394 TIMHERI. 
the Planters’ Association, at which resolutions dealing 
with the Royal Commissioners’ Report were passed, 
Some complaints have since been made that the meeting 
confined itself to one subjeét of discussion—the desir- 
ability of the cessation of bounties on sugar, or of the 
imposition of countervailing duties. When the failure 
of the efforts to obtain these, to my mind, almost certain 
remedies for our present distress, has taken place, then 
will be the time for discussion of the very few sugges- 
tions offered by the Commissioners or by Dr. Morris on 
the cultivation of economic agricultural produ&s to take 
the place of our present staple. 
The latter has alluded to the great fertility of the 
interior of the Colony. I do not know on what grounds 
he based his supposition of this great fertility. Ican find 
no grounds for believing that in a country having the geo- 
logical structure the interior of this has—sandstones and 
some hundred of conglomerates, archean granites, gneisis 
and crystalline schists—great tracts of land of excep- 
tional fertility will occur, although possibly traéts of 
limited area may occur in valley land and river bottoms 
or on the lines of dykes of certain classes of intrusive 
rocks. I may mention that as far as our analytical ex- 
aminations of some hundreds of the soils of the interior 
and seaboard of the Colony extend, no indication of ex- 
ceptional fertility in soils, other than those of our alluvial 
coastlands, have been obtained. All point to the wisdom 
of our Dutch predecessors in ceasing their attempts to 
raise economic agricultural produéts on many of the soils 
of the interior. 
In my January address I alluded to the necessity of 
the Agricultural Committee dealing with certain obscure 
