FOREW ORD 
By WIiLrrRep T. GRENFELL 
HAVING selected for myself a réle in life that compels 
me to pass most of my days along the coasts of Labrador, 
I have come to love the rugged fastnesses of my adopted 
country, and to lament the amount of almost Stygian dark- 
ness that hangs still over it and its resources. With re- 
gard to the future of this vast area, nearly half a million 
square miles, 1 am myself an optimist. True it is that 
the great tide of humanity flowing ever westward has for 
the most part passed it by, leaving it lone and frigid in 
its polar waters. But the hand of man has grappled with 
harder problems than this presents. 
A scientific man has but recently transformed the use- 
less flora of hitherto arid deserts into food for man and 
beast; at the bidding of an engineer water is now flowing 
over the sands of Southern California, and land of perhaps 
unrivalled fertility is the result. Man’s hand has dammed 
the royal Nile, so long prodigal of her unfettered waters ; 
and a vast, new kingdom is springing into being. A 
college man has given his skill to acclimatizing fruit and 
vegetables to Dakotan frosts, and we have a plum that 
withstands a temperature of forty degrees below zero 
Fahrenheit, and strawberries that will live in the open 
all winter even in that climate. 
Vv 
