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Title: The Strange Adventures of a Pebble
Author: Hallam Hawksworth
Release Date: November 24, 2021 [eBook #66818]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A
PEBBLE ***
THE STRANGE ADVENTURES
OF A PEBBLE
STRANGE ADVENTURES IN NATURE'S WONDERLANDS
THE
STRANGE ADVENTURES
OF A PEBBLE
BY
HALLAM HAWKSWORTH
AUTHOR OF "THE ADVENTURES OF A GRAIN OF DUST"
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON
Copyright, 1921, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
A
THE SCRIBNER PRESS
PREFACE
The purpose of this little book is to present the chief features in the
strange story of the pebbles; and so of the larger pebble we call the
earth. It is hoped that readers of various ages will be entertained,
without suspecting that they are being taught.
Several things led the author to believe that such a book might be
wanted.
(_a_) The circumstances under which it was written.
(_b_) The fact that there seemed to be an opportunity for improvement
not only in the popular presentation of scientific topics but in the
character and method of review questions and suggestions following such
topics in school texts.
(_c_) Experience has shown that pictures may be made to perform a much
more vital function in teaching than is usually assigned to them in the
text-books.[1]
[Footnote 1: On this subject I cannot do better, perhaps, than quote
from an article on "The Picture Book in Education," contributed to the
New York _Evening Post_:
"We learn more easily by looking at things than by memorizing words
about them. The principle, of course, holds whether the image which the
eye receives comes from the object itself or only from the picture of
the object. Therefore we should learn to read pictures as well as books.
"New York has long recognized the added efficiency in the teaching
process to be obtained from the use of pictures. The Division of
Visual Instruction, established thirty years ago, has an international
reputation for the extent of its equipment, the simplicity of its
methods, and the excellence of its results."]
(_d_) In the particular field to which this story relates comparatively
little has been written either for reading in the family circle or for
use in the school; although the relation of physiography, not only to
human history and political and commercial geography but to the whole
immense realm of natural science, is so basic and its great principles
and processes so striking in their appeal to curiosity and our sense of
the grand and the dramatic.[2]
[Footnote 2: Commenting on the need of popular literature dealing with
earth science, Doctor Shaler says:
"In no other fields are large and important truths so distinctly
related to human interests so readily traced; yet the treatises dealing
with these truths are few in number and generally recondite."]
What here appear as chapters were originally little talks for the
evening entertainment of the juvenile members of a certain family and
the neighboring children, who were attracted by what came to be known
as the "pebble parties," during the season at Mount Desert Island. They
are here given in substantially the form in which they first saw the
light. While they proved entirely intelligible to boys and girls of
eight and ten they seemed equally interesting to the older members of
the audience, including a youth of eighteen in his last year of high
school, whose comments, in the language of his caste, deserve to share
the credit for whatever of whimsical humor and colloquial style the
author may have succeeded in incorporating into the narrative.
The familiar tone, the number and variety of the chapters, the
sub-heads and marginal captions and the character and treatment of
the illustrations have a similar origin. They represent the variety
of aspects under which it was found necessary to present the facts in
order to hold a capricious audience whose attendance and attention
were wholly voluntary.
The use of unfamiliar words and scientific terms has been avoided as
much as possible, consistent with the educational purpose of the book.
It is to be remembered that educators do not consider it good practice
to omit all words which children cannot understand at sight; the theory
being that it is by the judicious introduction of words not current
on the playground that the intellectual interests and capacities of
children are enlarged. With regard to scientific topics (it is further
argued) a large proportion of the classics of science written for the
general reader and which boys and girls of fourteen and upward should
be able to read easily and with pleasure--Shaler, Darwin, and Wallace,
for example--contain quite a few scientific terms; and these it would
be well that young people learn from context or definition in their
previous reading in works of a more elementary nature.
Moreover, while younger children will read a book the general character
of which interests them, even though they do not understand every word
or get all the thoughts in it, sophisticated youths of the high-school
age will have none of it, if they suspect that they are being talked
down to. In the story of the pebble the aim, accordingly, has been not
only to make a book that young people will not outgrow but one that
will be of some interest to adults, particularly to travellers.
Not only in the text is special emphasis laid on the interpretation
of landscape, but the character, treatment, and arrangement of the
illustrations is intended to train the eye to read the story of the
earth drama as recorded in the forms of valley, mountain, field,
and shore. And--since the earth is not, after all, a mere geological
specimen--these illustrations include reproductions of paintings,
scenery as interpreted by the poet and the artist.
To create an appropriate atmosphere and so add to the vividness of
conception, the twelve chapters each deal with a seasonable subject.
Relation to the Text-Book
The relation of this book to the formal study of physiography or
geology in the schools will be apparent. The classified and exhaustive
treatment of the text-book, while so admirably adapted to organize
knowledge already acquired, or reward an appetite already aroused, is
not at all adapted for creating this appetite in the first place; a
thing so essential to true progress in education. For example, in a
text-book, the many aspects of glaciers and their work, which are here
distributed in a number of sections (as the discovery of these aspects
was distributed in time), are usually dealt with in a single chapter or
series of chapters, whose nature the reader at once gathers from the
title, "The Work of the Glaciers."
The young reader or school pupil is thus deprived of the element of
surprise, of the pleasure of following an unfolding mystery, which was
at once the inspiration and reward of men of science to whom we owe
these discoveries.
If left to the text-book alone, the student acquires his facts too
rapidly and too easily. The result is a loss of both pleasure and
profit. The movements of the glaciers and the nature of the movement,
which gave Agassiz seven years of keen delight to ascertain, the pupil
acquires through his text-book in something like seven minutes, and
without either the pleasure or the profit of Agassiz' gradual and
inductive acquirement of this knowledge.
In other words, to begin the study of a given science by means of a
text-book, without previously arousing interest in the subject, is to
assume a greater zeal on the part of school pupils and college students
than, it is reasonable to assume, was possessed by the scientists
themselves. It was the attraction of the unknown rather than the rapid
acquirement of the known that drew them on to their grand discoveries,
their illuminating generalizations.
In recording the pebble's story the endeavor has been to cause the
reader to come upon the data on which these generalizations were based,
piece by piece, here a little and there a little--as did the scientists
themselves.
Interesting as the mere facts of physiographic science finally become
to the trained scientist they make little appeal either to the average
boy or the average adult, if he must first come in contact with them as
they are presented in the text-book; classified, catalogued, labelled
in scientific terms and laid away (as it seems to him) in chapter,
section, and paragraph, like specimens in a museum.
Since this book is concerned mainly with landscapes and the story of
the forces that helped to shape them it does not undertake to deal
with mineralogy. Within the fields thus defined it is believed that
the larger facts, the great moving causes of things, have been covered
as thoroughly as they are in the average elementary text-book. In
addition, subjects in great variety are touched upon which do not come
within the province of the text-book, but are such as naturally suggest
themselves in the broader and richer discussion of such topics in the
conversation of cultivated people.
Hide and Seek in the Library
Since the whole purpose of the school is to prepare for the larger
world of life and books outside the school, special attention is
invited to the department of questions and suggestions following each
chapter. As indicated in the introduction to the first of the series,
an effort has been made to capitalize the fact that young people enjoy
conundrums and curious quests in the field of books quite as well as
mere passive reading.
The treatment is somewhat discursive, and in this and other respects
is intended to be more like the conversation of cultivated parents
with their children than like the review questions of a text-book; the
review element being incidental, in recalling the topics out of which
these questions and suggestions grow. The correlations in the most
modern texts lead into equally wide and varied fields.
If he has succeeded in the aim thus indicated, the author believes this
department may easily prove one of the most interesting as well as
educatively useful features of the work.
H. H.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. _In the Beginning_ 1
II. _The Winter that Lasted All Summer_ 20
III. _The Soul of the Spring and the Lands of Eternal Snow_ 41
IV. _The April Rains and the Work of the Rivers_ 66
V. _The Fairyland of Change_ 93
VI. _The Secrets of the Hills_ 113
VII. _The Stones of the Field_ 145
VIII. _The Desert_ 161
IX. _In the Lands of the Lakes_ 191
X. _The Autumn Winds and the Rock Mills of the Sea_ 212
XI. _The Handwriting on the Walls_ 234
XII. _The End of the World_ 260
_Index_ 279
THE ILLUSTRATIONS
In furtherance of the idea referred to in the preface, that a far more
effective use may be made of pictures in teaching than is usual, a
very extended use has been made of them in "The Strange Adventures of
a Pebble," and, moreover, these pictures have been made to talk, as it
were, by means of extended analysis and comment upon their significant
features; this for the double purpose of teaching important facts, as
only pictures can teach, and of stimulating the invaluable habit of
observation and of logical reasoning about things observed.
One of the main purposes of the book, as stated in the preface, is to
stimulate interest in further reading and study on the many subjects to
which it relates.
The author wishes to make special acknowledgment of the co-operation of
the editor of _St. Nicholas_ and the following publishers in supplying
the illustrations on the pages indicated:
The Macmillan Co.: 11, 29, 36, 41, 52, 83, 108, 121, 132, 145, 152,
168, 173, 195, 221, 225, 226, 235, 240, 249, 254, 257. The Century Co.:
For the following from the _St. Nicholas_ magazine: 38, 47, 70, 184,
199.
D. Appleton and Co.: 12, 22, 60, 97, 102, 136, 141, 224, 236, 241, 243,
245, 247, 252, 257. G. P. Putnam's Sons: 59, 105, 147. E. P. Dutton &
Co.: 157. Henry Holt & Co.: 37, 84, 149, 193, 207, 250. Silver Burdett
Co.: 28. _World's Work_: 79. _Geological Survey_: 13, 23, 114, 130,
194, 238. _Wisconsin Survey_: 33. _Encyclopædia Britannica_: 256.
THE STRANGE ADVENTURES
OF A PEBBLE
CHAPTER I
(JANUARY)
In the beginning the earth was without form and void.
--_Genesis_ 1:1-2.
IN THE BEGINNING
I. How the Worlds and Myself Were Born
I've been through fire and water, _I_ tell you! From my earliest
pebblehood the wildest things you could imagine have been happening to
this world of ours, and I have been right in the midst of them.
HOW MR. APOLLO TURNED ON THE LIGHT
The first scenes of all in my strange, eventful history remind me of
the old Greek story about Apollo and that boy of his--Phaeton. Apollo's
business, you remember, was to take the sun through the skies every day
in his golden chariot, so that people could see to get about. It was a
ticklish job, as the horses were fiery. As a rule, however, things went
fairly well. To be sure, there were overdone days occasionally, just
as there are now. Then the crops would wither and the birds and brooks
stop singing. This, as the little Greek boys and girls believed, was
because Apollo's horses ran too near the earth.
[Illustration: HOW MR. APOLLO TURNED ON THE LIGHT
Behold the sun-god starting on his daily round! Aurora, Goddess of
the Dawn, precedes him scattering flowers, the lovely colors of the
morning sky. The other figures are the early hours.
The Greek poets used to play with these myth stories a good deal,
changing them to suit their poetic fancy. Theocritus, for example,
in a beautiful fragment that has come down to us, paints this
picture of the breaking day:
"Dawn, up from the sea to the sky,
By her fleet-footed steeds was drawn."
You see, according to this poet's conception, Miss Dawn had a
chariot of her own.
]
But nothing serious happened until one time Phaeton persuaded father to
let him drive the sun chariot for a day. The horses, feeling at once a
new and weak hand on the reins, tore out of the regular road and went
dashing right and left. They even got so near the North Pole that the
ice began to melt. They fairly flew down toward the earth, set the
mountains smoking, and dried up all the springs and most of the rivers.
THEN THINGS BEGAN TO HAPPEN
They dried up a certain great lake, so that there is to this day the
Libyan Desert in Africa, where this lake used to be. They made the very
sea shrink so that there were "wide naked plains where once its billows
rose."
Finally Mother Earth called on Jupiter Pluvius, as god of thunder,
rain, and storms, to stop Phaeton and the runaways and put out the fire.
Struck by a bolt of lightning poor Phaeton fell headlong from the
skies, and a world-wide rain put out the world-wide fire.
[Illustration: _From a cameo by Da Vinci_
THE FALL OF PHAETON
(Museum, Florence)
]
Now, would you believe it, this queer old Old World story may really be
true in its way. Of course there never was a sun god and no spoiled boy
who did just that thing; although many spoiled boys have _tried_ to set
the world on fire and failed because they thought it would be so easy.
But the earth really has been on fire in a sense; that is, has melted
from the heat. And in parts where you would least suspect--the rocks.
There's where I got into it. And some of these rocks, not more than
ten miles[3] from where you live, are either still molten, or continue
to melt from time to time; as you can see when lava comes pouring from
volcanoes, such as those of Hawaii.
[Footnote 3: Straight down, of course.]
In the days of the Apollo story most men still thought the earth was
the centre of the universe; that the sun, moon, and stars moved around
it. But Pythagoras, one of the Greek philosophers, had formed a general
notion of the truth that the earth is only one planet in a great
system. Then, along in the Sixteenth Century, came Copernicus, and by
mathematical calculation--he was a fine hand at figures--began to find
out things that showed the wise old Greek had made a happy guess. Then
Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and others, each working on different parts of
the problem, finally settled the question. They found that there are
just worlds of worlds, and that ours is only one of them.
* * * * *
About the time of the American Revolution a great French mathematician,
Laplace, worked out a story of the origin of the earth which is,
briefly, this:
What we know now as the solar system--the sun with its attendant
worlds--was once a single big ball of fiery gas, a nebula. As this
nebula cooled it shrank, and as it shrank it whirled faster because
it had a smaller track in which to turn, and with an equal amount of
force would, of course, get around oftener. The faster it whirled
the more the outside of it tended to fly off, as water flies off a
whirling grindstone or as a stone flies from a sling. This centrifugal
or "fly-away" force was greatest at the sun's equator, and it threw
off big rings. Afterward, around some centre of greater density in
these rings, the gaseous particles in the rest of the ring gathered, so
forming spheres. Then some of the spheres themselves threw off rings in
the same way which became what are called satellites. The moon, which
is our satellite, Laplace supposed to have originated in this way.
The ring which Saturn still wears he thought would some day become a
satellite.
[Illustration:
_By permission of the Mount Wilson Observatory_
WATCHING THE MAKING OF WORLDS
At first you won't see anything very striking about this picture,
perhaps; but doesn't it give you something of a thrill to be told
that you are here looking not only at the making of a _world_,
but of worlds of worlds? A whole solar system! In the course of
unthinkable time that big, round ball in the center will be the
sun, and what appear to be little knots wrapped close around
it--they are really far from each other and from the sun--will
become rounded worlds like ours. They will be forced into roundness
by their own gravity, pulling toward their centers. They don't look
any farther apart than the strands in a little sister's braided
hair, do they? But remember how small this picture is compared with
what it represents. What here show as little dark lines, separating
the embryo worlds, are in reality vast spaces, like those you see
between the stars at night--millions and millions and millions of
miles!
]
So, you see, the myth story of Phaeton foreshadowed, in a way, the
science story of Laplace. For, according to the Laplace theory, the
world _was_ on fire; and a big rain storm, lasting for ages, with
plenty of thunder and lightning, did help put it out.
This theory of Laplace was long accepted as the true one. Indeed, it
was only yesterday, comparatively, that other explanations were offered
as to how we came to have a world to stand on. The broadest of these
new theories--the one that undertakes to explain the most--is that of
Professor Chamberlin, of the University of Chicago.
[Illustration: THE SUN AND HIS PEBBLE WORLDS
However the worlds of our solar system may have been made, when
they were done there was the sun in the centre and his worlds
travelling around him in their ordered orbits. Nearest the sun is
Mercury. Then Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus; then,
finally, Neptune nearly 3,000,000,000 miles away and with an orbit
so big that Christmas comes only once in 60,000 years!
]
YOU CAN SEE THESE WORLDS IN THE MAKING
Owing to the more powerful telescopes of to-day, and the amount of
exploring among the worlds that has been going on since the time of
Laplace, several things have been discovered that have brought his
theory into question. For one thing, many more nebulæ have been found
in space than were known when Laplace worked out his great conception,
and among them all not one has been found with a central mass
surrounded by a ring. Moreover, our sharp-eyed telescopes show that
Saturn's ring, which Laplace thought was a solid mass, is really made
up of a great number of small satellites: baby worlds. The greater
number of these nebulæ are like the ones you see in the illustration
on page 5. They consist of very bright centres with spirals streaming
out from opposite sides. Just take a look at the picture. Doesn't the
shape of those spirals suggest that the central mass is whirling? And
notice the little white lumps here and there. The thinner, veil-like
portions of the mass, as well as the "lumps," are supposed to be made
of particles of matter, but the lumps to be more condensed. All the
particles, big and little, are known to be revolving about the central
mass, much as the earth revolves about the sun. The little white lumps,
or knots, in the filmy skein are supposed to be worlds in the making.
Being larger than the other particles, they draw the smaller to them,
according to the same law of gravitation which makes every unsupported
thing on earth fall to the ground, because the earth is so much bigger
than anything there is on it. Since these bright little lumps behave
so much like the worlds we know as planets, and yet are relatively
so small, they are called planetessimals, or "little planets." So
Professor Chamberlin's idea of the origin of worlds is known as the
"planetessimal theory."
[Illustration: HOW YOU CAN WATCH THE WORLD TURN ROUND
Timepieces, you know, are really machines for keeping track of the
apparent movement of the sun. Here is a device, as simple as a
sun-dial and much simpler than a clock, by which you can record the
actual motion of the earth. Sprinkle the surface of the water in a
bowl with chalk dust. On this, sift from a piece of paper powdered
charcoal or pencil dust, so as to make a clean-cut band extending
across the centre and over the edge of the bowl. In the course of
several hours you will find that the black band has swept round
from east to west, because the water has stood still while the bowl
has been carried from west to east by the whirling world.
]
According to this theory the earth was once a mere baby world like
those white lumps, and grew by gathering in its smaller neighbors from
time to time by the power of gravitation. The larger it grew the more
particles of solid matter it could draw to itself. Then it drew larger
masses, for with increased mass came an increased pull of gravity. In
the same way the earth is still growing, for it is thought that the
shooting stars or meteors we see at night are little planets being
gathered in.
II. How the Continents Came Up Out of the Sea
And before I got to be myself at all, while I was still only a part of
the big pebble called the Earth, your geography and I lay at the bottom
of the sea.
For ages and ages!
This is one of the stories you will find in the literature of science,
of how, along with North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa,
and Australia--have I left out any?--I came to land and brought your
geography with me.
I remember hearing a pretty young lady say, once upon a time:
"There," said she, "I'm through with geography forever!"
You see, although she had passed with marks around 90, she still had
the idea that geography is a book. You and I know, of course, that the
real geography isn't a book at all. It's the world itself.
PUTTING THE CONTINENTS ON THE GLOBE
But there was a time when there was no land. It was all water, and
the continents were lifted into their places, much as you model a
continent in making a relief map; they were sketched out and then
filled in. North America, for example. First of all up came that mass
in the northeast in what is now Canada; the Laurentian Highlands, as
they are called in your geography. They rose very, very slowly, you
understand, only a few feet in a thousand years; for Nature has all
the time there is and never hurries. These highlands (they are really
granite mountains worn down), along with the other rock formations of
our continent, are supposed to be the oldest land on the earth. The
continents of Europe and the rest were born later. So you see Columbus
didn't discover the New World at all; he really came from the New World
and discovered the Old!
Next after the highlands north of the St. Lawrence up came the tops of
the mountains you see running along the eastern coast, what we now
call the Appalachians. Then the Rocky Mountains began to raise their
heads and looked eastward toward their brother mountains across a great
mediterranean sea, the bottom of which is now the Mississippi Valley.
Mediterranean means "middle of the land."
[Illustration: HOW YOUR GEOGRAPHY ROSE OUT OF THE SEA]
ADMITTING NEW STATES TO THE MAP
Wisconsin, into which I moved from the Laurentian Highlands in later
years, was on the lower end of a long, thin tongue of rock reaching out
from these highlands to the southwest. While Wisconsin went on growing,
the Alleghanies came up and brought some Middle Atlantic geography with
them. Up with all these early settler mountains came, in the course of
time, the beginnings of neighbor States. All these big, barren rocks
(as they were then), rising and ever rising, age after age, spread
more surface to the sun. And the sun, and the wind, and the frost,
followed by the lowest forms of plant life--the Adams of the vegetable
world--gradually worked the surface of the rock into soil; and so, as
we may say, got ready for the spring plowing.
[Illustration: LANDS THE SEA HAS SWALLOWED
Parts of the continents as they used to be but which are now
beneath the waters are here shown. Compare this with the globe map
in your geography. It is estimated that there are 10,000,000 square
miles of this land. You'll hear more about this swallowing habit of
the sea in Chapter X; but, as you will learn, there's nothing to be
frightened about.
]
By this constant rising and building on of the soil the foundations
of our States grew out toward one another in order, according to the
constitution of things, "to form a more perfect union." The United
States, at a time which, we may say, corresponds to "The Expansion
Period" in your school history, grew southward from Wisconsin and
westward from the Appalachians until they made continuous land; and
there was your Ohio and Indiana and the rest of the North Central
group. Below, toward the south, were more big stone islands here
and there, the first sketches or blockings out of the Southern
States. Florida seems to have been added later, as a final touch; an
afterthought, as one of my Wisconsin neighbors puts it. And it was
much enlarged by those remarkable little world builders, the corals.
Mexico and Central America, of course, are a part of the Rocky Mountain
system.
[Illustration:
_From Gilbert and Brigham's "An Introduction to Physical
Geography." By permission of D. Appleton and Company_
BUT WON'T WE GO UNDER AGAIN?
These little people of the sea-floor furnish one of the most
assuring evidences we have that although the continents rose out of
the sea, they will never go under the sea again. These are shell
creatures found in the slime dredged from the bottom of the deepest
parts of the sea. The shells of creatures that live near shore are
found in abundance in our rocks, but these types are found only
in the deepest seas. So, since the deep down-wrinklings of the
earth that make the sea-basins have never risen, it is probable
they never will; and consequently that the up-wrinkles--the
continents--will continue to stay above the waters.
]
It's a wonderful old story, isn't it? But more wonderful still, it
always seemed to me, is the story of how they found all this out.
Who do you suppose first told about it? The last people you would ever
think of, I'm sure--the oysters!
WHAT THE OYSTERS TOLD XENOPHANES
It sounds like a passage from "Alice in Wonderland," or "Through the
Looking-Glass," doesn't it? But it's a fact. Away back, more than
2,000 years ago, a wise Greek called Xenophanes, who lived in a place
called Colophon, and so was called Xenophanes of Colophon, said that he
thought the rocks of the mountain sides must once have been under the
sea because of the oyster shells that were found embedded in many of
them.
[Illustration: HOW THE OYSTERS TOLD THE GREAT SECRET
Here is a good example of the thing that led wise old Xenophanes of
Colophon to make the startling assertion that the mountains were
once at the bottom of the sea. These are the shells of oysters
embedded in limestone--which, by the way, the shells of the oysters
themselves helped make--and this piece of stone is from the top of
a high mountain.
]
"For," said Xenophanes of Colophon, "how else could the oyster shells
have got there? Who ever heard of oysters climbing a mountain?"
Another evidence that lands come up out of the sea is this: Even before
the days of Scott and Maryatt and Fenimore Cooper, men--and, of course,
boys--were interested in caves that face upon the sea. They are such
jolly places for pirates, and for boys playing pirate, and for mermaids
drying their hair. It was plain that down where the waves in storms
could reach them the sea itself bored out these caves. But how about
those caves in the cliffs high above the waves? The sea must have made
them, too, once upon a time when the land was lower in the water. Then
the land was raised.
Still more striking was the fact that not only caves but old sea
beaches were found on hill and mountain slopes far from the sea,
sometimes hundreds of miles inland. You can tell the old beaches by
their shape and the way in which the pebbles are sorted by size, just
as you find them on beaches to-day.
THE BAKED APPLE AND THE BULGING WORLD
The causes of the rise and fall of the sea coasts are many, and
there are things about these movements not yet understood. By what
wonderful machinery, then (we might naturally ask), were the continents
themselves lifted out of the sea? To this, which would seem much the
harder question of the two, the answer is simple; as simple as a baked
apple. You know an apple that goes into the oven with a smooth, neat
skin comes out covered with wrinkles. Now suppose, instead of a little,
hot apple, covered with a thin skin, you have a big, hot earth covered
with a thick crust of stone, and the inside of the earth shrinking all
the time as the inside of the apple shrank away from its skin. The rock
skin would wrinkle, and the wrinkles, rising out of the seas that then
covered it everywhere, would make continents.
[Illustration: THE RISE AND FALL OF JUPITER SERAPIS
In this account of the ups and downs of land and sea I must tell
you the story of Jupiter Serapis. In the days of the Romans this
temple, for his honor, stood on the seashore near Naples. Of that
temple only three pillars remain, but they answer a very important
question. On these pillars, over twenty feet above sea-level, is a
belt of holes bored in the stone by a certain shelled sea-creature,
one of the barnacle family; so evidently these pillars must, at
some time, have sunk, as shown in the second picture, and then
risen again, as shown in the third, which represents them as they
stand to-day.
Another interesting thing is that the third picture--observe--shows
a volcano that isn't in the other two. Following a series of
earthquake shocks in 1538 the earth opened and out popped hot
stones and ashes and built themselves into a small volcano right
before everybody; for it was all done in a short time, and you may
be sure the frightened people kept their eyes on it, and they named
it Monte Nuovo, which is Italian for "New Mountain."
]
"And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together
into one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so."
According to the planetessimal theory the way in which the seas were
made was this:
Owing to the collision--the "bang"--of the planetessimals against the
earth, and against each other as they met at the "terminal station,"
heat was generated. The compression, the squeezing together, of the
earth from its own weight--the gravity pull of the whole mass toward
the centre--generated still more heat, and the heat and pressure drove
the gases out of the rock. These gases included hydrogen and oxygen.
These two gases cooling and combining themselves, in a way they have,
became water, and there were other gases, such as nitrogen and carbon
gas, that helped to make the air.
WHEN THE SEAS WERE ALL IN THE SKY
At first the water was in the form of dense clouds of overhanging vapor
which, growing bigger and bigger, finally fell in rain. The heat, made
by the pressure of the outside of the earth toward the centre as the
earth kept growing, caused volcanic explosions. But there were far
more volcanoes in those early days when the earth was settling down,
and being "settled up," as it were, by these energetic pioneers in the
fields of space--the planetessimals--and the surface became pitted
with craters. In these great catch basins the rain was stored, and,
as for ages the rain kept falling faster than the vapor rose from the
earth, many of these bodies of water united, and so formed the lakes,
the river systems, the oceans, and the seas.
THE FOUR GREAT FEATURES OF THE BIBLE STORY
All of which, while it differs so much from the theory of Laplace, does
not affect the Bible outline of the origin of the earth. For these four
great things must still have been: (1) an earth without form, and void;
(2) a great deep; (3) upon its face darkness from the continuing masses
of black rain-laden clouds which overhung it and shut out the sun; (4)
the final dividing up of supply between the vapor of the clouds ("the
waters above the earth") and "the waters upon the earth," so that at
last the dark cloud curtain disappeared, and the sun began to rule the
day. "Let there be light."
* * * * *
But good-by to Phaeton and the story of an original glowing ball which
cooled off on the outside. If the earth grew bit by bit instead of
being whirled off in one fiery mass by the sun it was never any hotter
than it is now, if as hot. It grew hot by being pressed together by its
own weight, and by the blows of additional little worlds as they fell
upon it.
But on one thing everybody agrees, that the rocks, as you go toward the
earth's centre, have been and still are in a molten state; that this
rock, when it cools, becomes granite, all full of little crystals like
a lump of sugar, and that the Granites are one of the F. F. E.'s.[4]
[Footnote 4: First Families on Earth.]
I, as you see, am a Granite. So, besides going through fire and
water--yes, and ice, as you will learn--and having many strange and
wearing adventures both by land and sea--I'm "awfully" old. Older than
you think. I looked it up in the family record called the "Geological
Column"--just the other day. That column gives my age as "80+." This
means I'm 80,000,000 years old, going on 81! (The _plus_ sign, in
geology language, means "going on"; or, "and then some," as a certain
slangful high school freshman puts it.)
But I don't think I _show_ my age. Do you?
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
Who wants to sit and be talked to all the time? When boys and girls
are playing games, the greatest pleasure is in taking part, and
it's the same way in the Wonderland of Books. Books mean most to
those who "get into the game"; who help chase after the answers to
things. This hunting for answers up and down among the books is one
of the interesting games we're going to play; and those of you who
don't come in will miss a lot of fun. That's all _I've_ got to say!
Let's begin like this:
* * * * *
In the Greek myth stories what else was Mr. Apollo supposed to do
for the world and its people besides turning on the light?[5]
[Footnote 5: Answers to all these questions at the ends of chapters
will be found in books you can easily get hold of--encyclopædias,
dictionaries, and school-books; or books usually found in home, school,
or public libraries. Words in parenthesis or italics indicate the
headings where the information referred to will be found.]
Why doesn't the force of the earth, whirling along as it does at 19
miles a second, cause the wind to blow us all away? (_Earth._)
What is the difference between a planet and a sun?
How does the earth compare in size with its brother planets of the
sun family?
How often would Christmas come around if we lived on the moon?
What causes different phases of the moon?
Why may we be said to have eclipses of the moon every month?
"Moon" and "month" sound a good deal alike when you come to think
of it. Don't you wonder why? "Moon" comes from a word meaning "to
measure." You'll find the rest of the word-story of the moon in any
dictionary that is big enough to tell about the origin of words.
By the way--speaking of the timekeepers in the sky--don't forget
to look up the lives of the great astronomers mentioned in this
chapter. You will find, among other things, how Galileo, when only
eighteen years of age, helped to give us our clocks and watches by
counting his pulse-beats while watching a hanging lamp swing back
and forth in the Cathedral of Pisa; how he found out who "The Man
in the Moon" really is and what the "Milky Way" is made of; how he
invented the wonderful glass for playing hide and seek among the
worlds, and with it found four moons in one night!
Yes, and how do you suppose he found that the sun is going round
and round like a top, just as the earth does? It was the _simplest_
thing! You'll see!
Old Father Science may be said to be a Santa Claus who keeps a
curiosity-shop. His pack is not only full of curious things but he
is always "springing surprises on us," as our High School Boy puts
it. For example, one of the most curious as well as picturesque
evidences that great stretches of land sink under the sea from
time to time is furnished by the English swallows. Like many other
wealthy people, they spend their winters in Algiers, and they find
their way over the Mediterranean, not by any lands they can see
between coast and coast--for there _are_ none--but by lands that
_used_ to be there, thousands upon thousands of years ago.
But how do the swallows know? They don't. Is it instinct? No.
(Whatever instinct is!) Then why do they do it? Look it up and
you'll see.[6] Yes, and you'll see that we have habits that _we_
get in the same way; our habits of bowing, for example, because
it's the custom, although few people know how it originated.
[Footnote 6: "Colin Clout's Calendar," by Grant Allen.]
CHAPTER II
(FEBRUARY)
Up rose the wild old Winter King
And shook his beard of snow;
"I hear the first young harebell ring,
'Tis time for me to go!
Northward o'er the icy rocks,
Northward o'er the Sea."
--_Leland._
THE WINTER THAT LASTED ALL SUMMER
It's been just one thing after another with the world and me ever since
we were born. First it was the fire, then it was the flood, and then it
was the winter that lasted all summer.
Just what started it nobody knows to this day. Some of the theories
have been that this particular winter stayed so long because the earth
wavered on its axis, or that it flew the track for a while and got too
far away from the sun. From our present knowledge of the machinery of
the heavens it is certain that the earth's motions could not vary to
this extent. One theory that appeals to many scientists to-day is that
when so much of the carbon in the air went into the making of our coal
beds the earth became unusually cold, and so snows of each successive
winter kept piling up instead of melting away during the spring and
summer. When there is plenty of this gas in the air the earth's heat
does not escape so fast. But with the great amount of carbon taken up
in the growth of the vast forests that were made into coal, Mother
Earth's air blanket grew thinner, so to speak, hence the long, cold
spell.
[Illustration:
_From Norton's "Elements of Geology." By permission of Ginn and
Company_
WHEN THE ICE SHEETS COVERED THE LAND]
But whatever caused it one thing is certain; it was a winter that beat
anything the oldest inhabitant ever saw; for the cave men are known to
have been on earth during this great winter, which is known as the Ice
Age or the Glacial Period. A great big ice cap reached from the North
Pole far down into the Temperate Zone in North America, Europe, and
Asia.
[Illustration: FROM THE CAVEMAN'S DIARY
This is a little note on the Ice Age from the caveman's diary--the
picture of a mammoth scratched with a flint on a mammoth's tusk.
You can see how the artist kept trying for the true form with
different lines, as all real artists do. Artists don't just have a
kind of sign that stands for the thing--like a little boy's picture
of a man that he always makes in just one way. Notice the action,
the natural motion of the animal. The artist means to say: "This is
the way he came at me."
]
I. The Mild Spell and the Menageries
Just before this dreadful winter set in we had a long, open spell;
about a million years or so. It was just like summer most of the year
in the temperate zone, and much warmer than it is to-day in what is now
the land of the little frosty Eskimo.
There weren't any little Eskimos in those days. In fact, there wasn't
much of anything that was little. Everything was on a big scale. Think
of a mud-turtle twelve feet long! He was all of that. His skull alone
was a yard long and he must have weighed a couple of tons. He had for
neighbors in the bordering swamps a number of huge creatures that one
wouldn't care to meet.
[Illustration: THE KING OF THE DINOSAURS AT LUNCHEON
Contrast the little, almost dainty, fore limbs with the enormous
legs. You can't help thinking of the arms of a human being, can
you? In fact, this mixed-up creature looks as if nature were even
then dreaming of man, the quadruped who, as some Frenchman said,
"took to walking on his hind legs that he might conquer the world."
]
DREADFULNESS OF MR. DINOSAUR
The Dinosaur, for instance. His name means "terrible reptile." Some
members of the family were, indeed, terrible creatures. Just see
this one at lunch, Mr. Ceratosaurus. He has the head of a queer
horse--"probably a night mare," says the High School Boy--teeth
and tail and belly scales like a crocodile, a comb that suggests a
rooster's, legs like an ostrich, the talons of an eagle, and the dainty
little arms of a child. What a combination! Those small fore limbs were
used only for grasping. On his hind legs he stalked about, seeking
whom he might eat for dinner. He was about fifty feet long when he was
all there. At this late day scientists usually find only parts of him
scattered around.
These Dinosaurs came in sizes and differed considerably as to looks and
eating and getting about. Some were as small as cats, some walked on
four legs, some--like the gentleman at lunch--walked on two. Some were
strict vegetarians, while others would have nothing but meat. The Big
Boys of the whole tribe were called the Sauropoda or reptile-footed
Dinosaurs. One of these, whose bones were found in Colorado, was
sixty-five feet long when complete, and he must have weighed around
twenty tons. His family nickname was Diplodocus or "Double Beam,"
because of his long, beam-like neck and his long, beam-like tail.
GENTLE MR. DIPLODOCUS AND HIS WAYS
Considering the reputation some of the other Dinosaurs had as bad
citizens, it is only fair to the Diplodocus to say that he was really a
gentle creature, and never disturbed anybody--unless somebody disturbed
him first. Then he would give them a switch with that tail of his,
and it was a switching they were not likely to forget. But his great
delight--indeed, his main occupation in life--was to sit deep in the
water, prop himself up with his great long tail, like a kangaroo, with
just his head out, like a turtle in a pond. Then he would strain little
water bugs and similar things through his teeth. He got his meals in
this way, very much as the whales do now.
And elephants! You ought to have seen some of the members of the
elephant family that arrived after the reptile age, the mammoths, for
instance. These huge creatures and many other strange animals were all
over the place. It was just like a circus day everywhere all the time.
Such elephants don't travel with circuses now, of course, because they
were all killed during that dreadful winter, but you can see them in
museums, all dressed in their skeletons and neatly held together with
wires.
[Illustration:
_From the mural painting by Charles R. Knight in the American
Museum of Natural History_
WHEN ELEPHANTS WORE UNDERCLOTHES
This painting on the walls of the American Museum of Natural
History in New York City shows herds of reindeer and mammoths in
the Ice Age. They didn't mind the cold as elephants do to-day,
because of their woolly underclothes. They fed on the shoots and
cones of those firs and pines. The reindeer, then as now, ate the
lichens we call "reindeer moss," first scraping away the snow with
their feet.
]
HOW THE MAMMOTHS PASSED AWAY
Picture herds of these mammoths huddled together like sheep in dark
ravines, and the blinding snow, swept down by the winds, burying them
deeper and deeper. That was how they died. You'll notice that they
wore their hair long, while the elephants we see in the circuses or at
the zoo have hardly any hair at all. This long hair was part of their
winter clothing. Under it they wore a close fleece. But this winter was
so severe and it lasted so long that even their heavy woollen underwear
couldn't save them. Sometimes there would be a thaw, but this was only
on the surface and helped turn the snow into ice. And winter piled on
winter and on the bodies of the mammoths until they were buried under
tons and tons of snow and ice.
