688 TRANSACTIONS OF SUB-SECTION K. 
might bring into view something under 230,000,000 acres as the world’s 
present extent of wheat-field. But, to place matters on a more comparative 
level, I am willing to omit the large Indian totals and some few of the 
distant regions which, partly on account of the somewhat uncertain identity 
of the areas they include at different dates, and partly on account of their 
relatively smal! contribution to the bread of the Western world, do not find 
a place in the estimates with which I am now making a comparison. For 
the leading groups of other areas the figures stand in millions of acres to 
a single decimal :— 
| Groups 1897 1907 Increase in 10 years | 
Russian Empire . . . .| 466 595 | 12-9 | 
| United States. sno sok pele + irene 452 | 57 | 
| Three chief European Wheat States 37 6 398 2:2 | 
| The Rest of Europe 5 ; 20°8 21-4 6 
| Argentina and Uruguay. 3 : 67 150 | 83 
Canada . : F . . : 30 GrGis- 4 36 
Australasia. - : ; . 5:0 60-4 1:0 
34:3 
| Potalits te ela itech Lee 193-5 
Now, whatever be the estimated increase in wheat-eating populatiun 
between these two dates, it cannot in the aggregate be 214 per cent., as is the 
growth of the wheat surface in these States. Nor will the result be materially 
affected if allowance were to be made for the three or four million acres repre- 
sented by the exports of unnamed States in this table, or even by the inclusion 
of any minor units of wheat-growing, such as Portugal, or Greece, or 
Switzerland, for which Mr. Wood Davis estimated from sources not recog- 
nised in our official statistics, their totals being well under a single million 
acres, and the variation, if any, probably insignificant. 
If, therefore, the growth of men outstripped the growth of wheat, as 
we have been warned was the case between 1884 and 1897, the growth of 
wheatfields has been well over the rate of population increase since that 
exceptional period, just as it was in the still earlier period between 1871 
and 1884. Nor is the check to the rye acreage and its decline by 4 per cent., 
which seemed to have happened concurrently with the wheat check between 
1884-1897, continuing; for that, in the aggregate, seems to have returned 
to, though it has not perhaps much exceeded, the older level. 
Comparisons at single terminal points have always a danger which 
may be avoided by examining more carefully the leading facts year by year. 
On the diagram which I introduce here I have tried, therefore, roughly to 
sketch the curves which indicate the growth of wheat acreage, both before and 
since 1898, in Russia, the United States, Argentina, Australia, and Canada, 
as typical of the exporting centres, while the acreage in France and 
Hungary has been added for comparison. The effect is, I think, to bring 
out the very much greater extension which has been going on during the 
last decade than could well have been locked for on the basis of the 1884-97 
figures. 
For the Russian Empire as a whole data are available only since 
1895, but I have shown by a separate and steadily mounting line the wheat 
area of the fifty governments of Huropean Russia, which are comparative 
for the entire period, and the latter are quite sufficient to establish my 
conclusion. There is, too, a suggestiveness about the course of prices (in 
shillings per quarter) in England, the chief recipient of wheat exports, 
which I have traced by a separate curve across this diagram. This may 
