TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 535 
so that splendid mountain scenery is. scarcely to be expected. It is a 
surprise, therefore, on reaching the Grand Forks of Fraser River to see 
Mount Robson rising 10,000 feet almost sheer from the narrow valley. 
The south-west side, seen from the railway, seems so walled with precipices 
as to be unscaleable; but on the north-east side, which is covered for 
7,000 feet with snowfields and hanging glaciers, three attempts were made 
to climb it. All were foiled by bad weather, though in one a height of 
11,500 feet was reached, about 1,500 feet from the top. 
A considerable area of unknown territory was mapped by our party, the 
first white men to visit Mount Robson. 
One of the glacial streams divides its waters between the Pacific and 
Arctic Oceans, one branch flowing to the Fraser and the other to the Peace 
River. 
3. The Australian Sugar Industry and the White Australian Policy. 
By Professor J. W. Grecory, F.R.S. 
Australia in 1901 decreed that the Australian sugar industry must use 
white labour, in spite of emphatic warnings that the policy meant the imme- 
diate and complete ruin of the sugar industry. It was maintained that 
sugar cane could not be grown in tropical Australia without black labour. 
The past five years’ experience, however, has belied these predictions. The 
new policy has been so vigorously enforced that the acreage under sugar cane 
in Queensland cultivated by black labour has fallen from 62.1 per cent. in 
1904 to 11.8 per cent. in 1907; but the total acreage in Queensland has 
increased from 95,697 acres in 1902 to 128,138 acres in 1907. Australia, 
instead of growing less than half the sugar it needs, as in the black-labour 
time, now raises practically all; the imports of sugar have fallen from 83,822 
tons in 1902-3 to 3,680 tons in 1908-9, while the amount grown in Australia 
has increased in the same time from 92,500 tons to 195,900 tons. The rateable 
value of the sugar areas has increased. The white labour proves cheaper 
than the black in spite of the great difference in nominal wages. 
The white settlers, moreover, have a much lower death-rate than the 
Kanakas. The evidence of the Education Department shows that the 
children in the tropical towns are as efficient as those in the southern tem- 
perate districts of Queensland. 
This experiment in the effort to use white labour in tropical agriculture, 
the greatest yet attempted, has so far proved a success as complete as it was 
unexpected. 
4. The Development of Nantasket Beach. 
By Professor Doucuas Wiison Jounson. 
This Paper presented the results of a study of the form of Nantasket 
Beach, near Boston, Massachusetts, and included a discussion of the 
stages of development through which the beach has passed to reach its 
present form, and of the processes by which that development has been 
accomplished. Nantasket Beach consists of sand, gravel, and cobbles, 
deposited by wave action between several drumlins which formerly 
existed as islands. The form of the beach ridges, and their relation to 
abandoned marine cliffs on the drumlins, prove the former existence of 
several ‘drumlin islands,’ now entirely destroyed by wave action. The 
evidence furnished by the beach on changes in the relative elevations of sea 
and land was considered, and it is concluded that no such changes have 
Se while the beach was forming, a period of one or two thousand years 
at least, 
