cereal crop of 5,000,000,000 bushels. Were all of our arable land under cultivation and producing only according to our present standard, which is less than half as high as that of western Europe, we could add enough cereals to take care of an additional population the size of that of Europe (see also page 91).

LITTLE ROOM FOR PESSIMISM

When one has lived on land, as the writer has done, which, at the end of the Civil War, did not produce more than eight bushels of wheat and twenty bushels of corn to the acre, and has seen this land produce as high as forty-five bushels of wheat and a hundred bushels of corn, it is difficult to take any other than an optimistic view of the possibilities of American agriculture.

Not only are there infinite possibilities yet untouched in our own country, but also in most of the other countries of the earth as well. For instance, Russia, that land for which nature has done so much, endowing it with food-producing possibilities such as few other countries possess, has a wheat yield of only ten bushels to the acre.

When the day comes, as come it certainly will, that Russia produces as much per acre as Germany and England, and when the untold millions of acres of undeveloped land are opened up and settled, as they are destined to be, alone she can supply the world's present needs in cereals except rice and corn (see pages 24 and 25).

TROPICAL POSSIBILITIES

Nor is that all. Any one who has traveled through the tropics, studying the production of foodstuffs there at first hand, cannot fail to understand that vast potential food sources still lie untouched. The wonderful discoveries of Ross and Reed and their coadjutors, of the methods of preventing malaria and yellow fever, followed by the mastery of the secrets of the bubonic plague and beriberi, and the application of these lessons. in Cuba, at Panama, and elsewhere in the tropical world, have made it possible for civilized man to open up gardens of plenty of which he never before dreamed.

Untold millions of acres of densest

7

jungles are, so far as man is concerned, nothing more than lands of infinite richness wasting their sweetness upon the desert air of unutilized opportunities.

Not long ago I visited the ruins of Quirigua, in Guatemala. The United Fruit Company had set apart several hundred acres as a reservation for the protection of the ruins. The jungle forest of the reservation, bordering the banana. clearings, towered like a green wall a hundred feet high, and the undergrowth was so dense that no man could penetrate it save by cutting his way through with a machete.

There I saw the contrast between the The banana plantations, stretching for past and the future of the tropical world. miles and miles up and down the Motaga River valley, were producing millions of bunches of bananas, where but a few years before had existed the same sort of jungle as that at Quirigua.

NEW PRODUCTS AVAILABLE

Not only are there vast millions of acres of potentially rich agricultural lands still awaiting development, and not only is it certain that the production per acre. of those lands now under cultivation will be vastly increased, but new products are an inevitable prospect of the future.

When one travels in tropical countries he finds that banana flour makes an excellent substitute for wheat flour; and if the day ever comes when the wheat and the rye and the barley crops do not yield. sufficient bread, there are hundreds of millions of acres of potential banana land which will produce many-fold as much banana flour to the acre as we are able to get today of wheat flour from our wheat lands.

One might go on at length showing the wonderful possibilities of agriculture that lie in the future. Even if there should be no other developments than those which, by experience alone, we are able to forecast, there is no question but that the prospect of the world's starvation is to all practical purposes as remote as it was in the days of the pessimistic Malthus.

But just as the forecasts of Malthus failed to consider the possibilities of the age of agricultural machinery, the age

of commercial fertilizer, and the age of preventive medicine as applied to live stock, so it is probable that the prophets who predict a hungry world in the notdistant future are failing to reckon with the possibilities of further extension and improvement of agricultural conditions.

Furthermore, they also entirely neglect the fact that synthetic chemistry is delving deeper into the mysteries of nature's laboratories in the roots and stalks of the plant world, and is gradually coming to the point where it can take the raw materials that the plant itself takes from the soil, and make foods in factories perhaps

as well as nature makes them on the farm.

CONTINENTAL CHARACTERISTICS

In any study of how the world is fed, one discovers very soon that the various

continents are characterized by widely varied forms of diet. Australia, smallest of continents, is the largest meat eater of them all. Asia, the largest continent, is the smallest meat eater among them. Africa and South America lean toward vegetarianism, while North America and Europe are large consumers of meat and

other animal products.

Although Asia has fifty-three out of every hundred of the world's inhabitants living within its boundaries, it has, outside of India, comparatively few cattle, only a negligible number of hogs, and not a great many sheep. Fish, rice, and vegetables form the principal articles in the Asiatic market basket.

The average meal of the laboring class of China consists mainly of rice, a little cabbage boiled in a lot of water, and