It is comforting to learn from the Bulletin of the
Imperial Institute that there is no reason to fear a scarcity of wheat. Even if Russia exports none, there should be wheat• enough for all, because North and South America, India, and Australia have greatly increased their wheat crops during the war. The late Sir William Crookes estimated in 1898 that a hundred million more acres might be put under wheat, and that the maximum additional crop would be 1,270,000,000 bushels, which would suffice for the world up to 1931. But by 1913 nearly as much as this had been raised by an addition of only fifty million acres to the world's wheat-fields, and since 1913 another fifty million sores have been laid down to wheat. According to the Bulletin, the area under wheat could easily be doubled, and if the average yield of thirteen bushels to the acre were inore,ased by better cultivation, there would always be abundance of wheat.
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