HOW THE SNOW CHANGED ITSELF INTO ICE
You know snow will get solid, like ice, where it is under pressure, and
it will make hard cakes and ice balls under your shoes. Well, this snow
of the long winter just "packed its own self" (as a small boy might
say) into ice. It did this by piling on and piling on. The weight of
the snow above and behind, in the spaces between the mountains and in
the mountain valleys, pressed with enormous force on the snow below and
in front.
Then what do you think this ice did? It began to move. And of all the
things it did from then on!
II. Marvellous Changes in the Old Home Place
Did you notice those scratches on my face? The ice did that. But,
of course, that's nothing in itself. And, besides, I'm not one to
complain, as you know. I only speak of it to show what big things may
be back of little ones, how much you can learn from the study of so
common a thing as a little pebble. For the very same ice fields that
scratched the faces of little pebbles like me deepened the gorges and
canyons among the mountains and shaved the crowns of the old ones--Bald
Mountain, in the Adirondacks, for example. They carried off good
farming soil by the thousands of acres from one place and piled it in
another; they shoved the Mississippi River back and forth; in fact,
turned many streams out of their courses--some of them the other end
to, so that they now flow south where they used to flow north. They
took old river systems apart, and with the pieces made new ones--the
big Missouri for one. They set Niagara Falls up in business; got all
the waterfalls ready that are now turning the wheels of New England
factories, and even put in great water storage systems that remind one
of the Salt River irrigation works, with their big Roosevelt dam in
Arizona, or of the reservoirs which England built in the Nile. Lakes
in river systems act as reservoirs, you know, and make them flow more
evenly, thus keeping the power of falls more uniform, as in the case
of Niagara, and making a uniform depth of water for vessels, as in the
case of the St. Lawrence River. The Great Lakes do both of these useful
things.
[Illustration: _From Norton's "Elements of Geology." By permission of
Ginn and Company_
THE LITTLE MOUNTAIN IN THE BIG CITY
In one of the parks in New York City you can see this illustration of
how the glaciers rounded off the mountain-tops.]
[Illustration: THE BEEHIVE MOUNTAIN
This huge mass in the Canadian Rockies is known as the Beehive
Mountain. Originally a cliff, it was reshaped by the glaciers. Can't
you tell from the picture which was the face of the cliff, and from the
information in the text which side the glacier climbed up and on which
side it tobogganed down?]
There were three great centres--union stations, we might call
them--from which the ice trains moved out. These were the points at
which the ice gathered to the greatest depth, the tops of the great
snow banks. One, as you see by our Ice Age map, was away over on the
Pacific Coast of Canada. It is called the Cordilleran Centre, from
the vast mountain system of which it is a part. Over what is now the
province of Keewatin, Canada, was the Keewatin Centre, while the
Labrador Centre stood guard over the highlands of Labrador. The ice
from the Keewatin and Labrador fields, you notice, flowed farthest to
the south. The Keewatin ice giant travelled away down the Mississippi
Valley as far as the mouth of what is now the Missouri, while the
giant from Labrador got nearly to the mouth of the Ohio.
[Illustration: THE OLD MEN OF THE MOUNTAIN AT THEIR WORK
Don't you always think of a glacier as a big white thing? So it is
when it starts to work, but after it has ploughed down the mountain
valleys and gathered up a lot of soil--such as the heaps you see in the
foreground of the picture--it begins to look as black as a coal-heaver!
It gets cracked up into all sorts of odd shapes, too. Doesn't that
figure near the centre look like some queer kind of old elephant, with
a fierce white eye (it's a big stone) and a snarl on his face?]
The reason Old Mr. Labrador didn't reach the mouth of the Ohio--as
you can easily guess--was that he didn't go far enough, but could you
answer a conundrum like this:
"Why was Mr. Keewatin bound to reach the mouth of the Missouri and stay
there for awhile no matter how far he went?"
The answer is easy, when you know it. Because he made the Missouri
himself. What we now know as the Missouri River was made of other
rivers that the big ice sheet turned around as it advanced and of the
water from the ice as the glacier melted its way back home. It was
something like Mary and the little lamb, all the time, so long as Mr.
Keewatin travelled south; for everywhere he went the Missouri was
_sure_ to go, because he kept pushing it ahead of him.
HOW THE OLD MEN PUSHED THE MISSISSIPPI ABOUT
As the ice sheets pushed into its valleys, now from the northeast and
now from the northwest, the Mississippi River was pushed back and forth
as if it were a--well, as if it weren't anything! It is known that the
Mississippi was pushed out of bed by this burly guest from the north
because its former channels have been traced along the old ice fronts.
In one part of its course the Mississippi actually got misplaced, and
hasn't found its way back to its old bed to this day. This you can
see at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. At that point the Minnesota River
flows in the Mississippi's old valley--which is plainly too big for
it--while above Fort Snelling the Mississippi is forced to squeeze its
way through a stingy little gorge that used to belong to the Minnesota,
and I'm sure would be plenty big enough for it now. It's like the story
of a changeling baby in a fairy tale, isn't it? Only in the fairy tale
the changeling always gets back to his old home, while the misplaced
Mississippi in Minnesota doesn't.
But the glaciers made it up to the Mississippi, in a way, for this rude
jostling. They not only left it an enormous extra supply of water as
they melted back home--what would a river be without water?--but they
actually took some smaller rivers away from the St. Lawrence and made
them do their pouring into the Mississippi system. Although they didn't
owe the Ohio any apology for anything, so far as I know, they did the
same thing for it, just to be good fellows, I suppose. All the rivers
that now empty into the Ohio above Cincinnati used to flow into Lake
Erie, but the glaciers turned them south and they've gone on obediently
flowing that way ever since.
A PLOWMAN WHO PLOWED THE FARMS AWAY
That these giants of the north, although they must have looked as cold
as ice, really had good hearts is shown by the way Old Mr. Labrador
treated New England when he went Down East. New England was at that
time covered with good, deep, rich soil, the decay of the granite rocks
that had been basking in the sun for ages and growing early grass and
vegetables for the live stock of those days. Then along came Old Mr.
Labrador with his plow, and set to work. But he plowed so deep that he
plowed all the farms away! Of the gigantic furrows that he turned a
lot of the slices fell over into New York State; but some, I'm sorry
to say, dropped off into the sea. This left New England in a bad way,
so far as prizes for farm produce at the country fairs a few thousand
years later were concerned.
But then what do you suppose Mr. Labrador did, the good old soul? He
took a lot of streams that had been flowing north, blocked them up
with pebbles and dirt, making them turn right around and flow south,
so that in climbing down from the rocks in these new unworn beds they
made waterfalls. And it was from the power made by its waterfalls, you
know, as your geography tells you, that New England grew to be a great
"manu-factur-ing" section.
[Illustration: _Courtesy of "The Scientific American."_
HOW THE OLD MEN OF THE MOUNTAIN COME TO SCHOOL
You can have glaciers like this right in the schoolroom, and icebergs,
too, by means of which the Old Men of the Mountain went to sea. Both
the iceberg and its parent, the glacier, are made by the crumpling of
white paper around books or any other support. Cliffs of dark-brown
grocery-paper bound the deep gully through which the glacier has
crept down to the sea. The sea-waves are made with crumpled paper of
appropriate colors. (Think what lovely green waves you could make
with a piece of old window-shade!) Pieces of white string make good
breakers, and powdered chalk can easily be made to turn to snow.]
Of course I'm only joking when I speak of these glaciers as if they
had minds like the rest of us, but really it almost seems true, when
you come to think of all the things they did. Take these New England
waterfalls, for instance. The glacier not only made them by turning
the rivers around, but, as the ice melted away toward the north the
land rose again, being relieved of the enormous weight. And in rising
the sloping land not only gave more force to the new southward flowing
streams but made it more sure that they should _go on_ flowing south.
As if the glaciers said:
[Illustration: THE GRAY TEMPLE OF THE WINDS
This gray mass of sandstone on the Wisconsin prairies is a piece of
architecture with which man has had nothing whatever to do. It is
all the work of the winds and the rains; of the sea and of rivers;
of water and rivers of ice; and the vertical division of the rock
into joints by the shrinking of the earth. The detail, the rounding
of the pillars, and so on, is largely the work of the winds and
their helpers, the frosts, the rains, and the wind-blown sand.
The original mass was carved out of a big rock-bed by flowing
rivers that had their course around it on either side. Then one
of these rivers was dammed by ice in the days of the glaciers and
a lake was formed in which this rock mass stood as an island.
The level prairie you now see around it was made by the sand and
gravel deposited in the bottom of this lake. The vertical divisions
are cracks in the earth crust called "joints." The horizontal
divisions are due in part to this cracking process and in part to
"stratification," the layer-like arrangement of the rocks when laid
in the bottom of the sea, as explained in Chapter X. The "cornice"
is a layer of harder rock which has yielded less to nature's tools.
]
"I've turned you around and I want you to stay turned around. And I
want you to go on running south and dropping over the falls until the
people of New England come down to Lowell and Manchester and those
places and get ready to put you to work."
Anyhow, that's just what happened. You can look at it any way you want
to.
It was in much the same way that Mr. Labrador and his friend Keewatin
did that great piece of engineering at the Great Lakes. Where the
Great Lakes are now there used to be rivers that were a part of the
St. Lawrence system. Then along came the ice sheets, dammed up these
rivers, just as small boys dam up roadside rivulets after a rain, and
so made big lakes, as the boys make little lakes in these streamlets.
But this wasn't all. The glaciers evidently wanted these to be nice
big lakes that would stay there for people to ride on in the beautiful
summer weather, and to help haul coal and iron ore and other kinds of
freight--Michigan peaches and everything. For look what else they did.
With pebbles and big stones and dirt they built the lake walls higher,
and dug deep basins for them out of the solid rock. Then they poured in
a lot of extra water--beautiful blue water, tons and tons of it--and
went back home.
The digging into the rock was done with big chisels--what a carpenter
would call "round-nosed" chisels. These chisels, of course, were made
of ice. They were what are called the "tongues" or "lobes" of glaciers.
As a glacier flows along--always on some down grade--there are portions
of it--those long lobes or tongues--that move on ahead of the main
mass. This is because those parts of the ice sheet strike a steeper
bit of land than the rest of it, so how could they help moving faster?
[Illustration: THE THOUSAND-YEAR CLOCK AT NIAGARA
You've heard of eight-day clocks and clocks that have to be wound
only once a year, but here is a clock that was wound up several
thousand years ago and is still going beautifully! In placing the
wondrous waterfall in Niagara River the glaciers also started a
kind of water-clock by which to record--for those who would take
the trouble to study it out--how long ago it was the glaciers
visited us. Owing to the constant wearing away of the base of the
falls, by the water grinding the pebbles against it, great blocks
like the one here shown (known as "The Rock of Ages") come tumbling
down. So the falls are constantly retreating up-stream, and the
distance from where they once stood to where they are now gives a
rough idea of the time that has passed since the Old Men of the
Mountain set them up in business--about 25,000 years.
]
The fronts of these lobes are rounded like the waves flowing up a
beach, or syrup travelling over pancakes on a cold winter morning. The
reason of this roundness is that the centres of these lobes of ice or
water travel fastest because the mass on either side furnishes a kind
of ball-bearing for the central part.
But this wasn't all. At the very same time, by the very same act,
Labrador, Keewatin & Co. set Niagara Falls up in business. In those
days there was a Niagara river but no Niagara Falls; at least not the
one we know to-day. The ice filled the Ontario Valley so that the
streams flowing into it had to turn around and flow south. The Niagara
River was one of these streams. Then, as the ice melted, it poured
loads of extra water into Lake Erie, so that it was some 30 feet higher
than it is at present and began draining out through the new Niagara
River, over the rocks that make the falls.
[Illustration: A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF NIAGARA
This is a bird's-eye view of the Niagara region. Where the river
crosses a bed of limestone below Buffalo, and again where it
crosses another just above the crest of the falls, some of the rock
has been dissolved away, thus making it rougher, so that slight
rapids have formed. Then comes the mighty plunge, after which
the water flows through a gorge for about seven miles. Where the
gorge bends abruptly at right angles is the great eddy called "The
Whirlpool."
]
NATURE IS THE ART OF GOD
"Nature," as Sir Thomas Browne so finely said, "is the art of God."
And nowhere is this art more striking in its beauty than in the work
done by the glaciers. Those wonderful falls and the blue inland seas
we call the Great Lakes, and thousands of smaller lakes scattered all
over where the glaciers came, are only a part of this art work. The
main ice sheets, you notice, didn't reach down among the mountains
of California, but these mountains had small glaciers of their own
in those days, just as they have now. Only they were much larger
then because, as we have seen, it was such a snowy time all over the
northern world. Listen to what these home-made glaciers of California
did, and listen to how John Muir tells it:
[Illustration: AND TO THINK WE DID IT ALL!]
"It is hard," he says, "without long and loving study, to realize how
great was the work done. Before the glaciers came, the range"--he is
speaking of the Sierras--"was comparatively simple; one vast wave of
stone in which a thousand mountains, domes, canyons, ridges, and so
forth lay concealed." To carve them out of the stone "nature chose
for a tool, not the earthquake or the lightning, but the tender
snow flowers, noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries.
The snowflakes said, 'Come, we are feeble; let us help one another.
Marching in close, deep ranks let us roll away the stones from these
mountain sepulchres, and set the landscape free.'"
It is evident that this was all in the Great Plan of things. For the
rocks had to be of a certain kind and laid in a certain way for the
little members of this art society of the sky to work these landscapes
out. And the rocks were so made and laid when they were at least a mile
below the surface on which the glaciers set to work.
"It was while these features were taking form in the depths of the
range, the particles of the rocks marching to their appointed places
in the dark, that the particles of icy vapor in the sky, marching to
the same music, assembled to bring them to the light. Then, after their
grand task was done, these bands of snow flowers, the mighty glaciers,
were melted and removed, as if of no more importance than dew destined
to last but an hour."[7]
[Footnote 7: "The Mountains of California." John Muir.]
[Illustration]
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
How do you suppose warm water--of all things!--could have caused
the Ice Age? This theory is one that was offered by a very eminent
geologist, Doctor Shaler, of Harvard.[8]
[Footnote 8: "Nature and Man in America."]
In the same book he also explains how the old men of the mountain
may have helped to make New York City, although they were never
there in their lives, of course.
When you take up geology as a special study--I hope you will--you
will find that there were five particularly heavy snowfalls during
the long winter. But why not look it up now? If you can't do it
just get somebody else in the family to do it for you. Where is
father's college geology? In the last two of these storms Mr.
Labrador rode all over New England and clear to the sea, where he
amused himself for a long time by setting icebergs drifting out
over the Atlantic.
How do they know about the icebergs? That's one of the interesting
things the books tell.
These books also show how Niagara Falls acts as a great time-clock
that tells how long ago it was since the glaciers visited us.
According to the record on the "dial" it was somewhere between
20,000 and 30,000 years ago. (Of course this isn't what _we_ would
call very close timekeeping; but remember, in the long story of the
earth even a hundred thousand years is a mere tick of the clock.)
And the way this clock is running down shows we're going to lose
Niagara Falls in the course of time. All falls finally run down in
the same way. This is the rather flippant way my high school friend
put it:
"First, the water falls over the waterfall; then the waterfall
falls, piece by piece, and the water falls no more. It's a sad
case."
(You'll see what he meant, quickly enough, when you read up on
waterfalls. Your geography tells, doesn't it? Well, then, of course
_you_ know.)
But here's a question you can answer right out of this chapter.
Which one of the illustrations shows that the mammoths and the cave
men lived on earth at the same time?
That the mammoth was seen in the flesh by those remarkable artists
of the caves is plain, but what do you say to seeing a mammoth in
the flesh in these days? Remember the mammoths have all been dead
for thousands of years. (_Elephant_, _Mammoth_, _Siberia_.)
What is there about the climate of Siberia that made this strange
thing possible?
How did the mammoth get his name? Was it because he was so
big--such a "mammoth" creature?[9]
[Footnote 9: Mammoth, you will find, comes from a word meaning "earth."
It didn't mean "big" at all at first. One of the most lovable traits
of a good dictionary, I think, is that it tells so many interesting
little stories like that about the early life of words; of their days
of adventure, so to speak, when there was no telling _how_ they would
come out.]
How did the mammoths compare in size with the elephants of to-day?
Which was the bigger, the mastodon or the mammoth?
Did we ever have mastodons in North America? And were there
mammoths, too?
If you want to see more about what the travelling menageries
of the days before the Ice Age looked like hunt up these
words: _Archelon_, _dinosaur_, _ceratosaurus_, _diplodocus_,
_stegosaurus_, _triceratops_.
See what the geography says about the manufacturing towns of New
England and how many of them have water power.
In that remarkable little book by Grant Allen[10] already referred
to in the H. & S. at the end of Chapter I, on page 139, you will
find what the Ice Age had to do with the fact that the rabbits of
Canada and our northern border States wear white clothes in winter,
while Br'er Rabbit of our Middle and Southern States keeps his
yellow-brown suit on all the year.
[Footnote 10: "Colin Clout's Calendar."]
And on page 204 how a little plant, whose old home was in the
Arctics, got stranded on an English hilltop among the mossy clefts
of weathered granite, and how the beautiful lady who has a little
flower named after her slipper (we all know that slipper) is
leaving England because the climate is too mild!
[Illustration: THE SUMMER PASTURES ON THE JUNGFRAU
Here are some of those Swiss cattle in their summer pastures.
Doesn't look much like summer, does it? But there's one thing
besides the cattle that tells. See that stretch of snow all by
itself? That's a snow-bank which has escaped the summer sun because
it is protected by the ravine in which it lies. All around it the
ground is bare of snow.
]
CHAPTER III
(MARCH)
With rushing winds and gloomy skies
The dark and stubborn Winter dies;
Far off, unseen, Spring faintly cries,
Bidding her earliest child arise.
--_Bayard Taylor._
THE SOUL OF THE SPRING AND THE LANDS OF ETERNAL SNOW
And that's how the Old Men of the Mountain visited us in the Ice Age
and what they did and how they did it. But now that they have all
been back home so long don't you think it would be nice and polite
to return the call--especially when you remember all they did for us,
making beautiful lakes and rivers and waterfalls and mountain scenery?
I. Springtime in the Alps
The best time to do this would be in the spring, because then the
kingdom of the glaciers is most beautiful, and the spirit of a
glorious new world, just waking up, is abroad everywhere. The glaciers
themselves seem to feel so good about it that they start to sing. And
like the birds, their joyous springtime mood responds to the quick
changes of sun and shade. In our own land when the sky grows cloudy,
even for a short time as you may have noticed, birds stop singing.
Then when the sky clears they start up again. But, up here in the Alps
in the spring when the birds are singing among the mountain meadows,
the glaciers, at whose feet these meadows lie, do the very same thing.
The songs of the birds are various, and the song of the same bird will
differ at different times of day, but the song of the glacier is always
the same--a pleasant dreamy tune between the murmur of little voices
and the tinkle of distant bells.
The very rocks that the glacier carries on its back seem to catch the
spirit of the springtime; for, when the weather is bright, they go
strolling. And when they do they remind us a little of that painting
by Franz Hals, "The Laughing Cavalier," for they apparently wear a big
broad-brimmed hat cocked jauntily on one side.
[Illustration: UP WHERE THE GLACIERS GROW
Here we are, looking down on the roof of the Alps--from a
flying-machine, let us say. The sky-line used to be more like the
ridge of a house, straight across. In the course of the ages the
glaciers and the weather have cut down the softer rock, leaving
those peaks. At the top are the snow-fields. Farther down the
glaciers begin to form. Still farther down, where the glaciers have
begun to melt, you can see a stream--its waters have taken white in
the picture because of the foam and the ground-up rock in it called
"rock flour"--falling into the woods below, the "timber line"
of your geography. Ruskin has a wonderful word-picture of these
mountain streams in his "Modern Painters." The index of any edition
will tell you where.
]
THE MAN WHO DISCOVERED THE ICE AGE
The Alps are the most famous of all the homes of the glaciers, not
only because of the great number of the glaciers and the beauty of
the scenery, but because it was in the Alps that Agassiz, living in a
little stone hut among the mountains, studied the glaciers and their
ways and proved that it was these strange creatures of snow and ice
that had come down during the Ice Age and worked such marvellous
changes on the face of the earth. In the Alps, just as Muir found them
doing among the glaciers of Alaska, the flowers bloom at the very edge
of the snow line. And they come on much more rapidly than they do in
temperate climates. As fast as the snow melts back blossoms just cover
the meadows thick with the deepest, richest colors--blue, red, white,
yellow, purple, and every shade of these. Some of these flowers are
as pure white as the snows. The queen of beauty among them all, many
think, is the Alpine rose. In that pure, clear air its color seems
actually to glow like the famous peak, the Jungfrau, at sunrise.
[Illustration: LOUIS AGASSIZ
The great teacher who discovered the Ice Age.]
One little flower is in such a hurry, so afraid it will miss the first
May party, that it blooms under the ice and melts its own way right up
through. Then it calls to the bees and the butterflies, in the way that
flowers have:
"Good morning! It's spring, and here I am again and how do you do? Come
and kiss me!"
The soldanella grows among the thick pebble beds and the big boulders
right on the edges of the glaciers. It is a member of the primrose
family. It may be pink, white, or blue. The blue flowers are most
common. But blue, pink, or white, these baby bells are always born
twins; two sisters side by side on the same stalk, showing their dear
fairy faces just above those layers of ice. They are such delicate
little things you wonder how they can ever stand it. But ice, pshaw,
they don't mind it at all.
BLUSHING A WAY THROUGH THE ICE
If you are a bashful boy or girl you can understand how the Misses
Soldanella have been able, in spite of their icy covering, to get here
to greet us on this lovely May morning. You know how warm your face
feels when you blush. It seems to be somewhat the same way with all
flowers when they blush into bloom. The blossom becomes quite a little
warmer than any other part of the plant. It is the heat of the growing
buds and, still more, the heat of the blossoms that melts a passage for
the Soldanellas through the ice, for they often blossom before they get
above the ice at all.
The higher we climb the brighter the flowers, and they grow in thicker
masses, and each kind spreads out into larger fields than they did
where we came from down below--great belts of blue gentians, whole
fields of golden yellow globe flowers. You'd hardly expect this, would
you? And you'll be still more surprised at the reason. Did you notice,
as shown in their pictures, that the Soldanellas have only the bees for
their callers? Just look if you can see any bees where we are now. Not
a bee. But butterflies everywhere. And that's the answer. The flowers
of the upper meadows are brighter, grow thicker and spread wider--all
on account of the butterflies; to get the butterfly "trade."
WHY THE BEES GET OUT OF BREATH
Bees can't climb to such heights because the air is very thin, and,
therefore, harder to fly in. Remember their little bodies are heavy
and their wings are small. They get out of breath, like a fat man with
short legs working his way up Pike's Peak. The butterflies, on the
other hand, have small bodies and large wings, and so have the meadows
of the higher Alps all to themselves. That the flowers here look so
brilliant is partly due to the thinness and clearness of the air and
partly to the disposition of the butterflies. A bee is all business,
because she has so many mouths to feed at home, and is laying up honey
for the days of the long winter. Mr. and Mrs. Butterfly, on the other
hand, are gay and carefree society people.
"We have no family waiting to be fed, so why worry?" This is the
butterfly philosophy. Only a sip of nectar now and then for their
personal wants; for the rest of the day the merry air dance, here,
there, everywhere! They flit long distances without lighting. To
attract the bee's attention a blossom need be neither large nor bright,
as the bee goes straight from flower to flower, wasting no time in
aimless flights. But to catch the eye of the butterfly the flowers
must be brilliantly colored and grow in large masses. So up in the
butterfly zone only brilliant flowers, and those having the habit of
growing in groups produce seed and have descendants. Those that dress
plainly and are not fond of company die out.
[Illustration: HOW THE SOLDANELLA SISTERS GOT TO THE MAY-PARTY THROUGH
THE SNOW]
Now didn't it turn out just as I said; that the butterflies themselves
help brighten the flowers that grow among these ice fields? I have
something else quite as curious to tell you: _Both the Alpine
butterflies and the flowers were left over from the Ice Age._ Not in
the same sense that we pebbles were, for we are the identical little
passengers who rode in on the ice trains, and the life of a butterfly,
as every one knows, is very short. So is that of a flower. Yet suppose
you found that the only other butterflies and flowers like these are
found, not among the flowers and butterflies in the lands lower down
in the Alps but up toward the Arctic Zone, in Finland and Lapland; in
the snow regions of mountains in the temperate zone all over the world?
It would look very much as if these flowers and butterflies, or their
ancestors, had been left behind there some time or other, wouldn't it?
This is what the men of science think, and they reason about it in this
way:
HOW THE BUTTERFLIES MISSED THE TRAIN
As the glaciers spread downward from the Far North in the Ice Age they
brought all their home things with them--climate, plants, insects,
animals. Plant and animal life was driven step by step before the
advancing ice. Then, as the ice melted, flowers, butterflies, and all
followed their natural climate back. But those that lingered too long
in the meadows around the mountain tops could not cross the hot summer
plains that now lay between them and the retiring ice sheet; for plants
and animals that are used to cold can't stand the heat any more than
those from the tropics can stand the cold. So only the flowers and
butterflies remained in the temperate zone that found their natural
climate among the mountain peaks and stayed there.
Near the top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in New Hampshire, is
a colony of the descendants of these butterfly pilgrims from the north
who never leave their high and wind swept meadows. There are no such
butterflies in the hills and plains below, but go into Labrador and you
will see plenty of them.
LEFT-OVER PIECES OF THE ICE AGE
Of course you understood all along that these aren't the very same
butterflies that came with the glaciers, yet in shady glens in high
mountains, where the snow never melts, people do sometimes find masses
of ice, which, there is every reason to believe, have been there since
the Ice Age. And sometimes thick veins of ice, buried hundreds of feet
under pebbles, boulders and soil, are struck in sinking wells. These
are known as ice wells; huge ice water tanks that never need filling!
II. A Little Visit with the Glaciers
But if the ice masses in the shady glens and under the old moraines
may be said to be pieces of the Ice Age left over, the glaciers of
to-day are, in a sense, the Ice Age itself. For these glaciers do, on a
smaller scale, what Mr. Labrador and his partners in northern America,
Europe, and Asia did on a large scale so many centuries ago. Suppose
now, like Agassiz, we trace a glacier to its source. It will be a long
journey, all steep, some of it almost straight up, and along chasms of
slippery ice with sudden storms that hide the chasms and blind your
eyes and take away your breath. The first part of our journey is over
a field of ice, gray with the dirt of weathered rock from the mountain
sides. Along its borders are those sharp-edged stones neatly packed in
rows, that our geography tells us are called "lateral moraines." It
has another row of these stones sticking up right in the middle of its
back, like the sharp-pointed vertebræ of the ceratosaurus.
By noon, as often happens in the Alps as elsewhere at this time of
year, a rain comes up and we lunch under the shelter of a tumbled heap
of rocks. Watching the downpour drift across the desolate wastes we
think what jolly times like this Agassiz and his companions had in
their little hall of science under the big stone. After lunch we start
again, and although it's stiff going, and it takes a lot of this thin
air to make one good breath, we spare a little, now and then, for
shouting, to hear the wonderful play of the echoes among the mountains.
We go through all kinds of weather--rain, mist, snow. Then suddenly we
burst into blinding light. The sun is so dazzling on the snow, now no
longer covered with dirt and mountain débris, that we must all put on
our colored glasses. In some places, among bare rocks that absorb the
sun's heat, it is positively sultry.
The fields around us look like an ocean turned to stone. Waves are
formed in the surface ice of the glacier because surface ice moves
faster than the main mass beneath. On the bordering mountain walls the
ice rises into still greater waves "foaming about the feet of the dark
central crests like the surf of enormous breakers." And this great,
still image of the parent sea, from which the air currents carried the
moisture that made it, has eddies and whirlpools, and like the troubled
sea, "whose waters cast up mire and dirt," the glacier, where it swirls
along its shores, works pebbles and dirt to the surface. Often this
material is carried into the centre of a whirl, as sea weeds and the
rubbish of the seashore are driven into eddies among the rocks.
Somebody must have been here just ahead of us. Isn't that a dark glove
over there? We come closer. What at a distance seems to be a glove
proves to be a hole in the ice so deep it looks dark. Lying flat and
carefully peering over the edge we look into something strangely
beautiful--an ice palace, with icicles in fantastic groups hanging
from the roof. Through this roof the sun comes in delicate floods of
pale green light, the combination of the yellow rays with the blue of
the ice. We drop pebbles into the hole. They rattle down and down with
long, dull echoes, dying away. We can hear the murmur of running water.
Gusts of cold air come up that bite like the wind on a sharp winter day.
These underground palaces of art start as great cracks in the ice,
called "crevasses," from a French word meaning a crevice. They can
usually be seen plainly as yawning chasms, but sometimes are so bridged
over by the snows that a small, dark hole is all you see. And we might
not see that in time. This would be very bad, for these snow bridges
are often quite thin. One might like to go down in a crevasse and
explore about in this beautiful dream world--but not when one wasn't
looking!
Even when one _is_ looking and is as careful as can be it's dangerous.
But still you may be sure that the famous men who have studied glaciers
have done it, for every true man of science likes to get at the bottom
of things. It was Agassiz who first went down in this way into the
heart of a glacier. It was while he was making his studies in the Alps,
and he came very near being drowned in one of the streams that always
flow at the bottom of a crevasse, for these crevasses, breaking up the
ice, increase the rate of melting. (You know broken ice will not keep
so well as a big block.)
[Illustration: WHAT TWO BOYS SAW IN THE FAIRYLAND OF ICE
When you have read John Muir's story of how he climbed down into
a crevasse in California in his shirt-sleeves (see H. & S.) you
will know that he was the other of the "two boys" I refer to, one
of them being Louis Agassiz, whose adventure in this fairy iceland
down in the glaciers is told in this chapter. Don't look dangerous
at a distance, do they, those crevasses? Remind one of the crimps
in a Christmas pie. But notice the difference when you get up close
to one of them in the next picture.
]
BUT THESE SCIENTISTS WILL BE BOYS
Agassiz had been lowered by a rope. When his feet suddenly plunged into
the icy stream his shout for help was misunderstood by his friends and
he was lowered still further. His second cry, which you may be sure
promptly followed the first, showed that something had gone wrong
and he was drawn out. The worst of it was that coming up he had to
steer his course among those huge icicles, any one of which, being
worn away or broken loose by the friction of the rope and striking his
head, would probably have killed him. But they are always doing things
like that--these men of science. They keep on being as curious and
enthusiastic about the things they are interested in as any boy.
[Illustration: THOSE LITTLE CURVED LINES WHEN YOU GET UP CLOSE
This is what those little curved lines are--really; great yawning
chasms in the ice. The sun is shining from the left; a morning
sun, probably, as those tourists are out for a walk. This scene
must be pretty well down the glacier's course, far from the upper
fields, for you see these people are just in ordinary dress--not in
the dress of mountain-climbers, with ropes and Alpine stocks and
everything.
]
It is perfectly safe to climb glaciers as we are doing--in a book--but
they are really ticklish things to go about on, as well as down into.
To find out all the interesting things you can so easily get through
pictures and the printed page took years of skillful study, ingenuity,
and endless patience and much courage. What a little further on in
this chapter you will learn about the movements of glaciers in seven
minutes, it took Agassiz seven long years to find out and make sure of.
To Agassiz more than to any other one man the world owes the tremendous
idea of the Ice Age and its story. His home among the glaciers of these
Alps--named playfully by the devoted scholars who worked with him the
"Hôtel des Neuchatelois"--was a rude shelter under a projecting rock.
The results of this long study he published in a work in two volumes,
and so made known the great facts he had found and the theory about an
Ice Age which he based upon them and which is now everywhere accepted.
He became professor of geology at Harvard University and as famous a
teacher as he was a student of nature. After his great and useful life
was ended he was buried in his adopted land with a boulder from the
site of the little stone hut on the glacier for his monument.
III. The Soul of the Glacier
Many of the fellow-countrymen of Agassiz, the peasants of the Swiss
Alps, believe the glacier is a living thing and has a soul. In the
spring the peasants take their sheep and cattle into the high meadows
called "alps," from which the mountains get their name, and remain
there until fall with the glaciers all around them. There are nearly
2,000 glaciers in the Alps, varying from less than a mile to over ten
miles in length, and from a few hundred feet to a mile in breadth. So
the peasants have every opportunity to get acquainted with their big
white neighbors.
"The glacier has a soul," they say, "and a voice, many voices.
Sometimes he groans. This is when he is in pain. Listen!"
SOUNDS THAT GIVE ONE THE "CREEPS"
We do hear a sound very like a groan. Even experienced mountain
climbers can hardly keep down a "creepy" feeling when they hear it.
This sound is made when the ice is cracking into a crevasse and while
it is enlarging. These crevasses are formed by various strains in
the ice as it moves along. So long as the strain which caused them
continues the crevasses keep widening. The "groans" may be said to be
"growing pains."
In some places you hear a constant roaring sound. The peasants are not
superstitious about this sound however. They know it is made by what
they call the "moulins" or mills of the glacier. Water, melting on the
surface, makes streams. These, running together, make a larger stream.
This stream, coming to a crack in the ice where a crevasse is just
beginning, pours down, hollows out a little shaft and joins streams in
the interior of the glacier, like that in which Agassiz took a bath
when he didn't want to. The noise of the water, striking far below,
comes up through the shaft, as a voice comes up through a speaking
tube. But the crack into which the water falls must be very narrow, so
that the water can melt both walls and thus form a shaft; otherwise it
merely glides down the nearer wall and makes no sound.
NOISES WE PEBBLES HELP MAKE
Where two ice rivers emptying into a main stream come together you
hear a constant dull rattle and rumble. This is made by the blocks of
stone and trains of pebbles that have ridden in on the backs of the two
glaciers thus going into partnership, falling between the glaciers at
the point where they come together. The stones that do not fall over
are brought together in the centre of the glacier and so make that
spiny backbone of his, the "medial moraine." The rows of stones on the
two sides of the glacier, called the "lateral moraines," have fallen
piece by piece from the mountain walls as the glacier moved along
between them.
But the strangest thing about the voices of the glaciers I have yet to
tell. Whenever the sun is shining brightly, as I have said, and the
gentians and the globe flowers open their petals and the birds start
the chorus of the day, the glacier begins singing, too, humming to
itself a pleasant tune. When the sky grows cloudy, even for a short
time, the birds stop singing, the flowers cover their faces, the bees
and butterflies hurry to shelter, and the glacier's song gradually dies
away. Any cloud may bring rain, as far as the flowers and the bees and
the butterflies know, and, for the same reason, the winged people hurry
to cover because they don't want to get their wings wet. The flowers
hide their faces to keep the rain from washing their pollen away, and
the birds stop singing because, like the rest of us, they don't feel so
cheerful under gloomy skies. But the glacier, why does he stop singing
too? Because that murmuring tinkle you heard was made by the water
melting on the glacier and running into rivulets a little way under its
surface. When the sun stops shining the surface ice stops melting, the
water gradually quits running and the murmur of the song dies away.
[Illustration: ON THE ROOF OF THE ANDES, WHERE IT'S TOO COLD TO GROW
GLACIERS]
It is because of these queer human habits of the glacier and, above
all, his sensitive response to the moods of days and seasons, that
many of the mountain people insist he is not only a living creature,
but that he has a soul. We think of all this now as the western sun
drops behind the snowy summits, the glacier's song grows silent, and
we hear, mingling with the vespers of the birds, voices echoing from
crag to crag the words of the psalm, "Praise ye the Lord." These are
the voices, of the herdsmen speaking to each other from alp to alp--the
evening call to prayer.
IV. How the Snow Men, the Glaciers, and the Rocks Go Walking
Now that we have learned how glaciers, wild flowers, and butterflies
get up into this high world, by climbing up here ourselves in the
beautiful springtime, the next thing, I suppose, is to climb down
again. But first just look over the edge here and you can get some
notion of how high we are, not merely in feet and figures, as we have
it in the table of mountain heights in our geography, but in _actual
feeling_.
"What are those little blocks, all ruled off like a chessboard, away
down there?"
"Those are the little Swiss farms with the gray roads between."
"And those small white things among the farms that look like pieces of
grit?"
"Those are the Swiss villages."
"And the black specks on the slopes of the mountain?"
"Those are tourists with their guides, coming up. People, no doubt,
whom we should like to know, but we shall have an interesting new
acquaintance travelling down with us. You've met some of his family, no
doubt, for he's an ice man. There are several of these ice men always
travelling down on the glaciers."
[Illustration: THE OLD MAN OF BALISTAN
Where would you say, judging from the head-dress of the man in the
middle, this scene is located? Somewhere in Asia, wouldn't you? For
in Asia the natives, particularly the Mahometans, wear turbans, as
you would learn by simply looking up "turban" in a dictionary. And
wouldn't those summer helmets lead you to suppose that this is a
hot climate, in spite of the great ice-pillar and the snow-field?
