12 GEOGRAPHICAL CONCENTRATION. 



coast having far outranked them. Ten years more and the 

 industry was almost revolutionized. While New York still 

 contained 73.03 per cent of the total hop acreage, its produc- 

 tion amounted to only 51.22 per cent of the total yield, owing 

 to the remarkable growth of the industry on the Pacific coast, 

 where 24.33 P er cent of the hop acreage of the country 

 yielded 47.16 per cent of the total production. The yield 

 per acre on the Pacific coast being nearly three times as 

 great as it is in the state of New York, the next census will 

 probably find the hop production of the country scarcely less 

 concentrated than in the past, but concentrated not in the 

 state that has so long dominated the industry, but 3,000 

 miles farther west. 



Now, however convenient it might be to do so, we cannot 

 dismiss these inequalities of distribution with the simple as- 

 sertion that they represent the experience and judgment of 

 the American farmer as to the balance of advantage accruing 

 from differences in temperature, in rainfall, in the chemical 

 composition and mechanical structure of soils, in facility of 

 cultivation, in cheapness of labor, in proximity to markets, 

 in convenience of transportation, and other considerations 

 that affect, in varying measure, the cultivation of crops ; in 

 other words, that they are wholly the result qf the operation 

 of the law of the survival of the fittest. 



While it would be absurd to deny that, at least in the case 

 of corn, wheat, and oats, the areas of principal production 

 are peculiarly adapted to the successful cultivation of those 

 products, the geographical distribution even of those lead- 

 ing cereals as it exists to-day is in no small degree the result 

 of circumstances that are entirely distinct from any consid- 

 erations of the superiority of soil and climate and that cannot 

 be depended upon to maintain the situation they have so 

 largely contributed to bring about. 



