FAILURES IN LAND RECLAMATION 73 



half a century or more of cultivation, the soil is still 

 short of lime, phosphoric acid, potash — sometimes of 

 one constituent, sometimes of all three. 



It is necessary to emphasize this general statement : 

 that land reclamation as practised in Great Britain has 

 never taken into account the chemical constitution of 

 the soil and its possible rectification by cheap mineral 

 fertilizers, largely because the process was already 

 falling into disuse by the time these fertilizers became 

 available, and because few landowners have had suffi- 

 cient confidence in the situation or faith in science to 

 embark capital on agricultural enterprises during the 

 last thirty years. It is for this reason that such accounts 

 as are available of the costs of land reclamation in Eng- 

 land afford no guidance to the possibilities that are 

 open. They sometimes show good results where the 

 land was initially healthy as on Lincoln Heath, or 

 where plentiful supplies of town refuse were available 

 as in Cheshire, Bedford, or parts of Surrey ; elsewhere 

 they have been unremunerative, and have led to the 

 widespread tradition that the most ruinous of all pro- 

 ceedings is to try to turn bad land into good. 



Before discussing the different types of waste land 

 that are capable of reclamation in Great Britain, it is, 

 perhaps, advisable to render the term more precise 

 by excluding those forms of improvement that may be 

 regarded as within the scope of a tenant holding a lease 

 of reasonable duration. Many examples of rough waste 

 land occur that can be profitably brought into cultiva- 

 tion by ordinary means — e.g., fields of clay land over- 

 grown with briers and brambles, which only require 

 clearing and draining, with a dressing of basic slag, 

 to convert them into decent grass land. The term 



