A 1922 scientific article from the Botanical Gazette on the bacteriology of flax retting, the process that frees bast fibers from the flax stalk. It describes flax cultivation, dew and water retting, and scutching. It then reviews earlier work on retting organisms (van Tieghem, Winogradsky, Haumann, Beijerinck, Rossi and others). It also reports the author's experiments with pure cultures and vat liquors from a Michigan rettery, concluding that an anaerobic spore-former, identified as Clostridium amylobacter, is the specific retting agent.