And don't those helmets suggest Englishmen? Now, where in Asia
would you find vast mountains, a hot climate, Mahometans, and
Englishmen together? Yes, to be sure, in the Himalayas of India.
And that's just where an expedition of English scientists came
across this grotesque creature of stone and ice one summer day,
on a glacier in Balistan. So I just called him "The Old Man of
Balistan."
]
You'll know one of them the moment you see him, for they are
queer-looking fellows with only one leg--or rather one leg at a
time--and they wear big stone hats. They never go walking without them.
They can't.
[Illustration: LOOKS LIKE A BROTHER, BUT HE'S NO RELATION
This "old man" is a creature, not of the snows but of the winds.
The capstone--apparently conglomerate, it looks so rough and
pebbly--tumbled down from the mountains once upon a time and found
a resting place on a bed of softer rock, a section of which became
separated from the mass on either side by those earth cracks called
"joints." Then the winds and other instruments of weathering got
their fingers in these cracks, wore the neighboring sections away,
and left this pillar standing. It is broader at the bottom because
the winds, checked by the obstacles on the ground, didn't strike
with such force as they did higher up.
]
To the group of boys and girls to whom I first told these stories of
my life and adventures nothing was more interesting than this account
of the ice men who walk. On that occasion I called them snow men
because the boys had just been making a snow man, and these ice men up
here, like the glaciers on which they always travel, are made of snow
turned to ice. You have heard the expression "clothes make the man,"
but in the case of these men of the snows it is literally true, so far
as their hats are concerned, for it is their hats that make them grow.
"I bite," said the High School Boy, "what's the answer?"
[Illustration: CAN YOU SOLVE THIS PICTURE PUZZLE?]
For reply I roughly sketched the picture at the top of the page. From
this hint my audience thought out the answer for themselves. See if you
can do so before you learn, in the next few paragraphs, what the answer
is.
It comes about like this. One day we see a big stone lying on the
glacier, and when we come that way again several days later this same
stone is standing on a tall pillar of ice. We notice the stone hat is
tilted forward a little, apparently to shade this queer man's face,
which is always turned directly toward the sun. It sits jauntily on one
side--this hat of his--as if he were feeling particularly contented
with himself and the world on this sunny day and had started for a
stroll.
And it really is because the sun is so bright that the hat is tipped.
Moreover it is because of the sunshine that the man takes a stroll. If,
after more days of sunshine, we return we see the same stone further
down the slope of the glacier and apparently standing on the same leg.
"But does he or it actually walk on that leg?"
(The audience, who at first thought I was joking, had begun to believe
I was in earnest.)
Yes, that leg and others. Before this Alpine tourist ends his travels
down to the valleys below he may have, all told, as many legs as a
centipede, but only one at a time. Like the legs of the amœba and the
claws of the crab they are renewed as wanted. A big stone falling from
the mountain side upon a glacier protects the ice beneath from the
sun's rays, so, as the ice melts down around it, the stone is left
standing on a pillar. These "glacier tables" (to use the scientific
term) are formed on the south sides of glaciers where there is the most
sun. Owing to the slant of the rays the rock is heated most on the
south end and so tips in that direction more and more. Finally it falls
off and, in so doing, pitches farther down the slope. Then a new pillar
is formed and the whole process is gone through again.
(If we should get lost up here any one of these snow men will tell us
the way out. The snow man's hat, for the reason stated, always tips
toward the south.)
The stones of the winter lands are not only like human beings in the
fact that they walk, but like _little_ human beings in the fact that
when they are small they can't. In one of the pictures I drew for the
boys and girls--that representing the ice pillar from which the stone
has slipped--you may be able to make out a little pebble. It got a
ride because it was hiding under the big stone. Left to itself "it
wouldn't have a leg to stand on," as the saying goes, for small stones
are heated through by the sun and so sink down into the ice and form no
"legs."
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyrighted by Merl La Voy_
THE RUSH OF THE AVALANCHE
It's seldom you can get a snap-shot at an avalanche--it's so
sudden! Then, when you do get one you must be an expert or your
picture will be a blur. This picture was taken by Merl La Voy. An
interesting thing about it is that the scene is on Mount McKinley,
which, as your geography will tell you, is the highest mountain
in North America. The avalanche started near the top, where the
greatest fields of loose snow lie. We see it in the act of plunging
into a vast crevasse several miles below, and sending up clouds of
snow. They look like steam.
]
MR. GLACIER'S CATERPILLAR TRACTOR
"The glaciers," says Reclus, "seem as motionless as the peaks that
tower above them." Nevertheless, as we know, they do move. While the
motion is in so many respects like that of a river that glaciers are
often called "ice rivers," they have motions and, so to say, "methods"
that curiously suggest the inventions of men. Take, for example, the
way they climb down a steep hill; for all the world like the "tanks" in
the Great War. The tanks, you remember, made nothing of shell holes,
rough country, ravines, or trenches, but lumbered and crushed their
way along, resistless as the Fates. And, you may also recall, the
tanks moved by laying sections of themselves--the great cleats on the
outside belt--which they picked up again, as they advanced. This was
called the "caterpillar tractor" system of travelling.
Now watch the glacier when it comes to an incline much steeper than its
ordinary slope. It breaks across in sections at right angles to its
bed, and section after section drops down. Then the forward sections
crowded upon by those in the rear are pushed up close, freeze together
again, and on goes the glacier as good as new.
As a traveller, however, it is a little slow. It made faster time in
the old days--in the Ice Age--when glaciers were so much larger, but
to-day, at the rate at which ordinary glaciers travel, it may take a
boulder as big as Plymouth Rock something like a hundred years to be
carried from the upper fields to the heap of stones and soil which your
geography calls a "terminal moraine," and where Mr. Glacier says:
"All out! Far as we go."
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
How would you like to go to school to the pretty Misses Soldanella?
They can teach you a lot about botany. If you learn what an unusual
thing they do with their leaves, for instance, that will lead
you to follow up leaves in general. Leaves are wonderful things.
Indeed, it isn't often you find the leaf of a book that will tell
you half as much as the leaf of a plant, if you only know how to
read it.
In Grant Allen's "Flash Lights on Nature," you will find that the
Soldanella sisters store food in their leaves all winter just as we
put things away in the cellar, and how this helps them get up so
early in the spring; why the fact that the little sisters are not
very tall makes them hurry so; and why if they _didn't_ hurry they
wouldn't get to the party at all!
What other members of the primrose family do you know?
See what you can find about our earliest flowers--hepatica,
bloodroot, dog-toothed violet, jack-in-the-pulpit, Dutchman's
breeches, anemones.
If you will examine closely many early spring buds and
flowers--especially those like the willow and hazel catkins--you
will find that they too keep warm and grow in the early spring, not
from the warmth of the sun alone but from the fuel they have laid
up in their buds.
Did you know that to see the very first flowers of all in the
spring you must look up--away above your head? (_Maple._)
Any good book on Alaska will tell a number of striking things about
how rapidly spring comes on in the lands where glaciers grow.
Get Muir's "Mountains of California" and hear him tell about how he
went down into a crevasse in his shirt-sleeves, and of the fairy
underworld he found there, and how he hated to come away.
Reclus[11] tells how the glaciers not only come down to call on the
farmers, sometimes, but even help them pick cherries!
[Footnote 11: "The Earth."]
I suppose the children who go to the excellent Swiss schools take
delight in telling grandmother that Mr. Glacier isn't really a
person--as he is in the tales of the winter fireside--but wouldn't
both grandmother and the children open their eyes if they knew that
in Greenland there is a glacier so big it feeds itself and makes
its own snow and its own storms and everything? Hobb's "The Face of
the Earth" tells all about it.
And the Encyclopædia Britannica and Hobbs together will tell you
how to make a good glacier. There are a half-dozen things you must
remember or your glacier won't turn out right. (1) You must take
plenty of snow; (2) and keep it in a cool place; (3) but you must
warm it a little too, once in a while; (4) your mountain gorges
must not be too steep; (5) you must have your mountains set just
so; (6) and distribute your storms with care. By doing all these
things you get fine, durable glaciers, 100 to 200 feet thick,
sometimes 500 and even 1,000 feet thick. But you must be careful,
and, of course, it takes time.
CHAPTER IV
(APRIL)
Now the noisy winds are still;
April's coming up the hill!
All the spring is in her train,
Led by shining ranks of rain.
--_Mary Mapes Dodge._
THE APRIL RAINS AND THE WORK OF THE RIVERS
I always liked the little boy's definition of a river system. "Rivers
that empty into other rivers that empty into other rivers that empty
into the sea."
What is still more interesting, the sea at the same time is emptying
into the rivers; for the waters of all the lands and the waters of all
the seas, are one, and what the rivers give to the sea the sea returns
in the rain clouds that are blown landward by the winds. The Earth's
waters are thus always in circulation like the blood in our bodies. In
making this endless circuit they do an immense amount of useful and
beautiful work, and have many strange and curious ways of doing it.
It's a great family affair of the Waters people. Everybody has a hand
in it, from the baby rill that toddles across the country road, the
brook it meets in the meadow, the creek that runs through the wood,
and the river into which it flows, to the greater river which carries
forward these mingled waters to the sea.
[Illustration: THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER SYSTEM]
I. What I Brought Back from the Creek
I met a rain-drop once that had followed the thing through, starting
where a little creek began, and got such a load of information I could
hardly carry it, about the wonderful part the rivers take and have
taken in the making and remaking of the world.
We see the April rains carve fairy canyons in the soft clay of the
roadside or the creek, but it is hard to realize, as we stand on some
pinnacle of the Alps and look out over the deep and wide valleys, the
gorges, the cliffs, and mountains cut in two, that all are but the
handiwork of the rain-drops banded together as flowing waters. For
a long time this was questioned by scientific men, because the idea
so upset the old theory that great changes in this world of ours came
about all of a sudden and from causes not at work in these days. Now,
however, nobody doubts that the big things are done by the little
people, working together over long periods of time; little snowflakes,
little rain-drops, little cells in plants. As a result, the Alps, so
far as the expression of their faces is concerned, are as little like
the Alps of the past as the face of the old farm of to-day is like the
farm of those ancient yesterdays, when the brontosaurus browsed where
old Dobbin is nipping the meadow grass and the mammoth ate the leaves
of trees that stood where White Face is thoughtfully chewing her cud in
the shade.
[Illustration: HOW THEY STUDY GEOGRAPHY IN BOSTON
This is what, in the Boston schools, they call an "umbrella party."
"Umbrella party" sounds much more attractive than "geography
lesson," but as a matter of fact it is a geography lesson and a
fine one. As soon as they get off that brick pavement the boys and
girls will see those rain-drops cutting out little Mississippi
River systems, filling little Great Lakes, plunging over Niagaras
two inches high!
]
Right where you sit reading, perhaps, the land used to be buried two
miles deep beneath rocks which have been worn away by wind and rain and
by rivers which vanished long ago. Everything has been so changed that
if the old scenery should be put back you would be lost right on the
home farm.
WHERE YOU CAN JUMP ACROSS THE MISSISSIPPI
Wrinkles in the earth and in the mountainsides make the first troughs
for the streamlets and the rivers, and then the running water itself
digs these natural channels deeper. Many rivers begin as streamlets
flowing out of springs. The great Mississippi began as a baby, just
like the rest of us. You can jump across it still if you go up to
its source. Springs not only start rivers in life but go on feeding
them. Most large river systems get secret gifts in this way, as they
flow along, from thousands of springs that empty into them or their
tributaries.
So springs start and feed the rivers. Now what do you suppose starts
the springs? Rain-drops stored away in big stone "safes," much as a
small boy stores away pennies in his tin bank! The water of rains and
melting snows, passing down through the soil, soaks into the little
chambers or pores in such rocks as sandstone and limestone, and keeps
going on down until it comes to a bed of hard stone, such as slate or
granite, into which it cannot soak.
[Illustration: THE SPRING WHEN EMPTY]
[Illustration: THE SPRING WHEN FULL]
THIS SPRING PLAYS IT'S A TOWN PUMP
These two pictures show an intermittent spring about five miles
from Singer Glenn, Virginia, and there called the "Tide Spring."
You can see where the idea of the tide comes in, but can you think
why the spring seems to have a tide system all its own? You know
what a siphon is. Well, think how a kind of siphon might be formed
in rock, dissolved out by water flowing underground. Then look at
the picture on the next page.
Now rock-beds, as you know, have a slope--some more, some less--owing
to the wrinkling of the earth's crust. So the water, slowly trickling
through the porous rock, forms a steady stream which runs down along
the hard rock, as rain runs down a roof, and finally gushes out at some
lower level.
[Illustration: HOW THE LITTLE SPRING WORKS ITS PUMP
This is how the pump of an intermittent spring is worked. Some
portions of rock are dissolved by underground waters more readily
than others and so cavities are sometimes formed, as shown. As
long as the water in the reservoir is below the arch of the
siphon-shaped outlet no water escapes, but as soon as it rises to
the level of the arch the whole of the water is drawn off. Then
the spring ceases to flow until the reservoir fills up again. You
can empty water in the same way by using a bent tube of any kind.
Can you tell why the water flows up-hill in this way? Remember
what you know about air-pressure and then look up "siphon" in your
encyclopædia.
]
You can be sure these companies of rain-drops, hurrying back to the
light, don't fail to notice any cracks in the rocks along the way, and
at such places they come gushing up with sparkle and dance; and the
greater the dip of the rock beds the higher they dance, of course.
But it takes any one rain-drop so long to get back into the sunshine
after it starts on its underground journey that you'd think it would
forget how to dance at all! It isn't just the same rain-drop, to be
sure, that goes into the ground and comes out again, because the
rain-drops get all mixed up with each other as they move along, but
just imagine some one rain-drop that fell, say, on a hilltop on the day
a baby was born in a valley five miles away, where there was a spring
in a shady hollow near the baby's home. By the time that rain-drop got
down to the spring the baby would be old enough to vote!
Yet this is a very good thing for the rivers and the rest of us--this
slow travel of the underground water, whether it comes out in springs
or simply seeps through the soil as most of that which supplies the
rivers does. Otherwise, if all the water of the rains went directly
into the rivers we would have floods after every wet spell and empty
river beds between times.
Here's another river rebus. How do rivers grow longer at the top? All
rivers grow at their source because their headwaters eat back into the
rocks and the soil, just as the rain wears away the head of any gully.
Where the rock is soft they eat back faster. The Mohawk River in New
York State probably wouldn't have amounted to anything if it hadn't
done this very thing. From Albany westward past Utica runs a belt of
shale, a weak stone, but here so soft that the surface of it crumbles
back to clay in every winter's frost. Into this the Mohawk, which in
past ages was only a little stream, has eaten back its way until now it
is over a hundred miles long.
But sometimes rivers are so big the very first day they come into the
world that you may say they are born half grown. You find them, among
other places, in the mountains of California. Nearly all the water
from the melting snows on Mount Shasta sinks at once into the porous
lava fields of the mountain slopes, and after wandering about in the
hidden veins comes out, filtered and cool, in the form of large springs
which make rivers that set out on their life journeys without ever
having been babies at all so far as you can see. The Shasta River is
one of these. The McCloud is another. It gushes forth suddenly from a
lava bluff in a roaring spring seventy-five yards across, two-thirds of
the width of the river in its widest part. The River Jordan in the Holy
Land begins in one of these great springs at the foot of Mount Hermon.
[Illustration:
_From Norton's "Elements of Geology." By permission of Ginn and
Company_
HOW MOST OF EUROPE'S RIVERS GET THEIR START
Most of the important rivers of Europe start as streams of
ice-water, flowing out of glaciers. Notice the boulders along the
side of the stream. They also came out of the body of the glacier,
where, as we shall see when we take up "The Stones of the Field"
in Chapter VII, the boulders that rode south with the glaciers got
most of their roundness.
]
We know already what a hand the glaciers had in the Ice Age in shaping
the course and conduct of rivers, and you may be sure they have
something to do with the making of rivers to-day. The under side of a
glacier gets warmed from three sources: (1) its own pressure; (2) the
friction as it moves; and (3) the heat from the inside of the earth
which, on account of this thick ice blanket, can't get away into the
air as it does elsewhere. This heat melts the ice and, as we know,
there is water melting also on the surface of glaciers and in the
crevasses. Beside all this the water of rains falls upon the glacier
so that there is plenty of water to make rivers, and we always find
streams of water running from a glacier's front. Most of the rivers of
Central Europe start in this way.
THE BEAUTY OF THE BRIDAL VEIL
And, although they didn't make the rivers themselves, the Ice Age
Glaciers are held responsible for the fact that many little rivers
always have to jump to catch the train. That is to say, they come
tumbling over falls to join the larger streams into which they empty.
The reason of this is that when, in the Ice Age, the glaciers filled
the river valleys the larger glaciers in a main valley dug below the
tributary valleys and so left the mouths of the tributary rivers high
up on the main valley's walls. The famous "Bridal Veil" in the Yosemite
is one of these side valley falls. The fall--900 feet--is so great
that the water widens to a fleecy foam and waves back and forth in the
wind like a gauzy veil and, instead of a roar like Niagara, it makes a
rustling sound like silk.
While some rivers come hurrying down like that--as if they really were
afraid the larger river would go off and leave them--others, like the
Amazon, roll on as stately as a Lord Mayor's procession. But the
waters of all are on their way to the sea. The rock layers, owing to
the wrinkling of the earth as it shrinks, are nowhere level, so flowing
water is always on a down grade, sloping toward the sea or toward other
land that does slope toward the sea. Then remember too as the sea
bottom keeps sinking the continents keep rising, which increases the
pitch of the land.
[Illustration: JUMPING TO CATCH THE TRAIN
See the famous Bridal Veil Falls in the Yosemite Valley hurrying
down to reach the river below. As the stream descends, it broadens
into a beautiful, filmy veil.
]
All very simple, but none the less grand and impressive. Ruskin, in one
of the noblest of his passages, says:
"[All water courses], from the inch-deep streamlet that crosses the
village land in trembling clearness to the massy and silent march of
the Amazon and the Ganges, owe their play and power to the ordained
elevations of the earth; [to] paths prepared for them by which at
some appointed rate of journey they must evermore descend, sometimes
slow and sometimes swift, but never pausing, the gateways of guarding
mountains opened for them in cleft and chasm, and from afar off the
great heart of the sea calling them to itself."
That's a poetic way of putting it, but it's a fact nevertheless.
II. The Human Nature in Rivers
There's a lot of human nature in rivers. To begin with, as we might
suppose, they do the most playing and the least work when they are
young. Brooks will be brooks, you know!
What pretty ways they have in babyhood! Kissing the pebbles, crooning,
bubbling, chattering, playing, they are big Mississippis or great
oceans that, like Homer's ocean river, flow around the world. Their
bubbles are ships, sometimes wrecked on dreadful headlands along the
shores.
THE CHANT OF THE WATERFALLS
Waterfalls are found only in young streams and more often as you near
the source. Older streams have worn down their beds more nearly to
a level and, as we all know, more rivers begin among the mountains
and highlands than in the lower lands. In the mountain regions there
are plenty of rocks and cliffs to jump from, and the rivers, you may
be sure, make the most of their opportunities. At such falls as the
Bridal Veil they jump so far they are turned into white cascades, and
as you climb the cliff beside them and feel the wind wafting spray in
your face you hear the music of their songs. The more or less regular
dash of the water as it swings back and forth in the wind gives that
chanting sound described in waterfall poetry.
[Illustration: "BROOKS WILL BE BROOKS, YOU KNOW!"
Our baby river of the meadow seems to be playing it has a Niagara
Falls of its own, "Rock of Ages" and all! See the "huge mass" of
rock at the foot of the falls; and the rapids?
]
Like children these dancing, singing rivers love pictures and color.
You see that in the rainbow tints of the spray as the sunlight strikes
the air bubbles the waterfall "blows"; in the green of its waters
turned to gray in the foam; in the reflections of mountain, sky, and
cloud in the smooth stretches below the falls.
And, like pebbles and other little people, rivers love to play in the
rain. My! What a time! In a storm, with a gray flood pouring from the
sky, you hear, mingled with the voice of wind and rain, the swash and
gurgle of the eddies as the river goes along in its dance, wild with
the joy of it all. In a mountain stream during a heavy rain, with wind,
you can also hear the waves dashing against the rocks along the shore
or in the stream, and the smothered, bumping, rumbling made by the
boulders on the bottom knocking against each other.
STORM CHORUS OF THE MOUNTAIN TORRENTS
From any high place during a mountain storm you can see twenty, yes,
often a hundred torrents, and the noise of the water and the moving
stones makes a wonderful storm chorus. Reclus compares the sound made
by the stones to dull thunder.
WHERE TO LOOK FOR HIDING RIVERS
Rivers, both young and old, play hide and seek. Possibly the older
rivers get to dreaming of their infancy when they were springs, and
want to play they are springs again; anyhow, they disappear in the
ground in one place and then come out laughing in another as if they
really _were_ springs! And how they must chuckle to themselves when
they fool people into thinking they are brand new rivers! This happens
sometimes, and so the river gets a different name at the place where it
comes out from the name it bears up to the point where it disappears.
Such hide-and-seek rivers are found in regions where it doesn't often
rain. The Tujunga, which you cross in going from Los Angeles to San
Francisco, is such a river. At one place in its course it comes out of
a canyon, looks around a minute, and then disappears in the pebbles,
sand and gravel of the plain. Down it goes until it reaches a bed of
hard rock. Along this underground bed it runs until it gets to a place
north of Cahuenga Peak, where it comes up in springs and flows into the
Los Angeles River.
[Illustration: THE LOST RIVERS AND THE THOUSAND SPRINGS
These are the waters of some hidden tributaries of the Snake
River gushing out as springs from its beautiful banks. The group
is called "The Thousand Springs," and is supposed to be the
reappearance of two "Lost Rivers" that disappeared back in the sand
wastes.
]
Mountain lakes are where the lively little torrents stop to sleep. "The
sea," says Ruskin, "seems only to pause; the mountain lake to sleep and
to dream."
But after this sleep how they laugh and play--those baby rivers--as
they go dancing over the pebbles and down the falls; for in these lakes
they gather themselves together into a larger volume of water, and so,
of course, flow on with increased energy.
"As soon as a stream is fairly over the lake lip it breaks into
cascades, never for a moment halting, and scarce abating one jot of its
glad energy until it reaches the next basin. Then swirling and curving
drowsily (dropping off to sleep again!) through meadow and grove it
breaks forth anew into gray rapids and falls, leaping and gliding in
glorious exuberance of wild bound and dance down into another and yet
another lake basin."[12]
[Footnote 12: Muir, "The Sierra Nevada Mountains."]
Just as it is with human beings, a river seems to grow more thoughtful
and thrifty as it grows older; and, best of all, this thought and
thrift is for others--for the people of the plant world along its banks
and for its old parent, the sea. With the help of pebbles it puts money
in its savings bank and pays it out from time to time.
In seasons of flood it carries loads and loads of pebbles along. As the
flood goes down these pebbles are dropped and covered with the sediment
that settles along its banks. Then these pebbles begin to decay and so
enrich the soil. Later along comes another flood, takes the pebbles
out of the bank, carries them farther along, and, as the waters go
down, puts them back in the bank again. In course of time this kind of
fresh food from the decaying pebbles gets carried into the sea, where
it helps to furnish food and shell material for the shell-fish and raw
material to be worked up by the sea's rock mills.
[Illustration: WAYS OF A WANDERING RIVER]
III. The Machinery of the Rivers
To do all their great part in the world's work the rivers need only
time, enthusiasm, patience, machinery, and tools. All these the rivers
have, and the machinery they use and the engineering methods they
follow are much more modern than we would suppose. Take, for example,
the way in which rivers widen their banks. The current cuts with the
greatest force on the outside of bends, and the motion and effect is
practically that of a circular saw. This sawing is done on the largest
scale where the current meanders. Swinging from side to side it cuts
away both banks.
And what it cuts away it spreads over the valley by its back-and-forth
motion, much as men spread dirt with scrapers when they are grading a
road.
That's how crooked rivers make broad valleys. But they have to have the
help of us pebbles, too. We're hard to get along without! Notice, the
next time the river or the creek is up, the rolling, hopping motion of
the pebbles as they are carried along by the rushing water. It is these
pebbles grinding on the bottom and sides of the river's bed that help
most in this kind of valley deepening and widening. In the same way we
pebbles helped dig those grand affairs, the gorges and the canyons in
the mountains. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado is a part of our work.
In the widening of valleys the circular saws of crooked streams are
very useful, but there are other things at work. The rains dissolve
the soil and wash the banks away and slope them down; Jack Frost, with
his wedges, pries out both soil and rock; the little farmers with many
feet--the burrowing animals and insects--and the famous farmer with no
feet at all--the angleworm--loosen soil, and so help the river to carry
it away; and the ice, when the river breaks up in the spring, chisels
off the banks as it passes.
[Illustration: HOW RIVERS BUILD STONE BRIDGES
Natural bridges are made by the same agency that forms the
intermittent springs--the dissolving power of water--and, like the
springs, are characteristic of limestone regions because limestone
is readily dissolved in water. In the little model of a limestone
region "a" and "a" are "sink-holes"--saucer-shaped hollows
dissolved and washed into funnels through which the surface water
joins underground streams such as you see flowing beneath the two
"bs," which are natural bridges in the making.
The lower picture shows just how one of the bridge-builders looks
while at work, dissolving and wearing down the rock. The next two
pictures will help tell you two other ways in which rivers make
their own bridges.
]
If you have ever been in a machine-shop you must have noticed how a
planing-mill works away on a job it has been set to do, without anybody
watching it at all; and when it gets done with its job it stops, all
by itself. Such machinery is called "automatic," because, to a certain
extent, it runs its own affairs. A river, in planing down and reshaping
valley scenery, has an automatic stop. When it has cut its valley down
to sea level it stops, because, being then no higher than the sea, it
can no longer flow toward it.
[Illustration: AFTER A FEW CUPS OF TEA
When winding rivers get a few cups of tea--that is, are in
flood--they rush straight ahead and, while much of the water may
for a time still go on around the bend, some of it is forced
through openings in the rock and in time carves out a bridge. How
they do this is shown in the upper diagram on page 83.
]
But before this automatic stop shuts off their machinery the work that
rivers do is immense. The Mississippi River carries enough solid matter
to the Gulf every year to make a mountain a mile square and 268 feet
high.
[Illustration: YOU KNOW THIS BRIDGE, OF COURSE
The Natural Bridge of Virginia is an example of still another style
of river bridge-building. This bridge used to be part of the roof
of a cave and remained after the rest of the roof fell in.
]
When ordinary people want to cross a mountain they have to climb over
it. But do you know what a river does? It cuts its way right through
and makes what is called a water-gap--a great gate of stone that is
always open and through which the stream forever flows. All the river
used was tools and time. The tools were the sand and pebbles it swept
along. So in the course of ages, running like a band saw, the Potomac
made the water-gap at Harper's Ferry, the Delaware River the Delaware
Water-Gap.
HOW MOUNTAINS HELP MAKE THE WATER GATES
But how could a river do this? It couldn't flow up one side of the
mountain and down the other, could it? No, certainly not. What then?
Wherever you find a river cutting through a mountain range you may
be sure the river was there before the mountains rose, and that the
mountains rose so slowly the river kept right on in its old channel and
wore down the rock under that channel as fast as the mountains rose;
while, on either side, they could rise as high as they wanted to for
all the river cared!
GROWING MOUNTAINS AND THE EARTHQUAKES
But suppose, before I had explained how water-gaps are made I had told
you I could show you a mountain growing. You wouldn't have believed
it. Regions in which mountains are still rising, as on our Pacific
Coast, are liable to earthquakes. The reason is that as mountains rise
the rock layers of which they are made are strained dreadfully. Every
once in a while they crack and the rocks on either side of this crack
grind against each other. This makes the earth shake, much as the house
shakes when a heavy table is pushed across a bare floor.
If you want to see a job of river engineering that will make you catch
your breath, look over into some of the river canyons and gorges of the
West.
[Illustration: THE GREAT CUMBERLAND WATER-GAP
Here is the famous Cumberland Gap that the river cut through the
mountains; so cutting a great figure in United States history,
also, you remember. The picture shows the region as it looked in
early days.
]
A mile isn't much straight ahead, but a mile straight down and you on
your stomach, with your eyes just over the edge--it's an _awful_ long
way! Imagine yourself looking down a wall of rock like that, and the
bottom of the abyss so far off that it looks blue--that's a canyon!
AND YET THAT LITTLE RIVER DID IT ALL!
And now we are going down into the vastest canyon in the world, a
canyon so vast that it has already swallowed practically all the
words in the dictionary suitable to such scenery and still remains
undescribed--so all the skilled writers say who have tried their hands
at it. This is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Do you remember how
in "Alice in Wonderland" the cat disappeared and left nothing but its
smile? Well, the first time you see the Grand Canyon you feel as if it
had swallowed you and left nothing but your eyes! And when they tell
you that it was all done by that little river that you can just make
out threading its way along the bottom, you can't believe it! The total
length of the river's gorge--a canyon is just a long gorge--is some 400
miles. The part of it known as the Grand Canyon is a yawning abyss of
stone into which the river walls widen for a distance of 42 miles. The
Lower Colorado River, that dug this chasm in the rock, flows through a
vast table-land where rain seldom falls. But the river, which rises in
the Rocky Mountains, has a constant supply of water from the mountain
rains and the melting snow. The canyons you see branching from the main
gorge in our picture were cut by the Colorado's tributaries. Working
together on different sides, they carved out those rock masses that
look like oriental temples and have been named accordingly--the temples
of Brahma, Osiris, Zoroaster, and so on.
And here in this canyon is a splendid example of how the rivers, in
addition to all their other labors, write history. They helped to lay
down on the borders of the ancient sea the material out of which the
rocks were made. It is in the leaves in such books of stone that the
geologist reads the great events of world-making history. Moreover, the
rivers may be said to cut the leaves of the book when they dig down
through them, as in this immense library of the Grand Canyon.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyrighted by Fred Harvey_
AND WE PEBBLES HELPED DIG THE GRAND CANYON, TOO!
River water alone couldn't cut those canyons--the Grand Canyon and
the rest. The Colorado and its tributaries had to have grinding
tools and the tools were the pebbles they dragged over their
rock-beds; and thus, in the course of ages, wore them down and down
and down.
]
Busy, busy all the time--these rivers. But although they are always at
work they not only never forget to look beautiful but they beautify
everything they touch. At the outset the lines of a river valley are
rather straight and angular, as if the scenery were just being blocked
out by an artist, but as the valley grows older its slopes become more
gentle, the angles disappear into rounded forms, and the river itself
winds along in graceful lines, exactly reproducing what the great
English artist Hogarth called "the line of beauty."
[Illustration: THAT MIGHTY RIVER IN THE MEADOWS
Yon stream, whose sources run,
Turned by a pebble's edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling towards the sun,
Through the cleft mountain ledge.
The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon.
--Holmes.
]
Back of all the work of the rivers from year to year and age to age,
there seems always the thought of beauty as well as the thought of use.
They are evidently under an eternal law of service, of beauty, and of
change.
"The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form and nothing stands.
They melt like mists the solid lands;
Like clouds they shape themselves and go."
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
Isn't Tennyson's "Brook" a beautiful title picture of a baby river
and its ways?
Speaking of human nature in rivers and apparent differences in
disposition, why is it that some of the rivers of California run
right through the mountain ranges from east to west--have evidently
cut their way--while others run along, meekly enough, between the
ranges? I'm sure from what we have learned about rivers that you
can tell how this happened as well as if you had been there when
the rivers were made; but if you can't think--after trying real
hard--you will find the answer in the Hide and Seek at the end of
the next chapter.
Beside being so prominent in the literature of the Bible and
so famous in history, the River Jordan is a most curious and
interesting stream, and every child should know about it. Here are
some of the things you will find: Why it is born partly grown, and
doesn't begin as a little stream, like the Mississippi; why it may
be said to be in both the tropical and temperate zones[13]; about
its two valleys, both of which it uses at the same time.[14]
[Footnote 13: Britannica.]
[Footnote 14: International.]
Another famous river over in that part of the world--it's the
biggest river in Western Asia, in fact--was born twins. See if you
can find such a river on the map. (The name of it is at the end of
the next chapter.) In the days of Alexander the Great these twin
rivers, which now unite in one after travelling along independently
for a while, were a good day's journey apart clear to the end. In
the article on this river in the Britannica, and in books of travel
you will find how, by a quaint and ingenious device, the river is
made to pump itself up hill and irrigate the fields; how history,
clear back to the beginning of civilization, is written in the
ruins of cities along its banks; how it used to put in part of its
time bounding the Roman empire, and how nowadays it is forced to
help support Arab river pirates and wild pigs.
Now let's go over into Africa with Doctor Livingstone and see how
a river can grind out a big, deep stone jar in solid rock.[15]
Rivers grind out these _pot-holes_ much as Indian women and the
American pioneers used to grind wheat and corn. (The river, you'll
find, uses pebbles for millstones.)
[Footnote 15: "The Expedition to the Zambesi," page 63. One of these
natural water-jars that Doctor Livingstone found was as wide as a well
and so deep it kept the water cool even under the broiling African sun.]
And what do you think of a waterfall big enough to swallow two
Niagaras? (It's the greatest waterfall in the world; so you must
have learned its name in your geography.) It's described on page
268 of Doctor Livingstone's book referred to in the foot-note. The
natives call it "The Fall of the Thundering Smoke." They wonder how
water can smoke, and so that you can see the "smoke" twenty miles
away. You'll wonder, too, until you learn the reason.
CHAPTER V
(MAY)
When April steps aside for May,
Like diamonds all the rain-drops glisten;
Fresh violets open every day;
To some new bird each hour we listen.
--_Lucy Larcom._
THE FAIRYLAND OF CHANGE
What a wonderful world it is, this world of green fields and perfume
and blossoms of pink and gold! Where did it come from? How did it get
here out of the white winter? That bleak and barren winter that lay all
around us everywhere only a few short weeks ago?
Just suppose we had never seen apple trees in bloom, as we are now
seeing them everywhere, and somebody should show us a little brown
seed, and a piece of bark, and a piece of root, and a green leaf, and
a blossom, and an apple, and tell us they grew out of each other--were
all made of the very same stuff.
Well, just as sure as anything, you wouldn't believe it. I wouldn't
believe it. We simply couldn't! But we've had this sort of thing all
around us ever since we can remember, and we've got so used to it we
don't see anything wonderful about it. It _is_ wonderful just the same.
The Colossus of Rhodes, and Jupiter of Olympia, and the lighthouse of
Alexandria, and all the other Seven Wonders of the World that people
used to go so far to see, weren't anything to it.
And to this day, how it all comes about is as much of a mystery as
ever. Yet Nature does it right before our eyes, and over and over and
over again! Even I, old as I am, and as much as I know, _I_ don't know
how she does it, but I do know how it all started; how Nature first
began to change one thing into another. It was when she began making
marbles, granites, and other kinds of rock out of other kinds. That
was ages before she changed little brown seeds into big trees with
pink blossoms and red apples on them, or little brown cocoons into big
golden butterflies, or anything like that.
I. In the Fairyland of Change
Ahem! Ahem! (Pebble coughing.)
I caught cold some several million years ago and I haven't got over it
yet. That's why I'm a granite pebble instead of a slate pebble, or a
sandstone pebble, or anything common. It's a part of the story of the
fairyland of change, this cold of mine.
Ahem!
Would you mind getting me a lump of sugar? I don't want it for my
cold--it never does that any good--but because a lump of sugar goes so
well with this part of my story.
You notice the sugar lump is made up of little crystals, little
building blocks just as I am, just as all granites are. And the
crystals in the sugar and in the stone were made in the same way--by
first heating and then cooling the material out of which they are made.
[Illustration: THE CRYSTAL FAIRIES IN THE SUGAR-BOWL]
When the earth's surface first cooled, the melted rock is supposed
to have changed to granite. Melted rock, under the same conditions,
does that to-day. So, for a while, granite must have been all the kind
of rock there was. There was as yet no sandstone, no shells or bones
to make limestone, no pebbles to help make conglomerate or "pudding
stone," no ground-up rock and soil to make slate.
The rocks of the earth have been made over so many times that it is not
probable that any of the granites now "living" (so to speak) are the
same rocks that were made when the earth first cooled, but you can see
that we have a right to say what I was careful to say when I introduced
myself to you in the first chapter, that we belong to one of the _very
oldest families_--we Granites.
Ahem!
There is a variety of rock--a crystallized rock--with bands all through
it, called gneiss (say "nice"). Gneiss is made from all kinds of rock
including, of course, conglomerate; that is to say "pudding stone"[16]
warmed over.
[Footnote 16: "Pudding stone" is a rock with pebbles all through it,
like the plums in a Christmas pudding. Its book name is "conglomerate."]
"And what they did not eat that night, the queen next morning fried!"
