Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/587

Rh world over, in the prices which it brings as compared with other flours. Wheat grown in this latitude has so large a proportion of gluten and phosphates that it is gradually but surely crowding more starchy flours to the wall. When Mr. Pillsbury began milling twenty years ago, he secretly brought flour from St. Louis to use in his own family. Minneapolis flour sold very much below that made in other sections of this country, and stood at the foot of the list in market quotations. Now it stands at the top of the list. A Board of Trade report, of the city of Minneapolis, for 1866, stated that the production of flour in the city during that year was 172,000 barrels; now it is forty times as much. Only eleven years ago the amount of flour made in Minneapolis and exported from this country was 109,183 barrels; now it is over 3,000,000, or thirty times as much. It is the improvement which has been made in milling in this section which has accomplished these results. It has also made the rapid settlement of the Northwest possible, as wheat is by all odds the chief crop of that region. On the other hand, the rapid increase of the farming population in the tributary country has made possible the rapid increase of mills in Minneapolis. Another thing that has contributed largely to this result is cheap transportation to the East. A few years ago the millers were paying one dollar and a half a barrel to get their flour carried to the seaboard; now the rate is only fifty-five cents. Mr. Pillsbury deems it quite possible that the flour industry of the Northwest is even yet in its infancy, as probably not more than ten per cent of the available land tributary to Minneapolis has been placed under cultivation.

Aboriginal Mounds in Manitoba.—The Winnipeg mound region, as described in the American Association, by Prof. George Byles, of Manitoba College, includes a district some four hundred miles long from east to west, and running from the international boundary north to at least latitude 50°. The author had seen some sixty mounds and had opened ten, working usually in connection with the Manitoba Historical Society. Numerous skeletons have been exhumed. Unmanufactured articles found included large quantities of charcoal—red and yellow ochre and birch bark charred. Manufactured articles: Stone implements, scrapers, gouges, chisels, axes, malls, conjurers' tubes, and a set of gaming stones. Bones: Breast ornaments of various kinds, whistles, beads, etc. Shells: Columella of conch from trophies, tropical natica and marginetta shells made into beads, wampum, and breast ornaments. Horn: Fish-spear, pottery, numerous marked fragments, various copper implements, and near one skeleton two lumps of arsenical pyrites, no doubt used as sacred objects. All mounds were circular, and all on prominent headlands. The majority contained skeletons, probably of Mandans of the Missouri, who fifty years ago were almost exterminated by small-pox. Certain mounds, from the state of the bones and certain topographical and geological considerations, are likely to date from the beginning of their central parts four hundred years back.

Tapestries.—The word tapestry has primary reference to carpets. As now used, we learn from a lecture by Mr. Alan S. Cole upon the subject, it may be read in two senses: one in which it refers to hangings generally; and the other in which it implies a special method of producing a textile fabric. In making carpet by hand, as in ordinary weaving, a stretched warp is necessary; but the warp-threads play no visible part in the face of the carpet. They are covered with weft-threads. Instead of a shuttle with a weft, as in weaving, various sets of thread are used, which are looped, knotted, and intertwined upon the warp-threads. In making carpets with a pile, the ends of the threads which have been knotted upon the warp are cut. From above these knotted threads, and across and in between the warp-threads, a stout thread is thrown. This is pressed down with a comb, so as to compact the whole fabric. A fresh series of knottings is then made, and the previous operations are repeated. In another closely allied process for making carpets and hangings, a stout cord is thrown across and in between the warp-threads; no scissors are used to cut the ends of knotted warp-threads, and no pile is produced. This process requires the variously colored wefts to be intertwisted between groups of the