to make flour on the old system and made a most lamentable failure of
it. I can remember when the farmer in Wisconsin, who liked a good loaf
of bread, thought it necessary to raise a little patch of winter wheat
for his own use. He oftener failed than succeeded, and most frequently
gave it up as a bad job. Spring wheat was hard, with a very tender,
brittle bran. If ground fine enough to make a good yield a good share
of the bran went into the flour, making it dark and specky. If not
so finely ground the flour was whiter, but the large percentage of
middlings made the yield per bushel ruinously small. These middlings
contained the choicest part of the flour producing part of the berry,
but owing to the dirt, germ, and other impurities mixed with them, it
was impossible to regrind them except for a low grade flour. Merchant
milling of spring wheat was impossible wherever the flour came in
competition with winter wheat flours. At Minneapolis, where the millers
had an almost unlimited water power, and wheat at the lowest price,
merchant milling was almost given up as impracticable. It was certainly
unprofitable. To the apparently insurmountable obstacles in the way of
milling spring wheat successfully, we may ascribe the progress of modern
milling. Had it been as easy to raise good winter wheat in Wisconsin and
Minnesota as in Pennsylvania and Ohio, or as easy to make white flour
from spring as from winter wheat, we should not have heard of purifiers
and roller mills for years to come.

The first step in advance was the introduction of a machine to purify
middlings. It was found that the flour made from these purified
middlings was whiter than the flour from the first grinding and brought
a better price than even winter wheat flours. Then the aim was to make
as many middlings as possible. To do this and still clean the bran so
as to make a reasonable yield the dress of the burrs was more carefully
attended to, the old fashioned cracks were left out, the faces and