468 
AMERICAN AGRICULT URIST. 
[December, 
Blow 'I'hirng-* sai-e E>owe in Other 
CouiiIrics-'riirashiag’ Out Grain. 
Lust month, in describing the “Milkman in Malta,” 
we mentioned that one of the most interesting things 
{to us) about traveling is to observe the ways people do 
their daily work, and in seeing 
how those who live in other coun¬ 
tries do things that wc do very 
differently at home. Of course, 
in most of these operations the 
end to be gained is the same, hut 
there are many ways of reaching 
that end, and those followed by 
people elsewhere are often better 
for them than our ways would be, 
while at the same time we could 
not adopt their plan of doing 
things if we wished to do so. 
Take the Milkman in Malta, for 
•example ; it would be almost im¬ 
possible to serve the people in 
one of our large towns with milk 
if a flock of goats had to be driven 
around to be milked at the houses. 
But goats can be kept around 
Malta, while it is very difficult to 
keep cows. So the people there 
do the best they can. We cannot 
all travel and see these things, 
but we can do what is next best, 
we can make other countries and 
their customs come to us in pic¬ 
tures, and learn much in that way. 
Thinking that the boys and girls 
will like it and will find it in¬ 
teresting, we propose to give a 
series of articles and engravings, 
showing how things are done in 
other countries. We may not do 
this every month, but by keeping 
these articles running along, we 
shall in time have learned much 
that it is well to know. It is not 
necessary to tell our boys and 
girls how important bread is— 
some of you may add: “Yes, and 
butter, too,” but all people donor 
have butter with their bread, and 
we will attend first to the bread, 
and see how other people manage 
to get that. It is a very rude peo¬ 
ple who do not raise some kind of 
grain to make bread from; it is not always wheat, but 
that grain is raised in many countries where all the steps 
of preparing it, until it finally gets to be bread, are of 
the rudest kind. You know that after the wheat is ripe 
and harvested, the next 
thing is to separate the 
grain from the straw and to 
get it out of the husks that 
are around it in the head. 
This operation, you are 
aware, is thrashing. All of 
you, who live in parts of the 
country where wheat is 
grown, know what quick 
and lively work the thrash¬ 
ing machine makes, with its 
eight or more horses, or a 
steam-engine; how hard the 
men have to work to keep 
its hungry jaws supplied 
with sheaves of wheat; how 
the straw runs out in a great 
stream as fast as a man or 
two can shape it into stacks; 
how at another place' the 
grain runs out in another 
6 tream, and bag after bag is 
carried off to the granary, 
and how it all goes with a 
buzz, and a hum, making a 
noise that can be heard for 
a mile, and this with the 
shouts of the drivers make 
the whole neighborhood 
ring with the music of the 
harvest. This is our way 
of starting the grain on its 
way to the loaf of bread. 
But it is likely that most 
of your fathers and mothers 
can recollect when there 
were no thrashing ma¬ 
chines, and that the grain 
was all beaten out upon the barn-floor by the flail. In I 
some very new parts of the country, or where but little | 
grain is grown, the flail is still used. Those who have 
never seen one will understand what it is like, if we de¬ 
scribe it as a whip, of which the lash as well as the han¬ 
dle is made of wood ; indeed, the original flail was a 
whip with two or more lashes. To use the flail so that 
the lash part will strike a smart flat blow upon the heads 
making emends with the birds. —{Seepage 4G7.j 
of grain needs some skill, as an awkward beginner may 
hit his own head instead of the grain-heads. The first 
thrashing machines in England were made with beaters, 
to act like several flails together, but it was not until 
THRASHING GRAIN FOR THE SERVIAN ARMT. 
American inventors took hold of it, that the machine 
reached its present usefulness. “But before the flail— 
what then? ” You have read in the Scriptures, as one 
of the laws given by Moses, “Thou slialt not muzzle the 
ox when he treadeth out the corn;” and this, if we had 
no other account of it, would show us how thrashing 
was done in those days of old, for you must know that 
where corn is mentioned in the Bible it does not mean 
Indian corn, but wheat or barley, 
and these are still called corn 
in England, where our corn is 
scarcely known. The ancient 
people made a thrashing-floor by 
pounding the surface of a clayey 
place until it became smooth and 
hard ; the bundles of grain being 
laid upon this floor, oxen were 
driven around and around, until 
they had trampled the kernels out 
of the heads. It was the custom 
to muzzle the oxen, to prevent 
them from eating, but Moses evi¬ 
dently thought that was not fair, 
and that the poor animals should 
have a bite to pay them for their 
labor. In other Eastern countries 
horses were used instead of oxen 
to trample out the grain. “What 
strange people those ancients 
were, and what odd old ways they 
had,” some of you will say. In 
many Eastern countries the peo¬ 
ple live just as they did in the 
time of Moses. While other parts 
of the world have gone on im¬ 
proving, these portions remain as 
they were ; no buzz of the thrash¬ 
ing machine is heard; not even the 
thud of the flail, but instead the 
yells of the drivers as they urge 
the oxen around and around, as 
in Moses’ time. Just now you 
read in the papers the accounts of 
the wicked war between the Turks 
and the Servians and others, and 
perhaps you have read that the 
Turks have received so many 
thousand, of some improved rifle 
from America, and that the Servi¬ 
ans have had other thousands of 
other improved rifles from Eng¬ 
land or Germany. Fast enough 
these people are to seek out im¬ 
proved implements for killing 
people ; yet the very armies that 
are to use these new rifles “ with all the modern improve¬ 
ments” are fed upon grain thrashed just as it was 
thousands of years ago, before gunpowder and rifles 
were known. Our engraving, from a sketch by one of 
the artists at the seat of 
war, shows how the wheat is 
thrashed for the Servian 
army. You may think it 
strange that people do not 
improve in thousands of 
years, tut we need not go 
off of our own continent, to 
find that they do not. Our 
next neighbors, the Mexi¬ 
cans, thrash their grain in 
just the same way that the 
Israelites did, and we have 
many a time seen the oxen 
and horses tramping around 
the earthen thrashing-floor, 
just as they did in the far 
East long before our pres¬ 
ent era. In some parts of 
Mexico, where horses and 
oxen are scarce, even goats 
or sheep are made to answer 
the purpose. Having shown 
you how some other people 
get thair grain, we will fol¬ 
low it to the next step 
towards bread another time. 
The Ibast.—This is the 
very end of our Boys and 
Girls’ Columns for the year 
1876. By the time this reacli- 
esyoti, wesliall be providing 
for your amusement and in¬ 
struction for 1877. We do 
not say “good-bye,” because 
we expect our friends to 
keep with us. So we only 
pause long enough to give the greeting of “A Merry Christ¬ 
mas and A Happy New Year” to all our young friends. 
