The Native Method Of
Crushing Is Exceedingly Rude And Ineffective.
A heavy plank about
sixteen feet long and three inches thick, furnished with two rings, is
dragged by oxen over the surface; which generally remains in so rough a
state that walking over the field is most laborious.
There are many
stone columns lying useless among the heaps of ruins so common in
Cyprus, that would form excellent rollers, but the idea of such an
implement has never entered the Cypriote head. The plough,
smoothing-plank, and the ancient threshing-harrow, composed of two broad
planks inlaid with sharp flint stones, are the only farm machinery of
the cultivator. As in the days of Abraham the oxen drew this same
pattern of harrow over the corn, and reduced the straw to a coarse chaff
mingled with the grain, so also the treatment in Cyprus remains to the
present day. The result is a mixture of dirt and sand which is only
partially rejected by the equally primitive method of winnowing.
Mr. Hamilton Lang gives an amusing description of the strictly
conservative principles of the Cyprian oxen, which have always been fed
upon the straw broken by the process described in threshing by the
harrow of sharp flints. This coarse chaff, mixed with cotton-seed,
lentils, or barley, is eaten by all animals with avidity, and the
bullocks positively refused Mr. Lang's new food, which was the same
straw passed through an English threshing-machine and cut fine by a
modern chaff-cutter.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 40 of 524
Words from 10614 to 10865
of 143016
