636 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION M. 
Section M.—AGRICULTURE. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION.—A. D. Hauu, M.A., F.R.S. 
The President delivered the following Address at Adelaide on Wednesday, 
August 12 :— 
Tue Presipenr of a Section of the British Association has two very distinct 
precedents before him for his Address; he can either set about a general review 
of the whole subject to which his Section is devoted or he can give an account 
of one of his own investigations which he judges to be of wider interest and 
application than usual. The special circumstances of this meeting in Australia 
have suggested to me another course. I have tried to find a topic which under 
one or other of its aspects may be equally interesting both to my colleagues 
from England and to my audience who are farming here in this great 
Continent. My subject will be the winning of new land for agriculture, the 
bringing into cultivation of land that has hitherto been left to run to waste 
because it was regarded as unprofitable to farm. ‘To some extent, of course, 
this may be regarded as the normal process by which new countries are 
settled; the Bush is cleared and the plough follows, or under other con- 
ditions the rough native herbage gives way to pasture under the organised 
grazing of sheep or cattle. I wish, however, to deal exclusively with what are 
commonly termed the bad lands, inasmuch as in many parts of the world, 
though recently settled, agriculture is being forced to attack these bad lands 
because the supply of natural farming land is running short. In a new 
country farming begins on the naturally fertile soils that only require a mini- 
mum of cultivation to yield Stentabte crops, and the new-comers wander 
further afield in order to find land which will in the light of their former 
experience be good. Before long the supply is exhausted, the second-class land 
is then taken up until the stage is reached of experimentation upon soils that 
require some special treatment or novel form of agriculture before they can be 
utilised at all. Perhaps North America affords the clearest illustration : its 
great agricultural development came with the opening up of the prairies of the 
Middle West, where the soil rich in the accumulated fertility of past cycles 
of vegetation was both easy to work and grateful for exploitation. But with 
the growth of population and the continued demand for land no soils of that 
class have been available for the last generation or so, and latterly we find 
the problem has been how to make use of the arid lands, either by irrigation 
or by dry-farming where the rainfall can still be made adequate for partial 
cropping, or, further, how to conyert the soils that are absolutely poisoned 
by alkali salts into something capable of growing a crop. You yourselves 
will supply better than I can the Australian parallels, at any rate we in 
England read that the wheat-belt is now being extended into districts where 
the low rainfall had hitherto been thought to preclude any systematic cropping. 
Now, the fact that the supply of naturally fertile land is not unlimited 
reacts in its turn upon the old countries. During the ’eighties and ‘nineties 
of the last century the opening up of such vast wheat areas in America, 
Argentina, Australia, and the development of the overseas trade reduced 
prices in Europe to such an extent that in Great Britain, where the full extent 
of the competition was experienced, the extension of agriculture came to 
