544 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 
manufacturing industry. Each town would require a very elaborate and highly 
organised system of local transport, touching all points of its agricultural 
area, in addition to lines of communication with other towns and with the great 
‘north-and-south’ lines of world-wide commerce, but these outside lines would 
be relatively of less importance than they are now. We note that the more 
perfect the system of local transport the less the need for points of intermediate 
exchange. The village and the local market-town will be ‘sleepy’ or decadent 
as they are now, but for a different reason; the symptoms are at present visible 
mainly because the country round about such local centres is overwhelmed by the 
great lines of transport which pass through them; they will survive for a time 
through inertia and the ease of foreign investment of capital. The effect of 
this influence is already apparent since the advent of the ‘commercial motor,’ 
but up to the present it has been more in the direction of distributing from 
the towns than collecting to them, producing a kind of ‘suburbanisation’ which 
throws things still further out of balance. The importance of the road motor 
in relation to the future development of the food-producing area is incalculable. 
It has long been clear that the railway of the type required for the great 
through lines of fast transport is ill-adapted for the detailed work of a small 
district, and the ‘light’ railway solves little and introduces many complications. 
The problem of determining the direction and capacity of a system of roads 
adequate to any particular region is at this stage one of extraordinary difficulty ; 
experiments are exceedingly costly, and we have as yet little experience of a 
satisfactory kind to guide us. The geographer, if he will, can here be of con- 
siderable service to the engineer. 
In the same connection, the development of the agricultural area supplying 
an industrial centre offers many difficult problems in relation to what may be 
called accessory products, more especially those of a perishable nature, such as 
meat and milk. In the case of meat the present position is that much land 
which may eventually become available for grain crops is used for grazing, or 
cattle are fed on some grain, like maize, which is difficult to transport or is not 
satisfactory for bread-making. The meat is then temporarily deprived of its 
perishable property by refrigeration, and does not suffer in transport. Modern 
refrigerating machinery is elaborate and complicated, and more suited to use on 
board ship than on any kind of land transport. Hence the most convenient 
regions for producing meat for export are those near the sea-coast, such as occur 
in the Argentine or the Canterbury plains of New Zealand. The case is similar 
to that of the ‘accessible’ coalfield. Possibly the preserving processes may be 
simplified and cheapened, making overland transport easier, but the fact that it 
usually takes a good deal of land to produce a comparatively small quantity of 
meat will make the difficulty greater as land becomes more valuable. Cow’s 
milk, which in modern times has become a ‘necessary of life’ in most parts of 
the civilised world, is in much the same category as meat, except that difficulties 
of preservation, and therefore of transport, are even greater. That the, problem 
has not become acute is largely due to the growth of the long-transport system 
available for wheat, which has enabled land round the great centres of popula- 
tion to be devoted to dairy produce. If we are right in supposing that this 
state of things cannot be permanent the difficulty of milk supply must increase, 
although relieved somewhat by the less intense concentration in the towns; 
unless, as seems not unlikely, a wholly successful method of permanent pre- 
servation is devised. 
In determining the positions of the main centres, or rather, in subdividing 
the larger areas for the distribution of towns with their supporting and 
dependent districts, water supply must be one of the chief factors in the future, 
as it has been in the past; and in the case of industrial centres the quality as 
well as the quantity of water has to be considered. A fundamental division 
here would probably be into districts having a natural local supply, probably of 
hard water, and districts in which the supply must be obtained from a distance. 
In the latter case engineering works of great magnitude must often be involved, 
and the question of total resources available in one district for the supply of 
another must be much more fully investigated than it has been. In many cases, 
as in this country, the protection of such resources pending investigation is 
already much needed. It is worth noting that the question may often be closely 
related to the development and transmission of electrical energy from waterfalls, 
