COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES. 459 



the population of the world is increasing and will probably continue to 

 increase. As an offset to this, there are many fertile places in the world 

 which are at i)resent worthless and neglected because they are prac- 

 tically inaccessible. There are thousands, aye millions, of acres of land 

 capable of producing food, which only await the coming of the railroad 

 and the farmer to yield their fertility for the use of man. Africa is still 

 the "Dark Continent," and awaits development. South America is but 

 little better than half developed, and our own country has still fertile 

 lands which the plow has never entered. 



Not only is transportation opening new lands, but improved methods 

 of agriculture are rendering lands, hitherto unprofitable, of sufficient 

 value to warrant cultivation. Pessimists point to the occupation of 

 poorer lands as a proof that our food supply is becoming limited, but it 

 rather shows that improved methods have greatly enlarged the terri- 

 tory capable of profitably producing food. 



When we call to mind this great possible increase of tillable land, 

 when we think of the sparsely settled portions of the world and contrast 

 their population with the population they might contain, it would seem 

 that the day when starvation would threaten is too far distant to attract 

 much attention. May we not fairly assume that the increase of land 

 under cultivation will offset the increase of population for many cen- 

 turies before all the land capable of producing food shall have been 

 used? 



But what is to be the future of the land already under cultivation? 

 Will it deteriorate in productive ability as successive crops are removed? 

 There is an old familiar saying that "the granary is the ante-room of the 

 desert,'' meaning that as successive crops are raised, the land becomes 

 depleted. As an example of this we are directed to Egypt, which but 

 for the annual enriching as it is overflowed by the Nile, would soon 

 become a desert. Unless we are able to give up this idea of the earth 

 as a storeroom, we can see no future but final starvation. 



The earth is not a granary or storehouse. The food produced is not 

 destroyed when consumed. It is conserved, changed, it returns to the 

 earth and air in the state in which it was before the plant, under the 

 influence of the sunlight, assimilated it and built it into grain or fruit. 

 Holmes expresses this thought so happily when he speaks of man as 

 simply ''peeling off the sunshine" in the food that he eats. It is the 

 sunshine that we use, since the elements of the food return to their 

 original state in the earth or air. 



We must abandon the idea of the earth as a storehouse. It gives the 

 mother eai'th too lowly a station and to the farmer too mechanical a 

 task. It is a laboratory, a workshop, where by proper mani]uilation and 

 condMiialion the crop is produced. Like any workshop or factory, as 

 the efficiency of its management increases the product will be increased. 

 The yield of wheat per acre in the United States is yearly increasing, 

 riiinn is as fertile today as it was .1.000 years ago. A ])roper under- 

 standing of the laws of agricultural chemistry and of the physical 

 nature of the soil will give us a far greater yield of food. 



For example, let us take the law of minimum. A soil may have all 

 the necessary ])hysical characteristics; it mny have all the requisite 

 <.^hemical elements save one, yet in obedience to this law the productive- 



