766 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



amy. When a healer treats for hire a sufferer from typhoid fever, 

 is he acting in a religious capacity? 



The observer will find in Christian Science much charlatanry 

 (by which many honest fanatics are deceived), much to surprise 

 reason and common sense, to offend good taste and the proprieties, 

 to outrage justice and the law, and to mortify the pious. 



And in the last degree reprehensible will appear this cult's 

 ghastly masquerade in the garb of Him that prayed in the Garden 

 of Gethsemane, " the pale, staggering Jew, with the crown of 

 thorns upon his bleeding head," the tenderest, the divinest, the 

 most mankind-loving personality the world has ever known. 



THE WHEAT LANDS OF CANADA. 



BY SYDNEY C. D. ROPER. 



~\TT"HEN Sir W. Crookes, in his inaugural address as President 

 ' of the British Association, startled a large number of peo- 

 ple by stating that, unless some radical change was made in the 

 present system of wheat cultivation, there would be a bread famine 

 in 1931, because the world's supply of land capable of producing 

 wheat would have been exhausted, there was undoubtedly a con- 

 siderable feeling of uneasiness engendered, and more attention was 

 paid to the address than is usual even to so valuable a contribution 

 as the inaugural address of the President of that Association must 

 always be. It was, therefore, with a feeling of relief that we found 

 one person after another, well qualified to speak, coming, as it were, 

 to the rescue, and pointing out that Sir W. Crookes's conclusions 

 were not warranted; and in the minds of the majority, no doubt, 

 the last feeling of uneasiness was dispelled by the able letter in 

 The Times, in December last, in which Sir John Lawes and Sir 

 Henry Gilbert, who are facile principes as scientific agriculturists, 

 and whose opinions carry greater weight than even those of the 

 President of the British Association, gave most satisfactory reasons 

 for being unable to believe in Sir W. Crookes's predictions. 



It is true that, in a subsequent letter, Sir W. Crookes stated 

 that his remarks were intended more as a serious warning than as 

 a prophecy; but, seeing that his conclusions were based on definite 

 statements of definite facts and figures, it is difficult to treat them 

 as other than prophetic. 



In order, however, to establish the probability of a wheat fam- 

 ine in the near future it became necessary for Sir W. Crookes to 

 seriously misrepresent and underestimate the wheat resources of 



