752 DISCUSSION ON WHEAT: 
After illustrating the records of this renewed advance, the distinctively 
Canadian features of the movement were discussed in the address, and the 
difficulties which an investigator encountered in forecasting the future was 
acknowledged. Some illustrations of the widely divergent conclusions of com- 
petent experts were found in the discrepant estimates which Professor Mavor 
had collected (without himself adopting) from acknowledged authorities in his 
exhaustive Report of 1904. One of these estimates, it will be remembered, 
placed the land fit for settlement or ‘ susceptible of cultivation,’ in the North- 
West as low as 92,000,000 acres, and another as high as 171,000,000 acres. One 
skilled estimator restricted the surface likely to be annually available for 
wheat to an aggregate of 13,750,000 acres, while another offered more than 
three times that figure, or 42,750,000 acres. The resultant produce antici- 
pated in the one case represented 254,000,000 bushels and in the other 
812,000,000 bushels, while the higher figure had the high authority of 
Dr. Saunders. It was, therefore, for. the experts now assembled to say 
die 
Nore.—(a) The single black line across the columns for 1890, 1900, 1907, 1908, 
represents the estimated total acreage of the Dominion of Canada for which no 
continuous series of statistics exist. j 
(b) Were the preliminary estimates for 1909 taken into account, the total 
acreage would have been given as 7,750,000 acres—a rise of 1,139,000 acres in 
the latest twelve months. This is indeed the net result, for the West has added 
1,402,000 acres—of which 1,289,000 were in Saskatchewan and 113,000 in Alberta 
_while there are declines in the East and in Ontario of 114,000 acres, and 
likewise a reduction of as much as 149,000 acres in Manitoba since 1908. 
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