240 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE. 
The lunits of this paper allow little more than mere mention of the 
profound effects on American wheat culture of conditions of production, 
manufacture, and transportation. The vast interior plain of North 
America, ranging from warm to cold-temperate as one passes from 
the Lower Mississippi to the Upper Mackenzie, has provided not only 
an unlimited expanse of soil, but offers a surface on which the modern 
machinery of production and transportation can operate. The plains of 
Russia and Argentina fall into natural comparison, but here the inventive 
genius and enterprise of the North American step in and give present 
suplemacy, and, so far as we can see, this advantage will project itself 
over many years of the future. 
We may, indeed, consider transportation as important as production, 
for otherwise wheat has little value to grower or consumer. Genesee 
wheat was little more than the bread of a few pioneers before the digging 
of the Erie Canal. To send a barrel of flour from western New York 
to Philadelphia cost $1.25. Grain and flour in general could not bear 
the cost of transportation for more than 150 miles. In 1825, 50 cents per 
bushel was considered a large price on the Ohio River; and indeed, after 
a haut of several days to the river, the farmer commonly got 25 to 
30 cents, and that in trade.? In that year wheat brought 25 cents in 
Illinois, 80 cents in Petersburg, Virginia, and flour $6 per barrel in 
Charleston, South Carolina. Similar differences prevailed in France, 
for in 1847 the average difference of the price per hectolitre in different 
parts of that country was 26 francs. Since 1870 the difference has 
averaged 3.55 francs.* Similarly prices have become equalised among 
nations as well as sections, and there is now a world market for wheat 
which, according to the experts in economics, cannot be widely or for 
long disturbed by speculation. The world’s crop is becoming available 
for the world’s hunger, and in this transformation the Transatlantic 
highway and the American railway and waterway have borne the largest 
part. The same author says: ‘ In respect to no other one article has 
change in the conditions of production and distribution been productive 
of such momentous consequences as in the case of wheat.’ 
It was the building of railroads and the development of lake naviga- 
tion that enabled the States of the old North-West to replace the 
Atlantic States as the grain centre, and in turn gave the new North- 
West its present supremacy. And now history repeats itself in the 
Canadian North-West, in the multiplication of trunk lines and spurs 
and in the extension of through lines of transportation from Europe to 
the St. Lawrence, from the St. Lawrence to the Pacific, and from 
Vancouver and Prince Rupert to the Orient. The grain elevator also 
has extended its useful sway from Buffalo, Chicago, Minneapolis, and 
Duluth to Winnipeg, Prince Albert, and Kdmonton. The develop- 
ment of Pacific steamship lines, the opening of the Mississippi, a canal 
from Lake Huron to tidewater, and the possible utilisation of the 
Hudson Bay route are all further steps in making North America the 
central bread-grower of the world. 
The future of the United States in the universal wheat market: is 
of peculiar interest both to her own citizens and to those of Canada. 
McMaster, Fistory of the United States, ili. p. 463. 
2 J. Turner in American Nation, vol. xiv. 105-106. 
*Rand’s Leonomic History since 1763, p. 315. 
