ation in bread-making
of about 87-1/2% of the wheat berry, that the resultant bread is fairly
white in colour and is agreeable in flavour, and that it is extremely
simple and provides a ready and cheap means of flour-making.

_Machine Bakeries._--Bread-baking, though one of the most important of
human industries, was long carried out in a most primitive manner, and
machinery is still practically unknown in the bulk of British
bakehouses. The reasons for this apparently anomalous condition of
things are not very far to seek. Bread, unlike biscuits, is a food
quite unfitted for long storage, and must be consumed within a
comparatively short time of being drawn from the oven. Hence the
bread-baker's output is necessarily limited to a greater or lesser
degree. This will be the more apparent when it is considered that the
cost of distributing bread is high relatively to the profits to be
realized. A baker's bread trade is therefore usually limited to local
requirements, and trading on a small scale he has less inducement to
lay out capital on the installation of machinery than other classes of
manufacturers. But there are now many machine bakeries (known in
Scotland as bread factories), both in London and in other parts of
Great Britain, where the manufacture of bread is carried out more or
less on a large scale. The evolution of the machine bakery has been
slow, and the mechanical operations of the bakehouse were long limited
to the mixing of the sponge and the kneading of the dough, but now the
work of the bakery engineer extends over almost every operation of
bread-making.

A bread-baking plant should be installed in a building of at least two
storeys. The ground floor may be used for the shop, with possibly a
bread-cooling and delivery room at the rear. The flour may be hoisted
to an attic at the top of the building, or to the top floor; in any
case there must be sufficient floor space to accommodate the flour
sacks and bags. Underneath the floor of the flour store should be
installed a flour sifter, a simple apparatus consisting essentially of
a hopper through which the flour enters a cylinder with a spiral
brush, by which it is thoroughly agitated previously to passing
through one or more sieves placed under the brush. A sack of flour may
be passed through this sifter in a couple of minutes, the operation
freeing the flour from lumps and pieces of strin