CHAIRMAN’S ADDRESS. 697 
especially in the new regions of the wheat supply of the future. Nor 
yet, again, can we dispense with the urgent lesson that science has much 
to teach us in making more use than we do of the areas acknowledged 
to be under more or less rudimentary cultivation. If Sir William Crookes 
was right in adopting the American statistician’s average of 12-7 bushels 
per acre as the mean of the recognisable wheat-fields of the world, the 
prospect of the extra seven bushels he sought as immediately desirable will 
make us eager to learn the very latest triumphs of the laboratory in 
winning for the soil a freer measure of the nitrogen of the air. Even here in 
Manitoba, where a much higher yield seems on the average to be main- 
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tained under existing conditions, and where the cultivators with their 
18 bushels average start from a vastly higher level, the promise of such a 
scientific ally should gladden the hearts of the hard-working pioneer. 
One caution, however, I feel it my duty to give, as a practical rather 
than a scientific agriculturist. Whatever wonders are offered in the way of 
manurial adjuncts or mechanical contrivances, do not let our advisers over- 
look the paramount consideration of the cost which the newer systems may 
involve. For the extensive farming of a young country it is above all 
requisite to remember that expensive methods of cultivation are not as 
feasible as in the intensive husbandry of old settled regions. Hopefully as 
we may wait on the chemists’s help, I confess that, for my own part, I 
incline still more confidently to the botanist, under whose eegis of protection 
agriculture has this year been placed by the decision of the authorities, 
