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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL. No. 1030 



over them, carrying hundreds of human 

 beings back and fore day by day ? On what 

 terms did British Columbia join the Do- 

 minion of Canada? That the natural bar- 

 rier between them should be pierced by the 

 railway. Take the Alps. The canton Tic- 

 ino, running down to Lake Maggiore, is po- 

 litically in Switzerland; it is wholly on the 

 southern side of the Alps. Is not the posi- 

 tion entirely changed by the St. Gothard 

 tunnel, running from Swiss territory into 

 Swiss territory on either side of the moun- 

 tains ? 



If, in the Bible language, it requires faith 

 to remove mountains, it is not wholly so 

 with other natural boundaries. Forests 

 were, in old days, very real natural divid- 

 ing lines. They were so in England, as in 

 our own day they have been in Central 

 Africa. Between forty and fifty years ago, 

 in his "Historical Maps of England, "Pro- 

 fessor C. H. Pearson, whose name is well 

 known and honored in Australia, laid down 

 that England was settled from east and 

 west, because over against Gaul were heavy 

 woods, greater barriers than the sea. Kent 

 was cut off from Central England by the 

 Andred Weald, said to have been, in King 

 Alfred's time, 120 miles long and 30 broad. 

 Here are Professor Pearson 's words : ' ' The 

 axe of the woodman clearing away the for- 

 ests, the labor of nameless generations re- 

 claiming the fringes of the fens or making 

 their islands habitable, have gradually 

 transformed England into one country, in- 

 habited by one people. But the early influ- 

 ences of the woods and fens are to isolate 

 and divide." Thus the cutting down of 

 trees is sometimes a good, not an evil, and 

 there are some natural boundaries which 

 man can wholly obliterate. 



Can the same be said of deserts? They 

 can certainly be pierced, like isthmuses and 

 like mountains. The Australian desert is 

 a natural division between western and 



south Australia. The desert will be there, 

 at any rate 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 com- 

 munication, except when they are in tun- 

 nels. 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 "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 af- 

 forestation have to say? In the evidence 

 taken in Australia by the Dominions Royal 

 Commission, the Commissioner for Irriga- 

 tion 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 pub- 

 lished entitled "The Conquest of the Des- 

 ert." 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 

 afforestation. He points out in words 

 which might have been embodied in Mr. 

 Marsh's book, how the desert zone has ad- 

 vanced through the reckless cutting of trees, 

 and how it can be flung back again by tree 

 barriers to the sand dunes. By conserva- 

 tion 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 



