242 
"WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
country cause such climatic changes as tend to forbid the 
successful production of wheat. 
In the first place, this is inherently improbable. It is di¬ 
rectly contrary to the wise provisions of nature, that a grain 
ranking higher than any other as a source of food to mam 
should find its deadliest foe in climatic changes which civilized 
man’s very presence necessarily engenders. This idea is ab¬ 
surd upon its very face. Nature is not thus malicious. She 
does not war upon man in this pitiless and remediless way. 
She hides her bounties that she may call forth man’s ingenu¬ 
ity. industry and energy to secure them, but she has at¬ 
tached no such penalty to the culture of the soil as this theory 
would imply. 
In the second place, this notion is not only not supported 
by facts, but is entirely contrary to facts. The removal of the 
forests from a well timbered country unquestionably produces 
marked climatic changes; but failure in wheat culture is by 
no means confined to such localities, nor is it any more marked 
in such localities. On the great prairies of the west no such 
climatic changes have or could have occurred ; and yet their 
diminished crops testify no less emphatically of some potent 
deranging cause. The same is true of California, where the 
diminished yield has been striking, while no one pretends there 
has been any change in its peculiar and remarkable climate. 
It is true also of France where the annual yield has been di¬ 
minishing; while in England, a country whose civilization is 
of nearly the same age, the yield is now larger than ever be¬ 
fore,—having steadily increased more than five bushels per 
acre during the last one hundred years. In Egypt, again, the 
yield has continued large and steady for centuries. Egypt 
and England are perhaps the only countries that form excep¬ 
tions to the general rule of diminished yield. 
Again, there have constantly been isolated instances of a 
large yield in the midst of districts where the general failure 
has been marked. These instances have not been confined to 
particular localities or countries. They have occurred in New 
York, in the western and-southern states, in France, and else- 
