TRIPOLI USELESS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1098, 25 January 1912, Page 4

TRIPOLI USELESS.

INDICTMENT BY PROFESSOR GREGORY.

Professor J. W. Gregory, formerly of the Melbourne University, writes in the Contemporary Review of the meagreness of Tripoli’s natural resources. In 1908. at the request of Mr Israel Zangwill, he organised an expedition to Cyrenaica, the eastern and least unpromising district of Tripoli, to investigate its suitability for the purpose of a colony of Jewish refugees from Eastern

Europe. The expedition had reluctantly to report that the country, owing to its large area of useless land and its insufficient and uncertain water supply, was quite unsuitable for extensive agricultural colonies. Over the greater part of it even “ dry farming,” as practised in America and Australia, is inapplicable, owing to the nature of the ground, and the fact that half the acreage ol the country has a rainfall of less than loin. Professor Gregory points out that Italian explorers were as disappointed as he with the potential value of the land, and that the former Italian commercial agencies proved such failures from the financial point of view that Italian activity was suspended in 1896. He suggests that the revival oi Italian interest in Tripoli of late years has been due to sentimental rather than to practical reasons, though he admits that the Turkish officials have given the Italians much cause of offence. Apparently the possibilities of development in Tripoli cannot be judged by what has taken place in Algeria and Tunisia. Tripoli is in fact geographical part of the Sahara, while the western States of North Africa belongs rather to Southern Europe. The northern coast of Africa, according to Professor Gregory, includes three types of country. The western section, comprising Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, is traversed by the great mountain chain of the Atlas, which ends abruptly iu Tunisia, where it is cut across by the southward turn of the coast, its eastward continuation being in Sicily. This western section differs altogether from the rest of Africa, and is placed by geographical zoologists iu the same region as Europe. The second section of the coast consists ot the Tripoliton shores of the broad bight between Tunisia and Cyrenalca. Here the Mediterranean reaches to the inner zone of the continent; that is to say to the plateau of the Sahara. The third section extends eastwards from the gult northward around the hills of Cyrenaica to Egypt. Cyrenaica is, in many respects, similar in structure to Egypt, but its economic conditions are quite other, since it has neither Nile nor Suez Canal. Tripoli’s chief importance in times past lay in the great caravan route, which ran from its chief ports to the interior of Africa. That trade, however, has been diverted, owing to the opening of better routes through the Soudan, and as the country, besides being poor agriculturally, is also almost devoid oi minerals, it is never likely to repay the Italians for the money they are expending upon their present war-