DOWN IN THE GREAT MELTING-POT
But how is old rock warmed over and made into new? You might easily
guess that as the heart of the earth is melted rock the rock layers
lying next to it would be melted, too, and so started on their way to
becoming crystallized rock. Crystallization in rock takes place from
the surface down, in the same way that maple syrup turns to sugar, as
it does if allowed to stand undisturbed. So, as the central mass of
rock is cooling from above toward the centre, we may suppose granite is
still being formed away down there, miles under our feet.
But there are other ways in which rocks make their own heat--rocks far
above this central molten heart of the world. One of these ways might
remind you of how the mother hen gets her chickens to come out of the
eggs, for rocks hatch out new rocks by sitting on one another!
[Illustration: THREE CHAPTERS IN THE STORY OF MARBLE
If you're ever in New York City up around 192d Street, you can read
the three chapters in the life of a piece of marble right in the
rocks themselves, for there you'll see this mass of rock with that
granite dike pushing its way through. The rock on either side of
the dike is limestone, and this limestone, owing to the heat of
the lava which afterward hardened and became a "dike," is full of
crystals; that is, began to turn to marble because of the heat. See
how the lava crumpled the limestone as it pushed its way up into
the original crack?
]
The pressure of the upper rocks generates heat in those beneath.
Then when these deeply buried rocks come up into the upper world as
parts of mountain chains, and the covering of the softer rocks is,
by the rivers and by weathering, worn away, we find the granite. The
wrinkling of the rocks which makes mountains also creates immense
pressure, and this is another great source of made-over rock. Such rock
is found almost entirely in mountain regions. Some rocks, as shown
in pebbles stretched out like a piece of gum, are heated by pressure
without being crystallized. Often one of these stretched pebbles is
the only thing in a crystallized rock that shows what kind of rock it
was originally, all the finer material in it has been so changed. The
deeper down in the earth the rocks are the more apt they are to be
crystallized, because the rocks piled above them help to hold in the
heat, just as thick blankets keep you warmest on a cold winter night.
KINDS OF "METAMORPHIC" ROCK
Rock of any kind may be changed to crystallized rock. Where the
conditions are not favorable for crystallization the rock is made more
solid, and material soaked out of the rocks above filters down into it.
The lower layers of sandstone may become almost as solid as glass, and
are then called "quartzite." Clay rocks are hardened into slate. Rocks
changed in any of these ways are called "metamorphic" rock, from two
Greek words meaning "to form over." But by "metamorphic" is usually
meant rock that has been crystallized.
NICE HATCHING TEMPERATURE FOR ROCKS
I compared the hatching of new rocks to the hatching of new chickens,
because it is done by the rocks sitting on one another. But chicken
hatching and rock "hatching" are alike in still another way. The rocks
need heat, but not too much heat. Too much heat melts them. It is only
when they have cooled down a good deal that they begin to crystallize;
and that, you see, wastes time.
A nice hatching temperature for rocks is between 500 and 1000 degrees
Fahrenheit.
But we might also compare Mother Nature's way of changing rocks to the
cooking that goes on in our kitchens. She uses not only heat, but water
and other things, including salt and soda. Both the salt and some of
the water in the rocks comes from--you'd hardly guess it--the seas! Not
the seas of to-day, but the seas of yesterday, when these rocks were
made. Then the pores were filled with water and the water has been kept
shut in down there by the rocks above ever since.
From this sea water comes the salt. The salt in the water, when heated,
helps to dissolve the rocks so that the different materials in them can
separate and come together again in new ways, and so form new rocks.
You know when you go to the lavatory to change your hands from dark to
light what a lot of difference it makes whether the water is hot or
cold and whether you use soap. The soap helps dissolve the dirt on your
hands just as the salt helps dissolve the rocks.
The soda which Nature also uses is particularly good for dissolving
rock that will hardly dissolve without it; silica, for instance, out of
which are made the hardest of the sand grains, the sand in sandstone,
the sharp, glassy edges of grass blades, and the blades of wheat, and
the stalks of corn. Whenever there is a great deal of silica in rock
you find soda mixed right with it. This, having the rocks already
salted and mixed with soda before putting them in the oven, Mother
Nature has always found _so_ convenient!
ONE PEBBLE MAY PLAY MANY PARTS
I, in my time, may have been many kinds of rock. First, heaved up out
of the sea by the earliest wrinkling of the cooling earth as granite;
then weathered away into soil and carried by rivers to the sea, where I
was remade the first time, maybe, as part of the "dough" in a pudding
stone; then up again in an earth wrinkle and again back to sea, this
time to be made into some one of the clay stones, and then back to
granite again.
Anyhow here I am, a little freckled granite pebble talking myself red
in the face because I've got so much to say, such wonderful things to
tell, and only a few hundred pages to tell it in!
II. How Do They Know?
But, after all, how do they know that one rock changes into another? No
one ever caught a rock doing this, did they?
Not quite, but almost. To explain, I must first tell you about the
fossils that are found in stone. Haven't you often noticed in marble
curious figures that reminded you of sea-shells? They were sea-shells
but have been turned to stone, and things similarly changed while still
keeping their original form are called "fossils."
When the plants and the shell creatures of the sea die they fall to the
bottom, and mud and sand settles over them and closes them in, much as
you shut leaves and flowers between the pages of a book. But while the
book presses the leaves of flowers out of shape these bodies of the
water-plants and shell creatures are slowly enclosed in a soft mass of
mud that doesn't change their shapes at all. Then the particles that go
to make up the soft bodies of these buried things are slowly dissolved
away, and the minerals in the water and mud above them soak in and
take their places. It's like passenger after passenger in a car getting
up and other passengers taking the vacant places. Finally this mass of
limey shells becomes buried deep under the sea, is turned to limestone,
and when in course of time this part of the seashore rises--as we know
shores have a way of doing--or is wrinkled up into a mountain, this
limestone becomes a part of the face of the land.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by the American Museum of Natural History_
STORY OF THE LITTLE JEWEL-BOX
A kind of jewel-box? Yes, the kind geologists call a "geode." It
began as a piece of limestone in which the underground waters had
dissolved a cavity. But these waters had already, in solution,
quartz which they had dissolved from quartz rock, and this quartz,
deposited little by little in the cavity, formed into crystals. The
quartz also made the surrounding walls more solid, so that when the
mass of limestone containing this pocket was cut away by erosion
this jewel-box remained, and, being rolled about in streams or by
the lap and plunge of waves, it was rounded.
]
WOULDN'T WE SAY THE SAME THING?
Now suppose where some great granite rock stood up through layers of
other kinds of rock--looking as if it had pushed itself through like
the great granite boss on which Edinburgh Castle stands--you found
that wherever this intruder touched the other rock that rock was
crystallized. If we had just found all this out for ourselves, as the
geology people found it, we would say, just as they said:
[Illustration: FATHER, GRANDFATHER, AND THE CHILDREN IN THE PORPHYRY
FAMILY
In this piece of porphyry you see three generations, all living
under one roof, as it were. Notice that six-sided crystal near the
centre? Compare it with other good-sized crystals that haven't
any distinctive shape. The reason for the difference is that the
shapeless ones have had some of their substance taken away to form
the smaller crystals. The dark mass is lava. In it the big crystals
formed. Then, from most of the big crystals the lava reabsorbed
material, and this material later turned into little crystals--the
"grandchildren" of the three generations.
]
"I wonder what the granite did to the limestone and the other rocks
around it to make them 'sugar,' or, as we say when speaking of rocks,
'crystallize'? Syrup sugars when it is heated and then cooled without
stirring. I wonder if this intruding mass that is now granite didn't
spout up, in melted form, from down in the earth, and heat the rocks
on either side as it burst its way through. Then both this hot rock and
its neighbors cooled and crystallized. That's it!"
[Illustration: SPLITTING MARBLE ROCKS IN THE QUARRY
This is a scene in a marble-quarry. The men are splitting up a
120-ton block. A writer in _Scribner's Magazine_, in which this
illustration originally appeared, also describes the process. The
wedges, carefully greased, are inserted in the drill-holes which,
for a horizontal split, are neither close together nor very deep,
as that is the natural plane of cleavage between the strata. Two
men with sledges go down the line giving each wedge a blow--not
too hard. Then two more men follow, and in go the wedges a little
farther. You see it wouldn't do to rush matters, or you'd fracture
the marble. The operation is so delicate, indeed, that the foreman
himself gives the final blows. Then the marble cracks from hole to
hole. For the vertical splits the holes, you notice, are closer
together. They are also deeper.
]
In some places you find these granite masses in great bosses, or
domelike rocks; elsewhere in long strips, like an iron bar thrust
through other rocks; in still other places in great slabs between other
rocks, like a warming pan pushed between the bed-sheets on a cold
winter night; but everywhere it touches other rocks these neighbors are
crystallized.
Now, coming back to our friends the fossils, we sometimes find
limestone bordering one of these intrusive marble rocks with fossils in
it, shading off into limestone containing the same kind of fossils. As
you get closer to the granite mass the fossils in the marble gradually
fade away until you come to marble in which there are no fossils at all.
So there we get the whole story of the life, not only of marble but of
granite, and what happened to them in "The Fairyland of Change" and how
it happened:
_Chapter I._--The limestone was made in the sea and the shell creatures
helped to make it.
_Chapter II._--Hot melted rock from the inside of the earth broke its
way up through these limestone beds.
_Chapter III._--Then, as the melted rock cooled, it changed to granite,
and the limestone on either side, being first heated and then cooled,
crystallized and changed to marble.
Men of science have still other ways of working out this problem as to
whether and how and why one kind of rock changes into another.
"But," we might say, "aren't they satisfied? We are. It's all plain
enough to us now that one kind of rock does change into another. Then
why do these geologist people go on getting more evidence when they've
already got enough? It's like a boy learning two lessons when he only
has to recite in one; and whoever _heard_ of such a thing!"
THESE BOYS JUST LOVE TO STUDY
The answer is that this "going on" is one of the many delights of
study, particularly in Nature's books, when once you get the habit.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Frith & Co., Ltd., Reigate_
THE MARBLE ROCKS AT JABALPUR
The gorge of the "Marble Rocks," near Jabalpur, India, is a mile
long and of an unearthly beauty of which even this little picture
will give you some idea. The walls gleam white and golden in the
sun. They are not really marble but limestone, which, as you will
learn in this chapter, is the stone that becomes marble in "the
fairyland of change." It looks as if nature had begun the making
of marble columns in those cliffs, doesn't it? This is because the
cliff is cut up by joints. You can also make out in one of the
"pillars" the strata, or horizontal divisions of the rock, as it
was laid down in the sea.
]
Among other things, the scientists search the pockets of the rocks,
so to speak, for further evidence as to whether one kind changes into
another. Chemistry is a great help in doing this, and, of course,
the microscope. They find in this way that rocks that are full of
crystals, such as granite and marble, and that look so different
from the rocks that are not crystallized--such as limestone and
sandstone--have in them the very same substances--silica, lime, potash,
iron, and so on.
And again they put the oysters on the witness stand. (You remember
how, long ago, oysters helped tell that mountains were once a part of
the sea bottom.) They put a piece of limestone in a certain acid, and
it bubbles and gives off a certain kind of gas. Then they do the same
thing to an oyster-shell, and it gives out the same kind of gas. Then
they try it on a piece of marble and out comes that very gas again! So
all three--the limestone, the oyster-shell, and the marble--must be
pretty close relations. Marble is just oyster and other shells warmed
up and then allowed to cool.
But they don't stop here--these students of the rocks. It isn't enough
that all these facts point to one conclusion. They want to actually
_try it out_. So what do they do but change chalk--which is a kind of
very soft limestone--into marble in the laboratory? This they do by
heating the chalk and then cooling it under immense pressure.
III. The Fairies of the Fairyland of Change
If there really are fairies in this deep-down fairyland of change--and
surely there must be--I should say they were the very same fairies we
find in a lump of sugar--the crystals. For it is when these crystals
take different shapes--the very thing fairies are always doing, you
know--that things change into something else, so different you can
hardly believe it. One could easily believe that charcoal and coal are
related, they look so much alike in the face; but who would say that a
piece of charcoal and a diamond were made of the very same stuff? They
are. But diamonds are made of crystals and charcoal is not; and that
must be it. The carbon of the charcoal was never touched by the wand of
the Crystal Fairy.
[Illustration: SIX MEMBERS OF THE CRYSTAL FAMILY
Introducing six interesting members of the crystal family. The crystals
of common salt and of gold, among others, take the form shown at _A_.
Alum and diamonds crystallize as shown at _C_; while _B_ and _F_ belong
to a system of crystals which we find built up into ice and arsenic.
_D_ and _E_ are building-blocks for green vitriol, borax, and sulphate
of soda.]
A strange thing is that big crystals are always made up of little
crystals. So what looks like one crystal is really a United States
of crystals, all like each other and each like all of them put
together, much as our federal government repeats the form of the State
governments, and the State governments duplicate the government at
Washington on a smaller scale.
[Illustration: THE SAND GRAINS AND THE CRYSTAL FAIRIES
The crystal fairies often give battered sand grains a new lease of
life and these pictures show how they do it. Fig. "_a_" is a single
sand grain which has grown into crystal form; "_b_" shows parallel
growths about a grain; "_c_" is a group of neighboring grains that have
crowded each other so in their growth that the crystal facets have been
destroyed. Sounds odd to speak of sand grains "growing," doesn't it?
But they do!]
But why do the little crystals always come together in just such a way
as to make big crystals shaped exactly like themselves?
Goodness knows!
But whatever the how and the why of it may be, not only do the crystal
people stick as closely to the family pattern in dress as the Scotch
Highlanders do to the plaids of their clans, but the crystals are
clannish in another way. When a clay rock, for example, is dissolved
by the heat, moisture, and chemicals down in the land of change,
the particles of the same kind that are scattered through it hunt
each other out, and ever after cling together, like Emmy Lou and her
"nintimate friends." You've noticed how "spotty" granite is, haven't
you? This is because it is made up of different kinds of minerals; but,
although the crystals in all follow the granite pattern, the particles
of each kind of mineral "flock together." The feldspars and the micas
never mix.
JUST TRY IT WITH A PIECE OF PAPER
Now take a piece of writing paper and roll it into a tube and I'll show
you something else. Stand the roll up between your two hands and press
down on the top. It takes a good deal of pressure to bend or break it,
doesn't it? Now lay it on its side and squeeze. It breaks right away.
But how should the crystals in a piece of granite know that a column
of anything will stand so much more weight when the pressure comes on
the ends than when it comes on the sides? They seem to know; for I'll
tell you what they do, away down there in the dark of the earth. The
crystals stand at right angles to the pressure on the rock in which
they are forming. Sometimes, because of the movements of the earth
as it shrinks and cracks, the crystals already formed in granite are
crushed over on their sides. Then, in course of time, they form again,
but _this_ time they stand upright, with their "heads and shoulders"
against the burden--little Atlases supporting the world! And they
not only manage to get up and stand up straight when re-formed under
pressure, but they stand closer together than they did before; they
close up ranks, like soldiers with serious business before them.
A crystal is made up of molecules, that is to say, little parts
of itself. You can't see a molecule; you just have to think it.
Each different thing in the world--as salt and sugar, boys and
bumble-bees, little girls and butterflies--is made up of its own kind
of molecules or little parts of itself. In order to grasp the idea of
certain scientific facts, the men of science thought of the molecules
themselves as being made of little bits of _themselves_, which the
scientists called "atoms." Now they find that it is necessary--in
order to work out still further their ideas of how things are made
and done and changed, in this wonderful mystery we call the world--to
imagine these atoms as made up of what they call "electrons." You
mustn't think, however, that this is all mere fancy. We can, of course,
think of anything as made up of small particles or parts of itself
which we can call "molecules," and that these molecules are made of
still smaller parts which we can call "atoms." But there is reason to
believe that while each different kind of thing is made of its own
kind of molecules and their atoms, all the atoms are made of the same
thing--electrons or little bits of electricity. For reasons which need
not be gone into here, it is known that electrons actually exist. These
electrons are so much smaller than an atom that there is as much room
for them to move around in an atom as there is for the planets to move
around the sun.
And they _do_ move--travelling round and round. There are, even in so
small a thing as a grain of sand, untold numbers of these circling
worlds; systems like the sun with its planets and other vast star
systems of the sky.
And that, it is thought, may be one of the secrets of the continual
change of things; clay rock changing to granite, granite to soil, soil
to fruit, fruit to children, and so on--everything on the move and the
electrons doing the moving--carrying the changes, so to speak--these
wonderful little myriad messenger boys of the universe!
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
Don't imagine, for all I've talked so long about them, that I've
told you everything there is to know about the crystal fairies. For
example, did you know that if it wasn't for the crystal people we
wouldn't have any ice? (_Ice._)
You will also find that if it wasn't for ice--ice and the
Greeks--we wouldn't have the word "crystal" at all. (_Crystal._)
One of the most striking things in the whole conduct of these
clever crystal folks you will find in reading about ice. If it
wasn't for a peculiar--a very peculiar--habit the ice crystals
have, all the waters of the world that ever freeze at all, would
freeze solid to the bottom and never _would_ thaw out!
I'll tell you this much about it:
While everything else in the world--including boys and
girls--contracts when it gets cold, ice expands, and so becomes
lighter than water, and so floats.
And yet the ice crystals know how to contract as well as expand,
and that's why ice sometimes builds stone walls, as we will see
when we come to study "The Stones of the Field" in July.
Shaking still water that is cold enough to freeze but hasn't frozen
makes the crystal fairies get very busy in their ice factories.
And it looks very much as if the fairies themselves warmed up with
their work; for, after this shaking, the temperature of the water
rises ten degrees at the very same time it is freezing!
You will also find that when the weather is cold enough ice itself
freezes, gets harder and harder with the cold; that ice will melt
ice; that two blocks of ice will grow into one if you give them a
chance; that ice crystals are apt to be born twins; that these twin
crystals are fond of gardening--at least, they raise "ice flowers";
that the ice crystals are so punctual in their coming and going in
water that they are used to help place the markings on thermometers
just right, so that we can tell exactly how cold or hot we are.
All this just about the crystals of the ice, but the work of the
crystal people in making snowflakes is even more wonderful. In
the bound volumes of St. Nicholas for March, 1882, in your Public
Library you will find a most interesting account of a man in
Vermont who began studying snowflakes and taking their pictures
when he was a boy. He's known all over the world as the great
authority on snowflakes. In the Encyclopedia Americana you will
find a long article by him in which he tells the many interesting
things he has learned about the ways of the fairies of the snow And
how many pictures do you suppose he has in his snowflake gallery
now? Over a thousand, and no two alike!
Just to think! Some of these wonderful little people of the
fairyland of change sit at the table with us at every meal--the
sugar crystals. And they are among the most interesting members of
the family. Under the word _Sugar_ you will find that the sugar
crystals themselves eat and grow. But what do you suppose they eat?
Not sugar. (You may easily guess, however, they have a sweet tooth.)
Yes, and at their home table, before they come to _your_ home
table, they have their regular meals, and they are not allowed a
second helping until they have eaten the first!
Answers to Conundrums in H. & S. No. 4
The east and west rivers in California were there before the
mountains rose and so cut their way through; while the north and
south rivers between the ranges owe their origin to the mountains
themselves.
The big twin river referred to is the Euphrates.
The greatest falls in the world are the Victoria Falls on the
Zambesi.
CHAPTER VI
(JUNE)
The rivers laugh in the valley,
Hills dreaming of their past,
And all things silently opening--
Opening into the Vast.
* * * * *
That pebble is older than Adam,
Secrets it hath to tell.
These rocks--they cry out history,
Could I but listen well.
--_William C. Gannet_: "_Sunday on the Hill-Top_."
THE SECRETS OF THE HILLS
I. In the Bad Land Library
It has been said[17] that crystals are dreaming of life, they act
so like living things. We may imagine the crystals in the granite
rocks which first came into being with the cooling of the fire globe,
dreaming out the long procession of life and change that followed them.
[Footnote 17: John Burroughs: "The Breath of Life."]
But what nightmares they must have had when they foresaw such creatures
as the one on page 23, that grotesque, that unbelievable combination of
bird and beast, the cerotosaurus! The bones of such monsters are one of
the most astonishing secrets of the hills.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF MOUNTAINS
[Illustration: HOW THE BAD LANDS GOT THEIR NAME
"The Bad Lands are so called because they are bad for
travelling--that is, if you're in anything of a hurry!"
]
The Bad Lands of South Dakota, in which, as in other parts of our great
West, so many bones of the ancients have been found, got their name
because they are so bad for travelling; that is to say, if you are in
anything of a hurry. But if you are just looking around--during your
vacation, in June, say--they are anything but bad lands. They are full
of interesting secrets. This secret of the ancient bones is only one
of them. Another thing they lead us into is the secret history of the
hills themselves; and as this particular book is mainly about the face
of the earth, the story back of the landscape, as it appears to the
traveller, we shall give the rest of this chapter to the origin of the
Hill family, using the word "hill" in its broadest sense. If you have
looked it up in the dictionary you have found that what people call a
"hill" depends a good deal on where they are. The Bad Lands are really
hills; but in South Dakota, where these particular bad lands are, they
also have what they call the Black Hills, which are really mountains,
because they "mounted" to get where they are.[18] They wrinkled up,
just as the continents themselves did, when they came out of the sea.
Most of the great mountain systems of the world were made in this way,
but table-lands may be so cut up by streams in course of time that they
look like mountains.
[Footnote 18: Mr. Pebble did not mean to say, I am sure, that the
word "mountain" comes from "mount," used in the sense of rising. The
original of the word mountain comes from the language of the People of
the Seven Hills, the Romans, and means a great mass of rock or earth
that sticks up.--_Translator._]
[Illustration: _Painted by Dewitt Parshall. In the possession of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art_
THE CATSKILLS IN A MIST
]
The Catskill Mountains are of this type, while real mountains may be
so worn down that you would take them for plains. You see, with the
Hills and the Mountains, as with other royal families, it isn't the
importance of the individual that counts, but the ancestry.
Another kind of real mountain, beside the folded-up kind, is the
mountain that is made where a rocky plain is split up into great stone
blocks by the movements of the earth crust, as it settles around the
shrinking centre. In the settling and crushing together of the rock
cover around the shrinking ball within, some of the blocks drop down,
and the blocks that are left sticking up make cliffs. Mountain ranges
so made have long, gentle slopes on the side opposite the cliffs. Then
there are volcanic mountains. Fujiyama, the sacred mountain of Japan,
is one of these.
Mountains are also formed where the molten rock on the inside of the
earth is forced up under layers of rock nearer the surface. This lifts
these rock layers into domes. In the course of time the rivers and the
weather wear away the overlying rocks, leaving the hard central core
standing out. Harder layers of the overlying rock, wearing down less
rapidly than the other layers, often stand out as circular ridges with
valleys in between, so that the central core looks like some old ring
master at a circus. The Bear Paw Mountains and the Little Snowies of
Montana are mountains of this type.
WHERE MOUNTAINS GET THEIR PEAKS
Most mountain peaks, except those of the volcanoes, are remnants of
hard rock which have been left standing while the rivers and the
weather cut away the softer rock around them.
[Illustration: IN THE HIMALAYAS THEY MIGHT CALL THESE "HILLS"
High as these mountains are--we are right on the roof of the
Rockies--if they were in the Himalayas they might be called "hills,"
because there the scenery grows so much taller. What does the sharpness
of the peaks say as to the age of these mountains? Compared with the
Appalachians, for example?]
In regions of gently rolling country even small hummocks are sometimes
called "mountains," while out West, where scenery grows so tall,
the Black Hills seem to the people only stepping-stones to the big
Rockies. So they call them "hills." In the region of the Himalaya
Mountains--mountains that don't think anything, you remember, of
climbing up 16,000 to 30,000 feet in the air--a peak of 10,000 feet is
often called a "hill."
II. Hills That Were Moved In
Nearly every region has hills, because every region has or has had
running streams and the streams have carved out the hills. But there
are kinds of hills that aren't home-made; they were made elsewhere and
moved in. I believe this is the biggest hill secret of all, speaking of
hills proper and not of mountains.
[Illustration: _From Norton's "Elements of Geology." By permission of
Ginn and Company_
KAME SCENERY IN NEW YORK STATE]
Almost all over the northern part of North America, as well as much of
Europe and Asia, there are mounds, heaps, and hills of various shapes
and sizes made up of a mixture of pebbles, sand, and clay. In the
United States these heaps make a big line of hills, like a procession
of ancient Indian chiefs, with bowed heads and stooped shoulders,
plodding back to the land of their fathers. And, sure enough, there
they go from down East clear across country to the far West and then
up North, where, as we know, these hill-moving giants, the glaciers,
came from.[19] For, beginning with Perth Amboy, N. J., say, you will
find them marching on through Elmira, N. Y., skirting the suburbs of
Cincinnati, winding their way through Indiana and Iowa up through
Wisconsin to the Dakotas and Montana, and so back into Canada.
[Footnote 19: Did you suspect the giants of this chapter were our old
friends the glaciers of the Ice Age, when I first began talking about
them?]
When the geologists first began digging into these hills they not only
found them as full of pebbles as a Christmas pudding is full of plums,
but the pebbles were of all kinds--sandstone, limestone, slate, granite.
JACK FROST DIDN'T DO IT!
"These different pieces of stone didn't come from the breaking up by
frost of the rock beds on which we now find them," said Some Wise Man,
"for then they would all have been of the same kind of rock."
"And besides," said Some Wise Man No. 2, "they would not have been
shaped into pebbles with the edges rounded off, as all pebbles are by
the waves of lakes or the sea or the water of flowing streams. So these
pebbles must have come from somewhere else."
"Yes, and a long way off," remarked Some Wise Man No. 3; "for look,
there aren't any rock beds anywhere around here from which some of
these pebbles could have been made."
"True enough," said Wise Man No. 4, "and I know what brought these
little foreigners. It was a great flood; for water moves not only
pebbles and clay, but, in times of flood, good-sized cobblestones."
WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "DRIFT" THEORY
So, for a long time, it was believed that the material in these hills
was drifted in by the waters. This was called the "drift" theory, and,
although it is now known that this theory was not the true one, such
heaps of clay and stones are still called "drift."
But the learned men kept on digging into the question and into the
hills, and finally more things were observed.
"Did you notice this?" said one. "The material is not separated into
layers and divided up into coarse, finer, finest as the sediment of
pebbles, sand, and mud is separated and divided when it settles along
shores. These pebbles, this sand and clay, are all mixed up."
"Look at this, will you?" (Here imagine a Learned Somebody picking
up a pebble with a scratched face like mine.) "Water never scratched
anything like that. Here are a lot more of these pebbles, all with
their faces scratched."
"And just see how all these scratched pebbles have flat faces," cried
another of these famous grown-up boys in these great field excursions.
"It looks to me as if they had been ground against something
hard--another rock, say; and for a long time."
HOW THE QUESTION WAS FINALLY SETTLED
Well, to make a long story short, they found that the glaciers of
the Ice Age, those great bodies of flowing ice, were the only things
that could have brought all this material together from such widely
separated regions (as shown by the different kinds of pebbles), and
left them all mixed up as they were; and the faces of many pebbles
scratched and flattened where they had been ground along.
And then, to put the question entirely beyond dispute, they find that
the glaciers are carrying down pebbles and stuff in just this way
to-day, and piling it up in hills in the valleys at the foot of the
mountains. Only the hills of to-day are much smaller, because the
glaciers themselves are so small compared with the giants of the past.
[Illustration: HOW THE OLD MEN MOVED THE HILL FURNITURE ABOUT
This picture of a glacier in Alaska shows you just how the Old Men
of the Mountain moved the hills about, that time. As indicated by
the white lines--which, of course, were added to the picture for the
purpose--the Alaska glacier melted back, leaving just such heaps of
pebbles, boulders, and soil as made certain types of hills. Then from
1910 to 1913 it advanced again, thus picking up the very hills it had
laid down and setting them farther along, just as the glaciers did in
the Ice Age.]
HOW THE HILL FURNITURE WAS MOVED ABOUT
During the Ice Age, when glaciers were all the fashion, they flowed
down, and then, as we have seen, melted back a certain distance; then
they flowed down again. Sometimes in later visits they flowed further
than before, and in so doing, you see, picked up some of the very
hills they had previously laid down and set them along somewhere else.
Sometimes we find different rows of hills, one right alongside the
other. This shows where the glacier melted away toward the mountains,
paused, then melted again and so on, each time leaving a group of hills
and not coming back there and disturbing them any more.
Such hills as we have been speaking of may be steep or gentle, and from
a few feet to more than 1,000 feet high, although they are seldom as
high as 1,000 feet.
And there are other kinds of hills made by the glaciers. One of the
most curious of these remind you of the serpent mounds left by the
mound builders in Ohio. These hills are the deposits left by the
streams, the veins inside the glacier's great body. The soil in them
is also apt to be in layers like the deposits of other rivers. These
hills wind along like serpents, because they reproduce the bends in the
streams inside the glacier. Such hills are called "eskers." They are
seldom more than a few rods wide and 10 feet or so in height. They run
for 10, 20, 40, 50, and sometimes 100 miles.
Around Boston, and all along Cape Cod and in parts of New York and
Wisconsin, you will see other hills called "drumlins"; and you will see
plenty of them, too. It is estimated that there are 6,000 in western
New York and 5,000 in southern Wisconsin, and they are all around
Boston. Bunker Hill is a drumlin. You wouldn't have to tell an Irish
boy what "drumlin" means, as they have these hills in Ireland, too, and
from Ireland came the name. The word means "little hill."
But while Mr. Glacier made the drumlins of the stuff he brought with
him, he enjoyed himself (at least let us hope so) tobogganing on hills
he found ready made. These hills are real mountains; usually the
granite heart of the mountain, because only a very strong rock could
stand having one of these playful giants riding over him and live to
tell the tale. Such glacier "slides" are referred to as "domes" or
"round tops" or "bald mountains."
Mr. Agassiz, the great scientist who spent so many years studying the
motion of glaciers, could tell from the height of one of these bald and
rounded hills how high the glacier was that rode over it. For instance,
the glaciers rode over what is known as Blue Mountain in Pennsylvania,
which is 1,500 feet high. "Then," Mr. Agassiz would have said, "the
glaciers that did that must have been at least 2,000 feet thick; for a
glacier can only flow over a rocky mass when it is half as tall again
as the rock."
You see it is the mass of it, the pressure of its own weight, that
boosts the glacier up the slide. It seems almost like lifting oneself
by one's boot-straps, doesn't it?
III. The Ants and the Volcanoes
Beside all the hills we have mentioned there are several others, well
worth looking into; ant-hills, for example, not only because ants are
so interesting in themselves but because the ants helped to answer what
for a long time was one of the puzzles of science, "How are volcanoes
made?"
When your mother's mother went to school--or it may have been back in
your mother's mother's mother's time--a little girl, on being asked in
the geography class, "What is a volcano?" was expected to say something
like this:
"Please, teacher, it's a mountain with a hole in it."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
_From a photograph. Copyright by W. P. Romans_
SACRED FUJIYAMA AND ITS COUNTERPART FOUR THOUSAND MILES AWAY
On the top is the famous Fujiyama, the sacred mountain of Japan,
and on the bottom Mount Rainier in the State of Washington. Although
they are more than four thousand miles apart, the two volcanoes
look as if they had been cast in the same mould, owing to the
uniform system by which volcanoes are built up.
THE WISE MEN AND THE ANT CRATERS
It does look it, doesn't it? But, what is still more striking, it
_isn't_ a mountain with a hole in it at all, if you mean, as the
little girl in the geography class meant, that it was once an ordinary
mountain and then had a hole put through it. For a long time it was
thought that volcanoes were simply mountains through which fire and
lava from the interior had forced its way. Finally, however, some
scientist thought perhaps of his Proverbs 6:6. In any event wise as he
must have been--how else could he have been a scientist?--he went to
the ant, learned her ways and became wiser. It was by noticing how the
ants build their little craters with the sand and clay they carry from
their underground homes that men got the idea that volcanoes may be
built up in much the same way. So they set to observing Mr. Volcano's
habits more closely, and sure enough, the ant had told the answer! The
stones, lava, cinders, and the stone dust called "volcanic ash" are
shot out by the explosion, and coming down in showers pile around the
opening, as the ant piles the pellets around the entrance to her nest.
As the explosions keep on the crater is piled higher and higher, and
the stones, cinders, and things, rolling down the sides, spread the
pile out at the bottom, much as the ant drops pellets over the edge
of her growing pile, and so both the cone-like ant-hill and the big
volcanic cone are built up.
WHY THE VOLCANO DOES NOT SMOKE
But here is something about volcanoes that will surprise most people.
They throw mud, they throw stones, but they don't smoke. What we call
smoke is the steam that makes--or at least helps make--the explosion.
It often has the color of brown smoke because of the rock which has
been blown into dust. Neither do volcanoes make "ashes." What is called
"ash" is this rock powder, made when the rocks are blown into pieces by
the sudden expansion of the water in them into steam.
WHY VOLCANOES SEEM TO FLAME
Neither do volcanoes flame, although they are supposed to. Only rarely
does flame issue from a volcano, and then only to a moderate extent,
due to the burning of the hydrogen gas. What seem to be huge flames
are the lights from the molten lava in the crater shining back on the
steam clouds above; and these apparent flames rise and fall and vary in
brightness because of the rise and fall of the lava.
But the greatest of volcanic eruptions--that is, the welling up
of melted rock from within the earth--have not built cones. The
lava spread out into vast plains in India and Abyssinia and in our
northwestern coast States. Great cracks in the earth cross one
another. It is at the crossroads that the volcanoes are apt to form,
while out of the cracks leading up to these crossroads the lava spreads
in sheets. Mount Shasta began at one of these traffic centres. It is a
big brother of the landscape which it overlooks.
[Illustration: "BUT VOLCANOES DO NOT SMOKE!"
This is an eruption of Vesuvius. You would think it was throwing
out smoke like a gigantic locomotive, wouldn't you, if you hadn't
read the text? The darker masses, which look so much like mingled
smoke and steam, are shadows. It is probably eight to ten miles
high--that cloud.
]
Lava, before it cools and for some centuries afterward, is the last
thing you would think of farming on, perhaps, but leave it to the
little chemists of the water and the air and it will decay into the
richest land you ever saw. That is why they raise the finest wheat and
the best fruit in the world right in the parts of Washington and Oregon
that were once covered by the lava flood.
Not only do volcanoes help to supply us with food by making rich soil
of the eruptions of the past, but all life might disappear from the
earth if they didn't go on exploding.
[Illustration: HOW VOLCANOES BLOW BUBBLES
The surface of lava is apt to bubble like hot mush; and for a
similar reason, the expansion of the gases within it. (In the case
of the mush it is the mixture of gases we call "air.") When such
lava cools you have sponge-like masses such as this.
]
Plants must have carbon and they get it from the air, but the amount
of it in proportion to their needs is never large. Moreover, every bit
of coal that is formed--and coal is being made to-day just as it was
in the coal ages, although not in such quantities--takes carbon from
the air and locks it up. Every bit of limestone deposited on the floor
of the sea locks up more carbon. But, fortunately, immense quantities
of carbon are given back to the air through the gases thrown out by
volcanoes, thus offsetting these losses.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by the American Museum of Natural History_
ROCKS AND BOMBS THROWN BY MOUNT PELÉE
Look at these giant rocks thrown out by Mount Pelée in 1902.
Compare them with the man and you will realize how big they are.
The rounded rocks in the foreground are volcanic "bombs"--masses of
lava discharged by successive outbursts of volcanic gases and given
their shape by being whirled through the air.
]
[Illustration: WHEN IS A VOLCANO DEAD?
This is Mount Rainier with its shroud of snow, reflected in Mirror
Lake. To all appearances it is as dead as dead can be; but until
after a volcano goes off you never can be entirely sure whether it
is dead or not; and then, of course, you know it isn't!
]
WHEN IS A VOLCANO REALLY DEAD?
When is a volcano dead? You never can tell. A volcano goes off when it
wants to, quite regardless of the fact that it has had the reputation
for a thousand years of being dead. And the worst of it is volcanoes
are like guns--only more so. A gun doesn't shoot any harder because
it wasn't supposed to be loaded; but the volcano, if it breaks out
unexpectedly, is violent in proportion to the length of time it has
been apparently dead. This is the reason. The original vent becomes
plugged up with the cooled lava. This plug being harder than the rest
of the mountain, the next outbreak is forced to take a new course,
and the longer the forces of explosion are held back the greater the
accumulation of energy and the more violent the discharge.
But why do volcanoes go off at all? Why can't they be quiet and
well-behaved like other mountains? Nobody knows for sure. On one thing
all scientific men seem to be now agreed; namely, that while the rocks
inside the earth are hot enough to melt they are hard as steel, owing
to the tremendous pressure of the rocks above them, and one theory
about volcanic eruptions is that they are caused by the release of the
pressure on this rock in one place and a pressing down in another, as
the earth's crust settles and crumples around the centre. Some of this
rock--that on which the pressure is released--melts and rises under the
folds of rising rock, and so makes the granite hearts of the greater
mountains. Some of it wells up through the cracks in the rock and
spreads in lava fields, while some of it gushes up and explodes at the
points where cracks cross and so make volcanoes.
