ADDIIESS. 10 



all experience shows that when the road has been pointed out by a small 

 laboratory experiment, the industrial operations that may follow arc 

 always conducted at a cost considerably lower than could be anticipated 

 from the laboratory figures. 



Before we decide that electric nitrate is a commercial possibility, a 

 final question must be mooted. We are dealing with wholesale figures 

 and must take care that we are not simply shifting difiBculties a littk- 

 further back without really diminishing them. We start with a shortage 

 of wheat, and the natural remedy is to put more land under cultivation. 

 As the land cannot be stretched, and there is so much of it and no more, 

 the object is to render the available area more productive by a dressing 

 with nitrate of soda. But nitrate of soda is limited in quantity, and will 

 soon be exhausted. Human ingenuity can contend even with these 

 apparently hopeless difficulties. Nitrate can be produced artificially by 

 the combustion of the atmosphere. Here we come to finality in one 

 direction ; our stores are inexhaustible. But how about electricity 1 Can 

 we generate enough energy to produce 12,000,000 tons of nitrate of soda 

 annually 1 A preliminary calculation shows that there need be no fear 

 on that score ; Niagara alone is capable of supplying the required electric 

 •energy without much lessening its mighty flow. 



The future can take care of itself. The artificial production of nitrate 

 is clearly within view, and by its aid the land devoted to wheat can be 

 brought up to the 30 bushels per acre standard. In days to come, when 

 the demand may again overtake supply, we may safely leave our suc- 

 cessors to grapple with the stupendous food problem. 



And, in the next generation, instead of trusting mainly to food-stuflTs 

 which flourish in temperate climates, we probably shall trust more and 

 more to the exuberant food-stuffs of the tropics, where, instead of one 

 yearly sober harvest, jeopardised by any shrinkage of the scanty days of 

 summer weather, or of the few steady inches of rainfall, Nature annually 

 supplies heat and water enough to ripen two or three successive crops of 

 food- stuffs in extraordinary abundance. To mention one plant alone, 

 Humboldt — from what precise statistics I know not — computed that, 

 acre for acre, the food-productiveness of the banana is 133 times that of 

 wheat — the unripe banana, before its starch is converted into sugar, is 

 said to make excellent bread. 



Considerations like these must in the end determine the range and 

 avenues of commerce, perhaps the fate of continents. We must develop 

 and guide Nature's latent energies, we must utilise her inmost workshops, 

 we must call into commercial existence Central Africa and Brazil to 

 redress the balance of Odessa and Chicago. 



Having kept you for the last half-hour rigorously chained to earth, 

 disclosing dreary possibilities, it will be a relief to soar to the heights of 

 pure science and to discuss a point or two touching its latest achievements 



