  The reconstruction of the peculiar velocity field from the 1.936~Jy iras
selected sample of galaxies is compared to a similar reconstruction from an
optically selected sample. A general method for combining different samples to
reconstruct a self-consistent density and peculiar velocity field is presented.
The method is applied to determine how sensitive the derived peculiar velocity
field is to the characteristics of the sample used. The possibility that the
iras galaxies do not trace the general galaxy population is explored adopting a
simple model of linear biasing between the iras and optical samples. We find
that the velocity fields derived from the two samples are consistent, within
the estimated shot noise error, for the case of no relative bias. This result
suggests that the predicted peculiar velocity field based on iras samples is
not sensitive to the sampling properties of iras galaxies. Combined with
previous suggestion of a relative biasing of iras galaxies on small scales
(about 5 h^-1Mpc), this result suggests scale dependent biasing.
