TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 827 



Dominion venture on annual returns. Annual, if later, figures reach us from the 

 smaller States of Holland and Sweden, and from Algeria and Japan. 



It is not for us here, like amateur war-critics distributing praise and blame from 

 our armchairs on statisticians engaged in local conflict with the difficulty of crop- 

 collection abroad, to forget the relative compactness of the area of these islands 

 and the relatively developed intelligence of an agricultural population farming, on 

 the average, larger holdings than most of our continental neighbours. We ought 

 not, therefore, to refuse to appreciate the difficulties, administrative and financial, 

 which a close adoption of anything lilce the British system would involve, either 

 where the peasant population is predominant or where the areas to be accounted 

 for are vast, as in the United States or in Russia. 



It is, I thinli, in the circumstances not illegitimate to use, at all events for 

 comparison of the state of matters within the same country, the data which are 

 now available from year to year. With less contidence we may even quote, as 

 presumptive indications of the directions of movements, the isolated returns of 

 acreage for particular years which alone some States supply. That there is peril, 

 however, in such a course may be seen by what is proved to have happened in a 

 country like France, whence we do receive continuous data. For the past quarter 

 of a century the acres devoted to wheat in France have been practically the same, 

 17,000,000 acres. One single exception appears, however, in the season of 1891, 

 when under exceptional climatic conditions an area of only 14,000,000 acres was 

 reported. Now, had France i-endered only occasional acreage records, like her 

 Belgian neighbour, like Denmark, or like Argentina, and had the year 1891 chanced 

 to be the date of the enquiry, an investigation of the rise or fall of wheat culture 

 in Europe might have been deflected from a true conclusion by the deceptive record 

 of a state of matters occurring only once in a single exceptional season, and 

 immediately recovered from. 



In any attempts which may be made, even within the period of fairly reliable 

 agricultural statistics, to trace the features of the changes of the past twenty or thirty 

 years, it is necessary to remember that, as between one country and another, the 

 data can be received only with much reserve, and as strictly comparative, if even 

 that, only within the respective States compared at different dates. 



Attempts to utilise statistical data, to determine the relative development of 

 agriculture in different parts of the world and at different periods of time, are 

 sometimes made with regard solely to what is described as the world's aggregate 

 of one or two leading individual products as typical as the rest ; or, again, one or 

 two typical countries, or at least countries where the available information is 

 more complete than elsewhere, are chosen, and the course of development or 

 decline of their crop areas or the several descriptions of their animal produce is 

 traced and compared. 



Certain obvious objections, which it is well to recognise, impede the student 

 of figures who resolves to proceed on the first of these methods. At the outset he 

 is arrested by embarrassment attending the choice of what single products are to 

 be held as representative of agricultural outturn. The most usual of all selec- 

 tions is that which restricts enquiries to the case of wheat. This course appears 

 to be rendei-ed, comparatively speaking, easy, as more has probably been written 

 and more statistics, official or unofficial, theoretical or commercial, actual or 

 imaginary, have been compiled, with regard to this bread grain than for any other 

 crop. But it is time we recognised that wheat has had too much and too exclu- 

 sive attention directed to it as a type of agricultural production. Very widely as 

 it is undoubtedly used in the form of bread, even as food its place is occupied at 

 one time or another, and in one country or another, by other substitutes, and its 

 cultivation is, after all, not the employment which demands the most attention 

 and most skill at the hands of the agriculturist. Not only do rye and even 

 maize serve as substitutes or supplements in feeding man, but other crops, such as 

 oats, barley, millet, rice, and so on, have claims to greater notice than they 

 receive, and play a direct as well as indirect part in providing food. Cotton, flax, 

 and wool are other typical products, the use of which for clothing is all-important 



