Excerpt from Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 53: May to October, 1898 France is an excellent example of a combination of circumstances favoring the culture of wheat in the face of unfavorable conditions. Wheat is a necessity, and is grown everywhere as a usual and almost necmry crop, apart from its commercial aspect. The farmer puts down each year a certain amount of land under wheat for his own consumption, and would continue to do so even if it happened (a most unlikely supposition) that wheat should sell for one third its present price. With this personal and necessary crop the farmer obtains food, a stock for seed, and usually a small surplus for sale, even from the smallest of wheat farms. It has occurred many times that a slightly higher price for wheat has called out unexpectedly large quantities from the hands of the small farmers of France, quan tities that have been saved through indifference to sales or through supposed necessities, now set aside by the chance of reaping a profit. And what has happened before will happen again among so thrifty a nation of land cultivators as are the French. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.