RECLAMATION OF WASTE LAND. 417 



heav}' doses of manure, whether phosphates or nitrogenous, 

 would be clean thrown away. There is too little retentive- 

 ness in the soil. Inoculation has proved valuable. But 

 there is plenty of waste land which requires more even 

 on the top of inoculation after breaking up and treating to 

 heavy dressings of manures, and on which the second year 

 after reclamation will not see the imagined heavy wheat 

 crop grow that we hear talked of. Carting off the soil 

 from the mounds and filling it into the hollows, which is 

 spoken of as so very easy a matter, is likewise a good deal 

 less successful in practice than it appears in theory. There 

 are wastes in which that would mean piling.up soil capable 

 of bearing crops in'j, unnecessary thickness on some spots, 

 to leave other bits hopelessly bare and barren. People 

 want to be trained to the work of reclamation, as well as 

 to any other. You may waste a good deal of money and 

 labour in injudicious reclamation. 



Our cousins in the United States, although of course 

 disposing of enormous spaces of waste land, afford us no 

 guidance in the matter' of reclamation, except in the rough 

 and ready, generally ; wasteful way of reclamation by 

 individual settlers. In a national capacity they do, perhaps, 

 more than any other nation in respect of reclamation.' '. But 

 it is all irrigation, to make arid land capable of bearing 

 crops^ That means, in the United States, a great deal. 

 For arid land tells up to about a third of the entire Federal 

 area. Under this aspect the Americans have accomplished 

 veritable wonders, such as have astonished our Indian 

 irrigators. The United States Treasury now disposes of 

 a fund to be appropriated to this purpose of about 

 £8,000,000. On irrigated land as little as five acres, and 

 even less, is found sufficient to maintain a family. 



We shall have to lay our account with having not a little 

 inferior land, less grateful in itself, or else more beset with 

 obstacles than that now under plough and spade, to deal 

 with. When that task falls to expert hands, famiUar with 

 the quality of the soil and with local conditions, of climate 

 and otherwise, however primitive and elementary may be 

 their handling of the soil, we may count upon more or less 



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