BULLETIN" 1092, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
used with some success during the past three seasons on well-ripened 
fields of flax. 
The remainder of this bulletin is devoted to the solution of the 
problem of developing and increasing a long-stemmed variety of 
fiber flax. 
EARLY SELECTION WORK. 
The selection work with fiber flax was begun in the United States 
Department of Agriculture in 1909 by Mr. A. E. Mayland. He se- 
lected several thousand plants from the fields of commercial fiber 
flax in Michigan. (Fig. 2.) Only where a plant was distinctly taller 
than the surrounding plants was it selected. Each plant was weighed 
Fig. 2. — The beginning of fibei'-flax selection in America. These individual plants, selected 
because of their superiority to others in a field of fiber flax at Pigeon, Mich., in 1909, 
are the ancestors of the. best varieties developed by the United States Department of 
Agriculture. 
and measured separately, and fully nine-tenths of them were dis- 
carded. Only the seeds from the very heaviest plants were saved. 
In 1910 Mr. Leroy V. Crandall took up the work. Seeds from each 
plant retained the preceding year were sown in separate plats. The 
rigid selection methods with the centgener tests which had been de- 
vised at the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station were used. 
(Fig. 3.) The seeds were spaced 3 inches apart each way and cov- 
ered by soil to the depth of 1 inch, so that each plant would have an 
equal chance to develop. Notes were taken on the selections, and if 
at maturity any were short or uneven they were discarded. In case 
any were uneven and at the same time promising for height, indi- 
vidual plant selections were made from them for further testing. 
The selections which were still regarded as promising were harvested 
and thrashed by hand, taking pains to keep the seeds from each plat 
