"For reasons which I shall state presently, I hope to be able to show why these alkali lands when properly irrigated, can be made to produce abundant crops of wheat. "For the past twenty years, leading men of science, who, alive to the importance of increasing the world's supply of wheat; have given close attention to statistics which seemed to indicate that the yield per acre, of the wheat fields in all countries, is steadily decreasing. Decreasing to such an extent as to make it probable, that in the near future, the yield on a large proportion of these lands, will become too meagre to pay the cost of cultivation. A long series of carefully conducted experiments demonstrated the truth of these alarming statistics. "This discovery led to a general search for some cheap, available, chemical, compound, which might restore these worn out wheat lands to their former productiveness. "In an address, delivered at Bristol, England, near the close of the nineteenth century, by Professor William Crookes, president of the British Association for the advancement of science; he says; 'Wheat pre-eminently demands as a dominant manure, nitrogen fixed in the form of ammonia or nitric acid. Many years of experimentation with nitrate of soda, or Chili salt-petre, have proved it to be the most concentrated form of nitrogenous food demanded by growing wheat. This substance occurs native, over a narrow band of the plain of Tamarugal, in the northern province of Chili, between the Andes and the coast hills. In this rainless district for countless ages, the continuous fixation of atmospheric nitrogen by the soil, its conversion into nitrate by the slow transfiguration of billions of nitrifying organizations, its combination with soda, and the crystallization of the nitrate have been steadily proceeding, until the nitrate fields of Chili have become of vast importance, and promise to be of inestimably greater value in the future. The growing exports of nitrate from Chili at present, amount to about 1,200,000 tons annually.' "In carefully analyzing this lesson from the lips of Professor Crookes, we discover that the same peculiar climatic conditions which made a Chilian desert so valuable, have been continuously at work in our great American desert for a great many thousands of years. "For this reason, our uncounted acres of alkali lands, are so rich with stores of this valuable nitrogenous compound, that by proper treatment they may become the most valuable wheat-producing lands in the world. The desert shall become the source of abundance! Under the transforming influence of a generous water supply, forests shall spring up, and fields of waving grain shall flourish around the village homes of a happy, prosperous people! Altogether, we have an empire of these irrigable lands now worthless, awaiting the transforming labor of the homeless and landless, to restore them to productive fertility.