THE FERTILITY OF RAINLESS LANDS.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 11479, 12 January 1903, Page 4

THE FERTILITY OF RAINLESS LANDS.

The man who would attempt to prove to the victims of the drought in Australia that dry regions are the most fertile would! be in some danger of being set down as a lunatic or A person with a poor idea of a joke. Yet if the sufferers would have sufficient patience to study the lessons of history they would have to acknowledge that many of the great civilisations of ancient days sprang from more or less arid regions—in some cases from the desert. In.am extremely interesting book, "The Conquest of Arid America," written to show the immense possibilities of the almost rainless area of the United States, a Mr W. E. Smythe quotes many instances of ancient prosperity as showing that the dry lands of the earth are the best. He mentions Egypt, Asia Minor and! Syria, Palestine, Persia, Arabia, Northern India, Carthage, and the country of the Moora, the homes of the Incas, the Aztecs, an_ the Toltecs as cases in point, and he declares that the races which rose to power in these lamds chose them because they were infinitely better than humid lands. That they were dry can hardly be disputed, unless one is to assume that the climates have completely changed, and there is plenty of evidence to show that some of these countries were arid at the height of their glory. With regard to the theory as to tho reason for their selection, Mr Smythe apparently bases his argument on the researches of Professor Hilgard, of the University of California, who is described as perhaps the greatest living authority on soils. He starts with the assertion that certain arid districts are the richest spots on the globe. The Valley of the' Nile is one of these, and we are told that the fertilising quality of the seo-ment annually lett by the river has little to do with the productiveness of the land. The neighbouring province of the Fayoum, in the Libyan desert, is quite as fertile as the Valey of the Nile, though irrigated only with the dear waters of Lake Mceris. Certain districts in the Decoan have been phenomenally fertile for thousands of years, and that portion of China, drained by the headwaters of the Yellow River, " has been the granary of China for ages." All those regions are ari_ or semiarid. Professor Hilgard's researches into the cause of this fertility have led him to the conclusion that "it is a quality inherent in aridity itself." Soils axe formed from rocks by the process of "weathering," from which «ew compounds result. Some of these compounds are insoluble and remain in the soil, others are solu_le, and where the rainfall is abundant, they are washed out of the soil into the rivers and disappear in the ocean. Obviously where there is no rain they must remain in the soil, and this is what Professor HEgard declares has occurred in the arid lands of South Western America, where these compounds "lie now like an inexhaustible- " bank account, on which the plant life of "the future may draw at will, without " danger of protest." With the results before him of more than a thousand analyses of soils from the'dry and damp areas of the United States, the Professor asserts that the " average arid soil of the west is " equal to the most phenomenal sojl of the "east." But, of course, the fertility of all arid soils depends upon irrigation. •' Arid countries are always rich countries," says the Professor, "when irrigated," so that Mr Smythe is right when he points out that the much-quoted "blessing, of aridity" is really the compulsory adoption of irrigation. WJ_en New South Wales, of which two-thirds is more or less arid, has learned and applied that lesson, she may be able to suck more comfort from Professor Hilgard's researches and conclusions than she can at present.