72 POSSIBLE DEVELOPMENTS 



had been made upon the methods in vogue at the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century ; when a piece of 

 the waste was to be taken in the land was drained 

 where necessary, the rough vegetation was burnt off, 

 the soil broken up, the only treatment other than 

 mechanical being a dressing of lime. Once cleaned, 

 the land was put under the ordinary crops, with, as a 

 rule, extremely poor results for many years, though 

 eventually, by dint of perseverance and an annual 

 expenditure that was in the aggregate considerable, 

 though perhaps not large in any one year, the land 

 accumulated fertility and became a paying proposition, 

 like the little farms one sees everywhere bitten out of 

 the waste on the flanks of the New Forest, on the 

 Bagshot Heath and the Surrey wastes. The German 

 land reclaimers, on the other hand, have recognized that 

 the natural infertility of the heaths and moors is in the 

 main due to their deficiency in mineral salts' — lime, 

 phosphoric acid and potash — and after the mechanical 

 operations of drainage and clearing had been effected 

 they set themselves to remedy this deficiency by an 

 initial expenditure on fertilizers that would appear to 

 a farmer enormous for such land, but without which 

 even a moderate crop cannot be grown. In this way 

 the land at once becomes capable of yielding a living 

 return for the labour of cultivation ; the initial outlay 

 on basic slag and kainit proves to be much less costly 

 than the recurring losses involved in growing crops with 

 no special manuring until some sort of fertility is built 

 up. Indeed, in many cases one sees that the existing 

 farms reclaimed from the heaths in Great Britain are 

 still suffering greatly from their original deficiencies ; 

 their productivity is at a low level because, even after 



