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Living on the Air 265 are bread-eaters. In 1908 Sir William Crookes, one of our foremost scientists, stated, as a result of his investigations, that the number of bread-eaters rose by 101,000,000 during the short span of twenty years, and that this enormous rate of increase, far from diminishing with the passage of time, is being maintained, until in 1951 it will have attained the huge total of 893,000,000 people. At the moment we may not realise that the growth of the number of bread-eaters is far outstripping the quantity of wheat which is being grown. We look around and observe that new vast stretches of virgin territory, such as the prairies of Canada and the United States, the plateaux of South America and Australia, and the vast steppes of Russia, are being reclaimed and brought under cultivation. We remark that in nearly every instance the cereal which is being raised is wheat, so that we can scarcely credit the fact that the quantity of this grain grown is not keep- ing pace with the needs of the peoples of the world. But there is another aspect of the problem which invariably is ignored. As the population increases it wanders farther afield. New cities, towns, villages, and hamlets are springing up with astonishing rapidity in all the new worlds or territories which for years have been regarded as little else than wilderness. A hive of human toilers invariably settles down in a district which has been previously reclaimed for wheat, the result being that large areas of wheat- fields are taken over for the construction of buildings, the laying out of streets, and so on. Then the stretches of wheatfields are reduced still further by the in- habitants taking up plots for a variety of purposes