WINNIPEG, 1909. 753 
if the lapse of another quinquennium full of interesting movements, both 
of population and of crops in the North-West, had enabled them to arrive 
at any greater certainty as to the future. 
It was incumbent on those who forecasted the wheat areas of coming 
years carefully to avoid exaggeration and loose deductions, and whatever 
ample surfaces they believed to await the wheat grower, and whatever tales 
were told of practically inexhaustible regions yet untapped, they must not 
neglect to bear in mind the necessity of enlisting for the improvement of the 
yield the very promising aid which science in many directions, whether 
botanical or chemical, was now beginning to offer to the farmer. 
The vast territories still available in the North-West should not in any case 
be looked upon as a mere wheat mine to be exploited and exhausted by the 
recurrent culture of a single cereal. The successful farming of the future, here 
as well as elsewhere, would demand more careful tillage, more scientific 
rotations, and a watchful consideration of the changes going on in other 
lands in the grouping of the populations and the opening of other wheat 
fields than their own. 
As a guide to the ascertained movements of the Canadian wheat area 
which the local statistics so far available afforded, the subjoined illustration 
was offered representing the areas as recorded separately in Ontario, in 
Manitoba, and in the North-West respectively since 1889. This showed how 
the area had diminished in the older province, where farming was becoming 
more mixed, and how it had extended in Manitoba, and still more rapidly 
in Saskatchewan and Alberta. 
Professor Mavor’s Paper. 
In a paper bringing up to date the conclusions of his Report to the British 
Board of Trade in 1904, discussing the production of wheat in the North- 
West of Canada (printed in full in the Reports of the Association, p. 209), 
Professor Mavor explains the changes in the administrative divisions known 
at the earlier date as Alberta, Assiniboia, and Saskatchewan, and the exten- 
sion due to their absorption of almost the whole of the former territory of 
Athabasca. The surface now included in the three provinces of Manitoba, 
Saskatchewan, and Alberta covers 357,000,000 acres of land and nearly 
15,000,000 acres of water—together, 370,000,000 acres—as against 238,000,000 
acres in 1904, the additional 50 per cent. lying, however, beyond the region 
of practical settlement for commercial production at the present time. The 
experience of the later five years strongly confirms Professor Mavor in his 
conclusions of 1904 that very great improvements in the productive powers 
of the country, and a very considerable increase in the effective population, 
as well as a more exclusive regard to wheat cultivation would have to take 
place before the North-West could be relied upon to produce for export to 
Great Britain a quantity of wheat even nearly sufficient for the growing 
requirements of that country. This exclusive attention to wheat he regards 
as unlikely to arise, since, even were the soil uniformly suitable and the 
seasons absolutely reliable, the disposition of the people, and their settle- 
ment in small farms, of which the owner is also the cultivator, seems against 
such exclusive cultivation of one crop. The advice of the experimental farms, 
the Governmental encouragement of mixed farming, and the experience of the 
States immediately south of the international boundary, are all counter to 
continuous single-crop culture. 
The writer makes the net gain in the North-West Provinces by immigra- 
tion and by natural increase of immigrants between 1901-06 a total of 
369,000, and adds that there being no reliable available statistics of either 
births or deaths in the North-West, the actual natural increase cannot be 
stated. In 1907-08 immigration had largely increased—the number received 
that year being the largest in the history of the country. 
1909. bie) 
