Modern Improvements in Corn-Milling MacJiinenj. 93 
that will not remove the black contamination : and although it 
is used for getting rid of all sorts of dust and dirt, its efficiency 
in the treatment of smut is one of the tests of a good " smutter." 
Probably the most trying difficulty in native wheat is the 
presence of garlic. Grains of garlic are so nearly of the same 
size and weight as a large proportion of the grains of wheat that 
it is not possible to separate them. Thus the garlic passes on 
to the grinding machinery, and produces terribly bad effects, for 
the sticky tough contents of the grain smear and plaster over the 
cutting or grinding surfaces, whether of millstones or rollers, 
and thus effectually blunt them, and at the same time impregnate 
the whole mill with the vile familiar stink. The loss arising 
from this blunting is very serious, and it is surprising how mis- 
chievous is the result of the admixture of only so few of the 
garlic grains as will escape detection among the wheat. No 
machine has yet been invented which can be relied upon to 
make a complete separation. Garlic is avoided by the owners of 
large mills like the plague, and no trouble should be spared by 
the occupier of garlic-bearing land in eradicating the pest. In 
the old small mills wheat mixed with garlic was ground on 
separate millstones, to which the mischief was confined. 
With regard to wheats of foreign origin, it would be difficult 
to construct an exhaustive list of the impurities, or of the seeds, 
grains, or pulse mixed with them. It may be said generally 
that dust, lumps of mud, stones, sand, mouse and rat droppings, 
worms, weevils, beetles, larv^ of insects, grains seeds and pulse 
of all sorts, pieces of wood and iron, twigs, rope, twine, wire, 
pieces of sacking bagging or matting, straw and chaff, are the 
most frequent articles to be met with. There is, moreover, a 
certain proportion of shrivelled or diseased wheat, and the shells of 
wheat-corns of which the interiors have been eaten by weevil, 
and in Californian wheats many broken corns. 
These foreign wheats are purchased and delivered in large 
parcels, and the better practice is first to free them from such 
impurities as can be removed when the wheat is handled in 
large masses — in short, to subject them to a preliminary clean- 
ing before they are deposited in the mill granary. In order to 
do the work rapidly, this rough process, by which it is sought 
to remove all matters that are distinctly larger than the largest 
of the wheat-corns and smaller than the smallest, must be 
carried on by machines of very large capacity (some doing as 
much as 1,000 bushels per hour each), and the streams or 
layers of wheat in passing these machines must necessarily be 
somewhat thick. In the more delicate and accurate cleaning 
which will follow, it is necessary that the wheat should be spread 
in thin streams, so that each corn may be acted upon, and thus 
