into the earth and find there most of the elements essential to 

 healthy growth. A soil that is easily penetrated by the rain and 

 permiated by the moisture of the air; such land 'must be rolled 

 to keep it from drying and remain, as far as possible, a sort of 

 reservoir for moisture. The land need not be very rich to raise 

 good flax, when properly cultivated. As a recollection of past 

 experience in Belgium proves, when a farmer in Belgium is too 

 short of manure to raise winter wheat, he plows his land ten 

 inches deep in the fall, the last part of April he plows it again 

 six or seven inches deep, working it fine and about the fifth of 

 May, on a bright, sunshiny morning, he sows two or two and 

 one-half bushels of Riga or Belgium flax seed, harrows his seed 

 twice crosswise on the seed, and the next day, if not wet, packs 

 it well with a heavy roller. If he has a tolerably good season, 

 he is sure to raise a fine crop of flax, and a good crop of winter 

 wheat, without manure, the immediately following season. Was 

 flax so hard a crop on land, assuredly such a result could not be 

 obtained. Moreover, it is a fact well ascertained by science that 

 flax draws its nourishment partly from the ground and partly 

 from the atmosphere. Under such circumstances it naturally 

 occurs to ask, why should flax have received such a bad repu- 

 tation? This question has been very clearly answered fn a 

 recent report of Prof. Otto Lugger, of the Minnesota Agricultural 

 Experiment Station, to Governor Wm. R. Merriam of that state, 

 and published as Bulletin No. 13, December, 1890. As I under- 

 stand that bulletin is now out of print, and the subject of such 

 thrilling interest, and so high an example of expert skill of a 

 scientific investigator, that I take the pleasure of giving it a 

 place here. Mr. Lugger adopted three series of experiments to 

 explain the cause of the failure of flax after flax on the same 

 ground without an interval of rest. The first was on a piece 

 of land seeded to flax for two years running. In 1888, a good 

 crop of flax was produced and in 1889 every plant of flax had 

 been killed. In 1890, twenty- four plots of this land were seeded 

 to flax and various quantities of different fertilizers were ap- 

 plied to replace that removed by the previous crops of flax, 

 while some test plots were left without fertilizer being applied. 

 The seed all germinated in due time in all the plots, whether 

 fertilized or not, and the ground covered with their beautiful 

 foliage of green, but soon commenced to shrivel up and all dis- 

 appeared before they were three inches high. This experiment 

 indicated plainly that soil exhaustion by previous crops of flax 

 was not the cause of failure, as all fertilizing material removed 

 by the plant had been replaced in the land, in their most avail- 

 able form, the uniformity of the failure in all was very sugges- 

 tive. A second series of experiments were made on the same 

 ground to test whether this remarkable failure was from the de- 

 velopment of any germ or microbe disease. Several plots were 

 therefore treated with the most effectual germicides, in varying 

 proportions, while some plots were left untreated, as test plots, 

 the same result was obtained, the plants all dyinf^ when about 

 three inches high in all the lots. During the continuance of these 



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