ISO 



NATURE 



[October 8, 19 14 



Architectural and Building Construction Plates, W. R. 

 Jaggard, part ii., Thirtj- Drawings covering an Ad- 

 vanced Course for Architectural and Building 

 Students (Cambridge Technical Series). /. and A. 

 Churchill. — Lime Sand Bricks, A. B. Searle, illus- 

 trated; Bricks and Artificial Stones of Non-Plastic 

 Materials : their Manufacture and Uses, A. B. Searle. 

 Crosby Lockwood and Soti. — Paper and its Uses, 



E. A. Dawe. Longmans and Co. — Typographical 

 Printing Surfaces : the Technology and Mechanism 

 Employed in their Production, L. A. Legros and J. C. 

 Grant, illustrated ; Modern Practice in Mining, Sir 

 R. A. S. Redmayne, vol. v.. The Mechanical 

 Engineering of Collieries ; Engineering Workshop 

 Drawing, arranged for Use in Workshop, Prepara- 

 tory, or Minor Courses in Technical, Secondary, and 

 Trade Schools, etc., Prof. H. J. Spooner, illustrated. 

 Sampson Low and Co., Ltd. — Dictionary of Weaves : 

 a Collection of 2000 Practical Weaves from Four to 

 Nine Harness covering Cotton, Wool, Worsted and 

 Silk, conveniently arranged for the handy use of the 

 superintendents and designers of mills, E. A. Posselt. 

 Macmillan and Co., Ltd. — Cocoa, Dr. C. J. J. van 

 Hall, illustrated. Methuen and Co., Ltd. — A Manual 

 of Cookery on Scientific Lines, M. Dyer; The Little 

 Housewife, A. M. Phillips and C. L. Dean. C. A. 

 Pearson, Ltd. — Submarine Engineering, S. F. Walker, 

 illustrated; The Modern Motor Cycle, B. H. Davies. 

 Scott, Greenwood and Son. — ^The Science of Works 

 Management, J. Batey. The University Tutorial 

 Press, Ltd. — Manual Training, A. H. Jenkins. Whit- 

 taker and Co. — Electrical Instruments, Murdoch and 

 Oschwald ; Modern Illuminants, Gaster and Dow ; 

 Handrailing for Geometrical Staircases, Scott. John 

 Wiley and Sons, Inc. {New York).- — Pattern-Making, 



F. W. Turner and D. G. Town. 



Miscellaneous. 



D. Appleton and Co. — Psychology : General and 

 Applied, H. Munsterburg. E. Arnold.. — The Rare 

 Earths : their Occurrence, Chemistry, and Tech- 

 nology, S. L Levy. H. Holt and Co. (New York).- — 

 Behavior : an Introduction to Comparative Psycho- 

 logy, Prof. J. B. Watson. Longmans and Co. — A 

 History of the Royal Dublin Society, Dr. H. F. Berry, 

 illustrated. Sampson Low and Co., Ltd. — ^The 

 Camera as Historian, H. D. Gower, L. S. Jast, and 

 W. W. Topley, illustrated. Macmillan and Co., Ltd. 

 — The Life of Sir John Lubbock, First Lord Avebury, 

 H. Hutchinson, two vols., with portraits and illus- 

 trations. Open Court Publishing Co. — The analysis 

 of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical 

 to the Psychical, Dr. E. Mach, translated 

 from the first German edition by C. M. 

 Williams, revised and supplemented from the fifth 

 German edition by S. Waterlow ; Essays on the Life 

 and Work of Newton, A. De Morgan, edited, with 

 Notes and Appendices, by P. E. B. Jourdain. G. 

 Routledge and Sons, Ltd. — Discoveries and Inventions 

 of the Twentieth Century, E. Cressy. WiUiam^s and 

 Nor gate. — Cities in Evolution, Prof. P. Geddes, illus- 

 trated. 



THE AUSTRALIAN MEETING OF THE 



BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 



SECTION M. 



AGRICULTURE. 



Address by A. D. Hall, M.A., F.R.S., President ok 

 THE Section. 



The president of a section of the British Association 

 has two very distinct precedents before him for his 

 address ; he can either set about a general review of 



NO. 2345, VOL. 94] 



the whole subject to which his section is devoted, or 1 

 he can give an account of one of his own investiga- | 

 tions which he judges to be of wider interest and ' 

 application than usual. The special circumstances of 

 this meeting in Australia have suggested to me 

 another course. I have tried to find a topic which 

 under one or other of its aspects may be equally in- 

 teresting both to my colleagues from England and to 

 my audience who are farming here in this great Con- 

 tinent. My subject will be the winning of new land 

 for agriculture, the bringing into cultivation of land 

 that has hitherto been left to run to waste because 

 it was regarded as unprofitable to farm. To some 

 extent, of course, this may be regarded as the normal 

 process by which new countries are settled ; the Bush 

 is cleared and the plough follows, or under other con- 

 ditions the rough native herbage gives way to pasture 

 under the organised grazing of sheep or cattle. I 

 wish, however, to deal exclusively with what are com- 

 monly termed the bad lands, inasmuch as in many 

 parts of the world, though recently settled, agriculture 

 is being forced to attack these bad lands because the 

 supply of natural farming land is running short. In 

 a new country farming begins on the naturally fertile 

 soils that only require a minimum of cultivation to 

 yield profitable crops, and the new-comers wander 

 further afield in order to find land which will in the 

 light of their former experience be good. Before long 

 the supply is exhausted, the second-class land is then 

 taken up until the stage is reached of experimentation 

 upon soils that require some special treatment or novel 

 form of agriculture before they can be utilised at all. 

 Perhaps North America affords the clearest illustra- 

 tion : its great agricultural development came with the 

 opening up of the prairies of the Middle West, where 

 the soil, rich in the accumulated fertility of past cycles 

 of vegetation, was both easy to work and grateful for 

 exploitation. But with the growth of population and 

 the continued demand for land no soils of that class 

 have been available for the last generation or so, and 

 latterly we find the problem has been how to make use 

 of the arid lands, either by irrigation or by dry-farm- 

 ing where the rainfall can still be made adequate for 

 partial cropping, or, further, how to convert the soils 

 that are absolutely poisoned by alkali salts into some- 

 thing capable of growing a crop. You yourselves will 

 supply better than I can the Australian parallels ; at 

 any rate we in England read that the wheat-belt is now- 

 being extended into districts where the low rainfall had 

 hitherto been thought to preclude any systematic crop- 

 ping. 



Now, the fact that the supply of naturally fertile 

 land is not unlimited reacts in its turn upon the old 

 countries. During the 'eighties and 'nineties of the 

 last century the opening up of such vast wheat areas 

 in America, Argentina, Australia, and the development 

 of the overseas trade, reduced prices in Europe to such 

 an extent that in Great Britain, where the full extent 

 of the competition was experienced, the extension of 

 agriculture came to an end despite the continued in- 

 crease of population. The area of land under cultiva- 

 tion has declined but little despite the growth of the 

 towns, but the process of taking in the waste lands 

 stopped, and much of the land already farmed fell 

 back from arable to cheaper pasture. But as soon as 

 production in the newer countries failed to keep pace 

 with the growth of population, prices began to rise 

 again, and we are now in the Old World endeavouring 

 to make productive the land that has hitherto been 

 of little service except for sport and the roughest of 

 grazing. Even the most densely populated European 

 countries contain great areas of uncultivated land ; j 

 within fifty miles of London blocks of a thousand acres 1 

 of waste may be found, and Holland and Belgium, ! 

 perhaps the most intensively cultivated of all Western ( 



