May 20,' 1920] 



NATURE 



From the summary of the evidence produced it is 

 quite possible to extract some comfort. Sir William 

 Beveridge's appeal to the barometer makes it clear 

 that he regards a low mean annual pressure as a 

 direct indication of bad harvests, and points to the 

 years 1878, 1893, and 1909 as the three years of 

 lowest pressure in a forty-year period over the greater 

 part of the habitable globe. It is, on the face of it, 

 practically impossible that the pressure over the whole 

 earth should vary from year to year ; so perhaps we 

 are to assume a higher selective pressure over the 

 ocean areas in such years. In any event, we were 

 very fortunate in this country in 1893 with a glorious 

 summer, shared also by France, in spite of the world- 

 conditions. There is another aspect which must not 

 be ignored, and that is the physical basis on which 

 the period depends. The lecturer contented himself 

 with suggestions of a combination of periods of 

 shorter length, hinting that i5§ years is a sort of 

 least common multiple of two or more of these. The 

 actual figures given are, however, singularly uncon- 

 vincing. Sir William Beveridge mentions a meteoro- 

 logical p>eriod of just over five years, without any 

 details in support of it, and couples this with " the 

 Important 2|-year cycle." Is this a period in itself, 

 or is it merely one of the harmonics of the ii-year 

 sun-spot j>eriod? He says eleven of these make two 

 of his 15^-year periods ; so if the 2f-year period is 

 really "important," his new one should be 30! years. 

 What is apparently important, as we remarked before, 

 is the 12-month period, and this would indicate 

 46 years as a super-period, but there is no indication 

 of any specially bad harvests at every third period 

 in his table. 



Sir William Beveridge's forecast for 1924-5-6 is 

 given with some diffidence, showing that he is not too 

 confident of the realitv- of the period, and it is not 

 likely that he has made much impression on the 

 devotees of the sun-spot period, which has been 

 claimed to show direct correlation with such different 

 phenomena as the price of wheat and the number of 

 fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society. 



One last question we might raise is : Does fine 

 weather necessarilv moan lower food prices, con- 

 sidered in the light of the suggestion that strikes and 

 labour unrest are generally regarded as fine-weather 

 phenomena? W. W. B. 



The National Food Supply. 



SIR DANIEL HALL, in the first of his three recent 

 Chadwick public lectures on " Gardening and 

 Food Production," dealt with the national food supply 

 and the possibility of self-support. According to the 

 values obtained by a committee of the Royal Society 

 for the five-year period prior to the war, only 42 per 

 cent, of the total food supply consumed in the United 

 Kingdom was produced at home. At the beginning 

 •of the nineteenth century the country was practically 

 self-supporting, but since that time the population has 

 greatly increased, while the productivity has decreased. 

 In 1872 there were 14 million acres under the plough 

 in England and Wales, but by 1914 nearly 4 million 

 acres of this land had been put down to grass. Grass 

 land is comparatively unproductive of food as com- 

 pared with arable land, for, according to Sir Thomas 

 Middleton's calculation, 100 acres of arable land in 

 this country normally produce food that will main- 

 tain eighty-four persons, whereas the same 100 acres 

 under grass will maintain only fifteen to twenty per- 

 sons. The great difficulty is that arable land requires 

 much more labour than grass land, and farmers 

 ■naturally refrain from ploughing up their land when 



NO. 2638, VOL. 105] 



the cost of labour has risen very much more than have 

 the prices of the produce. In 19 17-18 another 2\ 

 million acres were added to the acreage already Under 

 the plough, but the food crisis is not yet over. It is 

 essential that we should increase our productivity, and 

 to attain this end we must agree to pay the prices ne- 

 cessary to, make arable farming reasonably profitable 

 to the farmer. Moreover, the population will have to 

 change its habits and eat more bread, potatoes, etc., 

 than meat, while pork will have increasingly to re- 

 place the more expensive animal foods. 



The second lecture was concerned with the develop- 

 ment and uses of allotments. The history of allot- 

 ments appears to go back to a very early date; for 

 from the time of Henry III. onwards there are 

 statutes dealing with pieces of cultivated land of the 

 allotment tyj>e. The first period of active growth of 

 the allotment scheme was in the nineteenth century, 

 when the industrial system and the large towns 

 developed. A noteworthy example is the still flourish- 

 ing group of allotments started by the late Sir John 

 Lawes on his Rothamsted estate, in connection with 

 which a club-house for the use of the allotment- 

 holders was built as early as 1857. Without doubt the 

 greatest extension of the allotment movement occurred 

 during the years 1916 onwards, when the country was 

 threatened with a serious food shortage. At the 

 present time it is estimated that about one million 

 allotments are in use. The typical allotment of one- 

 sixteenth of an acre is rarely capable of providing all 

 the potatoes and vegetables needed by an ordinary 

 small household, but when a million of such allot- 

 ments are considered, it is clear that they do bring 

 about a marked saving in the national food bill. 

 Unfortunately, the typical allotment is not always 

 cropped to the best advantage, but it is hoped that 

 this will be improved through the publication of a 

 detailed scheme for allotments by the Ministry of 

 Agriculture. In dealing with fertilisers the lecturer 

 pointed out that many allotments are deficient in 

 humus, and must be supplied with stable manure in 

 addition to artificial fertilisers. Town-dwellers are 

 faced with further difficulties over the tenure of their 

 allotments, but it is hoped that all building schemes 

 in tlje future will provide for a reasonable amount of 

 allotment land. 



" Social and Hygienic Conditions Respecting 

 Gardens and Allotments " provided the subject for 

 the third of Sir Daniel Hall's lectures. Under this 

 heading was discussed the extreme importance of 

 "vitamines," of which three at least have been found 

 to be present in food. These vitamines occur mostly 

 in living plants, although they are found also in 

 certain animal foods. They are essential for the 

 healthy development of human beings. In this con- 

 nection appears cne of the great values of allot- 

 ments, for by their means a large number of people 

 are provided with fresh vegetables containing the all- 

 important vitamines, without which various diseases 

 are liable to occur. The lecturer next dealt with the 

 social value of allotments. Passive amusements, such 

 as picture palaces, etc., fail to satisfy completely one's 

 need for amusement, but there is enormous satisfac- 

 tion in growing things; moreover, some of our best 

 varieties of flowers and vegetables are the result of 

 the efforts of working-men, who found much to 

 interest them in the allotments which provided a 

 welcome diversion from work that was often mono- 

 tonous and carried out under unpromising conditions. 

 The growth of the allotment movement will surely 

 put men on a sounder economic basis, in addition to 

 providing an active interest in life and to ensuring 

 the better health of their families. 



