Note 23 — Chapter IV

It is curious that this process which all concur in representing to be one requiring the utmost cleanliness and purity, should of all places be performed in Holland with an utter neglect of both. In an able document by Mr. Acton, in the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture for 1832, he gives the following account of the operation. “The mode of watering flax in Holland, and in the low lands of Belgium and France, is to put a dam across the canal, clean out the weeds and mud for a few yards next the dam, lay in three or four rows of sheaves of flax next the dam, and then covering these six inches deep with the rank herbage that grows in the canal, and the mud raked up from its bottom. A few more courses of sheaves are next placed in the same way as the first, and covered in the same way with weeds and mud, till the whole is put in steep. These fosses, and the mode of placing the flax in them, are as they ought to be, but the propriety of dragging up so much mud or slime from the bottom of the canals, to cover the sheaves, six inches deep, may well be doubted, it cannot fail to besmear the lint so much, as to render it so nasty, that it would require to be much rinsed and washed in the water to remove the mud. This not only creates labour, by no means the most agreeable, but must greatly injure the flax by ruffling it in the water, a thing that ought to be avoided.”—Vol. iv. p. 174.