This is one theory, but there are others. The latest is so big that we
will have to take it into the mind in sections.
THE LATEST THEORY OF ERUPTIONS
1. Imagine the interior of the earth divided into three zones. The
central zone, of course, is the hottest. Between this central zone and
the zone reaching down forty miles or so from the surface is a middle
zone. (Think of a doughnut ball inside a doughnut ring, with space
between the ball and ring. That will give you the idea.)
2. From what is known of the laws of heat it is assumed that the flow
of heat from the central to the middle zone is greater than the loss of
heat from the central to the outer zone. Thus the heat income of the
middle zone would constantly exceed its outlay, and so it would get
hotter and hotter.
[Illustration: THE MYSTERIOUS SHAFT OF MOUNT PELÉE
In 1902, after the first explosion, Mount Pelée continued its
eruptions for several months, and in the late stages there slowly
rose, through the crater, this strange shaft of red-hot lava,
like a great iron beam forged by giant hammers in Vulcan's famous
blacksmith-shop. As it rose it crumbled and finally fell to pieces.
It was forced up by the gases beneath and shaped by the crater
through which it came; but can you conceive of anything more weird
and awesome?
]
3. This middle zone is made up of different kinds of rock that require
different degrees of heat to melt them. So some parts of this zone
would melt and form pockets of liquid rock, while other parts were
still unmelted.
4. These masses of liquid rock would also tend to melt their own way
upward, especially when given a lift by gases; for gases would be given
off, also, in this heating and melting process, and tend to work their
way toward the surface, carrying with them the liquid rock.
5. Now the greater the pressure under which a thing is kept the more
difficult it becomes for it to flow; the less the pressure the more
easily it flows and the longer it remains in the fluid state. So as it
rose fluid rock would require less heat to keep it fluid and would have
more heat left over for melting its way up. Then, being joined by other
fluid travelers, the entire mass would finally come to a crack in the
earth. Finally, you see, it would be only a matter of five miles or so
of comparatively clear track up to the land of the fresh air and the
blue sky where the rest of us live and where the volcanologists (the
men who make a special study of volcanoes) would be waiting to give it
welcome!
THE VOLCANOES AND THE SEA
If you will locate with red ink the volcanoes on the world map you will
notice that volcanoes, like mountains, seem fond of the sea. Moreover,
while a large proportion of mountain chains are near sea water, and
some even dip their feet into it, volcanoes bob up right in the seas
themselves. Not only do the land volcanoes make a great circle of
fire 22,000 miles long around the rim of the Pacific, but within this
immense amphitheater are the islands of our story books "scattered in
pleiads" over the ocean. These islands are simply the tops of sea
volcanoes. Of all the active volcanoes, the great majority are on
islands or along the borders of continents.
[Illustration: ON THE FIRING-LINES OF THE VOLCANOES]
THE MOUNTAINS AND THE SEA
Last of all in this story of the secrets of the hills, let us speak of
the big brothers of the family--the mountains.
You remember in the story of how the continents came up out of the
sea about wise old Xenophanes of Colophon, who figured out that the
mountains must at one time have been under the sea and why he thought
so, don't you? (page 13). Now get your geography and come here a
moment; I want to show you something else. Turn to the map of North
America. Where are the great mountain chains? Nearly all along the
borders of the sea. Now look at the map of South America, and where
are the mountains? Along the borders of the sea. Then take Europe,
Asia, Africa, Australia, and you see the same thing. Usually the main
mountain chains are along the sea border or they stand near the borders
of what was once a sea; as in case of the Rocky Mountains.
[Illustration:
_From Norton's "Elements of Geology."
By permission of Ginn and Company_
A BABY MOUNTAIN THAT STOPPED TO REST
A mountain, as you can readily imagine, isn't made in a day. Here
is a little mountain near Hancock, Virginia, that started up ages
ago and then stopped to rest; one of the ripples in which the great
Appalachian waves died away. This baby mountain has no granite mass
in its centre, as big mountains have, because the wrinkling didn't
reach down far enough into the earth to release the pressure on the
molten rock.
]
Why should mountains show such a fancy for salt water? It seems
strange, doesn't it? I know why it is because I helped make a mountain
myself once--up on the Canada Coast it was--and I learned a good deal
of the mountains and their ways. I will tell you about the mountains
and the sea a little later; after I have told you some other things.
First of all, this is how the Granite family helped make mountains. As
the great stone sides of the mountain rise the enormous pressure on
the melted rock farther down in the earth is released, and is forced
up under the mountain as it rises. Then, cooling, it crystallizes into
granite, as explained on page 131.
[Illustration: MOUNTAINS MADE TO ORDER
Of course nobody ever watched a mountain crumpling up in the way
mountains are believed to crumple up, the process is so slow. Yet,
to try out the theory, geologists in the universities make layers
of different material, corresponding to the strata of different
kinds of stone, and then subject this composition to pressure at
both ends, as the earth crust is supposed to be pressed in the
crumpling process. The result is that these artificial strata take
similar forms to those we see in mountain rock. And that's the
answer!
Notice the similarity of the rock wrinkles in the baby mountain in
Virginia and these imitation mountains of the laboratory.
]
WHY MOUNTAINS RUN NORTH AND SOUTH
Look at your relief map once more. Which way do the mountains run in
North America? In South America? In Africa? They all run in a general
north and south direction, don't they? Do you see why? The fact that
they were made along the coasts of the oceans would make them run north
and south, too, wouldn't it? The same thing explains why the Alps do
not run north and south. They were made by the sinking of a sea that
runs east and west, and so they started out to run east and west, too;
then they got a wrench, the particulars of which we need not go into
here, and were much mixed up, as we find them to-day.
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE EARTH SLOWED UP
But there is another thing that may have helped to make many great
mountains run north and south. Bedtime and sunrise used to come a
good deal oftener than they do now, for then the earth turned faster
on its axis. It turned fastest of all at the equator, just as it does
to-day. So the lands in the equatorial belt were pulled up and the belt
enlarged. Then, as the speed of the globe slackened, the enlarged belt
began to wrinkle because there was not the same amount of centrifugal
or "fly-away-from-the-centre" force to make it stand out. So wrinkles
came at right angles to the belt, just as do the waist gathers in a
dress.
And now about the mystery of the mountains and the sea. When we visit
the rock mills of the sea along in October[20] we shall notice, among
other things, that the rock is made along the sea border, and that the
coarsest sediment settles nearest the land. As a result this part of
the deposit is built up faster than that farther off shore, and as it
gets heavier and heavier it sinks. The deposits farther away from the
shore sink, also, but more slowly because these deposits are not piled
up so fast. Now, if you come down on one end of a seesaw what happens
to the other end? It goes up, doesn't it? The effect of this sinking of
the rocks of the sea upon the rocks of the adjoining land is something
like that. The rocks that make the continents extend out under the sea,
and the weight of the newly laid stone on the sea margin end not only
tips the rock beds up, but, sinking in toward the continental mass,
wrinkles it up, as the pages of this book will wrinkle if you push them
from the front edge. So you get your mountains along the sea border.
And they are in parallel ranges, because the land is crumpled up into
several folds, like a table-cloth pushed from one side.
[Footnote 20: Chapter X, "The Autumn Winds and the Rock Mills of the
Sea."]
"But," you say, "how about the Rocky Mountains? And the Carpathian
Mountains in Europe, not to mention several others? _They_ are not on
the borders of the sea."
WHY SOME MOUNTAINS ARE FAR FROM THE SEA
That's no sign they weren't near a sea border at some time. Let me
just ask you. Suppose you found that most of the great mountain
chains are on the borders of seas, and suppose you had figured out
the reasons I have just been giving, then what would you do if you
found a few mountains far back from the sea? You would probably try to
find how they got moved back, wouldn't you? That's just what _other_
men of science did. A study of the rocks of the mountains themselves
and other things bearing on the question goes to show that since the
mountains were made the sea might have retired from regions where it
had previously advanced, as it did in the case of the Mississippi
Valley, or the land may have risen between these mountains and the
sea. Moreover, the down wash from the mountains themselves sometimes
builds wide lands, which, as they extend and shut back the sea, leave
the mountains farther and farther away. Much of the land extending
east from the base of the Rocky Mountains was made in this way. The
Mississippi Valley was for ages, you know (page 10) the Mediterranean
Sea of North America, lying in the downward fold of our continent
between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians.
[Illustration:
_From the painting by David James_
THE WAVE]
WHY SEA WAVES RISE TO GREET THE MOUNTAINS
One of the strangest, most poetic phases of the relation between the
great blue mountains and the great blue sea is that waves, as they
approach the shores of continents bordered by mountain ranges, rise
higher and higher; and the higher the mountains, the higher rise the
waves. These waves are not driven by wind or tide but seem drawn
forward by some strange power. This power, however, is no stranger
than the one that makes us fall and bump our noses when we stub our
toes--the power of gravitation, according to which all masses attract
each other. It is the mass in the mountains that exerts a pull on the
waves; and the greater the mountains the greater the pull, of course.
In the Indian Ocean, for example, around the head of the Arabian Sea,
the waves rise far above sea level, largely because there is beyond
them, on the land, one of the greatest mountain masses in the world.
Wouldn't it give you a queer feeling if you were, say, a sailor, and
for the first time saw waves act like that? Uncanny, almost, isn't it?
But do the mountains remember their old parent of the white flowing
rocks and beard, Father Neptune? They act as if they did; particularly
in the way in which they come to imitate, in time, the shape of the
waves of the sea.
Ruskin,[21] speaking to artists about drawing mountains, says:
"Good and intelligent mountain drawing recognizes a great harmony among
the summits and their tendency to throw themselves into waves, closely
resembling those of the sea itself; sometimes in free tossing toward
the sky, but more frequently in the form of breakers, concave and steep
on one side, convex and less steep on the other."
[Footnote 21: "Modern Painters," Chapter IV.]
When you stand some day on one of the high peaks of the Rocky
Mountains, and look out over the great fields of upheaved stone,
you will notice how closely the parallel ridges resemble ranks of
waves making toward a shore. Like sea waves also, the vast backs of
these waves of stone are long and sloping, while their fronts are
comparatively short and much steeper. Another thing that makes you feel
as if you were looking out upon a sea whose waves had been changed to
stone is the fact that these stone waves are not only green but have
white caps; for in the valleys, and far up the sides of the mountains,
are the forests with the perennial green of their pines, and on the
peaks the eternal snows.
[Illustration: "AND EVERY TOSSING OF THEIR BOUNDLESS CRESTS"]
Not only is the mounting and forward drive of waves repeated in
mountain forms, but also the whirlpools among the rocks when sea waves
reach the shore. Says the famous French geographer, Reclus[22]:
"The centre of the Pyrenees resembles a great whirlpool around which
the mountains rise like enormous waves."
[Footnote 22: "The Earth."]
Finally we might imagine that the mountains, like the mountain streams,
hear the call of the sea and are stirred by it. For, again to quote
from Ruskin's wonderful chapter on the nature of the thing we call a
mountain:
"Behold as we look farther into it, it is all touched and troubled.
The rock trembles through its every fibre, like the chords of an
Æolian harp--like the stillest air of spring with the echoes of a
child's voice. Into the heart of all those great mountains and through
every tossing of their boundless crests and deep beneath all their
unfathomable defiles, flows that strange quivering of their substance.
"'I beheld the mountains and lo they trembled; and all the hills moved
lightly.'"
[Illustration:
_From Norton's "Elements of Geology."
By permission of Ginn and Company_
"THAT STRANGE QUIVERING OF THEIR SUBSTANCE"
This picture shows mountain-peaks carved in folded strata in the
Rocky Mountains in Montana. How well it illustrates Ruskin's grand
lines.
]
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
Of course you saw that the Greeks meant the story of Phaeton to
account, among other things, for the origin of deserts, but what is
there in it that would lead one to believe the Greeks knew there
were such things as volcanoes? Read what the encyclopedia says
about volcanoes and Vulcan and the physical geography of Greece and
the Greek islands.
Where is Mount Stromboli and why is it called "The Lighthouse of
the Mediterranean"?
On which of our coasts do we have young and growing mountains, and
on which old mountains that are much worn down?
Did you ever notice, on your map of Europe, how the curve of
the Carpathian Mountains follows the curve of the shore of the
beautiful Adriatic Sea so far away?[23] What does that remind you
of in the story of the relation between the mountains and the sea?
[Footnote 23: How far away is it? The scale of miles on your map will
tell.]
"Yes," you say, "but if mountains are formed on the borders of the
sea why are the Carpathians so far from the Adriatic; and the Alps
so far from the Mediterranean and the Rocky Mountains of America
and the Altai mountains of Asia so far away from any sea at all?"
Professor Heilprin[24] knew you would say that; at least I suppose
he did, for he has explained all this in his little book, written
especially for young people, "The Earth and Its Story." After you
have read this part of the story write it out in your own words and
then copy it into your notebook. You might call your own story,
"How Mountains are Moved Back from the Sea."
[Footnote 24: Professor of Geology in the Academy of Natural Sciences,
Philadelphia.]
What mountains do the waves of the Indian Ocean rise to salute? How
do they compare in size with other mountains that you know of?
How does the carbon in the gases of volcanoes get into the plants?
What does it say in Proverbs 6:6 that might remind one of the fact
that the ants helped solve the puzzle as to how volcanoes are made?
As to the hills that were moved in, a Wisconsin writer, who has,
among other things, written delightfully of his companionship with
the rocks and hills of his State[25] tells about sinking a well 132
feet deep on his farm, and going through this imported scenery all
the way.
[Footnote 25: Charles D Stewart, "Essays on the Spot."]
"Somewhere down there," he says, "if I had kept on going I should
have struck the original Wisconsin."
And why not be an author yourself? Start a little book of science
of your own and learn to make notes on interesting things you
have been reading about. For instance, put in it now some of the
different things we have learned about the wonder-workers of the
Ice Age, up to and including this chapter. Call what you write "The
Story of the Old Men of the Mountain." At the end of the part you
write now you can put "To be continued," just as they do in a story
paper; for we are not through with the work of the old men, as you
will see.
How did Rome get its seven hills? (You know it was called The City
of the Seven Hills.)
The Bible quotation in Ruskin about the trembling of the mountains
is from Jeremiah 4:24. How grand it sounds, doesn't it? Like the
music of a pipe organ. The Bible has many references to "hills" and
mountains. Here are some of the most striking: Psalms 114:4; Exodus
20:18; Deut. 5:23; Rev. 8:8; Micah 1:4; Isaiah 54:10.
Where are the most famous of the Bad Lands of our Western States?
Those of South Dakota are perhaps the strangest. Among other
strange things is the fact that some of the hills were set on fire
by rain--goodness knows how long ago--and these hills are like
gigantic stoves for the cattle, who never fail to collect around
them on bleak days.
In the article on South Dakota in the Britannica you'll learn all
about how the rain started the fire. Then perhaps you will want to
look up "spontaneous combustion" and "iron pyrites."
Aren't those ancient monsters whose bones they find in the hills
comical looking creatures--now that we are several million years
safely away from them? The comic artists (of pen and pencil) are
always having fun with them. Arthur Guiterman, for instance, in
picturing what spring must have been like in those old days:
"Go-dum, bally hoosh!" is the note of the Icthyosaurus.
"Notorum-dorando!" the blithe Hippocampus replies.
"Chin-chin-orizaba-pelote!" rings the jubilant chorus
Of sweet Pterodactyls that wing the cerulean skies.[26]
[Footnote 26: "The Laughing Muse."]
[Illustration: ON A NEW ENGLAND HILL
"Great lumps of pudding the giants threw,
They tumbled about like rain."
]
CHAPTER VII
(JULY)
They flung them over to Roxbury Hills;
They flung them over the plain;
And all over Milton and Dorchester too
Great lumps from the pudding the giants threw.
They tumbled about like rain.
--_The Ballad of the Boulders._
THE STONES OF THE FIELD
In our rambles during the summer vacation season we are constantly
coming across boulders; in the mountains, in the fields and by the sea.
In the mountains and near rocky headlands or at the foot of the cliffs
we take them for granted; they have evidently fallen from the rock
walls above them. But haven't you often wondered how they got out on
the prairies far from any rock masses? This chapter tells about that
and other curious things in the lives of the great Boulder family.
I. Big Chief Boulder
Even the Indians who, in those early days, had never gone to school or
studied geography, used to wonder how these big stones had travelled to
the places where they found them.
Once upon a time the Indians in the wilds of Minnesota found an
unusually big granite boulder lying among the hills. So what did they
do but paint a head with eagle feathers on one end of the stone. Then
they put stripes around its body. You see they thought of Mr. Boulder
as a big chief in feathered head-dress and painted for war.
WONDER THE BEGINNING OF KNOWLEDGE
It may seem foolish to make all this fuss about finding a big stone
in a field. But these ignorant red men were much wiser than we are if
we don't wonder about it too. Wonder is the beginning of knowledge;
and the Indians thus took the first step toward one of the great
discoveries of geology.
It was just such wondering on the part of scientific men that led to
their finding out not only how these big stones got into strange lands
but how certain kinds of hills that we have just been reading about
were made. For, as you must have already guessed, the moving of these
boulders was one of the many jobs Mr. Glacier did for us during the
Ice Age. But pretend you don't know the answer. It took the wise men a
long time to find it and that's where the fun comes in--in the hide and
seek.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Bourne & Shepherd, Calcutta_
THE STRANGE OLD INDIAN OF MOUNT ABU
If those Minnesota Indians thought a boulder of the usual shape
was some big chief from another land, what would they have thought
if they had set eyes on this solemn old creature? He sits by the
hour--like Socrates in the market-place--and has sat for ages
gazing down at his image in a lake at the foot of Mount Abu in
India. He was carved into that shape by sands blown from the North
Indian desert acting on the softer parts of the rock. Most Indians,
as you know, are silent people, but this old chap, so I hear, never
speaks at all!
Yet some day he may, all of a sudden, take a jump! Boulders do that
sometimes, as you will see before you have finished this chapter.
]
ON THE NORTH END OF THE WORLD
Some of the boulders seem to have belonged to Alpine Clubs, for you
find them away up on mountain sides; some of them as high as 6,000
feet--that's over a mile you know--above the level of the sea. And
often these boulders are not of the same material as the huge pieces
of broken rock that fall from the neighboring mountain walls. Moreover
the blocks of stone from the mountain are angular; they are not nicely
rounded off as are boulders and pebbles. It's that way all over the
north end of the world as far south as the Ohio in this country and the
Alps in Europe.
[Illustration: WOULDN'T IT MAKE YOU NERVOUS, TOO?
This picture is from a story about a little boy who had to cross
a field full of big, dark boulders like this at night, and how
nervous it made him.
]
But there's one place in which you never will find boulders, and that's
in a country where there are caves of any considerable size. Neither
will you find such caves where there are boulders.
Why shouldn't the caves and the boulders live happily together just
like other people? The answer is simple. The glaciers of the Ice Age,
with their enormous weight, crushed in the roofs of caves in every
region over which they flowed; and it was these same glaciers that left
the boulders. Since the glaciers went away the underground rivers that
hollow out the caves have not had time to make new ones. It takes ages
and ages to make a nice big cave.
II. The Train of Thought
These widely scattered boulders furnished the students of the subject
with the very best evidence that there was once an Ice Age. First, the
geologists noticed, just as the Indians did, that the boulders were of
a different kind of rock from that of the regions in which they were
found. Up in Wisconsin, running southwest from Waterloo is a train (as
it is called) of boulders sixty miles long. The boulders are of a very
hard rock called quartzite, while all the rock deposits in that region
are of limestone or sandstone.
[Illustration: MR. BOULDER ON HIS PERCH
This is what is called a "perched boulder." Being a harder kind of
rock than that on which it was left by the glaciers, it has held
out against the winds and weather, while the stone under it has
been worn away.
]
In eastern Wisconsin, along with these stones, have been found pieces
of copper, although there are no copper deposits near by. To the
northeast of where the fragments of copper were found are the great
copper deposits of what is now Michigan, and from this region the
glaciers brought the copper and scattered it about as they moved
south and southwest. So these mysterious stones and other things kept
pointing toward the north, in a kind of dumb show.
In mountain rain storms you can see the torrents driving great stones
before them, so one of the first theories about the stranded boulders
was that, at some time in the earth's history, there had been great
floods covering whole continents, sweeping away rocks from the
mountains and carrying them here, there, and everywhere. That theory
also accounted for the rounded shape of the boulders, for if you have
a volume of water big enough and swift enough you can roll boulders
wherever you like.
WHAT A QUEER HOBBY-HORSE!
But why should the boulder trains all lead to the north? And how could
water carry boulders right across a deep mountain valley and pile them
high up on the mountains on the other side? How could water perch one
boulder on another or on a flat ledge of rock or on the summits of the
cliffs? Boulders so perched are very common, and often they are so
nicely balanced that a man can set them rocking; and sometimes a small
boy can do it. Every young man who goes to Dartmouth College knows
about the rocking stone some half mile east of the college. In the town
of Barre is a big boulder with a small boulder on its back, and the
small boulder can be set rocking like a child's hobby-horse.
[Illustration: HOW THE MOUNTAIN TORRENTS HELP SHAPE THE BOULDERS]
The only thing that could handle boulders in this way, so it turned
out, were the glaciers. By following up the boulders to their homes
in the mountains they found on the backs of the glaciers of to-day
stones just like those in our fields, and they found them thickly
scattered over the ground where the glaciers melted back during the
summer months. The glaciers not only pick up boulders from the mountain
torrent beds, as they move along, but themselves pluck rocks from
mountain sides. Huge blocks of rock, dislodged when water freezes in
the cracks of the mountain walls, also fall upon the glacier. It was
the boulders held underneath the ice that left their autographs, deep
grooves on the native bed-rock in the regions into which the glaciers
of the Ice Age came.
These great ice rivers filled the mountain valleys, and reaching far
up on the mountain sides carried boulders to those heights. Sometimes
the glacier left the stones standing on a narrow point on top of other
rocks--so making the rocking stones.
[Illustration: HOW THEY KNOW THE OLD MEN DID IT
Here is one of those heaps of boulders, pebbles, and soil that the
glaciers of the Ice Age brought and left behind them. They know
those ancient glaciers did this, because just such heaps are found
under the edges of glaciers to-day.
]
III. Leaves from the Family Records of the Boulders
What I have said so far of the Boulders is mainly about their travels
into foreign lands and how they were received by intellectual people.
But there are many other interesting things to be found in their
family records that you will want to know about, I am sure.
HOW THE BOULDERS RODE ON THE WATER
One of these is how they came to ride on the water, when I said just
a little while back that only _ice_ could carry them across mountain
valleys, and pile them up on the mountain sides. That was all true;
yet, under certain circumstances, boulders _have_ ridden on the water.
As the glaciers melted away finally in those early days the water, as
you know, helped make rivers and lakes. Then, from the front of the
glaciers icebergs broke off and floated away down the rivers or across
the lakes. In these icebergs boulders were often imbedded, and so were
dropped wherever the iceberg carried them before it dissolved.
[Illustration: HOW THE BOULDERS RODE ON THE WATER
This is a scene in August in Glacier National Park. It illustrates
how boulders of the Ice Age travelled by water, when icebergs
containing them broke from the glaciers and floated away on rivers
and lakes.
]
Ice helps handle boulders in still another way; but before I tell you
what it is I want you to imagine you are an Indian, away back in the
days before Indian schools, and see if you wouldn't be as superstitious
as they were. Just suppose then that you are a red child of the forest,
and that along a certain lake you saw near the shore a lot of boulders
scattered about in a disorderly way. This, say, was in the fall. But
when you came back the following spring you found them all piled up
into a wall along the lake, and you positively knew no member of your
tribe or of any other had done the piling. Wouldn't it make you feel a
little superstitious?
HOW MR. WINTER BUILDS BOULDER WALLS
It was Mr. Winter that built these walls. With the spring break-up on
lake shores big cakes of ice, blown by stiff gales, pry up the boulders
along shore, and force them further up the bank. Then another gale
and another push, and more stones are crowded up on top of the first
course, and so there is built a rude wall. Some of the stones may be
crowded together side by side. This makes what is called a "boulder
pavement." But even this isn't all of nature's engineering in the
handling of boulders. Here is another example. Ice is formed on lakes
early in the winter when the air is but little below the freezing point
of water. Under these circumstances ice expands. Then, with the first
severe cold spell it contracts and so cracks. Water, rising from below,
fills these cracks, and is itself, in turn, frozen to ice. Then comes
a warm wave, these ice wedges swell, and so the ice sheet expands,
pushes up along the shore and, if there are any boulders there moves
them about; or sometimes drives them deep into the bank so that the
following spring it looks as if somebody had been shooting at the bank,
using boulders for bullets.
The sun shapes boulders somewhat as the blacksmith shapes iron, but
instead of striking with a hammer it strikes with its rays. Rock is
a poor conductor of heat, so the heat from the sun only goes into
the rock a little way. The result is that the surface expands and so
loosens itself from the rock beneath and in course of time falls off.
With the cooling of the atmosphere at night just the opposite thing
takes place; the surface cools off first and so, contracting, loosens
itself from the body of the stone. It seems to be a regular tug of war
between the heat of the day and the cool of the night. First of all the
corners and sharp edges break away because, being thinner, they are
heated and cooled more quickly. The boulders owe their rounded shapes
most of all, however, to the fact that they were ground together in the
body of the glaciers as those great ice sheets flowed along.
GOOD TALKS BY LEARNED BOULDERS
Of course, the boulders, like other people, differ in their tastes--as
you can tell by their talk. The granite boulders have the most to
say about travel because they are so hard that they can take longer
journeys than weaker rocks, and so have more to tell. But there is
another branch of the family that is still more "bookish" as you may
say. These are the "pudding stone" boulders--conglomerates. In that
most interesting biography, "The Story of a Boulder," Professor Geikie
describes a stone that was not only made up of a variety of pebbles,
but in which there was a section of sandstone. The sandstone and the
conglomerate had been neighbors in some rock ledge just as the pebble
section and the smooth sand section are always neighbors where the
shores descend into the sea. So when the rock mass, which was finally
rounded into a boulder, broke away it included portions of both
sandstone and conglomerate.
[Illustration: WHERE THE SEA HELPS SHAPE THE BOULDERS]
The upper part of this boulder--the sandstone--had in it stems and
leaflets of plants of the Coal Age, changed to coal. The pebbles below
were fragments of more ancient rocks made at a time when frogs as big
as the oxen of to-day lived in the marshes.
"They must have had a croak like a fog-horn," said the High School Boy.
In this story of the boulder, Professor Geikie says:
"I had here a quaint old black letter volume of the Middle Ages giving
an account of the events taking place at the time it was written and
containing in its earlier pages numerous quotations from the authors of
antiquity."
[Illustration: WHICH DO YOU SAY?]
The "quotations from the authors of antiquity," were the pebbles, of
course, once parts of older rocks.
I have spoken of the boulders as authors. You will also be interested
in their relations with artists. Boulders add much to the picturesque
effect of the shores of lakes and seas and mountain ravines, as they
appear to the traveller, and as artists reproduce them in pictures.
They also add to the beauty of streams, by forming rapids. These
boulders that are piled in so thick as to make rapids are brought
in by smaller but swifter tributaries that flow into larger but more
sluggish streams. Rapids are favorite topics for landscape artists.
They are characteristic of the work of Ruysdael, for example, with whom
you have become well acquainted in your picture studies in school.
Of the drawing of stones in general Ruskin says:
"There are no natural objects out of which an artist, or any one who
appreciates the form of things, can learn more than out of stones. A
stone is a mountain in miniature. The fineness of Nature's work is
so great that into a single block a foot or two in diameter she can
compass as many changes of form and structure on a small scale as she
needs for her mountains on a large one, using moss for forests and
grains of crystal for crags."[27]
[Footnote 27: "Modern Painters."]
[Illustration: WHY BOULDERS SOMETIMES TAKE A JUMP
Boulders sometimes jump up, all of a sudden, as if they had sat
on a pin. They do this when an earthquake wave passes straight
through the globe; from Ecuador, say, to Borneo. Such waves, called
"waves of transmission," travel "incog" as it were, not causing
any disturbance until they reach the surface again. Then if there
happens to be a big rock on the spot, up it jumps--the funniest
thing you ever saw!
Harry Furniss, the famous English cartoonist, made this picture
just for a joke.
]
On page 157 you will find two pictures of stones by two famous
landscape artists, Claude and Turner. Of the stones in one picture Mr.
Ruskin says, "they are massy and ponderous as stones should be"; while
the stones in the other picture are "wholly without weight."
In which of the pictures would you say the stones are "massy and
ponderous," and in which are they "wholly without weight?"
Now look at the "Hide and Seek" notes below and see if you and Mr.
Ruskin think alike.
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
A boy scout, as you know, is expected, among other things, to be an
Indian (a good Indian, of course); to keep his eyes wide open as he
goes about in the woods and fields. In that way he is always coming
across things to wonder over, such as the big stone the Indians
found.
It's just such boys that great men are made of. All the great
scientists began in that way.
Take the case of Hugh Miller, for example. In the encyclopedias you
will meet him as a famous geologist, along with great artists and
inventors and statesmen and other fine company; but at first he was
only a boy, like the rest of us. And he had very little chance to
go to school, but he went anyhow; went to school, like Lincoln, to
all the good books he could get hold of and also to the stones of
the field. After a while he got so he could write books himself,
and they are among the most readable books you ever saw. You just
read his story of "The Old Red Sandstone," and if you don't open
your eyes!
The encyclopedia will tell you a great deal about the boy himself
and about "Uncle Sandy" and "Uncle James," and how they helped him.
But the start of it was this:
One day a mason in Scotland[28] broke off a piece of stone--he was
building a wall at the time--and inside of the stone he found--what
do you think? A fish! Inside of the stone, mind you!
[Footnote 28: Hugh was a Scotch boy.]
Of course you won't be surprised to hear that it was a queer,
outlandish sort of fish, and that it was dead. In fact, it had been
dead so long that it also had turned to stone. In short, it was a
fossil. But no Pharaoh in his huge pyramid ever became more famous
than did that little fish in his tomb of stone.
Yet, would you believe it?--neither the mason nor his fellow
workmen thought much about it. They frequently came upon these
fossils and, beyond being idly curious at first, paid little
attention to them.
This day, however, among these workmen was Hugh Miller, who was
also a stone-mason by trade. Hugh got as excited over this fish as
a boy. (He was only seventeen at the time, I believe.)
"The story of this queer fish," he said to himself, "must be as
good as Sinbad the Sailor, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Jack the Giant
Killer, that I used to like so well when I was a little lad;"[29]
and he determined to find out all he could about it. He found from
the geology books that there was much yet to be learned about such
fish, and so he proceeded to study the stones. He opened the stones
with his hammer as you open a book. He put in all his leisure time
at this work, with the result that he not only became one of the
world's famous geologists, but he wrote books in which he made it
a point to tell these curious stories of ancient life in the sea,
so that people without any previous scientific knowledge could read
and enjoy them.
[Footnote 29: He had read all these stories and a lot more, so my old
Chambers' Encyclopedia says.]
Besides "The Old Red Sandstone" he wrote "Footprints of the
Creator," "The Testimony of the Rocks," "My Schools and School
Masters," "Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland," and a
book of poems. Not all the conclusions he came to are accepted
to-day--for geology, like all the sciences, is always growing--but
the history of its growth and how men reasoned things out is quite
as interesting and profitable as the facts themselves, and Hugh
Miller has a particularly attractive way of telling things.
So you see those Indians who painted up old Big Chief Boulder were
on the right track; they were deeply interested in it and its being
there as a great and mysterious work of nature. They named it
"Waukon," an Indian word meaning "mystery."
Oh, yes, and about boulders in art, it's the stone in the upper of
the two pictures that Ruskin considers "massy and ponderous" and
hence true to nature. Turner painted it.
CHAPTER VIII
(AUGUST)
In the parching August wind
Cornfields bow the head.
--_Christina G. Rossetti._
Over the sea-like, pathless,
Limitless waste of the desert.
--_Longfellow._
THE DESERT
August is usually such a hot, dry month that it ought to be a good time
for talking of deserts. We can realize better what a desert is and
what an interesting region it must be to those who spend their lives
there--the Arabs and the camels, for instance. In fact, there are so
many strange and striking things to be seen and learned in deserts that
whole books--including many stories--have been written about them, and
I'm sorry we can give the subject only one chapter.
I. The Face of the Desert
I sometimes think it was no wonder the old Sphinx got to asking
conundrums. Always looking toward the desert and its mysteries, how
could he help it? The desert is just full of conundrums. For instance:
Where is it that rains fall without reaching the earth?
[Illustration:
_From the painting by Elihu Vedder_
THE QUESTIONER OF THE SPHINX
]
Where is it that there are lake beds without lakes, river beds without
rivers, and rivers without mouths?
Where do you see stretches of water that aren't there, and men and
animals walking and trees growing--most of them upside down?
Where are the roses of the land and the waves of great inland seas made
of sand and where does the wind always blow the mountains away?
Of course you would probably give the right answer at once--"the
desert"--because you know I am talking about deserts. And the "water
that isn't there," and the trees and people and things that are upside
down--you probably know that's the mirage; and that the inland seas
with their waves of sand are the dunes; that the rivers without mouths
are those that, like the Tajunga in California, lose their waters in
the sand.
Most people who have gone to school know all these things. Most people
also think of the desert as just a sea of sand and all tawny, like a
lion's skin; but this is wrong. The Romans used to call the African
desert "the panther's skin," because of the tawny stretches spotted
with the dark palms of the oases, but the sands are not all tawny, and
the desert isn't all covered with sand.
If we could arrange to get on the back of any one of the great birds of
the Sahara--say an eagle or his big cousin the vulture--and sail with
him on his way to dinner, the scenery would unroll beneath us something
like this:
On the northern border the Atlas Mountains, with precipices of wild
beauty and ranges of bare, pink rock outlined against the blue of
the morning sky; then dune waves stretching for miles and miles with
valleys between them, so wide that it takes the camels from breakfast
time until noon to lumber their way across. The crests of some of these
dune waves go spinning off in spray with every freshening breeze.
Little dunes often dissolve away in the wind as the caravan moves
toward them.
GAUNT OUTLINES OF THE HUNGRY HILLS
Then we come to more mountain ranges running right across the desert's
face, their bare rocks shivered and shelving down into broken fragments
at their feet; then sharp-edged, jagged hills--not rounded, plump,
and well-fed hills, such as we have at home. They are the bones of the
hungry landscape showing through. Then we come to bare table-lands and
the empty beds of rivers and lakes that long ago went dry; valleys
scattered with boulders of all sizes and in every imaginable position;
and so on over into the Arabian desert, with its flats of white sand
closed in by high cliffs, and vast stretches of black and red gravel.
More of the sand and gravel of the desert is red than yellow; but some
of it is white and some of it is black.
[Illustration: AN OASIS]
[Illustration: THE DARK HILLS AND THE FIGURES IN WHITE
"The Baths of the Damned," the superstitious Arabs call the region
of the Northern Sahara in which you come upon these strange white
figures. The fearsome name was suggested by the fact that the
figures slowly rise from some hot region inside the earth. In
reality they are mounds of carbonate of lime deposited by the water
of hot springs heavily charged with dissolved limestone. Similar
springs in our Yellowstone Park spout up in the form of geysers
and form "geyser basins"--huge stone tubs. Here in the desert the
water doesn't spout; it bubbles up slowly and so builds the mounds.
In the background you see black masses of volcanic rock, for this,
like Yellowstone Park, is a volcanic region where the underground
rocks haven't cooled off.
]
A CHAOS OF COLOR IN THE ROCKS
The desert wears rocks and stones of as many colors as the jewels of
Oriental kings. It also runs much to solemn black in its heaps of
volcanic rock with cold limestones on the heights; but you can see
blue-grays, browns, ochres of every shade gleaming in the sun, the reds
of the rusting iron in them staining the precipices and the walls; and
there are purples and pinks and dark greens and violets. These colored
rocks are often fantastically mixed together, like the colors on an
Easter egg.
THE SKELETONS OF THE DEAD RIVERS
And here we come upon one of those skeletons of dead rivers that I
spoke about. There they are, the river valleys and the river beds,
full of sand and gravel, and with boulders along the banks, and branch
valleys running into them; a river system all complete but for one
thing--water. It's just as if the main valley and the branches had been
made all ready but the river never came; or as if there had been rivers
there once but they couldn't stand the climate! Of course, when a
cloudburst comes along it helps itself to these ready-made river-beds;
but for the most part they stand as empty as the ruins on the desert's
edge in which
... the lion and the lizard keep
The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep.[30]
[Footnote 30: "The Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam.]
Not only do the size of the river-beds show that there used to be more
frequent rains in these regions of desolation, but right at the edge of
the northern Sahara are the remains of immense aqueducts; great troughs
built of stone and carried on bridges from the source of a water supply
to a city. When the Romans owned the earth--including the Sahara
desert--they were famous builders of these aqueducts.
