PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 645 
in Germany. Next, I doubt, in view of the great industrial demand for men 
in England, if we have the men available who will bring to the land the skill 
and power of drudgery that I saw being put into these German holdings of thirty 
to forty acres in their earlier years of low productivity. Moreover, in 
Germany these heaths are generally bordered by forests, in which the small 
holder gets occupation for part of the year while his wife and children keep 
the farm going. For this, if for no other reason, afforestation and land 
reclamation and settlement should go on together. But, despite these draw- 
backs, I am still of opinion that the reclamation of such heath-lands is a sound 
commercial venture in England, either for a landowner who is thinking of a 
future rather than of a present return on his capital, or for the State or other 
public body, wherever the waste land can be acquired for less than 5/. an acre. 
The capitalised value of its present rental rarely approaches that figure, but the 
barrenest heath is apt to develop the potentialities of a gold-mine when purchase 
by the State comes in question. The map of England is so written over in detail 
with boundaries and rights and prescriptions that the path of the would-be 
reclaimer, who must work on a large scale if he is to work cheaply, can only 
be slow and devious. There are other possibilities of winning agricultural land 
even in England, from the slob land and estuaries, from the clays nowadays too 
heavy for cultivation; but the problems they present are rather those of 
engineering than of agricultural science. What I should like in conclusion once 
more to emphasise is, that the reclamation of heath and peat-land of which I 
have been speaking—reclamation that in the past could only be imperfectly 
effected at a great and possibly unremunerative expense of human labour—has 
now become feasible through the applications of science, the knowledge of the 
functions of fertilisers, the industrial developments which have given us basic 
slag and potash salts, the knowledge of the fertility that can be gained by the 
growth of leguminous plants. From beginning to end the process of reclamation 
of moor and heath, as we see it in progress in North-Western Europe, 1s stamped 
as the product of science and investigation. 
MELBOURNE. 
FRIDAY, AUGUST’ 14. 
Discussion on Dry Farming. 
(i.) Dry Farming Investigations in the United States. 
By Dr. Lyman J. Briaas.—See Reports, p. 263. 
(ii.) The Ten-inch Line of Rainfall. 
By Professor Toomas Cuerry, M.D., M.S. 
The relative importance of Australia in regard to the future food-supply of 
the world is influenced to a very marked degree by its average winter tempera- 
ture and the peculiar incidence of the rainfall throughout the southern third of 
the Continent. In these regions the term ‘dry farming’ has a different mean- 
ing from that accepted in the Northern Hemisphere, on account of the fact that 
our rainfall is almost exclusively of the winter type, and that the winter tem- 
peratures are high enough to keep the ordinary cereals growing steadily during 
these months. Consequently, before the dry summer sets in the crops have 
reached a sufficient degree of maturity to complete their ripening before the soil 
has become too dry to arrest all further growth. 
Graphs were shown illustrating typical rainfall records in the region of the 
winter rains in all the States of the Commonwealth except Queensland and the 
Northern Territory. A brief comparison was made -with the limited areas in 
other parts of the world which are similarly situated. 
As a result of these conditions it may be said that in the southern parts of 
