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between Western and South Australia. The desert will be there for many a 
long day after the transcontinental railway has been finished, but will it be, 
in anything like the same sense as before, a barrier placed by Nature and 
respected by man? Nor do railways end with simply giving continuous communi- 
cation, except when they are in tunnels. As we all know, if population is avail- 
able, they bring in their train development of the land through which they pass, 
Are these deserts of the earth always going to remain, in Shakespeare’s words, 
‘deserts idle’ ? Is man going to obliterate them? In the days to come, will the 
desert rejoice and blossom as the rose? What will dry farming and what will 
afforestation have to say? In the evidence taken in Australia by the Dominions 
Royal Commission, the Commissioner for Irrigation in New South Wales tells us 
that ‘the dry farming areas are carried out westward into what are regarded as 
arid lands every year,’ and that, in his opinion, ‘ we are merely on the fringe of 
dry farming’ in Australia. A book has lately been published entitled ‘The Con- 
quest of the Desert.’ The writer, Dr. Macdonald, deals with the Kalahari Desert 
in South Africa, which he knows well, and for the conquest of the desert he lays 
down that three things are essential—population, conservation, and afforesta- 
tion. He points out in words which might have been embodied in Mr. Marsh’s 
book, how the desert zone has advanced through the reckless cutting of trees, 
and how it can be flung back again by tree barriers to the sand dunes. By 
conservation he means the system of dry farming so successful in the United 
States of America, which preserves the moisture in the soil and makes the 
desert produce fine crops of durum wheat without a drop of rain falling upon 
it from seedtime to harvest, and he addresses his book ‘to the million settlers 
of to-morrow upon the dry and desert lands of South Africa.’ If the settlers 
come, he holds that the agency of man, tree-planting, ploughing and harrowing 
the soil, will drive back and kill out the desert. The effect of tree-planting 
in arresting the sand dunes and reclaiming desert has been very marked in the 
Landes of Gascony. Here, I gather from Mr. Perkins’ report, are some 3600 
square miles of sandy waste, more than half of which had, as far back as 1882, 
been converted into forest land, planted mainly with maritime pines. 
What, again, will irrigation have to say to the deserts? Irrigation, whether 
from underground or from overground waters, has already changed the face of 
the earth, and as the years go on, as knowledge grows and wisdom, must 
inevitably change it more and more. I read of underground waters in the 
Kalahari. I read of them too in the Libyan Desert. In the ‘ Geographical 
Journal’ for 1902 it is stated that at that date nearly 22,000 square miles in the 
Algerian Sahara had been reclaimed with water from artesian wells. What 
artesian and sub-artesian water has done for Australia you all know. Tf it is 
not so much available for agricultural purposes, it has enabled flocks and herds 
to live and thrive in what would be otherwise arid areas. Professor Gregory, 
Mr. Gibbons Cox, and others have written on this subject with expert know- 
ledge; evidence has been collected and published by the Dominions Royal Com- 
mission, but I must leave to more learned and more controversial men than I am 
to discuss whether the supplies are plutonic or meteoric, and how far in this 
matter you are living on your capital. 
If we turn to irrigation from overground waters, I hesitate to take illustra- 
tions from Australia, because my theme is the blotting out of the desert; and 
most of the Australian lands which are being irrigated from rivers, and made 
scenes of closer settlement, would be libelled if classed as desert. Mr. Elwood 
Mead told the Royal Commission that the State irrigation works in Victoria, 
already completed or in process of construction, can irrigate over 600 square 
miles, and that, if the whole water supply of the State were utilised, more like 
6000 square miles might be irrigated. The Burrinjuck scheme in New South 
Wales will irrigate in the first instance not far short of 500 square miles, but 
may eventually be made available for six times that area. If we turn to 
irrigation works in India, it appears from the second edition of Mr. Buckley’s 
work on the subject, published in 1905, that one cana] system alone, that of 
the Chenab in the Punjab, had, to quote his words, turned ‘some two million 
acres of wilderness (over 3000 square miles) into sheets of luxuriant crops.’ 
‘Before the construction of the canal,’ he writes, ‘it was almost entirely waste, 
with an extremely small population, which was mostly nomad. Some portion of 
the country was wooded with jingle trees, some was covered with small scrub 
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