Abstract
THE death of Dr. W. MacDonald at the age of sixty years removes an enthusiast for South Africa and a firm believer in her future as the seat of a white civilisation. A Scotsman by birth and education, he spent some time studying in the United States and in France before settling in South Africa. There he realised that the prosperity produced by the recently discovered gold mines could only be stabilised by a concomitant development of agriculture, and he became the leading protagonist of his time for the dry-farming system. His two books “Dry Farming” and “The Conquest of the Desert” focused attention on what was, and probably always will be, one of the greatest obstacles to intensive agriculture in South Africa, and although modern policy is directed, perhaps wisely, towards encouraging extensive animal husbandry rather than the more intensive dry farming advocated by Dr. MacDonald, the influence of his work can be traced in the way that policy has developed. The growth of the citrus industry owes not a little to his encouragement in its early days. He had some of the enthusiasm of Cecil Rhodes for colonisation, and became director of the South African Land Settlement Bureau which did much to promote immigration before the Great War. He was proprietor, editor and a frequent contributor to the Agricultural Journal of South Africa, and was the prime mover in the institution of a faculty of agriculture at the University of Pretoria.
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Dr. William MacDonald. Nature 136, 979 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136979b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136979b0