To insure the best quality, it must be pulled and bound in bundles before it is entirely ripe, thus impairing the value of the seed, while the edible and nutritious portion of the stalk is lost or injured in the water.

For many years it was spun on the little wheel, but of late years improved machinery has been applied at Belfast, Leeds, Dundee, and other cities of Great Britain; yet nearly a third of the value is lost in the broken filaments, which are reduced to tow in its preparation for the spindle.  With a fibre at least as fine and delicate as that of cotton, its full value to the world will not be demonstrated until it is effectually cottonized.

In its present state, however, it has come into very extensive use.  More than eighty thousand tons were, in 1859, imported into Great Britain, and many acres are there devoted to its culture.  The consumption in that country is estimated to exceed one hundred and sixty thousand tons, a quantity equivalent to eight hundred thousand bales of cotton.  In addition to this, ten millions of bushels of flax-seed are annually crushed in Great Britain, a large portion of which is drawn from India.

The culture of flax was introduced into this country early in the last century by the Scotch, who crossed over to Ireland under Elizabeth and Cromwell, and soon after the siege of Derry transferred their arts and their industry to this country.  Several colonies of these were planted in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, and a large colony was established at Natfield, New Hampshire, upon a tract twelve miles square, one of the best sections of the State, situate in the area between Manchester, Lowell, Lawrence, and Exeter.  Here every farmer cultivated his field of barley and flax, here every woman had her little wheel, and the article formed the currency of the place;—­notes were given payable in spinning-wheels.  Girls were seen beetling the linen on the grass; and when the harvest over, the men mounted their horses, and with well-filled saddle-bags threaded the by-roads of the forest to find a market in Boston, Lynn, Salem, or Newburyport.  Fortunes were thus accumulated and a flourishing academy and two Presbyterian societies are now sustained by funds thus acquired by the Pinkerton family.  But as the wages of girls gradually rose from two shillings to two dollars per week with the invention of the cotton-gin, the power-loom, and the spinning-jenny, the culture of flax was gradually abandoned, the seat of manufactures removed from the hills to the waterfalls, and the flax-fields converted into market-gardens or milk-farms.  The town of Derry, once the great seat of New-England manufactures, is now principally distinguished for the Stark, Rogers, and Reed it gave to the French War and the Revolution, for the Bells, Dinsmores, Wilsons, and Pattersons it has given to the halls of legislation, and the McKeens, McGregors, Morisons, and Nesmiths it has furnished to commerce or the Church.