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On the Flax of JST ew Zealand. 
that of the fibres of the Phormium tenax, tried in the 
same state, was twenty-three and five- elevenths. The 
filaments of the aloe gave only seven, flax eleven and 
three-fourths, and silk thirty-four; or, in other words, 
the fibres of hemp broke only with a weight of 400.3917 
grammes, that of the flax of New Zealand by 590.5034 
grammes, flax by 895.8388 grammes, and silk by 855.997^ 
grammes. 
The hemp and flax which I employed for these expe- 
riments were the first fibres of the best kind produced in 
the department of L ? Orne. I extracted, by maceration 
and slight friction to detach the parenchyme, the fibres 
of the aloe from a leaf of the Agave foetida, Linn, or the 
Furcrma gigantea Vent, which was given to me by my 
colleague C. Thouin. 
I must here observe, that at first I took the filaments of 
a diameter much smaller, one twentieth of a millimetre, 
or 0.0331 of a line, and even less ; but I soon observed 
that it was difficult to obtain them of that tenuity without 
a great many inequalities and other defects, which pre- 
vented the exactness of the results ; besides, the more 
delicate they were, the more difficult it was to ascertain 
their diameter. I paid attention, therefore, to those 
only the diameter of which was one-tenth of a milli- 
metre. 
It may, therefore, be readily conceived what advan- 
tage it would be to the navy to have ropes, the strength 
of which, were it confined merely to this proportion, 
would be almost one-half greater than that of hemp ropes. 
But I have no hesitation to assert that it will far exceed 
it; for the fibres of the flax of New Zealand, according 
to a series of comparative experiments which I made on 
purpose to determine the tension of which they are sus- 
ceptible before they break, are more tensible by one-half 
than those of hemp ; and the principal cause of the dimi- 