[Illustration: WHY DYING RIVERS MULTIPLY BY TWO
Director Hornaday, of the New York Zoo, took this picture while
in the arid regions of the great Southwest. It shows a little
stream dying away in the desert sands. Now just notice how a little
knowledge of nature's methods as a landscape artist makes the most
commonplace scenery interesting. All streams as they go dry have
a tendency to spread out arms like that; sometimes two, sometimes
four or more, but always in twos or multiples of two. The reason
is that as the water evaporates the stream becomes weaker and so
is obliged to drop a part of its load. The heaviest part of the
load--the most pebbles, sand, and soil--is carried in the middle of
the stream, owing to the current being stronger, relieved as it is
from the friction of the banks. So bars of sand, gravel, and such
stuff are built up that finally divide the water into two branches.
Then if the water keeps on flowing, each of these branches divides
by two, and so on. You see the same thing in the mouths of deltas.
]
"But what about the roses made of sand? That's a conundrum you didn't
answer."
Oh, yes, we must get down closer to the desert to see these. We can't
see them in the bird's-eye view we have been taking. The desert sand
has a great deal of gypsum in it, and when the sand gets a wetting from
a cloudburst this gypsum crystallizes and forms what are called "sand
roses." These "roses" are of various sizes and forms; some look like
camelias and some like a cluster of pearls. They are not common and you
have to hunt for them.
[Illustration: ALL THE COMFORTS OF HOME
Children in the primary grades have here told us, with their clever
little fingers, about life in Africa immediately south of the big
desert, the part of Africa where they have rain and to spare.
]
II. How the Desert Makes Its Sand
Most of the sand of the desert, as you may imagine, is home-made; and
it is very curious to notice the different which it is manufactured.
The desert sun and the cloudless nights have a great deal to do with
it.
[Illustration: HOW THE ARAB FARMER GATHERS HIS DATES]
Think of the hottest day in August you ever saw, and then multiply
by two. That will give you an idea of how hot a desert gets in the
day-time--something like 200 degrees; and 212 degrees boils eggs, you
know! But how cold do you suppose it gets at night? Fifteen minutes
after sunset the temperature drops to freezing. The reason of this is
that there are no clouds over the desert to keep the heat of the sand
wastes and the burning rocks from passing off rapidly into space. The
days are so hot and the nights are so cold that the rocks get a kind of
fever and ague, which makes them pull themselves to pieces.
THE "GOOSE-FLESH" ON THE ROCKS
It is the same process we have just read about in the story of the
stones of our fields, only it goes on much faster in the desert on
account of the more rapid changes of temperature. You know how your
skin will pucker up into goose-flesh when you are cold. The desert
rocks do something similar. Because rock is a poor conductor, the heat
of the day and the cold of the night penetrate only a little way--only
through the skin of the rock, as it were; so this skin, stretching in
the day-time and puckering up at night, becomes loosened and shells off
bit by bit. Then it is blown about and in time ground into sand by the
desert winds.
Some rocks have an additional way of getting picked to pieces. Granite
is one of these. It has several different kinds of mineral in it, and
some of these minerals contract and expand faster than others; some
more than others. As a consequence, the particles of the rock keep
pulling and hauling at each other. This helps to break it up into
little pieces, which soon become sand. The darker the rock, other
things being equal, the greater the changes, because anything dark--a
suit of clothes, for instance--absorbs heat faster than a light object.
[Illustration:
_From Norton's "Elements of Geology."
By permission of Ginn and Company_
HOW RAIN-DROPS HELP SPLIT BOULDERS
A big boulder in western Texas split, just as you see it here, by
rain-drops, with the help of the sun, and under the conditions
described in the text, sat for this photograph. A friend of mine
who has been all over that country says that on blistering-hot
days you can see little pieces pop out of the granite boulders,
like chips from an invisible chisel struck by an invisible hammer.
This is why: We Granites are made up of particles--little bits--of
several different minerals, and some of these minerals expanding
much faster than others pop themselves out.
]
The great mountain rocks of the desert, bare of all protecting soil and
verdure, are always crumbling as a result of all these causes, and so
the winds are constantly blowing them away, piece by piece.
HOW LITTLE RAIN-DROPS SPLIT BIG BOULDERS
As if everything in the desert were in the sand-making business the
very rain-drops help make sand. The rain-drops do this in much the same
way that the farmer breaks big boulders in his fields, so that he can
more easily haul them away, piece by piece. He builds a fire against
the boulder, gets it as hot as he can, then rakes the fire away, dashes
water on the stone, and--bang! It cracks as if old Thor had struck it
with his hammer.
You see why this is, don't you, after what we have been saying about
why the rock's skin chips off? The water suddenly cools the highly
heated rock, and the parts shrinking pull away from each other with a
bang! bang! bang! The hot desert rocks, dashed by the torrents of a
cloudburst, break apart just like that, and you can hear them. Stones
twenty-five feet across are often broken into many pieces after a
downpour. Then the finer pieces of rock that are made in this continual
splitting, and by the chipping that goes on day and night, the fierce
winds grind against each other; so manufacturing sand. And the fiercer
winds also drive coarse sand against crumbling rock surfaces, thus
grinding them away and making more sand. So the winds, using sand to
make sand, put the sand out at interest, you may say.
And on all its sand, made in these various ways--by wind and rain and
heat and cold, and the crystal fairies of the land of change--the
desert puts its special trade-mark, just as a manufacturer puts his
trade-mark on his goods. If you should take some desert sand and some
sand from the shores of the sea and show them to a man who knows about
such things, he would say (after he had put them under a microscope, of
course):
THE DESERT'S TRADE-MARK ON ITS SANDS
"_This_ sand came from a desert, or from some place where it was much
blown about by the winds; while _this_ sand is from the shores of the
sea, or of a lake." The sand grains of the seashore, although they are
always being tumbled about by the waves, as the desert sands are by the
winds, are protected from each other by the water between them. These
little water cushions prevent the sand grains from rubbing together;
so they keep a good many of their sharp edges. They are not rounded
like the sands of the desert. The winds keep the desert sands grinding
against each other, at the same time turning them over and over, so
wearing them away pretty evenly on all sides. It also grinds them
against the desert rocks.
[Illustration: A DESERT SIMOOM ON ITS TRAVELS
A traveller in the Sahara took this snap-shot of a simoom from
the outside and at a safe distance. You can see that it must be
quite a distance from where we are standing, for the trees in the
foreground are still. The vast cloud of sand looks quite dark
because of the shadows cast by the sun, which it hides from view.
]
It is as if there were cut upon the sea sands, "Father Neptune: His
Make"; while the genii of the desert, jealous for the desert's
reputation, had engraved on their own product:
"Genuine Desert Sand. Look for the Trade-Mark and Accept No
Substitutes!"
III. The Plant People of the Desert
Although it doesn't look a bit homey to us there are quite a few people
living in the desert, when you come to count them all--four-legged
people, and six-legged people, and two-legged people, and big and
little people with wings, and the people of the plant world.
THE WATER BOTTLE OF THE DESERT
One of the most curious of the plant people is the cactus, particularly
the one known as the "desert water bottle." Like many two-legged people
it has a rough, unsociable exterior, but a kind heart. Let a traveller
come upon one of these bristly cactuses, after long, thirsty hours,
and he will realize what this means. Inside this cactus he will find
what will seem to him the most delightful drink he ever tasted. While
it isn't as cool as it might be, neither is it as warm as you would
expect, and it has a pleasant, sweet taste.
[Illustration: DRAWING WATER FROM THE BARREL CACTUS
This cactus, so far as shape is concerned, really belongs to the
barrel family, as you can see, besides performing one of the most
useful functions of a barrel in holding good drinking water for
thirsty travellers in the desert. My, how thirsty you get! You
drink, drink, drink from sunrise to sunset--about two gallons a
day. But sometimes the supply you are carrying gives out because
you miscalculated or you've lost your way, or the barrel leaks.
Then, oh, how you welcome the sight of a barrel cactus among the
rocky foot-hills! Director Hornaday, in the delightful book from
which I have already quoted says: "You get a gallon of water
surprisingly cool, and in flavor like the finest raw turnip. The
object on the ground is not a circular saw, but the inverted top
of the cactus, and the whiteness is that of the white meat that
contains the water. With a stick the meat is pounded to a pulpy
mass, and the water oozes out, forming a little pool. Then the
man with the cleanest hands washes them cleaner with some of the
pulp--throwing _this_ pulp away, of course--then squeezes the water
out of the rest of it into the barrel."
Another interesting thing about this cactus is that it enables you
to get candy right in the desert; for here and there, through its
thick skin, it oozes out a secretion called "cactus candy," which
is very delicious. You are always sorry there is so little of it.
]
The fact that you can get a drink in this way, just when you want it
most, all comes of foresight on the part of the cactus. After they get
down from two to four inches in the ground the roots of this cactus
spread out in every direction and for a long way. They collect every
bit of moisture in the soil, and they make the most of every drop of
rain that falls within their reach. Then they hide all this moisture
away and cling to every precious drop. Most plants, you know, evaporate
a great deal of water through their leaves. But the cactus, living in
a world where rains are few and far between, just can't afford to do
any evaporating to speak of; so it has practically no leaves, you see,
only little bits of things that you almost have to take a microscope to
find. But what it lacks in leaves it makes up in spines, which defend
it against the attacks of most thirsty animals, although it is believed
the desert mice know the secret of getting at this water, in spite of
the spines.
One kind of desert plant you have no doubt met face to face, for it is
used to make printing paper. It grows in the deserts of Libya and other
parts of North Africa, and is called esparto grass. Like hemp, it has
stems which are full of strong fibres. These stems are gathered in huge
bundles, which are carried by camels to the sea, where they are sent by
ship to the English paper mills.
HOW THE "ROSE OF JERICHO" GOES TO SEA
But there is a member of the desert plant family called the "Rose of
Jericho," that doesn't wait for anybody to come after it and carry it
to sea; it just picks up and sets sail for itself. It is a bush about
six inches high, a native of the wastes of Northern Africa, Palestine,
and Arabia. It bears a little four-petaled flower. When blossom time is
over the leaves fall off and its branches, loaded with seeds, dry up,
and, curling inward as they dry, form a ball. Its roots also let go of
the soil, so that the strong desert winds easily pull it up and it goes
bowling away toward the sea. When it gets there it tumbles in.
[Illustration: THE CACTUS-WREN AND HER LITTLE FRONT DOOR
Speaking of cactus spines, do you know how many of those wicked
little spines the cactus-wren had to work with and tug and twist
about in building that nest? About two thousand! These spines not
only make the nest but defend it. You can't be too careful about
your front door in Desertland. Such neighbors!
]
Then this bold little traveller, who is very sensitive to moisture
although he has had so little of it in his bringing up, promptly
unfolds his arms and scatters his handful of seeds on the water; which
is precisely the thing he took all that journey to do! For the seeds
are carried far by the currents of the sea. Thus the family to which
this plant belongs keeps sending out colonies into new lands. This
seems to be one of the chief missions in life of plants as of other
peoples.
The plant of which we have just been speaking is called the "Rose of
Jericho," although it looks so little like a rose that quaint old John
Gerard, an English doctor who loved and studied plants over three
hundred years ago, says:
"The coiner of the name spoiled it in the mint; for of all plants that
have been written of not any are more unlike unto the rose."
THE WIND WITCHES OF THE STEPPES
Our own tumbleweeds and the Canada thistle have the same trick of
bowling before the wind. There is a relative of these tumblers living
on the Russian steppes that the Cossacks call the "wind witch." At
the end of the season the branches dry up into a ball and then by the
hundreds these witches go skimming over the plains, driven by the loud
autumn winds. They are as light as a feather, and they go so fast that
sometimes even the Cossack horsemen cannot catch them, as they often
try to do in sport. Part of the time they move along with a short,
quick, hopping motion, and then, caught by an eddy, rise a hundred feet
in the air.
Often dozens of them get locked together, join hands like the real
witches of our fairy tales, and the whole company goes dancing away
before the howling blast.
Eery creatures!
IV. The Autographs in the Sand
There are certain very interesting people of the desert that you
don't often find at home, not because they aren't there, but because
they don't _want_ to be found. Snakes, lizards, rabbits, and ground
squirrels slip quietly out of your way in the early morning, and by
the time the hot sun is high, beast and bird seek the shadows of the
canyons, or of big rocks, shelving banks, or caves.
[Illustration: THE COYOTE'S NOCTURNE
In addition to what he tells so cleverly in the picture about the
night song of the Coyote, Dan Beard--_your_ Dan Beard of the Boy
Scouts--says the animal is a ventriloquist; can throw his voice so
that it sounds as if he were a mile off, then startle you with the
noise of a full pack at your heels--and all the time be sitting
watching you from behind a stone not fifty yards away!
]
But they all leave word. In the lava beds of the Arizona desert, where
not even the cactus will grow, you can make out the tracks of the quail
and the linnet, and of a peculiar desert bird called the road-runner.
There, also, are the tracks of the coyote and the wildcat, the gray
wolf, and sometimes the mountain lion. If about daybreak you saw what
seemed to be a long, lean, hungry dog, trotting away slantwise with a
cautious eye to the rear, it was probably a gray wolf a little late in
getting home. Like the coyote, the wildcat, the owl, and many other
desert people, that old gray wolf belongs to the world's great night
shift and is usually back in his mountain home by sunrise. Even when
you see him at all--which is seldom--he is hard to make out; for, like
the coyote, he wears a rusty, sunburned coat, which blends with the
sand and the yellow rocks.
The coyote is a smaller member of the wolf family, to which both the
dog and the fox belong. He has much of the same cunning, and like Br'er
Fox is fond of chicken. But his home is usually so far from modern
conveniences he has few chances to visit poultry yards, and lives from
paw to mouth, as it were, catching a jack-rabbit when he can--the
desert rabbits seem to sleep with both eyes open--and lizards when he
can't get rabbits. At the worst he will make out on "prickly pears,"
the pods of the mesquite bush, which are full of seeds.
THE WINGED PEOPLE OF THE DESERT
Although you will not realize it at first there are a good many birds
in the desert. Some are transients, just passing through, and stopping
for a rest and a bite or two on the way. Others, such as the linnet
and the wrens, have nests tucked away among the spines of the cactus,
and there's a finch singing from the top of that bush! In flower
time in the Arizona desert (of which we are now speaking) there are
humming-birds, but their colors are not so bright as those of our
humming-birds. Feathers, like hair, have the natural color burned out
of them in the desert sun. Only the insects keep their bright clothes.
Turn over a stone and away will scamper golden beetles, silver beetles,
turquoise blue beetles, beetles in bronze; a whole boxful of jewels on
six legs.
[Illustration:
_From McCook's "Nature's Craftsmen."
Copyright Harper and Brothers_
THE LIFE STRUGGLE IN THE DESERT
The late Harry Fenn, who did everything so well, drew this picture
of one of the incidents of the life struggle in the desert. It
represents the desert wasp, known as the "tarantula killer,"
pursuing its prey. The tarantula of the Southwest is the giant
among our native spiders, but it cowers before the wasp, and
hurries off as fast as it can; but usually it _can't_, and is soon
laid away in Lady Wasp's nest as food for her solitary baby when
it comes out of the egg which the mother wasp lays in the spider's
body.
]
INSECTS, LIZARDS, SPIDERS, AND OTHERS
And there are gray lizards, yellow lizards, and lizards called
"skinks," with tails as blue as indigo; and the gila monster, a lizard
in dull orange and black, with an ugly disposition and poison in his
lower jaw. Another big lizard of the Arizona desert is called the
chuckwalla. The Arizona Indians are very fond of him. They say he
tastes like chicken.
Most of the spider family are represented in Arizona, including the
trap-door spider, who hides and waits for his dinner in a hole with
a wonderful trap-door that he made himself. This door he slams tight
when he gets you inside, if you're a fly or anything like that. He
also shuts this door in the face of his enemy, the centipede, a flat
worm a foot long, with loads of legs and feet. His name means "hundred
footed." He has poison daggers in his feet and his two-branched tail.
[Illustration: A DESERT BEETLE AND HIS GYMNASTICS
This desert beetle is called by the Indians
"The-Bug-that-Stands-on-His-Head." At first I thought he was taking
stomach exercises, for beetles have wonderful digestions, as you
may learn from Fabre's book on "The Sacred Beetle." But Mr. Howard,
Chief of the Bureau of Entomology at Washington--Uncle Sam's great
authority on bugs--tells me this is an attitude many beetles take
on the approach of an enemy, the object being to discharge a kind
of poison-gas which is intended to drive him away; and usually does.
]
WHAT A WONDERFUL FLYING MACHINE HE IS!
But what's that away up in the sky? A flying machine? Yes, one of the
most wonderful flying-machines in the world--a vulture. There he goes,
sweeping in wide circles, as he hunts along the mountain range, mile
after mile, closely scanning the base of the cliffs for the bodies of
unfortunate creatures that have fallen over. Vultures will keep in the
air in that way whole days at a time, following the cliffs and canyons
for hundreds of miles. But for all that it is sometimes a week or two
between meals with a desert vulture.
How does the vulture soar so wonderfully? Nobody is quite sure about
it. Often for hours there is no motion of the wings, as far as anybody
has been able to make out, and a soaring vulture seems to be able to
move as easily against the wind as with it. You'll not be surprised
to hear that it takes time to learn to fly like that--a whole year.
And even after the first year the young vultures stay for a good while
under the instruction of their parents, going out hunting with them
every day and sleeping with them in the nest on the cliffs at night.
V. A Day in the Sahara
How would you like to spend a day in the famous Sahara desert with the
camels and the people and the dogs; and, I was going to say, the flies?
But the flies can't stand it. They stay in the villages on the borders.
Only a few are ever bold enough to start with a caravan and these soon
turn back.
When a desert Arab and his family start on a journey the tents, the
sleeping-rugs, the scanty provisions, and the women and children are
piled on the camels, the dogs take their places at the end of the
procession and the men at the head, and the caravan starts.
As the chieftain throws the end of the burnoose (his hooded cloak)
across his shoulder and, with his carbine in the hollow of his arm,
stalks in advance of all, you feel that if you were an Arab boy you
would be as proud as he is to have a father like that. What a splendid
figure; what a strong, grave, handsome face, and utterly without fear!
All his poor possessions would hardly pay a month's rent in a fine city
apartment, but he has the proud bearing of a king. He looks as if he
had just stepped out of a picture in a Bible story-book.
[Illustration: ALL IN THE DAY'S WORK!
This looks to me like the beginning of a simoom; if so, we'd better
wrap _our_ shawls about our faces as the Arabs are doing. Notice
how the rising wind picks up and twirls the sand about the camels'
legs and sends it stinging into the faces of the men. Maybe it
will die down as quickly as it came; maybe it will increase into a
choking sand-storm that will last a week.
]
And how keen those dark eyes must be; and what a memory for the look
of things! At the beginning of the day's journey he is guided, as
sailors are at sea, by the stars. But soon the winds begin to rise, as
the desert farther away is warming under the sun, and the fine sand
drifts and shifts like snow, filling up our own tracks as fast as they
are made; so, you may be sure, it is leaving no guiding tracks made by
previous travellers. But this man has known every hill, every dune, and
every rocky gully along the way since he himself was a little boy, and
went over this same route sitting on the camel with his mother while
his father stalked on before.
[Illustration: A CARAVAN ON THE MARCH
Here is a caravan lumbering along over what appears to be a
pretty well-beaten roadway in Algeria where many improvements to
facilitate travel have been made by the French. It must be about
8.00 A. M. or 4.00 P. M. Shouldn't you say so, from the shadows?
]
Presently we come across another little group of travellers going in
another direction. They are on their way north to the summer pastures;
for you see they have a little flock of sheep and goats and two
donkeys. And there are two men. These people are probably two families
travelling together. But they are not so well-to-do as our Arab. They
have no camel to carry the women and children. So dogs, donkeys, men,
women, children, and the sheep and goats all tramp along together.
[Illustration: THE FORLORN LITTLE RAT OF THE DESERT SANDS
If you've read Roosevelt's books on Africa you've met this little
creature before. But isn't he the rattiest-looking rat you ever
saw? He has only a hair here and there on his yellow skin; and no
eyes to speak of. He can hardly see at all, spending most of his
time, as he does--like the sightless creatures of caves--in the
pitch-dark of his underground burrow. Yet, I suppose, like that
desert boy it tells about at the end of this chapter, he thinks
there's no place like home!
]
They are not worried because they are poor; for listen, they are
singing! It's a melancholy kind of song, as we think. It reminds us
of the queer sound the sand grains make when the desert winds are
beginning to blow. But to the Arab it is music. What a lot of verses it
has--all just alike--and sung over and over again.
But what's the matter now? All of a sudden they stop singing and
begin to shout and fire off their guns. You'll laugh when I tell you
why. They heard something talking back to them; repeating all their
words. It was only an echo made by the rocks of the mountains that
we have just reached. But these superstitious people of the desert
don't know what an echo is. They think echoes are the voices of evil
spirits mocking them, and the shouting and the firing of the guns is to
frighten these mockers away.
[Illustration: THE PACK-RAT'S FORTRESS
This is a diagram of the fortress of another little citizen of
mountain rocks and desert places, known out West as the "pack" rat
because he is always packing off other people's things and hiding
them in his burrow. The "fortress" consists of several burrows,
the roads leading to which are carefully protected by the prickly
bayonets of the cactus joints which the rat drags there for that
purpose.
]
Life for everybody in the Sahara and the Arabian desert is very much
what it is for the animals in the Arizona wastes--a constant struggle
for food. In the Arizona desert every living creature puts in all its
time trying to get something to eat without being eaten. The wildcat is
fortunate if he gets a meal once in two or three days; and while the
coyote is trying to slip up on a rabbit, ten to one there's a panther
slipping up on him. A traveller in northern Africa tells how, when his
caravan halted for dinner at an inn for the French soldiers quartered
in that region, he saw a lean and hungry cat eying him from around the
corner of a nearby hut. To borrow from Victor Hugo's description of
the hungry cat at the Spanish inn,[31] this cat of the desert looked
at the traveller "as if it would have asked nothing better than to be
a tiger." When the guest of the inn had finished the piece of chicken
he was eating he tossed the bone toward the cat which pounced on it
fiercely. Instantly a dog, which had been watching proceedings, rushed
forward and took the bone from the cat. Just then an Arab, who happened
to be passing, fell upon the dog and wrenching the bone from his mouth
began eagerly gnawing it himself.
[Footnote 31: "Hugo's Letters to His Wife."]
It's a hard life!
And yet if you should bring an Arab boy to London or New York to live
and give him three good meals a day--he's not always sure of _one_ at
home--and nice clothes to wear and a real bed to sleep in, and shady
parks to play in, do you suppose he would be happy? No indeed. The
thing has been tried. He says this kind of life is all right for those
who like it, but it _isn't_ the desert.
And you have to admit it!
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
Not at all dry, are they--these deserts--when you get down into
them? And I haven't told you half there is to tell about them.[32]
[Footnote 32: John C. Van Dyke, for one, has written a wonderfully
interesting little book just about the American desert. It's called
simply "The Desert."]
To begin with, what does your geography say about deserts--about
how they are made?
How do mountains help make deserts?
In and near what zone does your geography locate the great deserts
of the world?
How does the Sahara desert compare in size with the United States?
(You see, the Sahara is practically a whole United States gone dry!)
Yet, the soil of much of the Sahara is very fertile and with water
would yield wonderful crops. But where is the water to come from?
Where do we get the water that has made our deserts bloom? Has the
Sahara any such sources of supply?
Is it true that the Libyan desert was once covered by the sea, as
it was in that story of Phaeton, the boy who set the world afire?
And speaking of that story, was there a Jupiter and a Jupiter
Pluvius, too?[33]
[Footnote 33: "That was a good deal like asking if there was a George
Washington and a President Washington too," said the High School Boy,
after he had looked it up.]
Wouldn't you say the addition of "Pluvius" to the name of their
chief god meant the ancients recognized rain-making as a very
important and difficult business to manage?
But what is it, really, that brings our rains? What has the sea
to do with it? And the winds? And the mountains? Your geography
answers all these questions briefly. You will find a full treatment
of the whole subject of the weather and of how the weather man,
"the man with a hundred eyes," manages to be so clever, in
"Pictured Knowledge."[34]
[Footnote 34: In the article in the Nature Department, "What is the It
that Rains?"]
From what general direction do the winds come that bring the rains
in North America? In South America? Why the difference?
How many inches of rainfall are enough for raising good crops?
Nevertheless, they raise fine crops in many parts of the United
States where they have hardly any rain at all. How do they manage
it? I mean how do they store up the water and distribute it, and
everything? (Irrigation.)
In reading up on deserts in the encyclopedias alone you will
find many such interesting things as the following, and in other
books--particularly books of travel--much more:
How long the commercial caravans are (such great freight trains as
those that cross the Sahara between Morocco and Timbuctoo); how
many camels one driver takes care of; how fast the camels travel;
how many days they can go without a drink.
If you're going to cross with one of these caravans (or just
pretend to cross) I must tell you one thing:
_You've got to look out for lions!_
From what you have learned in your geography about African lions,
where would you say you were likely to come across them?[35]
[Footnote 35: Have you read Roosevelt's "African Game Trails"? or his
"Life Histories of African Game Animals"?]
What do these caravans bring back from Central Africa? (What is
produced in Central Africa that the civilized world wants?)
The ostrich is a most interesting citizen of the desert that I
didn't have room to talk about. There's enough for a whole chapter
in your notebook just about ostriches and their ways.
Among other things, I wish you'd find out for me if the ostrich
really does bury its head in the sand and imagine that it is
thereby hiding itself. (I'll warrant you it's only book ostriches
that do this; not real ostriches.)
One of the most curious things about Mrs. Ostrich is how she and
her neighbors work together. It's like an old-fashioned quilting
bee, for all the world; although, to be sure, the ostriches don't
make quilts--they make nests.[36]
[Footnote 36: "Romance of Animal Arts and Crafts."]
Speaking of ostrich nests naturally suggests eggs--and very big
eggs, of course, including the roc's egg in the "Arabian Nights."
They do have real rock's eggs in the desert, only this kind of a
roc's egg is spelled with a "k." You just turn to the chapter on
deserts in Hobb's "Face of the Earth," and you'll find not only
that there are such eggs, but how the desert sun uses salt in
cooking them and what the crystal people have to do with it; and
how, like a cat in a hen-house, the desert winds suck these eggs,
leaving only the hollow shell.
CHAPTER IX
(SEPTEMBER)
Morning
The summer dawn's reflected hue
To purple changed Loch Katrine blue.
--_Scott_: "_Lady of the Lake_."
Evening
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up
And slips into the bosom of the lake.
--_Tennyson_: "_The Princess_."
IN THE LANDS OF THE LAKES
If we really had spent the month of August in a desert what a relief it
would be to find ourselves, as we do now at the very beginning of the
golden autumn time, in the lands of the lakes with their cool, fresh
breezes, the whisper of leaves and the glint of waters dancing in the
sun. The best of it is that the deserts are just as delightful as the
lands of pleasant waters, if you only visit them in imagination as we
have been doing; and they make the lakes all the more attractive by way
of contrast.
I. How the Lakes are Born
But where are the lands of the lakes? I may say to start with, it's
no use looking for many lakes in the lands of the big caves. Caves
and lakes don't seem to get on together any more than do caves and
boulders.
When this story of the lakes was first told to a certain group of young
people some of the youngest of whom had not forgotten the giants or the
language of their fairy tales, I put it in this way:
"The rains and the rivers, with the help of some other things, have
made all the lakes in the world. One of these helpers is a bright-eyed
creature with two legs; another a little creature with four legs and
a third a great big thing with no legs at all!" (I said it like this:
"G-R-E-A-T B-I-G T-H-I-N-G," and opened my eyes wide for the benefit of
the younger members of our "pebble parties," as these little gatherings
came to be called.)
The great big things, as you have already guessed, were the glaciers of
the Ice Age. We have had specimens of their work in the story of how
the Great Lakes were made.
The four-legged lake makers are the beavers. They live on the margins
of quiet, shallow ponds--really little lakes--which they make for
themselves by gnawing down trees and building dams.
And the bright-eyed creature with two legs--can't you guess who he is?
If you never helped make little lakes of your own by damming up a brook
or a roadside rivulet, you have missed a lot of fun.
WIDE RANGE OF SIZE IN LAKE FAMILY
But you _must_ have made them; what boy hasn't? And those little ponds
or puddles were lakes, while they lasted, just as much as the great
Lake Superior is a lake. Even lakes that are called lakes and get their
names (and often their pictures) in summer resort folders, differ in
size, ranging from little affairs that are not much larger than the
pond in the meadow, to Lake Superior, with its 31,000 square miles; and
in depth, from a few feet to 5,618 feet in the deepest part of Lake
Baikal. You see if you touched bottom there you would have to keep
going for over a mile.
"And there's all the way back!" said the High School Boy.
[Illustration: THE GREAT LAKES OF TO-DAY AND
THE GREATER LAKE OF YESTERDAY
The farmers of Canada and the Dakotas now sow their harvests and
reap their golden grain on the bottom of the great inland sea of
the Ice Age, Lake Agassiz. It was larger than all the Great Lakes
of to-day put together. It is known how big this lake was from its
old beaches, which can easily be made out all around the margin
shown on the map.
]
[Illustration: THE BLUE LAKE IN THE VOLCANO'S MOUTH
In the mouth of a dead volcano lies one of the most beautiful lakes
in all the world, the chief attraction of Crater Lake National
Park. This model of its basin tells how nature did the work. The
steep sides and the glacial valleys show that the top fell in
when the lava that helped build the volcano sank back and so left
it without support. If the top had blown off, as volcano tops
sometimes do, the valleys would have been filled with débris. Later
there was another outbreak, but so small that it only built that
little volcano in the big volcano's mouth. Notice the tiny crater?
This baby volcano rises above the waters of its mimic ocean and
makes an island, just as so many volcanoes of the great Pacific
make the far-flung islands of the Southern Seas.
]
Even the water ouzel, that wonderful diver of the mountain lakes and
waterfalls, might hesitate at a dive like that.
Those remarkable old men of the mountains, the glaciers of the Ice
Age, were the greatest of all lake-makers. Although for size the Great
Lakes were their masterpieces, they made lakes of all sizes and no end
of them. They fairly sowed the landscape with lakes. Look at the map of
the lake regions of America and Europe and then turn back to the map
picture of the great ice invasion (page 21). Don't you see the lake
regions and what was once the ice regions cover practically the same
territory?
[Illustration: LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE TO WIZARD ISLAND
There you see is the top of that little volcano--right across the
lake. It is known as "Wizard Island." The lake is 4,000 feet deep.
Its walls are 1,500 feet high; in some places over 2,000 feet high.
In spite of the fact that they, as you see, slope a good deal,
owing to the crumbling down of the weathered rock, the banks are
still so steep it has taken us several hours of careful climbing to
get down where this picture was taken, and we shall be all the rest
of the forenoon climbing back again.
]
In addition to making lakes in their Great Lakes manner the glaciers
had other methods. A glacier coming into a dry mountain valley would
supply it with a river by melting, and at the same time dam up the
river with stones and soil brought down from the mountain and so make
a lake. Then the water would run over the brim of the dam, and the
thing was complete; a beautiful little lake with one river running into
it and another running out.
LOOKS AS IF IT HAD RAINED LAKES!
You just go through Wisconsin or Minnesota or Maine, and right and left
you'll see lakes and lakes and lakes: and then more lakes! Of course
most of these lakes are small; otherwise it wouldn't have been possible
to work so many of them into the same landscape. In Wisconsin you find
these small lakes in what are called the "Kettle Ranges." The low hills
and their valleys form what the early settlers called "kettles," and in
these kettles are the little blue-eyed lakes.
It was the glaciers that not only made the kettles but often filled
them with the lakes. In many of the mounds of pebbles and clay that
we read about in "The Secrets of the Hills," the glaciers left big
blocks of ice. Then, when this ice melted, two things happened: (1)
The covering of the ice sank down, much as the sawdust sinks in an
ice-house when a block of ice is taken out, thus making the kettle; (2)
the big ice cake in the hill of pebbles melted, so filling the kettle
with a lake.
But what broke off these big blocks, these land icebergs that made the
basins for the kettle lakes? They were left by the glacier when it
began to retreat; that is to say when the supply of snow back at the
gathering ground became insufficient to keep pushing it forward as fast
as the front melted away. Melting most rapidly in those huge cracks
called crevasses, big blocks were finally separated entirely from the
main body and left behind as the rest of the glacier slowly melted back
toward the mountains.
If the glaciers were thus responsible for most of the lakes of the
lowlands you may be sure they had a hand in making the lakes of the
mountains, right where they themselves live. John Muir, who spent his
life in loving study of the mountains of the West and of everything
connected with them, found mountain lakes in every stage of existence
up the mountainsides; empty stone bowls that showed by the work of the
waves on the rocks that they had once held lakes; above these, in the
same chain, lakes growing shallow; and, still higher, brand new lakes
in stone bowls with the edge of the glacier that had carved out the
bowl and filled it with blue water, still bordering it on the upper
side.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE KETTLE LAKES OF WISCONSIN]
And this is why, like fruit on a tree, the youngest lakes are found at
the top. Since the glacier melted from the foot of the range upward the
lower lakes were the first to be born and the first to pass away; while
the lakes higher up on the mountain were the last to be born and the
last to pass away.
II. The Moods of the Lakes
Lakes are like the rivers and the sea; they have their moods. In
sunshine and storm, in wind and calm, and from season to season they
show many changes. As we already know they are great sleepy heads. To
Ruskin mountain lakes seemed both to sleep and to dream. But their
longest sleep, like that of Br'er Bear, is taken in the winter. Of this
long sleep Mr. Muir says:[37]
"The highest (mountain lakes) are set in bleak, rough bowls, scantily
fringed with brown and yellow sedges. Winter storms blow snow through
the canyon in blinding drifts, and avalanches shoot from the heights.
Then are these sparkling tarns filled and buried, leaving not a hint of
their existence. In June and July they begin to blink and thaw out like
sleepy eyes, the daisies bloom in turn and the most profoundly buried
of them all is at length warmed and summered as if winter were only a
dream."
[Footnote 37: "The Mountains of California."]
EVEN THE DUCKS OVERLOOK THESE LITTLE LAKES
But possibly these lakes are not asleep after all! They may be only
playing possum; or hide and seek. There _are_ mountain lakes that play
hide and seek. That is to say, they hide and _you_ seek; and often you
don't find! They are so small that, surrounded as they are by trees,
tall and thickly set, even the ducks pass them by. The glaciers that
made them seem to have hidden them, as the robins did the babes in the
wood. The glaciers did this, not by heaping leaves over them, but by
piling up stones and soil around them. They are encircled by moraines,
and on the moraines grow the trees that hide the lakelets even from the
sharp eyes of the ducks.
[Illustration: A LITTLE GIRL'S PICTURE OF A FAMOUS SWISS LAKE
This picture of the lake of the Great St. Bernard was taken by
Phyllis M. Pulliam, who sent it to _St. Nicholas_ with a long,
enthusiastic letter, such as only school-girls know how to write.
Among other things she met a great St. Bernard dog that had saved
more than fifty lives.
]
Mountain lakes are usually as clear as crystal, and, like perfect
mirrors, reflect the outlines and coloring of the clouds and the
neighboring peaks. They are apt to contain mica and feldspar ground out
of the granite rock by the glacier that made their basins. Then the
sunlight falling on these rock particles gives them the color of jade
or Nile green, or dark green like a peacock's tail. They are constantly
changing color with the changing angles of the light from morning until
sunset; and under the passing clouds and the rippling of the winds. The
deeper lakes are dark blue in the deepest parts, turning to green in
the shallow waters near shore where the yellow of the sun rays and the
sand mixes most with the blue of the waters.[38]
[Footnote 38: Van Dyke: "The Mountain."]
THE MYSTERY IS IN THE SECRET PASSAGE
In Florida there are sister lakes so sympathetic that their waters rise
and fall together. One responds to the mood of the other as promptly as
your right eye waters in sympathy when you get a grain of dust in the
left. The reason for this goes back to the days when the corals helped
build Florida. They did this by leaving their "bones" on the coral
reefs when that part of North America was in the making. These remains
formed limestone. Then, in this limestone, "sink holes" were formed on
the surface leading to underground passages, just as they do over the
land surface in the cave regions of Kentucky. These sink holes often
fill with water and form little lakes. These lakes, being connected
by the underground passages, rise and fall together. It looks very
strange, even when you know the secret of it; and still stranger when
you don't.
Yet I shouldn't be surprised if a bright boy or girl seeing two lakes
rising or falling together would suspect the underground connection;
for, of course, we all know about springs and their underground
channels. But what would you say to this:
A lake that, a moment before, was as smooth as glass suddenly begins
to shiver all over as one shivers in a sudden draught. But there is no
breeze stirring! A moment later the water rises and falls along the
banks; an inch, two inches, a foot, two feet. Then, in the course of a
couple of hours, the sky, which before was without a cloud, begins to
grow black and there follows a terrific storm.
