836 REPORT— 1900. 



picture of at least the world's wheat crop. For the close comparison of one season 

 with another much must depend on the sufficiency of the weakest item in the 

 account, and weakness is sure to creep in somewhere when crops are estimated on 

 varying systems, at different dates, and on authorities of unequal value. The 

 definitions adopted by one calculator as to the limits of the ' world ' vary from 

 those of another, and commercial estimates, as they are called, may be, at the 

 discretion of the computer, substituted for or adopted in the absence ofofficial data, 

 so that the guesses at a single country's harvest may differ more widely from each 

 other than would account for the total margin between one year's aggregate supply 

 and another, to the confounding of satisfactory conclusions as to what is really 

 happening. Last but not least of the obstacles to uniform grouping of harvests in 

 complete years — ending as these years do at different periods— is the fact, not to 

 be overlooked, that wheat harvests are being gathered somewhere in every month in 

 twelve. 



One is driven back then to the attempt to rest opinions on the growth of one 

 form of culture or another on recorded acreage, rather than assumed production. 

 Yet even here a good illustration of the difficulty of any extensive compilation 

 may be found in the tentative memorandum Sir Robert Giffen put before the last 

 Ivoyal Commission on Agriculture as indicating, with many necessary reservations 

 and qualifications, the relative movements of grain area, live stock, and population 

 in the twenty years before 1 893. Briefly, the earlier totals brought into conjunction 

 for this purpose were made up, as regards the population figures taken to represent 

 the starting-point of 1873, from the statistics of groups of countries and colonies at 

 dates for the most part about 1871-3, but in some instances ranging back to 1866 

 and on to ISSl, and aggregating 365,800,000 persons. Against these were set a 

 total of 461,800,000 persons, enumerated, for the most part, about 1890-93, but in 

 a few instances, where later data were wanting, going back to 1880-88, the growth 

 of population between the totals being 26 per cent. 



The acreage about 1873 and about 1893, contrasted with these figures, included 

 wheat, rye, barley, and oats, but not maize — a larger crop than any of the last 

 three. The countries contrasted were limited necessarily by the extent of 

 information, and the list did not include all of which the population was accounted 

 for, the increases per cent, being 28 per cent, in the case of oats, 19 per cent, in the 

 case of wheat, 5 per cent, iu the case of barley, with a decrease of 5 per cent, in 

 rye. It should be observed, however, that the calculation as to the increase of 

 wheat would have been much closer to that of population bad not a very large 

 area, nearly stationary iu amount, been credited to India and Japan at both dates ; 

 the local population of these Asiatic countries being disregarded as, generally 

 speaking, nou-wheat-eatiner. 



It was only as an outline pointing the direction in which enquiry might be 

 useful tliat Sir Robert Giffen called attention to these figures, which, as "he acknow- 

 ledged, were of the roughest possible description, and rather suggestive of a closer 

 enquiry, which should take account of the difterence between the consumptive 

 power of the countries aggregated, the varying productive power of nominally 

 equal areas of surface, and the varying type of live stock maintained. 



If the wheat acreage table, in the memorandum referred to, is examined in 

 detail, a very effective picture of the difficulty of exact comparison as between 

 any two given dates is incidentally presented. Out of twenty-four countries 

 euumerated (including Canada and Australasia as units) a twenty or twenty-one 

 years' comparison is only really effected in five cases— Russia, the United States, 

 France, United Kingdom, and Australasia. In five other instances the period 

 dealt with is only from seventeen to eighteen years ; in three other cases only 

 fourteen or fifteen years. In Canada, Egypt, and Denmark, the comparison will 

 be found to be more limited still, and only to cover eleven or twelve years ; while 

 in the Argentine Republic, where the recent expansion of wheat-growing has been 

 prominent, tlie available statistics allowed only of a comparison of two periods, no 

 more than nine years apart. For seven other countries the wheat acreage was 

 necessarily either omitted or inserted as presumably the same at both the'earlier 

 and the later date. Had the retrospect been confined to the cases where a twenty 



