THE WHEAT LANDS OF CANADA. BY SYDNEY C. D. ROPER. When Sir W. Crookes, in his inaugural address as President of the British Association, startled a large number of people by stating that, unless some radical change was made in the present system of wheat cultivation, there would be a bread famine in 1931, because the world's supply of land capable of producing wheat would have been exhausted, there was undoubtedly a considerable feeling of uneasiness engendered, and more attention was paid to the address than is usual even to so valuable a contribution as the inaugural address of the President of that Association must always be. It was, therefore, with a feeling of relief that we found one person after another, well qualified to speak, coming, as it were, to the rescue, and pointing out that Sir W. Crookes's conclusions were not warranted; and in the minds of the majority, no doubt, the last feeling of uneasiness was dispelled by the able letter in The Times, in December last, in which Sir John Lawes and Sir Henry Gilbert, who are _facile principes_ as scientific agriculturists, and whose opinions carry greater weight than even those of the President of the British Association, gave most satisfactory reasons for being unable to believe in Sir W. Crookes's predictions. It is true that, in a subsequent letter, Sir W. Crookes stated that his remarks were intended more as a serious warning than as a prophecy; but, seeing that his conclusions were based on definite statements of definite facts and figures, it is difficult to treat them as other than prophetic. In order, however, to establish the probability of a wheat famine in the near future it became necessary for Sir W. Crookes to seriously misrepresent and underestimate the wheat resources of some of the principal countries most interested in producing that cereal, and it is to a large extent by exposing the magnitude of these misrepresentations that the validity of his conclusions is called in question and disproved. The two countries which, with perhaps the exception of Russia, are most concerned in the wheat production of the future, and therefore in the correction of these misstatements, are Canada and the United States.