- 218 
wheat-fields > ne New J ges or Pennsylvania, and it costs 
actually less to put Hour into the New York market from 
Minnesota un it cost our fathers to carry it fifty miles. With 
sulky-plows and horse-cultivators, with cheap fertilizers and a 
knowledge of how s apply em , the market-gardeners and truck- 
farmers of Virginia and outhern New Jersey, by the aid of 
rapid transit, can sell ro pain at a profit in this Ec for 
less money than they could have afforded to sell them on their 
farms a few years ago. It is owing to this eed iratis portation 
that the fruit growers of the east are compelled to compete wi ith 
d d 
from California. When early apples from Canada come into 
Wee ane with late winter apples from Australia in the English 
market, and perishable fruits like plums and peaches, raised in 
California, are sold in Liverpool, it is evident that the element 
of distance between the roducer and the consumer of agri- 
-cultural products is VHiMübally annihilated." 
When as annihilation has been effected it is simply, in a great 
number of cases, a question whether the producer of any given 
commodity can face the competition of the world. If he can't, 
nothing will save him, and he must, before his capital is 
exhausted, devote his attention to some other i industry. 
Cultural industries will be limited then, in the long run, by the 
i and 
the next, by the local cost of labour. The cultivation of the v 
Smh in England, not because, as is often supposed, the -CSpA 
ecame unfavourable, but because the produce of the ill-matured 
English grape could not hold its own in competition with that of 
France, when that became procurable. On the other hand, as 
already pointed out at some length in these pages (Kew Bulletin, 
1895, pp. 307-315), ME although they can be readily 
grown in this country, are largely imported from abroad, because 
the cost of production (and perhaps of transport) is cheaper. 
The ee of Egypt has crippled the growth of onions in 
Bedfordshire 
In a few ca ses, but it is unlikely that they will ever be very 
numerous, the progress of discovery has superseded some staples 
altogether. 
e manufacture of a gave the death blow to the 
cultivation of madder. But synthetic chemistry has its limits, 
and it is improbable that mankind will ever be wholly satisfied 
with artificial substitutes for wine or for tea and coffee. Yet 
cheaper and retical d inferior products will often press heavily on 
dearer and better ones. menn oil is daily taking the place 
of that expressed from the oliv But economy is a more exacting 
factor in boasaniptioik than the gratification of a cultivated 
te. 
P 
DLXVIL—FAT HEN IN AUSTRALIA. 
(Chenopodium album, L.) 
'The plant referred to in the following communication turns 
out to be a familiar British plant. It is very commonly met with 
in Europe and temperate Asia as a weed of cultivation, probably 
