830 



REPORT — 1900. 



ProbaHy quite two-thirds of the cotton of the world is gi'own in the United 

 States aloue, where the surface so employed reaches 25,000,000 acres as compared 

 •with under 9,000,000 acres in British India, the next largest cotton-growing region 

 of which statistical record exists. In wool the produce of the Australasian 

 Colonies of Great Britain — with flocks which still exceed 100,000,000 head — makes 

 much the largest contribution to the total. In rice, so far as statistics carry us, 

 our Indian possessions head the list of producers. In hops the English crop still 

 probably exceeds the German in production, although the latter with larger area 

 closely contests the place. In tobacco, while the acreage apparently employed in 

 British India is nearly double the 595,000 acres in the United States, no other 

 country in our statistical recoids comes within one-seventh of the American 

 area. The vineyards of Italy are returned as covering 8,500,000 acres, and 

 those of France 4,300,000 acres, while those of Austria and Hungary, next in 

 magnitude, cover but a seventh part of the last-mentioned figure. Itussia bulks 

 largely as a grower of flax, aud alone shows a whole third of the area of barley 

 recorded in all the countries which supply returns, and if in the case of potatoes 

 the Russian acreage is not very difierent from that of Germany the total produc- 

 tion of the latter empire reaches the largest aggregate of any single country. 



If the subject of enquiry be the place of wheat-growing in the world at one 

 date or another, it would not be to the older European countries, other than Russia 

 at all events, we should turn to see where the surface so utilised was extending. 

 Reckoned by tlie percentage of her cereal area which she still devotes to wheat, 

 France, with 47 per cent, under the crop, or Italy, with 55 per cent., would 

 naturally be selected as typical wheat-growers ; but both are practically in a 

 stationary or, collectively, even in a slightly retrograding position. It is on the 

 other side of the Atlantic where the most noteworthy movements have occurred. 

 In comparatively new exporting countries, such as Argentina and Canada, 

 though the statistics from neither are complete, wheat areas still extend, and 

 that of the United States, though fluctuating with great sensitiveness under vary- 

 ing price conditions, and moving from one centre to another westward or north- 

 westward across the American continent, is now reported as covering 44,600,000 

 acres. This total, it must be allowed, whatever views may be held as to future 

 progress, makes the United States a typical grower of this particular cereal, to 

 which it gives an importance second only to the still more extensive product of 

 American soil, to which we give the name of maize, but to which alone in Ameri- 

 can parlance is allowed the title of corn, 



The leading changes in the production of typical crops as measured by the 

 acreage, and the stock of cattle, sheep, and swiue recorded at or near the com- 

 mencement, the middle, and the close of the past thirty years, may be contrasted 

 for exporting countries with expanding populations and growing agriculture, and 

 in countries where these conditions are absent, or in a typical consuming centre 

 like our own country. Relying on the agricultural returns of the United States, 

 a table could be constructed, as under, for three dates within the past thirty years 

 which furnish the following indication of agricultural changes: — 



In 1870 the United States held, it would thus appear, a population of 



