Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/799

Rh is applicable to the fluctuations in the province of Ontario, and goes to show just as clearly that the decrease in area has had absolutely no bearing on the wheat-producing capabilities of the province.

"A permanently high price for wheat is, I fear, a calamity that ere long must be faced," says Sir W. Crookes; but, with due deference to so great an authority, I believe that the day of a permanent high price for wheat is yet far distant. There will be appreciations undoubtedly, but the sources of supply as yet undrawn upon are so great that it will be long before those appreciations are of any prolonged duration; but in the meantime they mean periods of great prosperity to the farmer and therefore to the world. Is a higher price for wheat such an unmixed calamity, after all? Has the average consumer of wheat benefited by the low price of wheat of late years in proportion to the hardships endured by the producer? I think not. Let those who are qualified by literary and scientific knowledge point out if they will the possibility, or even perhaps the probability, of at some period in the future the time coming when there may be, if present conditions continue to exist, a scarcity in the wheat supply, and urge as strongly as they like the advisability of taking steps in good time to prevent such a calamity; but nothing is to be gained by frightening the world with predictions of evil based only on a series of unfounded assertions, mathematical calculations, and "purely speculative computations." When, if ever, the day of scarcity will come is unknown. That it is yet far off appears to be tolerably certain; but it is sufficient for the purposes of this article that it should be understood that Sir W. Crookes's statements concerning the wheat area of Canada are absolutely unreliable and incorrect, and that there are millions of acres of good wheat land waiting for occupation by the surplus population of the world, which, when under cultivation, will assist in deferring for many years the threatened day of famine.

, in his account of travel through Asia, mentions as the most remarkable feature in the central region of internal drainage (in which the rivers drain into inland lakes) "the process of leveling which goes on unceasingly. The detritus which results from the disintegrating action of the weather, and the more or less mechanical agency of the wind and water and gravity, is constantly being carried down from the mountains all round its borders toward the lower parts of its depressions, and being deposited there. In this way the natural inequalities in the configuration of the ground are being gradually smoothed away." Mr. Curzon refers to the same phenomenon in the central districts of the Pamirs—the process being the exact reverse to that where the streams hew out deep ravines in their course to the sea-going river.