A KIND OF NATURAL BAROMETER
The cause of the rising of the water is the heavier pressure of the air
at the farther end of the lake, the region of the coming storm. The
water, being forced down at one end of the basin, you see, rises at the
other. Then as the storm advances toward you the pressure is released
and the water falls again; but for a while it rocks to and fro as water
will do in a basin if you tip it up at one end and then let it down
again.
THE TIDES IN A TEACUP
But, besides these imitation tides made by the unequal pressure of
the wind, lakes have real tides just as the ocean does; and from the
same cause, the attraction of the moon. In fact, there are tides in a
teacup, and the tea rises toward the passing moon as does everything
liquid on the face of the earth. In the teacup the rise is so small you
can't see it as you do when the great mass of the ocean waters is moved
in the same way. Even in the Great Lakes the tide only amounts to three
inches or so.
And, in addition to their tides, there are many other things about
lakes that have led the largest of them to be referred to as "inland
seas." Says Reclus:[39]
"Lakes are indeed seas. They have their tempests, their swells, their
breakers. It is true the waves are neither so high nor move so rapidly
as those of the sea because they do not move over such great depths.
They are short, compact and choppy, but for this very reason they are
more formidable. And the water being fresh and therefore lighter than
that of the ocean is more readily agitated. The wind has scarcely begun
to stir when the surface is covered with foaming billows."
[Footnote 39: "The Earth."]
Not only are lake storms especially dangerous for the reasons just
given by the great French geographer but lakes in mountain regions are
subject to an additional danger; for their storms are most apt to come
at night, just as described in the story of the storm on Galilee in the
New Testament. You remember it says the storm came "down."[40]
[Footnote 40: Luke 8: 23.]
"Now it came to pass on a certain day that Jesus went into a ship with
his disciples; and he said unto them, Let us go over unto the other
side of the lake. And they launched forth.
"But as they sailed he fell asleep: and there came down a storm of wind
on the lake; and they were filled with water and were in jeopardy."
Macgregor, in his "Rob Roy on the Jordan," draws the following vivid
picture of his own struggles with one of these tempests:
HOW THE STORM CAME DOWN ON GALILEE
"Just as the Rob Roy passed below Wady Fik a strange, distant hissing
sounded ahead where we could see a violent storm was raging. The waves
had not time to rise. The gusts had come down on calm water and they
whisked long wreaths of it up into the sky. This torrent of heavy, cold
air was pouring over the mountain crests into the deep caldron of the
lake below. Just as it says in Luke 8:23. 'There came _down_ a storm
upon the lake.'"
[Illustration: ON THE BORDERS OF THE SEA OF GALILEE
You can see this is in a desert, mountainous country, and, from the
dress of the man, that it is in the Orient. The beach is wide--for
so small a lake--because of those frequent and severe storms that
drive the waves, loaded with sand and pebbles, far back from the
shore.
]
This peculiarity of squalls among mountains is known to all who have
boated much on lakes, but on the Sea of Galilee the wind has a singular
force and suddenness. This is no doubt because the sea is so deep in
the world that the sun rarefies the air in it enormously and the wind,
speeding swiftly over a long and level plateau, suddenly comes upon
this huge gap in the way and tumbles down into it.
III. How Lakes Grow Old and Pass Away
But, however formed, lakes, of all the features of our landscape, are
the soonest to pass away. Because of the sediment brought into them by
the rivers they keep getting more and more shallow and at last, in the
course of time, are quite filled up. The waves of the lakes themselves
help to bring this about by cutting material from their shores and
washing it into the water.
So the time will come when all lakes now in existence will have passed
away. But the people of those times will not be without their lakes.
New lakes will probably be made by the same causes which produced the
lakes of to-day; for Nature's great processes do not change.
WHY LILIES COME TO THE DYING LAKES
Meanwhile how beautifully they pass, these lakes; particularly the
little lakes like that in Rousseau's painting. First, on the margin of
a dying lake the lilies gather. Lilies grow only in quiet waters and
these they find in the shallow margins of lakes that are filling up.
LAST OF ALL COME THE TREES
Next after the lilies come the sedges, grasslike herbs that grow in
marshy places. And after they are well established they get things
ready for the next arrivals; for these plants come in a regular
procession. The dense tufts of the sedges make mats on which soil
gathers. In this soil shrubs begin to grow. From the decay of all
this vegetation more soil is formed in which the seeds of spruce and
tamarack spring up. Then come willows, then poplars and maples, and
last of all the oaks and nut-bearing trees, which march into new lands
slowly because they must depend on their heavy seeds to move them
forward, while the little seeds of maple, willow, poplar, and pine are
easily carried by the wind.
[Illustration:
_"The Lake." From the painting by Rousseau_
HOW LAKES GROW OLD AND PASS AWAY
This picture, called "The Lake," is from a painting by Rousseau, a
great French landscape artist, and illustrates the beautiful way
in which lakes grow old, as described in the text. Already, as you
see, Father Oak and his family have arrived.
]
But while fresh-water lakes and their surroundings are so beautiful
and poetic, and never more so than when the lakes are passing away,
there are dying lakes, whose surroundings are the very pictures of
desolation. These are the lakes which have become bitter with salt
because their waters are evaporated by the sun faster than fresh water
comes in. The most famous of these salt lakes is the Dead Sea of the
Holy Land, into which the Jordan flows. Lying in a rock-bound pit, in
the deepest part of a vast trench, it is like a caldron into which for
eight months of every year is poured the heat from a burning sun in a
cloudless sky. Although Palestine, as you can see by the map, is in
the temperate zone, the thermometer here often registers 130 degrees,
because cooling breezes never come down into this pit except in those
occasional storms due to the sudden rush of cooler and therefore
heavier air from the surrounding heights.
THIS IS HOW THE DEAD SEA DIED
As shown by the wave-cut terraces on the surrounding rocks this lake
was once a part of a great body of water that extended clear from Mount
Hermon to the Red Sea. Then, by a series of heaving movements, widely
separated in time (as shown by the depth of the beach terraces) the
bottom of this greater sea was uplifted into the two parallel chains of
limestone mountains which flank the Jordan Valley. At the same time a
great block of earth crust between them settled down, step by step, and
made the long trench running clear to Africa, one end of which is the
Jordan Valley, in which the Dead Sea lies.
Later, during the different Ice Ages, as it is supposed, there was
plenty of moisture, for the rock records show that the Sea of Galilee
and what is now the Dead Sea were once parts of the same body of water.
Then the climate gradually changed, the land went dry, and the Dead
Sea water became far saltier than that of the ocean--so salty that all
life died out of it. To-day the water tastes like a mixture of epsom
salts and quinine, and any unfortunate fish swept into it by the fresh
waters of the Jordan, in which fish are abundant, gives a few desperate
gasps and dies.
[Illustration: THE DEAD SEA]
[Illustration: HOW THE DEAD SEA DIED]
While it is not true, as the ancients believed, that birds drop dead
in flying over it, neither birds nor beasts make their homes in the
choking pit; and on its shores, always gray with a mixture of mud and
salt, of course no green thing can grow. Indeed, there is little plant
life anywhere round about, but as if in mockery there grow nearby what
are known as apples of Sodom or Dead Sea fruit. This fruit looks like
an orange, but it is bitter to the taste and filled only with fibre and
dust.
The official report of Lieutenant Lynch, of the United States Navy, who
headed an expedition sent out by the government to explore the Dead Sea
and the surrounding regions, is full of word pictures which might well
have supplied material for the imagination of Dante.
LIKE A VAT OF MOLTEN METAL
The sea, yellow from the large amount of phosphorus in the water, is
overhung in the early morning by a dense mist. This mist is made by the
water steaming in the intense heat. It looks, however, like smoke above
a great vat of molten metal "fused but motionless." After dark, when
the night winds come down from the heights and go moaning through the
gorges, the scene changes.
"The surface becomes one wide sheet of phosphorescent foam, and the
waves, as they break on the shore, throw a sepulchral light on the
white skeletons of dead trees which have been washed from the woody
banks of the Jordan and, lying half buried in the sand, are coated with
gray salt from the muddy spray."
On a portion of the land now covered by the lake, according to
tradition, were the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and after
their destruction these bitter waters flowed in and forever buried the
scene of their wickedness from the sight of men.
It seems probable that the region did once support a larger population.
We know this to be true of other parts of the Orient which have since
become desolate owing to the ravages of war, the change of climate, and
the decay of Oriental civilization. And when we recall how the sinking
of the great earth block that carried this land so far below the level
of the sea forced lava up through the earth cracks, we can account for
"the fire from heaven" that poured down upon the cities of the plain.
Professor Huntington, who headed the Yale Expedition into Palestine
in 1909, speaks of visiting the ruins of Suweim south of the Dead Sea
and picking up bits of lava (the whole region abounds in evidences of
volcanic action) while the sheik who acted as guide told the story of
Sodom as the story of Suweim. The name Suweim, Professor Huntington
thinks, may be a corruption of Sodom. Continuing, he says:[41]
"The place is much greener than the other side of the valley, and in
the days of Lot may have been 'like the garden of Jehovah'[42]; for in
those times, as our studies of old levels of the Dead Sea quite clearly
indicate, the climate of Palestine was probably decidedly moister than
it is now.
"And not two miles from Suweim we found a little volcano of very recent
date geologically, and an eruption may have wrought havoc in a town
located near Suweim."
[Footnote 41: "Palestine and Its Transformation."]
[Footnote 42: Genesis 13:10.]
In one part of the valley he also found a cave among the mountains,
hewn out of the limestone above a spring.
Now turn to your Bible, Genesis 9:30:
"And Lot went up out of Zoar and dwelt in the mountain, in a cave, he
and his two daughters."
In short, the geography of the region--such is the conclusion of
Professor Huntington's careful study--"supplies all the elements of the
story of Sodom and Gomorrah in exactly the location where the Biblical
account would lead one to expect them."
But the native Arab goes further. Not far from the borders of the Dead
Sea is a mountain of salt called Jebel Usdem, which "the early and
later rains" in the course of ages have dissolved into many fantastic
shapes. Among these strange figures is a pillar tapering toward the
top, on which is a wide cap of stone, such as that shown on page 60 and
such as are often seen on detached and pillared rocks.
But this gaunt remnant of grisly gray, although it is still obviously a
part of the mountain and cannot be less than forty feet high, your Arab
friend insists was once the wife of Lot!
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
If you were hunting for mountain lakes where would you expect to
find the most, in high mountains or in low?
Rivers sometimes make lakes by using the same stuff the small
boys do, just plain mud. Look at Lake Pontchartrain in the map of
Louisiana and you can see one of the ways in which this is done.
Remember that all the land around this lake is part of the delta of
the Mississippi. The river deposits have simply enclosed a portion
of the shallow sea.
Or--this is another way in which rivers make lakes by building mud
walls--a river emptying at right angles into a narrow gulf may
build a dam clear across it. The rich Imperial Valley of southern
California was cut off from the Gulf of California in this way.
Look at the map and you can see just how this was done.
One of the puzzles about mountain lakes is how frogs got into them.
The frogs never climbed up there, you may be sure. Muir thinks
maybe the ducks did it. How do you suppose? See if you can imagine
and then see what Muir says about it.[43]
[Footnote 43: "The Mountains of California."]
In connection with what was said about lakes playing they are
oceans--not these little mountain lakes, of course, but great
big lakes--you will be interested in what Lord Bryce says in his
"Travels in South America" about why lakes may even look larger
than the ocean.
In the Britannica and other books that you may not yet be old
enough to read you will find many more curious things about lakes.
I can't tell which one of my readers you are, you see, but if you
belong to the "younger set," father, mother, or some other member
of the family can do the looking up and then tell you about it.[44]
In the Britannica will be found such interesting things as this:
[Footnote 44: I don't know of anything that is more fun, of an evening,
than looking up things in an encyclopædia--except looking them up in
_two_ encyclopædias.]
How certain kinds of mountains and lakes are made at one and the
same time--by the same movement.
How even the wind may make lakes.
Why lakes are to the land what lands are to the sea.
Then if you will turn to page 75 of that fascinating little book we
have already dipped into several times[45] you will find what the
fact that lakes are to the land what islands are to the sea has to
do with a peculiar beetle in the Shetland Islands (where the ponies
come from) and the famous tailless cat of the Isle of Man.
[Footnote 45: "Colin Clout's Calendar."]
One of the quaintest little bits of real life in Lakeland is how
the baby gulls of the Great Lakes worry their papas and mamas by
going swimming before they are old enough; how their parents give
them a spanking and send them back home; and how kind all the lady
gulls are to the little gulls of neighbors that come to their
houses to play with their children.[46]
[Footnote 46: "The Bird, Our Brother," by Olive Thorne Miller.]
[Illustration: DROWNED VALLEYS ON THE MAINE COAST
Wherever you see very irregular shores, as along the coast of
Maine, you may infer that the shores have sunk so that the waters
of the sea came up into the river valleys, and the hills and long
tongues of high land became islands and peninsulas.
]
CHAPTER X
(OCTOBER)
To-night the winds begin to rise
And roar from yonder dropping day;
The last red leaf is whirled away,
The rooks are blown about the skies.
--_Tennyson._
THE AUTUMN WINDS AND THE ROCK MILLS OF THE SEA
Nothing looks more aimless, more unorganized, perhaps, than the long
turmoil of the waves of the sea which begins in late autumn and
continues through the winter months. If, with your nose well over the
edge of a cliff, you look straight down, you will see something like
this: With every forward leap of the surges the waters are divided and
entangled among the rocks, and division after division is beaten back
by the upright wall in front and the broken blocks of stone on this
side and on that. On-coming waves, met by those recoiling, rise into
mountainous, struggling masses of wild fury. The whole affair seems to
be as clear a case of wasted energy as a Mexican revolution.
But if you watch the waves carefully and study them a little you will
see underlying and controlling this apparent anarchy the wonderful
engineering by which the machinery of the sea works out its appointed
tasks. It is when the earth has gathered its harvests and laid down
to its winter rest that the sea begins gathering harvests of its own,
grinding up the rocks for food for the plants in its gardens, for
new clothes for its shell-fish, and new soil for earth harvests in
millenniums yet to be.
I. The Destroyer
On the face of it the case looks bad. The sea's chief business seems
to be that of eating us up, or at least the lands on which we live.
And this idea of it we find running through all literature and art. A
very large number of the pictures of the sea, probably the majority,
show it in wind and storm. And this is still more true of the famous
sea pictures of literature. Shakespere, for example, makes some three
hundred references to the sea, and nearly always, where he gives it a
character, it is that of a monster, always hungry and never satisfied,
a "wild, rude sea," a sea "raging like an angry boar"--and so back to
Homer and forward to Kipling.
That the sea is constantly eating away the land cannot be denied, and
to an extent that is delightfully alarming if, as did the little boy
listening to the tale of the giants, we "like to be made nervous." It
is said that England still rules the waves, but where she fronts the
sea on the east the coast is being cut back at the rate of two to four
yards a year, in spite of all that modern engineering skill can do. In
the course of a thousand years the losses on all fronts have amounted
to over 500 square miles. Each year carries off 1,500 acres more from
the king's domains, to add them to the Empire of the Sea, "and he calls
to us still unfed." On the east coast the blows dealt by the waves in
severe storms are such that the land trembles for a mile back from
the shore. "The earth," said Emerson,[47] speaking of the industrial
greatness of England, "shakes under the thunder of its mills." So for
ages it has shaken under the thunder of the mills of the sea.
[Footnote 47: "English Traits."]
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of "The Scientific American"_
SEA-CLIFFS IN THE SCHOOLROOM
These dizzy cliffs and the wide sea beyond were made in the
schoolroom in the same way that the glacier and the iceberg were
made in Chapter II.
]
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of "The Scientific American"_
BEHIND THE SCENES
]
This apparent war of the sea upon the land is a war of machinery whose
workings are curiously like the ancient war machinery of men. Without
tools the sea is almost as helpless as man himself; and, as in man's
history, its use of tools begins with the Stone Age. Where there is no
stone-strewn beach or underwater shelf extending out from a cliff, the
waves do little damage. They give only a muffled and (to the poetic
ear) a baffled roar. But a sloping shelf along a rocky shore not only
makes a kind of scaling ladder on which the waves can climb to great
heights, but these waves are pitched forward with terrific force
as they reach it from the open sea. As they come on they seize huge
stones which they hurl against the cliffs. Even amid the wild voices of
tempests one hears the boulders crashing against the walls. In storms
of sufficient energy rocks of three tons weight are driven forward like
pebbles. The action against the upper part of a cliff may be compared
to that of one of those great stone-throwing engines of the Romans,
while on the lower portion the drive suggests the battering-ram.
WHAT NEPTUNE KNOWS ABOUT WEDGES AND PNEUMATIC TOOLS
Where the waves strike into narrowing crevices in the rocks they act as
wedges, prying the walls apart. In this form of the sea's destructive
work we find also an application of a motive power which has come to
play so important a part in modern engineering; namely, compressed air.
Waves strong enough to handle big rocks not only dash them against the
cliff, while the waves themselves drive into the crevices like wedges,
but in so doing they force air into the crevices and compress it. This
air, expanding as the waves fall back, forces out great blocks of stone
which, in turn, are also used as weapons of assault.
And, as we look back in the history of the sea, we find that he long
ago--the deep-laid schemer!--planted enemies within our very walls.
Waves, even when armed with the heaviest missiles, can do comparatively
little damage to walls in which there are no crevices. But there are
few such walls. Usually even the hardest rocks have running through
them those cracks which the geologists (with a fine sense of humor)
call "joints"; or they have "bedding planes," the divisions between
the rock beds. Both of these weaknesses in our defensive walls are,
in a large degree, the handiwork of the sea; the bedding planes
because rocks are so laid in the sea mills, and the joints because the
wrinkling up and consequent cracking of the land rocks is the other
end, as we learned in Chapter I, of the down-wrinkling of the rocks
under the weight of the sea.
In the very body of the rocks also is hidden a secret enemy; the salt
left when they were made. And more salt is constantly being forced into
the surface pores as the waves strike. This salt helps to dissolve and
weaken the rock under the chemical action of the air, and the rains and
the mechanical expansion and contraction of the surface with changes of
temperature.
PLANING MILLS OF THE WINTER SEA
All the Great Powers of nature, "on land, on sea, and in the air,"
seem to be in open conspiracy against our peace. The evidence seems
especially plain in late fall and winter, when the sea, contrary to the
usual practice in war, carries on its most vigorous campaigns. Then
come the winds for the great drives; then come the frosts that change
the water wedges into expanding blocks of ice that, almost with the
force of exploding shells, tear the walls apart. In winter are formed
the great ice-fields that help in two ingenious ways to further the
destructive action of the storm waves. In bays and smaller recesses in
rocky shores, the ice has embedded in it fragments of stone which the
sea has battered down. The constant plunge of the waves breaks up these
ice-fields into sections which, with the embedded stones, become rude
planing mills. Where a headland is sloping, these planers, driven back
and forth by the waves, chisel the rock away as a planer chisels down a
piece of steel upon which it has been set to work.
HOW STONES ARE CARRIED OUT TO SEA
A no less curious feature of sea engineering is the use of ice-fields
as "conveyors." During the spring, summer, and autumn the masses of
stone which the sea brings down from the cliffs on its occasional busy
days--that is to say on days when the winds are high--pile up and so
form a kind of bulwark against further attacks. But when in winter
these stones become embedded as above described, strong offshore winds
carry the ice-fields, stones and all, out to sea. Then, on shore, wind
and wave take up their work again unchecked. All along the rocky shores
of the Atlantic, as far south as New York State, beyond which no rock
walls come down to the shore, all these interesting things may be seen
by the traveller.
Another phase of this team-work of natural forces in feeding the land
to the sea is that steady advance of the waters upon certain shores. As
if science herself had joined literature and art in giving the old sea
dog a bad name, these advances are called in the language of geology,
"transgressions of the sea." These transgressions are caused in part
by the gradual sinking of the land and in part by the rising of the
waters. It is not possible always to tell which agency is at work.
Often both may be. One thing about the rising of the waters themselves
might be looked at as particularly alarming. The rivers, which, of
course, are parts of one great water system, whose centre and prime
mover is the sea, are not only constantly wearing the land down toward
sea level but raising the sea level by the inpour of vast quantities
of ground-up land. Even as matters stand, the amount of water in the
sea bowls is so great that if all lands were at the present sea level
they would be covered everywhere to a depth of two miles. Wind-borne
dust from the surface of the land and from volcanic explosions also, in
time, amounts to a pretty sum; and, of course, helps makes the waters
of the sea rise upon the land.
WEARING DOWN THE LAND AND FILLING UP THE SEA
Already the sea has advanced a thousand feet or more upon the coasts of
Maine, to take one instance; and the whole ragged outline of Europe is
due to the same cause. Let this sort of thing go on and it is easy to
see that it will only be a question of a few millions of years when New
York, London, and other centres of busy life will be buried like the
wicked cities of the plain.
And if, to help complete this picture of desolation, we for a moment
forget what we learned about the life insurance carried by the
continents, we can imagine how they too will disappear. And the Last
Man thus:
For now I stand as one upon a rock
Environed with a wilderness of sea,
Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave
Expecting ever when some envious surge,
Will, in his brinish bowels, swallow him.[48]
[Footnote 48: Shakespere: "Titus Andronicus."]
To make the thing seem doubly sure, let us reflect with Mr. Burroughs
that the world is now probably in a time of spring, following the
latest of the Ice Ages. If so, the water now locked up in snow-fields
and glaciers among the mountain peaks will, before this summer of the
centuries is over, all melt back into the sea. This alone will be good
for a rise of some thirty feet in sea level.
Then, still later, we shall no doubt have another Ice Age, and the only
thing that may save us from being frozen to death is the fact that we
have previously been drowned!
II. The Builder
But it's all a bad dream; a delusion of the mind, and of the eye. We
see these things--the destruction of the land, the invasions of the
sea--but we do not see them as they are because we do not see far
enough. Looked at broadly, and reading the story of it to the end, we
learn that the whole relation of the sea to the land and its life and
beauty is that of a builder and fatherly provider. Far from being the
savage creature he has been pictured, Father Neptune seems to have the
kindly disposition of old King Cole combined with the wisdom of King
Solomon. Everywhere is evidence not only of the highest intelligence
but of good will toward man and his brother tenants of the waters,
fields, and woods.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SEA IS THIS
To begin with you remember it was the sea that helped put the world
on the map. Of course, if we had not already learned in the story of
how the continents came up out of the sea, that there is no cause for
alarm, we might imagine that having been lifted up they might, by a
reversal of the process, be lifted down again. Indeed, I find a writer
in a popular periodical dealing in science stating that "every part of
the sea floor becomes, in its turn, the shore line and is subjected
to the wear of the waves." But, as a matter of fact, we know that
the continents have finally got their land legs; that for ages the
transgressions of the sea have been mainly confined to the continental
margins; and that unless the earth's shrunken centre should, from some
unimaginable cause, swell back to its old size, it is mechanically
impossible for the entire bottoms of the vast reservoirs of the sea to
be raised.
[Illustration: HARBOR ENGINEERING OF THE RIVERS AND THE SEA
In the mouths of certain rivers emptying into the sea the tides
come rushing up in a roaring wave like this. When the tide goes out
the water flows back again. This back-and-forth motion helps to
broaden the harbor made by the river's mouth, as in the case of New
York Harbor, which is the mouth of the Hudson. Owing to this tidal
action the water of the Hudson backs up clear to Albany.
]
[Illustration: A GOLDEN GATE FOR FRISCO
The famous Golden Gate of San Francisco (so called because of the
golden sunsets shining through), and its splendid harbor, made by
the sinking of the land. The gate was originally cut by the waters
of those two rivers that join and flow into the bay. What rivers
are they?
]
HOW THE SEA HELPS MAKE GOOD FARMS AND BIG CITIES
Moreover the rivers, in the very act of wearing down the land and with
it filling up the sea, help keep the land from being flooded, as it
would be if something were not done. For, as we learned in the story
of why the mountains border the sea the sediment poured in by the
rivers helps raise the mountains and the land along the sea border. It
is during the downward movement of the continental margins that most
sediment is spread from the inpouring rivers because the dip of the
land is greater and the swifter current not only cuts down the land
faster, but carries the sediment farther out from shore. Here the new
rock is made from old worn-out soil, and, since these new rocks when
brought to the surface will in time decay, fresh soil is thus prepared
for future generations. More immediate benefits of this sinking of
shores and advance of waters are the harbors which have made great
cities like New York and London, on or near the seacoast. These harbors
are all the results of "transgressions," combined with the digging
action of wave and tide.
[Illustration:
_Copyright by Underwood & Underwood_
STONE TERRACES FOR THE GANNETS
This picture shows what the rising of the land and the
architectural engineering of the sea did for the gannets on the
coast of Canada.
]
TAKING A HINT FROM THE SEA'S SHORE ENGINEERING
But the sea builds shores as well as eats them. Its chief work in this
line is the widening of the continental shelf by building it up with
rock made of the sea's own grist from its shores, and the sediment
poured in by the rivers. This work is not "delivered," so to speak,
for millions of years, when the sinking shores begin to rise again,
but the sea, in its wave work, does shore building of another kind
that shows above the waters in the generation in which it is done. On
wide, shallow beaches, storm waves break some distance from the shore,
and, so losing their force, drop the sediment which they have stirred
up, after carrying it forward only a little way. As a result of this
repeated dumping, an embankment forms, broadening seaward in the middle
and bending shoreward at the ends. A portion of the sea itself is
finally cut out and enclosed by this embankment, thus forming a lagoon.
Finally this lagoon is filled with material, washed from the land and
by sediment brought in from the sea at high tide. Human engineers,
taking the hint, now put the sea to work on similar undertakings of
their own. An embankment is built enclosing an area of the sea; then
the tides and the land wash do the rest.
[Illustration: THE DROWNED RIVERS THAT HELPED MAKE ENGLAND GREAT
Her fine harbors have helped to make England the great commercial
nation that she is. Notice here the relation of her largest cities
to the bay-like mouths of the drowned rivers and to the drowned
valley north of the Isle of Wight.
]
[Illustration: HOW THE SEA TAUGHT SHORE ENGINEERING TO MEN
This is a salt marsh at mid-tide. How the sea itself adds such
regions to the dominion of the land, and how human engineers,
taking the hint, have put the sea to work, you will learn in this
chapter.
]
The sea also works with the busy little corals in building reefs
and islands. Corals can only live and build where the water is kept
in constant and vigorous motion by current and wave. From the air
imprisoned in the bubbles by the stirring and turmoil of the waves and
particularly from the air in the white foam of the crests these little
people get their oxygen. At the same time they absorb out of the water
the food on which they grow. The sea not only feeds these little wards
of its bounty during their busy lives, but extends their usefulness
after death, either by cementing to the reef the coral, ground up by
the waves, or in storms scattering it over wide areas, to be made
later into the finest of limestone; and still later into the best of
soils.
[Illustration: FATHER NEPTUNE FEEDING THE CORAL PEOPLE
See that line of breakers just below the horizon? That shows where
Father Neptune is serving the little coral people with food and
fresh air, as explained in the text.
]
We know also that the sea makes coal as well as stone in its rock
mills; that the pressure of the overlying rock was in large part the
source of the heat that changed the vegetation of the swamps, first
into charcoal and then into coal.
The subject of what the sea has done and is doing for us is almost
as endless as the seas themselves; and no doubt the reason the sea
is never still is because it has so much to do. Nothing in earth's
animate or inanimate nature exercises an influence to be compared in
importance to that of the sea, not only upon the land, but upon the
whole life which land and sea support; and even in what seem to be the
most aimless of its movements it in reality acts with the precision of
a machine.
III. The Artist
And in the making of the rock in its presses under the water, as
well as in the grinding which takes place along the shores, the sea
evidently has an eye to beauty as well as use. As originally formed,
the conglomerates or "pudding-stones" are always laid nearest the shore
because there the retiring waves and the rivers emptying into the sea
drop the heaviest part of their load, including the pebbles. Next is
dropped the sand which is pressed into sandstone and beyond this the
finest particles of all, the ground-up soil, which becomes slate rock.
Still beyond the zone of slate is deposited the lime from the shells
of sea creatures who can live only in this clearer water, away from
the muddy waters nearer the shore. These deposits make limestone. The
result of this natural sorting process is that all the four kinds of
sedimentary rock are always laid down in just this 1, 2, 3, 4 order and
no other: (1) pudding-stone; (2) sandstone; (3) slate; (4) limestone.
Then, as a result of the transgressions of the sea, what was once
a region of conglomerate may be later found far out under the sea
and there is thus laid down over the conglomerate beds, strata of
sandstone, slate, or limestone, depending on how far the sea advances.
So we find rocks with all sorts of neighbors above and below; limestone
above conglomerate, conglomerate above slate. These changes take place
over vast regions and from the original uniformity in the arrangement
of the rocks there necessarily results a similar uniformity in the
results of this "shuffling," and no matter what changes may be made
afterward by raising them up into shore cliff and mountain and by
other earth movements, and by the endless reshaping by weather and
wave, there still remains that underlying harmony which, with variety,
gives to rocky shores their picturesque beauty.
Harmony and variety are necessary in all forms of art--pictures,
literature, music--and the conditions governing harmony and variety are
always found hand-in-hand in the art work of the sea and its helpers.
The difference in texture in different kinds of rock, for example, and
in different parts of the same rock, cause them to yield in different
ways and degrees to the action of wave, wind and weather; so there is
sure to be great variety in the shapes they take as they are worn away.
HARMONY, VARIETY, AND THE ART WORK OF THE SEA FAMILY LIKENESS IN ROCK
FORMS
Yet, with all their differences, the shapes rocks take--sandstone
compared with granite, for example--are so characteristic that one soon
learns to tell a long way off what kind of rock a distant landscape
is made of. There is inevitably a certain type resemblance, since all
sandstone is of the same general texture and weathers in the same way.
NATURE'S BUILDING BLOCKS AND THE SEA
Then take the natural division into blocks made by joints in the rocks
to which cliffs like the famous Castle Head at Bar Harbor owes its
striking form. These blocks are so nearly true that you feel sure they
must have been cut by stone-masons, and yet they have the variety which
art demands; they have not the monotonous sameness of shape of the
bricks in a wall. This is mainly due to the differences in the strains
which cracked the original rock mass. So, from the beginning a sea-wall
built by nature is more picturesque than a sea-wall built by man. And
it goes on taking more and more picturesque shapes under the hammers of
the waves. For the force of the waves, the angles at which they strike,
the size and shape of the rock fragments with which they strike, these
vary infinitely.
ETCHING, SCULPTURE, AND LANDSCAPE GARDENING
Equally true is this of other natural forces that shape the rocks;
such as the daily and seasonal changes of temperature that chip away
the mountain peaks and the faces of the cliffs, and the character and
number of plants that grow on rocks where they can get a foothold and
dying and decaying generate acids which help to etch the rocks away.
Trees growing on rocks search out the cracks with their roots and,
pushing in and prying them apart, help to change their form. And there
is sure to be variety in the arrangement of the wild trees growing on
rocks in the mountains and by the sea, since the seeds, being carried
by the winds or by running water or by birds or four-footed creatures,
fall in an endless variety of groupings. So of the shadows cast by the
trees. These shadow masses, so different in shape, owing in part to
the irregular arrangement of the trees and in part to the differences
in shape of the trees themselves, protect portions of the rock, to a
certain extent, against changes in temperature, while the bare rocks
are fully exposed to it, so there results a corresponding variety in
the result of the sun's work upon the rock. At the same time they help
on the acid etching process, because in these shadowed spots there is
more moisture and therefore more rapid decay.
The form of whole continents follows the same law. Take, for example,
Europe. "The geological history of Europe," says Geikie,[49] "is
largely the history of its mountain chains"; and the mountain chains,
for all their picturesque variety, have also, and necessarily, a
certain uniformity, because in the wrinkling of the rocks which made
them the vast areas over which they now extend were all subjected to
the same force--a big push from one side which crumpled up the earth's
outer crust as a table-cloth is crumpled up when pushed forward against
a book lying on it.
[Footnote 49: Encyclopædia Britannica: article on Geology.]
HOW THE VERY SCENERY PLAYS MANY PARTS
The ancient history written in the rocks, in the present relative
positions of the strata, shows that four times a great mountain system
has thus been raised across the face of what is now Europe; that three
times large portions of these mountain ranges have been sunk under
the sea and new rocks deposited over them; and that the mountains of
to-day--the Alps, the Carpathians, and the rest--are the survivors of
the fourth time up. Here we have another striking example of the fact
that on the great stage of life the very scenery has its exits and its
entrances!
But remember that in all these changes of scenery--in the crumplings
and the foldings, and new rock deposits and the carving by the rivers
and the frosts and the winds and the waves of the sea--we have certain
similar materials, similarly arranged, stretching over vast areas, and
the consequence is a certain uniformity and rhythm in the ups and downs
of the landscape and in the changes worked in the walls of stone "where
time and storm have set their wild signatures upon them."
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
What would you think of seeing the leaves all out and the trees in
bloom on Christmas Day? That happens right along, and the people
who live in the lands where this occurs don't think anything of
it, because this is in the Southern Hemisphere during the vacation
season of the sea.
One peculiar thing about this spring and summer in the winter time
in Africa is that when the leaves first come out they are not
green at all. They are brown, red, and pink. Later on they turn
green--just as any well-behaved leaf is supposed to do.[50] It's as
if they got mixed in their dates and thought at first it was autumn
and then woke up and said:
"Oh, yes, to be sure, this is spring! What are we thinking about?"
[Footnote 50: Livingstone's "Expedition to the Zambesi."]
Anyhow they turn from the autumn browns and reds to the appropriate
green of spring, and the flowers come out and the birds begin to
sing in the very season when our winter winds are loudest and the
rock mills of the sea are roaring at their work.
In which Hemisphere, the Northern or the Southern, do the sea mills
have most land to work on?
In Shakespere's "Tempest" you will find a description of a storm at
sea that will take your breath away. Almost the whole of Scene 2,
Act I, is in that terrible storm. In fact, the whole play, as the
title of it indicates, is full of storm.
While you are looking for storms in Shakespere see what you can
find in "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Twelfth Night," "Midsummer
Night's Dream," and "The Merchant of Venice."
Speaking of the sea still being in the Stone Age what do you know
about the kind of tools man used in the Stone Age and how he got
along?[51]
(You'll find that the story of the development of man, as dealt
with in connection with the Stone Age, is part of the strangest
story of all the strange stories of science. You will get a brief
outline of it in this story of mine, in the last chapter.)
[Footnote 51: Interesting books on this subject are: Starr's "First
Steps in Human Progress" (Chautauqua Reading Course) and Clodd's
"Childhood of the World." Osborn's "The Men of the Old Stone Age" is
the latest and most comprehensive work on the subject.]
How much more do you know about pneumatic tools than Father Neptune
does? No doubt you've used a "pneumatic" tool of a sort yourself
more than once--a tool for making a noise. Guess what. A pop-gun!
Look up _pneumatic tools_, and you will find that the same thing
that makes the pop-gun pop helps to build skyscrapers, locomotives,
and steamships, and do a lot of other wonderful things.
In connection with the water wedges made by the sea you must
remember that curious trick ice has when it freezes (page 154);
otherwise you can't understand how it could act like a wedge.
Yes, and wedges, simple as they look, are almost as wonderful as
levers; and you know what Archimedes said he could do with a lever.
The whole subject of machinery and particularly of "automatic" or
so-called self-acting machinery[52] is fascinating. Find out about
planing mills and how they work, particularly why they stop planing
just when they are told to.
[Footnote 52: As a matter of fact, the only machinery that is really
automatic is the machinery of nature, of which what we have called "the
machinery of the sea" is an example.]
In connection with how the sea sometimes helps make harbors
think of as many great harbors as you can, and then look on your
geography map and see how many you have missed.
What character in "Titus Andronicus" says that about the man
standing on a rock and watching the sea come to eat him up?
Your geography has a good deal to say about continental shelves;
and with pictures. Do you remember?
Speaking of lands sinking under the sea you'll run into a world
of interesting things if you look up the story of the Lost Island
of Atlantis; about the Egyptian priest who first described it to
Solon, the Greek lawgiver, as an earthly paradise where all the
laws and everything else were just right.
And if you're of High School age you'll enjoy reading what
Plato[53] and Homer[54] say about this ideal land.
[Footnote 53: Timæus.]
[Footnote 54: The Odyssey.]
Isn't it a striking thing how the big sea that can look so fierce
takes such tender care of the little coral people? And what
extraordinary folks these coral people are! Any good article about
them will tell you worlds of interesting things. For instance, you
will find the people of whole villages living together with only
one backbone. I mean not one backbone _apiece_ but one backbone
among them _all_!
And they have the queerest way with their stomachs, a kind of
co-operative digestion, of co-operative housekeeping. (Your
mother will be particularly interested in this because it shows
the "community kitchen" idea has been thoroughly tried out and it
works! If you don't know about "community kitchens" among human
housekeepers ask mother to tell you, and then you tell _her_ what
you found out about these strange little housekeepers of the sea.)
