MATERIAL REVIEWS.
THE PICCANINNY FLOUR MILL.* INnuaraY, like history, repeats itself. Thousands of years ago it gave us the Quern, and so made the caveman, through his wife, self-sufficient—a miller as well as a tiller. And now come Messrs. Tattersall and Co. with their Piccaninny Flour Mill, which you can fasten on to a table, fill with Mani- toba Bard, or whatever else it may be called, turn the handle (or if you have electric power slip on a miniature belt), and see a delicate stream of white wholemeal powder, as soft as that which graces Chloe's perfumed puff, falling as silently as Alpine snows out of the other end. If you work away like Samson when he stooped " grinding in Gaza at the mill with slaves " for a quarter of an hour, you will have produced enough meal to make two loaves of bread- and have given yourself a piece of hard but wholesome exercise. If you want delicate white bread you will have to stretch a piece of silk over an ordinary sieve and shake the fine white powder through. If you are a standard bread eater you will do no such In any case, the bread straight from grain to oven will be delicious.
Now, think what this elegant and potent little mill means for the settler or the dweller in what Marlowe in " Hero and Leander " calls a " wild, uplandish country." He will not
• Manufactured by A. R. Tattersall and Co., 75 Mark Lane, London, B.C. 3. [ES 1514
need to hitch two horses to his wagon, haul his wheat-fifteen miles to a mill, maybe through rivers and over spurs of moun-
tains, at any rate " thorough bush, thorough briar," wait there till it is milled, and then painfully haul back the flour and pro- bably leave the precious " offals " behind to save the horses. With a Piccaninny he is lord otitis own loaves. But it is not only in the distant parts of the Dominions that the man who can grind his own earn will.rejoice. There are plenty of little hill farms and isolated smallholdings and down farms where " it isn't worth while to grow wheat " because sending it out and back to the mill costs too much. The Piccaninny, once installed, will make the small man snap his fingers at the shop- keeper who now takes it out of him in flour, oatmeal and chicken food. " We make our own, thank you." " Yes, but how about ' thrashing ' 7 " We shall answer this before very long. Meantime, we may point out that the Piccaninny will also grind fine, or simply crack, barley, oats, maize, rye, peas, beans, coffee, rice and all small grains. Here are the exact particulars of the Piccaninny :-
"Extreme height 19 ins. Diameter of flywheel 12 ins. Nett weight 23 lbs. Shipping weight, packed, 32 lbs. and measurement 21 by 12 by 11 ins. Capacity about one bushel, or 25 kilos of wheat per hour at 230 revs. per minute (and less in proportion by hand power)."
The present writer is not writing at second-hand or from description. He ground the mill and felt the product slide through like water, as soft as that which bubbles from Helicon, and around gathered the shadowy users of handmills in all times and all places. Here an Egyptian slave prepared the " mummy wheat " for Pharaoh. There Clytemnestra, with dark and xnaliceful mien, superintended the making of the meal for the funeral-wedding-homecoming cakes which would never be eaten by her lord. Here the Roman matron ground the corn that kept her man fed in the field and gave him strength to smite the Samnite and the Tuscan. Here crouched the working mother of David, there the palace cook- maid who made the flour that made the morsel of bread that tempted Absolom. Here the Brahman wife, the primitive Mexican and Peruvian, there the busy housewife of China and Japan sped the mill, and all the time the courteous repre- sentative of Messrs. Tattersall demonstrated that if you had " power," water or wind or electrical, you could save yourself a good deal of labour, for the little mill does its work as well by " power " as by hand. Still; mankind and his wife need exer- cise, and the shadow ladies of my vision would probably have not kept their figures had they not engaged in the healthful toil of the mill. Besides, drought, dead calms and fuses that go wrong are terrible non-conductors of bread to the hungry mouth.
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