CHAPTER XVIII 



THE PROMISE OF SCIENCE 



Probably the greatest factor in agriculture is 

 the weather. We are beginning to realize that 

 drought in India, storms in the Argentine, frosts 

 in Canada, or floods in Russia, mean disaster to 

 the European, and a dry summer like 191 1 for 

 England spells scarcity for our town dwellers. 

 Our food depends on good weather, and a series 

 of bad seasons over the planet means the worst 

 of trouble. But still, the spectre of famine stalks 

 no more through the land; cheap transit has 

 laid the ghost, and the failure of our own crops 

 is less important than that of foreign ones. Yet 

 if there were two bad years everywhere — what 

 then? 



It is not impossible— nor even improbable. 

 Some extra-terrestrial influence might arise, some 

 sun-spot conflagration — >an unusually hot summer 

 might loosen a century's accretion of ice-cap in 

 the Polar regions — -a thousand things might 

 happen — and forthwith the English would be 

 eating rats, the Americans horses, the Australians 

 kangaroos, and the Chinese — each other. 



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