PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 



ON 



WHEAT AND ITS PESTS. 



By Hugh R. Rathbone, M.A., J.P., 

 Member of the Royal Commission on Wheat Supplies. 



[Delivered October 10th, 1919.] 



Early in the War I realised that much time was being 

 spent by the Grain Pests Committee of the Royal Society and 

 other scientific bodies in examining the problems of wheat 

 pests, from the point of view of the preservation of wheat for 

 lengthy periods. As a wheat merchant, that difficulty had 

 never seriously presented itself to me, because wheat merchants 

 as a rule do not want to keep actual wheat ; they like to pass 

 it on to someone else as soon as they can. They have found 

 by long and painful experience that the undue keeping of 

 wheat is an expensive amusement, not so much because it 

 decreases in volume by reason of pest ravages, but because it 

 is generally found that the heavy cost of keeping it is rarely 

 made up by the realization of the wheat when it finally finds 

 its way to the mill. Wheat eats money, rather than is eaten 

 by pests, and certainly cannot be classed with port which 

 if good in the first place always makes 5 per cent, per annum. 

 But the War modified many of our views and the wheat 

 merchant no longer looked askance at wheat in store. The 

 charges were looked upon as a light form <of insurance and it 

 was realised that a contract of wheat to be shipped or even a 

 bill of lading of wheat actually shipped, were only too often 

 " Scraps of Paper " owing to the activity of the submarine. 

 And so the corn trade no longer looked with amused interest 

 at the researches of scientific men into the habits and customs 

 of such animals as are usuallv associated with wheat. 



