The two essential qualities of a good marketable flour are color and strength. It should be sharply granular and not feel flat and soft to the touch. A wheat which has an abundance of starch, but is poor in gluten, cannot make a strong flour. This is the trouble with all soft wheats, both winter and spring. A wheat which is rich in gluten is hard, and in the case of our hard Minnesota wheat has a very tender bran. It is comparatively easy to make a strong flour, but it requires very careful milling to make a flour of good color from it. Probably the wheat which combines the most desirable qualities for flour-making purposes is the red Mediterranean, which has plenty of gluten and a tough bran, though claimed by some to have a little too much coloring matter, while the body of the berry is white. By poor milling a good wheat can be made into flour deficient both in strength and color, and by careful milling a wheat naturally deficient in strength may be made into flour having all the strength there was in the wheat originally and of good color. Good milling is indispensable, no matter what the quality of the wheat may be. The idea of gradual reduction milling was borrowed by our millers from the Hungarian mills. There is, however, this difference between the Hungarian system and gradual reduction, as applied in this country, that in the former, when fully carried out, the products of the different breaks are kept separate to the end, and a large number of different grades of flour made, while in the system, as applied in this country, the separations are combined at different stages and usually only three different grades of flour made, viz.: patent, baker's, or as it is termed in Minnesota, clear flour, and low grade or red dog. In the largest mills the patent is often subdivided into first and second, and they may make different grades of baker's flour, these mills approaching much nearer to the Hungarian system, though modifying it to American methods and machinery. In mills of from three to five hundred barrels daily capacity, it is hardly possible or profitable to go to this subdivision of grades, owing to the excessive amount of machinery necessary to handling the stuff in its different stages of completion. The Hungarian system has, therefore, been greatly modified by American millers and milling engineers to adapt it to the requirements of mills of average capacity. This modified Hungarian system we call gradual reduction. It can be profitably employed in any mill large enough to run at all on merchant work. So far it has not been found practicable to use it in mills of less than one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty barrels capacity in twenty-four hours, and it is better to have the mill of at least double this capacity.