776 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



values we find a ready explanation of tlie apparent lack of progress. 

 "What inducement has the immigrant had of late years to take up 

 land for, or the farmer to grow, wheat that he could hardly sell for 

 the actual cost of production? And yet Sir W. Crookes would argue 

 that because the land has not been utilized for this particular pur- 

 pose the land can not be there, and that land upon which wheat 

 once was grown, but which is now employed for other purposes, can 

 never again be included in the wheat-bearing area. 



Progress may appear to have been slow, but it has kept pace 

 w^ith the demand, and in any case has been considerably more 

 rapid than Sir W. Crookes allows. He says, " The wheat-bearing 

 area of all Canada has increased less than 500,000 acres since 

 1884," whereas the actual increase since 1880 has been over 

 1,100,000 acres, and since 1890 upward of 760,000 acres. The 

 area under wheat in Canada in 1898 was 3,508,540 acres, so that 

 Sir W. Crookes only allows for an increase of 2,500,000 acres in 

 the next twelve years. Perhaps it will not be as much, but if it 

 is not, it will only be putting the predicted day of famine still far- 

 ther away, and will prove nothing more than the fact that the 

 state of the market has not warranted any more extended cul- 

 tivation. 



The statements made by Sir W. Crookes about the wheat acre- 

 age in the States are as incorrect as those about Canada, for he 

 says, in his letter to The Times of December 8, 1898, that " the 

 whole wheat acreage in the United States is less than it was fifteen 

 years ago," whereas the ofiicial figures for 1897 and 1898, which 

 were before him at the time, told him that the wheat acreage in 

 1897 was 3,000,000 acres in excess of the average of the preceding 

 fifteen years, and in 1898 was in the neighborhood of 5,000,000 

 acres in excess of any year in the history of that country. Do not 

 the fluctuations in the wheat acreage of the United States in recent 

 years prove conclusively that they were solely the result of the 

 movement of prices, and had no bearing whatever on the question 

 of exhaustion of land? Under the depressing influence of an un- 

 profitable market, the wheat area fell from 39,900,000 acres in 1891 

 to 34,000,000 acres in 1895, but, under the stimulus of a substan- 

 tial appreciation, increased again, in three years, to 44,000,000 

 acres. If, in spite of a rising and remunerative market, the area 

 had remained stationary or shown signs of decrease, it would have 

 been in order to call attention to the fact as indicating exhaus- 

 tion; but when, in immediate response to a rising market, the area 

 increases by leaps and bounds, the question of exhaustion be- 

 comes less and less one of actual probability, and more and more 

 one of theoretical possibility. A precisely similar line of reason- 



