, represent the ease or difficulty with which the different 

 food crops are capable of getting their food elements from the 

 soil. The different farm crops have different feeding capacity 

 as have different farm animals. Flax belongs to the dainty or 

 weak feeding crops, it does not take a great deal of fertility from 

 the soil, but the small amount it does take, must be in the very 

 best and most available forms. Mangles and in fact nearly all 

 farm crops are capable of taking their food in cruder forms and 

 with far less difficulty than flax. A heavy crop of mangles wiH 



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