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CHAIRMAN’S ADDRESS. 687 
of that body at the Bristol meeting of 1898, whether the possible wheatfields 
of the globe possessed a potential capacity of expansion sufficient to meet 
the hypothetical needs of the bread-eaters of even one generation ahead ; 
whether, in fact, a dearth of wheat supply was not already within sight, and 
by 1931 would be upon us. The suggestion that the wheat-producing soil of 
the world was already becoming unequal to the strain put upon it by the 
multiplication of men was not unnaturally met by a vigorous criticism. 
The mere suspicion that some day, however, there would not be land enough 
to go round, that famine could be averted only by the beneficial magic of 
the chemist, is too vital a possibility—even if some of us do not place the 
date so near or rely so fully on some of the computations made—not to 
command a very careful examination of the remedy propounded, the 
promise of the artificial production of nitrate in’such a volume and at such 
a price as would raise the average of the world’s production from 12°7 to 
20, if not even to 30 bushels of wheat per acre. 
The fixation of nitrogen, not as a dream but as a certainty, was, it will 
be remembered, claimed by Sir William Crookes as the condition on which 
the great Caucasian race was to retain its prominence in the world, and 
avoid being squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not 
the ‘ staff of life.’ 
Personally, I confess I am not so pessimistic as to the surface still 
available for wheat-growing even without this aid. If we grant that the 
so-called contributory areas, at a date two or three years before the close of 
last century, were just what was then stated, that the bread-eating popula- 
tion of that date was rightly guessed at 516,500,000—a much more difficult 
certainty to reach in the manner adopted by the American statistician whose 
figures were adopted—and that both the growth of population and of ‘ unit 
consumption’ would proceed exactly in the ratio suggested, it may legiti- 
mately be asked, does it nevertheless follow that no such increment of area 
can be looked for as would satisfy the larger mass of consumers calculated 
for as likely to be dependent upon wheat in 1911 or 1931 on the scale here 
laid down ? 
I should not, in any statistical investigation into these questions, be 
contented to assume the probability of the exact continuance of previous 
ratios in the rate of production, or that of individual consumption over 
such periods, and my experience of very big averages makes me shy of 
adopting a simple mean of such wide diversities as correctly representing 
the head-rate consumption of wheat. These are points which might be more 
fittingly debated elsewhere. I want to narrow the issue now to the actual 
and more recent course of the wheat-growing surface; for it seems to me 
that the lesson of such figures as we have in the past, and as those of 
Mr. Wood Davis’s tables, is rather one of irregular than of arrested exten- 
sion. The periodical opening up of new areas, very often in advance of 
consumptive requirements of the time, would seem alm»)st invariably to be 
followed by a pause while prices recover from the over-supply, and that 
again by new developments and exploitation in new directions, or by better 
methods on the areas made tributary to the wants of the ever-increasing men. 
We may admit that the course of the wheat acreage from 1870 to 1884 
and thence onward to 1898 showed—first, a material advance outstripping 
. that of population, then an admitted and serious check, with a subsequent 
advance, although one below that of the bread consumers of the world. 
Let me ask, however, if a later view of the wheat area at the disposal 
of the world’s consumers is not well qualified materially to diminish, if 
not to dissipate, the ‘cosmic scare’ which, no doubt contrary to the real 
design of the distinguished chemist who followed Mr. Davis’s estimates, 
was induced by the figures of 1898. My own comparison of the later 
growth of acreage covers only the decade from 1897 to 1907, or as nearly 
to these years as figures permit, and in the form I originally designed it 
