1904.] 



Quality in Wheat. 



327 



firmed the general opinion ; in six of the seven centres Square 

 Head's Master yielded the bigger crop and stood up better, 

 but from the miller's point of view it was never so strong a 

 wheat as the Red Lammas grown on the same land. Although 

 one sample of Square Head's Master (King's Lynn) was actually 

 stronger than three of the samples of Red Lammas, yet at any 

 one place the Red Lammas was always the stronger of the two, 

 its average mark being 61 as against 46 for the Square Head's 

 Master. 



The second table deals only with imported wheats examined 

 for the sake of comparison ; these, with the exception of the 

 Calcutta Club wheat, were of great strength. 



The third table deals with various English wheats ; the 

 fourth with wheats of foreign origin, but grown for one or two 

 years in England. Tables V. and VI. deal with the wheats from 

 the experiment plots at Rothamsted and Woburn respectively, 

 where the land had been subject to different systems of manuring 

 for a very long period, 



Table VIII. gives some of the results obtained in 1903 on the 

 same class of flours. 



It should be remembered that in both years the harvest was 

 won under exceptionally unfavourable conditions, nor were the 

 conditions uniform — ripening, as the wheats did, at different 

 times in the different places. In 1902 particularly, many of 

 the wheats were sprouted and out of condition, so that the 

 experiments cannot always be trusted to determine the point at 

 issue. However, in each case it is the same material which was 

 baked and put through the chemical examination, so that the 

 material is necessarily true enough as a means of correlating 

 " strength " and chemical composition. 



Turning to the results as a whole, they cannot be said to 

 afford any means of solving the problem of measuring the 

 "strength" of a sample of flour by chemical means ; they do 

 not, indeed, represent any advance on the old well-known fact 

 that in a general sort of way the strength of the flour is corre- 

 lated with the amount of nitrogenous material present. But 

 this correlation is only approximate and true for an average of 

 samples, often failing entirely when applied to individual cases. 



These negative conclusions become most apparent when the 



