26 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
Middlings is a meal-like product, much finer than shorts and much 
coarser than flour ; it may be described as standing midway between 
the two, as its name imports. 
The term mi/l-stuf is applied in Boston to a mixture of shorts and 
middlings which includes everything not flour which has been sepa- 
rated from wheat at the mills of that city. In Chicago the same 
product is called mll-feed. | 
Ship-stuff seems to be a Southern term, analogous to, if not iden- 
tical with, the Northern mill-stuff. The sample of ship-stuff examined 
in this laboratory was manifestly a mixture of shorts and middlings 
in some unknown proportions. It was much finer than shorts, though 
coarser than middlings. Particles of shorts could be seen interspersed 
through it. ’ 
It is noteworthy that the use of the terms “‘ shorts” and “feed” seems 
to be essentially American. The words are at all events sufficiently 
unlike the English terms “bran,” “sharps,” “ boxings,” and ‘‘pollard,” 
which, with the exception of the first, are perhaps never used in the 
United States. It might have been supposed that the term “ shorts ” 
originated in Pennsylvania or New York by translation from the Ger- 
man Kurzkleve, or the Dutch Kort, were it not for the fact that the 
English archeologist, Halliwell, in his “ Dictionary of Archaic and Pro- 
vincial Words,” defines the word ‘‘shorts” as follows: ‘‘ Coarse flour : 
The term is also applied to the refuse of corn [i. e. wheat or other small 
grain| in various dialects.” It is to be remarked, moreover, that 
neither the German nor the Dutch word given above is the precise 
equivalent of the English word “bran.” The term “middlings” is used 
by London millers as well as in this country, though apparently in a — 
somewhat different sense. | 
I am indebted to Mr. Elijah H. Luke, grain-dealer of Cambridgeport, 
for the samples analyzed, and to that gentleman, as well as to other 
members of the trade, for information concerning the subject. The 
samples were obtained and analyzed in the autumn of 1872. 
The object of the analyses being merely to determine the foddering 
value of the substances examined, I have resorted to the processes 
ordinarily employed to that end, as set forth by Professor Henneberg, 
in Die landwirthschaftlichen Versuchs-Stationen, 1864, 6, 496. I 
have endeavored in this way to obtain results comparable with those 
which have been obtained by chemists who haye analyzed other kinds 
