of these desert lands can be transformed to an agricultural
paradise. The cost of these wells, would be but little more than the
expense of the labor required to bore them.

"But, says the objector, are not these mostly alkali lands? Of course
they are! And for that reason offer greater possibilities of value! Can
they be made to grow wheat, and thus increase the bread supply? Is a
question that comes from the mouths of the world's great army of bread
eaters, six hundred million strong. Just think of it!

"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. T