CHAPTER XI
(NOVEMBER)
It is a noble thing for men ... to make the face of a wall look
infinite, and its edge against the sky like an horizon; or even
if less than this be reached, it is still delightful to mark the
play of passing light on its broad surface, and to see by how many
artifices and gradations of tinting and shadow, time and storm will
set their wild signatures upon it.
--_Ruskin_: _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_.
THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALLS
One of the most interesting things in this whole wonderful story of the
life history of the world is how men were first able to read it at all.
For we know they didn't find it written out in plain print as we have
it now. Neither was it told in any one language so that getting hold of
the thread of the story they could unravel it all, as other learned men
did the picture writing of the Egyptians and the wedge-shaped marks on
Assyrian bricks.
We know already how they learned that rivers open their own gateways
through the mountains; how they know rocks are made over in the
fairyland of change; how they know the ancient glaciers scattered
the boulders over mountainside, valley, and field; how they know the
mountains are children of the sea.
All this and more we have been reading in the written language of the
rocks, but there are other things in this rock script that I have kept
for this last but one of our pleasant talks, so that they might serve
as a kind of summary and remembrance of all that has gone before.
[Illustration: A WALL THAT VULCAN BUILT
I've said it several times before, but I can't help saying it here
again, how much more wonderful the ways of Nature are than was ever
dreamed of even in the wonder tales of the Greeks! Take this great
iron wall, for example--a wall of the iron rock called "lava"--and
who would suppose that it was made by natural forces? It was driven
in a molten state into a crack in overlying rock. After it cooled,
the rock above and on either side of it, being of softer material,
was worn away. This wall is near Spanish Peaks, Colorado. It is 100
feet high and some 30 feet wide. Colorado boys, on their vacations
in that region, run along the top of it for miles.
]
I. The Mysteries in Marble Walls
Take a piece of marble for example, such as you see along the walls of
our great modern buildings. There's a story for you! Why, if half the
things it tells had just happened, or even just been discovered by some
enterprising reporter, we should see pages and pages about it all in
every newspaper in the land.
HOW MARBLE RETELLS THE WORLD HISTORY
In that piece of marble alone you have a pretty full review of the
earth's history; of many of the most important things we have seen and
heard about since we all started out together in Chapter I. It tells of
strange life in ancient seas; of being buried deep in the earth under
immense pressure, and where it could feel the intense heat of the rock
at the centre, and of coming up again completely changed; transformed
from the substance of a dead sea creature's shell to a crystallized
stone beautifully colored and of many patterns; of the chemistry of the
world underground and the laboratories in which its lovely coloring
were made and blended; and solid rock threaded through rock with a
skill that no worker in mosaic has ever equalled; drawn out and fixed
in mere films of white, fading into the rich dark of the marble around
them like white clouds shredded by the winds.
[Illustration: THE STRANGE STORIES THAT MARBLE TELLS]
Those broader lines bending and turning, rising and falling, tell of
the work of the giant forces that lift the mountains into place and
of the great earthquakes that accompany mountain building. When those
little quavering lines were being made, away down in the earth where
the limestone changed to marble, mountains were slowly rising into the
sky on the earth's surface far above. The quaverings in the marble are
pictures, "line drawings" of the mountain story. And beside these lines
that you can read so plainly there are others so small that you need a
magnifying glass to see them; echoes, away down in the fairyland of the
microscope, of the doings of the giants of Mountainland far above.
In following the lines of the earth's great walls of rock over a wide
extent they are found waving sharply up and down in one section, rising
and falling like ocean swells in another, in forward sloping folds in
another, and sometimes even with folds doubling over, as if the great
mountains which these folds made were trying to stand on their heads.
WHY LINES IN MARBLE REPEAT MOUNTAIN FORMS
All these rock folds which, with the help of the sculpturing of the
elements, produce the infinite variety of beauty in mountain scenery
are, speaking generally, repeated in the lines of the marble. But they
are repeated only in miniature, because the rocks deep in the earth are
under such pressure that while the rocks on the surface are free to
rise in big and comparatively simple waves those beneath are doubled up
into smaller and much more crumpled folds. Take several sheets of paper
lying free on the table and press them from the ends. They will rise
in simple arches as most mountains do. Now lay a book on these sheets
and press from the ends again. You see they crumple up a great deal
more; the larger wrinkles themselves doubling into smaller ones.
[Illustration: HOW MOTHER NATURE MAKES HER Z'S
These Z-shaped rock folds were made by the crumpling up of the
crust as the centre, cooling, shrank away. They are to be seen near
the east end of Ogden Canyon, Utah. The black lines were added to
the photograph in the offices of Uncle Sam's big department of
geology at Washington, to show clearly just where the rock runs.
]
You may often have noticed a banded effect in marble. My, what power
it took to do that! Pressure we can't realize. Pressure from above so
great that it made this marble spread; moulded it like clay in the
hands of the potter; the same kind of force that flattened out the
pebbles referred to in Chapter V. This is called "rock flow," and how
plainly the marble shows the flowing movement. I always think what the
weather people call "stratus" clouds, look as if they were made by long
strokes of a painter's brush; and this marble has the very same flowing
lines. Such cloud pictures in marble are made where deposits of other
kinds of rock have been interlaid with the deposits of limestone which
afterward changed to marble, and it is where these bands are folded or
bent that we have set down for us the story of the mountain folds.
Those gossamer effects and the little white clouds spinning out and
fading into the general mass of the marble, how delicate they are!
Yet it took a force that made the earth quake to put them there. The
more we know of the strange and fearful things that happen in times of
earthquake the more we can read between these filmy lines. They tell of
the sides of mountains tumbling down and spreading their valleys with a
chaos of broken stone; making cliffs where there were peaks and peaks
where there were cliffs; changing the course of rivers; shifting whole
forests on the mountainside and replacing them with grim walls and
bastions of barren stone--all in the twinkling of an eye!
THE EARTHQUAKES AND THE DELICATE FILMS
It is by the crushing movements that made the earthquake that rocks are
broken into confusions of cracks such as you often see in a thick glass
window that has been broken. Then into these cracks come dissolved
minerals from other rocks and harden into stone. In the marble one set
of veins often runs right through another as if they had been inlaid.
Then there may be other veins that cross both of these--no end of
criss-crossings. The different sets of veins usually differ also in
color and in grain, and even have different kinds of mineral in them.
With a good hand-glass you can see this difference in texture.
[Illustration: WHEN THE EARTHQUAKE TAKES ITS PEN IN HAND
These are, so to speak, the autographs of earthquakes--the
records earthquakes themselves make on an instrument called the
"seismograph," using a stylus, as the ancients did, as you will
see by looking up "seismograph" in the dictionary or encyclopædia.
After an earthquake starts it seems to stop for breath or for want
of the right word--just like people; for you notice portions of the
lines are almost straight. These were made when the earthquake was
comparatively quiet. Then, when it got excited again--as in the
second record from the top--the stylus fairly jumped up and down;
and there where the waves are long and close together the shocks
were particularly severe and followed each other rapidly.
]
II. How Vulcan Drove his Autograph into the Rocks
But there is another kind of handwriting on the walls that was made
with such a vigorous stroke that it also made the earth shake. Of
course we might expect Vulcan to write a rather vigorous hand--Vulcan,
forger of thunderbolts for Jove. The ancients thought volcanoes
belonged to the kingdom of Vulcan, so in scientific language everything
connected with volcanic action comes under the head of "Vulcanism."
These queer letters we are talking about are called "dikes." They are
made of lava that was driven into cracks in the rocks and afterward
cooled into rock that is as hard as iron. Lava is often largely made of
iron.
[Illustration: MR. VULCAN'S FAMOUS CASTLE ON THE HUDSON
This is a part of Mr. Vulcan's famous castle on the Hudson known
as the Palisades. Here the lava rock has formed into columns which
make the mass look all the more like some old castle of the Middle
Ages. The "windows" are where the softer spots in the rock have
decayed away. This castle--come to think of it--really belongs
to mediæval architecture, for it was built in the Middle Ages of
earth's long history.
]
[Illustration: THIS IS THE HAND OF VULCAN, TOO]
Were you ever down by the seashore in a storm? If so you remember
how the ground under your feet shook when a great wave rushed into
some narrow passage or crevice in the rocks, and was tossed high in
the air in spray. Then just imagine molten lava, which is many times
heavier than water, driven into a crack in a rock with the force of a
cannon-ball. That's how it happened. That's how those dark strokes in
the rock with their heavy shading were made.
This was done in the depths of the earth; not on the surface where you
see these rocks now. They used to have piles of other rocks above
them, but these in course of time have been weathered away. This is
known, not only from the marks of the wearing but from the fact that
these dikes, as well as the rock into which they have been driven, are
crystallized, wholly or in part. Such crystallizing, as we know, takes
place away down in the earth.
Dikes are very common. In some places you find the rocks fairly laced
with them. The picture of the dikes in the granite shores at Marblehead
also shows (in the horizontal plan) many "faults" or slips of the
rock since the dike was made, and each slip probably gave rise to an
earthquake. So you see there's the story of a terrible time written on
those quiet old residents by the sea.
[Illustration: THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY
Here is a still more striking example of the formation of columns
in lava--the Giant's Causeway. Here are 40,000 columns, packed
like the cells of a honeycomb, and they slope to the pavement in
the foreground that gives the mass its name. That bees should make
their little honey-jars in such regular form is wonderful enough,
but think of lava shaping its own self into columns like that!
]
DID MR. VULCAN USE A STEAM PILE-DRIVER?
Just what power Mr. Vulcan used to drive the dikes is not known for
sure, but I'll tell you how it is supposed to have been done. Remember
that all rocks that are deep down in the earth contain water, shut up
in their pores. Then remember how hot it is down there and how this
heat would make steam right in the rocks. Then let the rock above be
cracked by the movements of the earth crust, and this crack extend down
to where these hot rocks are, the pressure, being released along that
crack, the melted rock (lava) would rush up, as it does in connection
with the eruptions of volcanoes, and the exploding steam would help
drive it.
III. Ancient Weather Records Turned to Stone
So much for the literary remains of Mr. Vulcan. Now let's see how much
we can make out of the handwriting of the waters and the winds on these
walls of time.
What does the picture at the top of page 245 look like? Rain-drops in
the dust. And so you see they are; but the rain fell so long that the
pits made in the dust have turned to stone. Think of the autograph of
a rain-drop older than the Pharaohs; older than the pyramids these
Pharaohs built to perpetuate their names.
And this is how such rain-drops immortalize themselves; this is the
interpretation of their handwriting on the walls. Along the dry shore
of an ancient sea when the tide was out, rain-drops fell on the sand
and dust. Tides often come in with a rush, in wild waves driven by
the wind, but when there is no wind and no waves rolling in from far
distant storms the tide may overspread such delicate things as the
imprint of rain-drops with a thin protecting film of mud. This was what
happened to our little rain pits. Later tides overlaid them deeper
from day to day, and in course of time both the layer containing the
rain-drop prints and the overlying layers of sediment turned to stone.
Often the heat of a summer sun will bake these rain-drop designs and
this you see helps; it holds the impression until the tide can come in
and spread its protecting film. Many imprints of rain-drops and of the
feet of reptiles are found in the sandstone underlying the coal seams
in eastern Pennsylvania, and they are always, I am told, covered with
a fine powdery material, which was once the slime and mud of the tide.
Such rain marks are often found also in slate. Wouldn't you like to
have a slate with one of these rain-drop autographs on it?
[Illustration: RAIN-DROP AUTOGRAPHS OLDER THAN THE PHARAOHS]
Here, by the way, is a very important thing these rain-drops tell. Says
Professor Shaler:
"They tell us that the ordinary machinery of the atmosphere was
operating in those days very much as it is to-day, and that the climate
was much the same."[55]
[Footnote 55: This quotation is from Doctor Shaler's "Nature and Man in
America," a book you should read, as you should all of Doctor Shaler's
books. No one has observed so many interesting things in the field of
geology and few have written about them so simply or reasoned about
them so well.]
So, he argues, the great Ice Age couldn't have been due to change of
climate, but to the other things that we read about in Chapter II. For
they even know in what ages different records of rain-drops were made
because they are found in rocks laid down in different periods; and one
of the periods in which they are found was that in which the North Pole
ice and its neighbors came down and made us those long visits.
STORY OF A STROLL IN THE RAIN
Another story found in museums is written in slate--not by a rain-drop
but by a living creature. The slate shows the track of a reptile with
feet like a bird. Evidently he was strolling along in the rain; for
there you see the marks of the rain-drops right among the marks of his
feet, and in the footprints themselves. Being a reptile who spent much
of his time in or near the water he no doubt enjoyed these little pats
of the rain-drops as he went along.
BUT THIS STROLL WAS TAKEN IN THE SUN
In another of these museum specimens we see written out just as plainly
the story of a stroll in the sun. There are the imprints of Mr.
Reptile's feet, and there are the sun-cracks in the mud showing that
the sun was shining--or at least that it had been shining for several
days or weeks, for it takes a little time to make sun-cracks in mud.
This story, we might suppose, was written so that it could be read
by the blind; the cracks, as well as the footprints, are brought out
in raised lettering. Sun-cracked mud, after a long dry "spell," will
bake so that the cracks will not be washed out by the returning tide
but instead be filled by other material, and this material will go on
building up to a certain extent; so making those ridges.
[Illustration: "THEN THERE CAME A LONG DRY SPELL"
This shows how the cracks in dried-up mud are preserved in stone.
The process is the same as in the case of the stone imprints of
rain-drops, the imprints being protected by successive deposits of
mud by quiet tides, and afterward turning to stone.
]
THE STONE AUTOGRAPHS OF GENTLE BREEZES
On still other stones you will find written the story of gentle breezes
that stirred the water and made ripples on long-buried shores. First
the breezes rippled the shallow waters near the shore. Then the waters
rippled the sand, and the sediments of the tide preserved these ripple
marks as they did the rain-drops and the footprints.
But the wind alone, without the help of water ripples, can write its
name in the sands of time. And when you get to know the handwriting
of wind and wave you will not mistake the one for the other. You are
likely to find wind ripples on any big heap of sand. Have a good look
at them and then go down to shallow water on a sandy shore and compare
the two kinds. That's the way the great men of science do; they notice
every little thing.
[Illustration:
_From Norton's "Elements of Geology."
By permission of Ginn and Company_
THE STORY OF BIG ROUND TOP AND LITTLE ROUND TOP
One story of Big Round Top and Little Round Top your history tells,
but long before the battle of Gettysburg these two mountains had
age-long battles of their own with the winds, the rains, and the
frosts, and in these battles lost their peaks and their sharp
outlines of jagged rock, and became rounded down to the forms we
see before us. Those rocks in the field were probably broken off
in these battles, as the rocks of high mountains are to-day, and
carried down by roaring torrents.
]
WEATHER RECORDS ON THE MOUNTAIN WALLS
From a scientific standpoint little things may be just as big as big
things. For example, in this matter of old weather records these
rain-drops and ripple stones are just as interesting as other weather
records written large on mountain walls; such as those which tell that
what is now the Dead Sea was once part of a much larger sea that wasn't
dead at all. You may never get to read these records on the mountain
walls of Palestine, for they are a long way off, but here in our own
country we have a similar story told on mountain walls in the region
of another dead sea--the Great Salt Lake of Utah. From Salt Lake City
you can see on the mountain surrounding the desert of the Great Basin
the marks of old shore lines; where the waves cut into the rock. These
marks show that this Basin once held two great lakes, and the one in
the eastern portion dried up into what is now Great Salt Lake.
[Illustration: WEATHER RECORDS ON THE WALLS OF TIME
What is now the Great Salt Lake used to be a much greater lake that
wasn't salt at all. That vast flight of steps up the mountainside
shows how wide it spread. As the big lake dried up, and grew
smaller and smaller and saltier and saltier, its shores were
bounded successively by those wave-cut cliffs.
]
IV. Stories Written on the Pebbles
Sometimes when a geologist picks up a pebble and looks at it a moment
he can hear the roar of mountain torrents and of lowland streams in
flood. If the pebble is round it shows that it has been carried far and
rolled about by streams. If it has pits in it this shows that its water
journeys were rough, because such pits are made by knocking against
other pebbles and sharp stones in the struggle and confusion of the
rushing waters. You see these little dots are a kind of shorthand, for
we pebbles are stenographers too!
[Illustration: THE PERCHED BOULDER IN BRONX PARK
This is one of the interesting things to be seen when you visit
Bronx Park in New York City. Of course, _you_ know how that old
boulder got there, and how he drew those straight lines in the
rock-bed beneath, but many visitors to the park do not.
]
HOW PEBBLES TELL OF THEIR TRAVELS
Other great stories in small space are told on glacial pebbles.
Scientific men can often tell from the look of a pebble whether it was
shaped by rivers, by the sea, by the sand blasts of desert winds, or
by the glaciers. Not only that, but, if it is a glaciated pebble, on
what part of the glacier it was carried; whether in the middle of its
back, or on the sides, like the passengers in an Irish jaunting-car;
or whether it rode underneath, like a tramp stealing a ride on the
bumpers. The stones in the middle of the glacier's back naturally keep
their sharp edges longer than stones on the side, ground as the side
stones are by the moving ice mass against the mountain walls. And the
stones on both top and sides would lose less of their edges than the
stones underneath the ice.
[Illustration:
_From Norton's "Elements of Geology."
By permission of Ginn and Company_
ONE PEBBLE IN ITS TIME PLAYS MANY PARTS
Here are pebbles faceted in different ways by glaciers. No. 1 has
six facets. No. 4, originally a rounded river pebble, has been
rubbed down to one flat face. Nos. 3 and 5 are battered little
travellers faceted on one side only. Notice how No. 5 got his face
scratched just as I did.
]
[Illustration: PEBBLE FACETED BY WIND-BLOWN SAND
You remember how the glaciers ground flat faces or facets on the
pebbles, don't you? Here is another example of Nature's lapidary
work, but here she has used wind and sand instead of ice.
]
V. A Greater Cæsar and His Commentaries
Well, there he is again, you see, Mr. Glacier of the Ice Age. He's
always turning up, everywhere you go in earth history. As Shakespere's
Mr. Cassius said of Mr. Julius Cæsar, "he bestrode the world." And,
like the Roman Cæsar, this Cæsar wrote the story of his own exploits;
but although a vastly greater conqueror than the famous Roman, he was
even more modest. Cæsar and his Commentaries, our High School friend
will tell you, nearly always refers to himself in the third person;
but in his commentaries on his travels and exploits the Old Man of the
Mountain didn't even use his own name. He left the editors of his
manuscript to find out who he was.
HOW THE GREAT LAKES WERE TIPPED UP
One of the most striking things he did, of which he wrote the record on
the walls, was to tip up the Great Lakes. You remember just how he made
them. Well, it seems that as he started back home he tipped them up.
Suppose you could pick up the vast stone bowls that hold these lakes
and tip them toward the north as easily as you can tip a bowl of water,
what would the water do? It would fall lower along the south shores of
the lakes and rise along the northern shores, wouldn't it? Then suppose
the lakes were kept tipped up in this way for ages, and summer wind
storms and winter tempests dashed waves against their shores, what
would happen? Stone walls rising above the shore would have terraces
cut into them, and the line of these terraces would tilt toward the
north. There are terraces just like that on rocks bordering the Great
Lakes, and the explanation of their tilt is that the lakes themselves
were tipped up, and that the Old Man of the Mountain did the tipping.
The rock crust of the round earth bends under great weight like an
arch. So when the enormous weight of the glaciers of the Ice Age was on
a portion of the arch it bent down. Then, as the glaciers retreated,
the weight of them was shifted northward all the time. Finally when
the glaciers in the region of the lakes had melted quite away the arch
slowly rose into place again and lifted the terraces above the water
line as we see them to-day.
Throughout regions the glaciers visited you find rocks polished like
mirrors; in other cases they are scratched, and in others deeply
grooved.
[Illustration: SCENE ON THE COAST OF NORWAY BY A GLACIER
You know the fiords. You've met them in your geography. This is
a fiord on the Norway coast. Notice how smooth the walls of the
mountains are. They were trimmed down by the ice, which also plowed
off their soil. We are here looking up what was once a river
valley, but the glacier cut it down below sea level, and this is
sea water. Notice in the openings of the mountains all the way up
the valley where the tributaries of the ancient river flowed in
then as now.
]
HOW THIS MR. CÆSAR IS TRANSLATED
No one scratch can be followed far. The composition is, like Cæsar's,
in short sentences, whole episodes in a word: "Veni, vidi, vici." But a
series of scratches all run in one general direction--north and south.
To get at the meaning--just as in construing Cæsar--you must take the
context; what goes before and after.
The sides of the valleys of the Alps from 1,000 to 2,000 feet above
the surface of the glaciers of our own time are scratched and furrowed
in the same way. Here we catch Mr. Glacier almost in the very act of
writing.
THE HANDWRITING OF THE TWO CÆSARS
To do this writing, our Cæsar, like the Cæsar of the High School,
used a stylus. Mr. Glacier's stylus, as we know, was made of stone
held fast in his icy grip (page 121). And here is another curious
resemblance between the manuscripts of Mr. G. Cæsar and Mr. J. Cæsar.
They both wrote in straight lines. The reason Julius Cæsar and other
Roman gentlemen wrote in letters made of straight lines was that they
scratched these letters on tablets covered with wax, using a sharpened
piece of iron or ivory. You can see it would be much easier with such
writing tools and material to form letters in straight lines than to
write in flowing, rounded and connected lines as we do so easily with a
nice flexible pen on a smooth surface.
HOW THE OLD MEN CHANGED A "V" TO A "U"
Here is something else about the story of the Old Men of the Mountain
that is a curious reminder of the Romans and their letters. The Romans
had no letter U in their alphabet and so V had to do a double duty;
it had to be a V and then when asked, had to take its place in line
and pretend to be a U. For instance, a Roman who wanted to write the
word "number" would do it in this way: "NVMERO." After a while, in the
history of the growth of our alphabet, the V that was intended for U
was rounded at the bottom.
Now, curiously enough, the writing of the Old Men of the Mountain has
gone through the same process. River valleys in mountain regions, as
elsewhere, are originally V-shaped, but where glaciers flowed down
these valleys they not only made them wider but rounded out the bottoms
so that they became U-shaped. Look at the valley in the Wind River
range in Wyoming shown in the geologies. You notice the farther your
eye goes up into the mountains the more V-shaped the valley becomes.
Back toward antiquity, you see, when they had nothing but V!
[Illustration: THE HANDWRITING OF THE GLACIERS AND THE ROMANS
Here is an interesting relic of ancient days that will enable you
to compare the chirography of the Old Men of the Mountain with that
of the Romans. These are marks left by the masons on Roman walls.
They show just what part each mason laid, so that if the wall
proved defective the authorities would know who was responsible.
]
All quite striking, isn't it, this strange kind of writing on the walls
of time? As if, among the ruins that are all there is left of the
fallen Roman Empire, we should in some heap of dust and crumbled stone
find one of the very tablets on which Cæsar wrote his commentaries and
there engraved in Cæsar's own hand:
[Illustration: THIS STYLE IS CALLED FLUTING
Looks like moulding, doesn't it? This is a piece of rock, and it
was carved in that way by the glaciers with their tools of embedded
stone. The deeper grooves were made where the rock was softer or
where the glacier's chisels were of a particularly hard quality,
such as flint or granite.
]
"Cæsar, maximis bellis confectis, in hiberna exercitum deduxit."
Can you translate that for us? (This to the High School Boy.)
"As easy as anything," says he. "Cæsar, on completion of these great
wars, led his army into winter quarters."
And that same phrase might serve in Mr. Glacier's Commentaries too.
For the glaciers of the Ice Age, after their great work was done, also
went into winter quarters; melting back to the present snow-line in our
mountains and the regions of eternal ice around the pole.
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
One of the most interesting stories of men's handwriting on the
walls and how scholars, many centuries afterward, learned to read
it, you will find in encyclopædias, histories, and other books
under such headings as _Egypt_, _Assyria_, _Rosetta Stone_, and
most of all under _Hieroglyphics_; a big word, but full of meat
when once you've cracked the shell.
Among other things, you will find that if it hadn't been for the
Egyptians and other clever people of the long ago we would not have
had our written language to read at all; on walls or anywhere else!
If you had been an Egyptian, say 4,000 years ago, how many letters
do you suppose you would have had to learn before you could have
read well? About a thousand! But it wouldn't have been so hard
as you think, for the Egyptian letters talked, so to speak. They
told their own story much as did the picture words that told so
much to the little Greeks. These Egyptian words, however--for they
were words, or several words in one, rather than letters--were
real pictures, and very good pictures, too. (See Chambers under
"Hieroglyphics" for the little pictures.)
Some of them were very simple. It wasn't hard to learn.
But now suppose you were an Egyptian and you wanted to write a
letter telling somebody how pleased you were about something--a
nice new book an uncle had sent you, for instance--the proper
picture-word to use would be a lady beating a tambourine. She is
pleased--that's why she is beating the tambourine, just as a small
boy claps his hands when he says, "Oh, goody, goody!" So this
picture-word came to be used to express "joy" or "pleasure" over
anything.
These are just some samples to show you what interesting things
even such formidable words as "hieroglyphics" are when you make
friends with them. But now, to get back to Nature's handwriting and
the nature myths connected with it, what do you know about this
Vulcan, who left so much of his manuscript in the rocks?
The ancients thought of him as a worker in metals. Don't you think
they would have, been quite sure of it if they had known about the
dikes and the palisades of the Hudson, and Fingal's cave, with
their remarkable iron-like columns of cooled lava? But he was an
artist in metals, too, and a mechanical engineer, it seems. Do you
remember about those two statues of beautiful women that he made
of pure gold, and how they walked about with him wherever he went?
And the brazen-footed bulls of Ætes, that filled the air with their
bellowings and from their nostrils blew flame and smoke?[56]
[Footnote 56: I wonder if Vulcan could have been thinking of
locomotives--what we sometimes call "iron horses"--when he made those
bulls. Do you suppose?]
The Greeks probably didn't know about such "art metal" work as
the palisades--certainly they didn't know about the Hudson River
or Fingal's Cave--but they had Vulcan (Hephæstus they called him)
doing all sorts of other art-metal things. There was the famous
shield he made for Achilles, for instance. Homer takes several
pages just to tell about the different figures on it and what they
meant.[57]
[Footnote 57: The Iliad.]
Why do you suppose a temple was erected on Mount Etna? (What kind
of a mountain is it?)
Wouldn't it be strange if we could make hard coal out of soft?
Vulcan does that sometimes with these dike strokes of his.[58]
[Footnote 58: The International Encyclopedia.]
The International will also tell you why dike rock is usually so
solid and tough, and what the crystal people have to do with making
it so.
The Britannica (28: 188) tells how, in the walls of volcanoes
Vulcan wrote out the hint for making re-enforced concrete which is
so important a feature of modern architectural engineering.
Look about on the rock-beds in the stone quarry and see if you
can't find some of the writing of that Older Cæsar with his queer
stone stylus. Probably the men in the quarry will have wondered how
these scratches came there and you can tell them.
There is one style of Mr. Glacier's hand-work that even the dogs
and the horses notice, and that is the "mirror rocks." Muir tells
about them in his "Mountains of California."
CHAPTER XII
(DECEMBER)
"A fire-mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell,
A jelly fish and a saurian
And caves where the cavemen dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty
And a face turned from the clod--
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God."
--_William Herbert Carruth._
THE END OF THE WORLD
So the Ice Ages and their glaciers and the Romans and their Cæsars
melted away. We know them only by the marks they left on the walls
of time. But why this constant doing and undoing of things? We have
seen it going on from the very beginning; rock crumbling to dust, dust
changing back to rock; rocks raised up into mountains, mountains worn
down to plains; then more mountains, and on through the same cycle of
endless change; as if always starting the whole thing over again.
What is it all about? Are we getting anywhere? If so, where?
Ever since men looked out upon the world around them and began to
think, they have puzzled not only about the causes but the purpose of
this endless drama of creation and decay. Some said one thing; some
said another. The Persian poet who wrote those fine lines about the
lion and the lizard in the ruins of the palaces meant to say that's
all that everything comes to; all things, men included, return to the
elements of which they were made and that's the end of them. So, said
he, what's the use of bothering one's head about it? There's nothing to
be learned. One verse of his famous song reads like this:
"Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went."
But Science, as we shall now see, has a better answer.
I. Nothing Happens
In the first place you must have noticed as we came along through this
little book that nothing happens in this world of ours; everything
is under a government of laws. Not only did it turn out that there
was method in the apparent madness of the sea but we found method
everywhere. It was not chance that made our worlds, whether they were
born full-grown or grew up piece by piece. And we see the same forces
at work in small things as in the great. The force that keeps the earth
in its orbit is just as careful to catch and plant the tiny seeds of
the grasses and the pine-trees drifting forward in the wind, so keeping
the world clothed with life and verdure.
ALL NATURE UNDER A GOVERNMENT OF LAW
So with the seasons with all that they mean in the life of the world;
spring never fails to follow winter. Little things happen that make
spring "late," as we say; but spring itself never fails to come and
always in its right place in the procession of the year. All this
because the earth stays in its orbit and spins on its axis. Watches
break their mainsprings, clocks run down. These things "happen"; but
we never think of saying that the mainspring or the wheels "happened,"
or that they "happened" into their places in the watch. The worlds not
only make their appointed round as regularly as the wheels of a watch
but they never run down, and the power that keeps them going and in
their places never breaks. If it ever occurred in any other way--if we
should hear of a world flying out of its orbit and going banging around
among the other worlds, we could talk of "happening."
NATURE'S ACCIDENT INSURANCE SYSTEM
We might call these laws that make it so certain that nature's business
will go on as usual, rain or shine, the Accident Insurance of the
Universe. We have nothing quite like it in human insurance systems; for
these only make it up to you--the best they can--after some accident
has happened. Nature's insurance system, on the other hand, makes it
certain that nothing _will_ happen to change the main course of things.
The protective insurance of the universe is woven right through Nature
itself. The continents, for example, were bound, in due course, to rise
in their places, because it is the nature of cooling masses to shrink
and for the outside to cool the faster and to harden and to wrinkle up.
It doesn't matter whether the cooling mass is a little baked apple or a
big hot earth.
[Illustration: THE CLOCK OF THE AGES
By representing the great geologic periods of time in the form of
a clock-face a writer in the _Scientific American_ enables us to
form a rough conception of their duration, their distinguishing
features, and their relations to one another, according to
ideas associated with the theory of La Place, but which have
been considerably modified in the light of later reasoning and
investigation. The view now generally accepted, for example, is
that the Azoic era was longer than all subsequent time. But, taking
the picture as it stands, each "hour" represents 3,000,000 years.
For a quarter of the total period up to the very recent appearance
of man "there was darkness upon the face of the deep." Next after
the Azoic was the Laurentian Period, when "the dry land appeared."
Later came the dawn of life, and this life, like the inanimate
matter which preceded it, kept rising and continues to rise, as the
ages pass, to higher, more beautiful, and nobler forms.
]
Nor was it an accident that the continents in their original form grew
larger with the fat of the land that was added to them under the action
of the chemistry of the air. You see Nature must understand chemistry
or things wouldn't come out right in the laboratory, as they always do
if you have made no mistakes. Ever think of that, Mr. High School Boy?
II. The Strangest Thing of All That Didn't Happen
But the strangest thing of all that didn't happen in this history of
the world and its making I'm going to tell you about now.
KINSHIP OF KITTENS AND APPLE-TREES
You remember what I said of the apple-tree in Chapter V (page 93), how
nobody who didn't know it to be true would believe that little Miss
Greenleaf and old Mr. Root and rough Mr. Bark and lovely Miss Blossom
were not only born under the same roof but were as closely related as
a pussy-cat and her nest full of kittens. I didn't mention the kittens
then, but just suppose I had done so; and then had gone on to say
that kittens are relations of the apple family and that all birds are
related to all kittens, and that both are kindred of that terrible Mr.
Cetiosaurus that we met in the Bad Lands of Dakota.
Would you have believed it?
No? Well, I don't wonder. It was quite a while before the wise men of
science believed it. Now not only is this idea of the origin of all
living things--animal and vegetable--universally accepted by men of
science, but every educated person is supposed to know about it. It is
always, and as a matter of course, put into the school-books dealing
with the history of nature; just as in all histories we are sure to see
Columbus landing in 1492 and George Washington being inaugurated April
30, 1789.
Most people, including the scientists, used to think that each kind of
plant and animal was given its present form in the first place and that
this form had never changed. This was known as the "special creation"
theory; while the idea that the various kinds of plants and animals
we now know gradually developed from quite different forms is called
the theory of "evolution." Among the curious facts that finally led
educated people everywhere to believe this strangest of all the strange
fairy tales of the land of science were these:
AS WE READ THE ROCKS FROM THE BOTTOM UP
The remains and imprints of plant and animal life of long ago which we
find in the rocks show successions of related but different forms in
the rocks of different ages. At the beginning in the lowest rocks the
forms are much alike, but grow more and more unlike as we climb these
stairs of time. At first there are no animals with backbones; then
there come animals with backbones that resemble each other in general
build; and finally such wide varieties of backboned creatures as fish,
birds, horses, and men. And so with endless varieties of birds and
beasts and creeping things and the trees and the grasses of the field.
Sometimes the differences between these apparently related forms, as
we find them in the rocks, are very great; but everything goes to show
that this is because there are missing pages, so to speak, in the great
stone book. When you remember how long it takes to make one of these
layers of stone, and what they go through in cracking and twisting and
wearing down on their way back to dust and the sea, and how quickly
the remains of big animals--to say nothing of plants and insects--are
destroyed, you must agree that the wonder is that we have any records
at all. Yet so enormous has been the number of plants and animals that
have died in the course of the world's history that there have been
found hundreds and thousands of these remains and imprints between the
layers of stone. In all cases the fashions in form change from age to
age; and the longer the time, as shown by the thickness of the rock,
the greater the change.
THE RABBIT THAT TURNED INTO A HORSE
The horse, which has been such a faithful carrier for man since man and
horse arrived from the lower ranges of life, also brought with him on
the way up one of the most complete of these strange autobiographies
that our brother animals have recorded with their bones. The most of
this story of the horse was found in the rocks of our Western States,
but the first chapter of it saw the light about forty years ago in
England. When the bones were found in the rock deposits of that
country known as London Clay they looked so unhorselike that a famous
paleontologist (as the students of these ancient anatomies are called)
gave it a name which means "rabbit-like beast." But in rock of the
same age in Wyoming they afterward found the bones of an animal that
looked a little more like a horse, but plainly a close relation of
the rabbit-like beast. They went on finding different forms, through
thirteen successive stages of rock history, and with each new period
the form kept getting larger and more horselike until they came to a
horse with three toes; and finally to one with the single big toe which
we call a hoof. Instead of the other two toes there were those two
little lumps that you can feel in any horse's foot just above the hoof.
These are the ends of two small splintlike bones that are all there is
left of the other two toes.
So there have been found in the rock records more or less complete
serial stories of thousands of plants and animals. In the case of man,
not only do we find that there were once human beings on earth like
the caveman with low forehead and huge jaw, but nothing has ever been
found to indicate that there were any higher types of human beings in
existence in his day. And both the caveman and the handsomest human
beings of to-day--the captain of our football team, for example--have
essentially the same bodily framework as the monkey tribe. This does
not mean that man--even so low a creature as the caveman--descended
from monkeys, any more than the fact that he has a backbone means he
descended from humming-birds. But the backbones in humming-birds,
monkeys, and men show that all are descended from older types of
backboned creatures. As monkeys and men are much more alike than men
and birds they are evidently more closely related.
We might suppose, to be sure, that men and all other forms of life
which they resemble in any way were so made from the beginning; that
is, if we hadn't learned from the records of the rocks that they
_weren't_ so made from the beginning. Yet, even after that, we might go
on supposing that each species was created separately, but that the
form was changed from age to age. But in that case what are you going
to say to this:
In man's body are several organs that are useless and often harmful.
Other animals, also, contain among useful organs some that are
"out-of-date," as we would say if we were speaking of some old machines
in a machine-shop. Why, in making a brand-new species, shouldn't Nature
have all the latest improvements from the start, just as man does in
building a brand-new home? If each species was separately created it is
hard to understand why these useless or harmful organs should be kept;
but if one species grew out of another, by gradual improvement, just as
cities grow out of villages, this is exactly what we might expect.
One of these useless organs in man is called the "vermiform appendix."
It is always getting its name in the papers by giving trouble to some
prominent man. Now this appendix, while a perfect nuisance to human
beings, is just the thing for cows and other grass-eating animals. In
them it is very large and of great use in digestion, while in the case
of man and the monkey family it has shrunk into a little affair that
puts in all its time either doing nothing or getting out of fix.
III. Upward; Always Upward
These are some of the reasons why the various varieties of animals are
supposed to have descended from common ancestors and to have undergone
endless changes of form; changes as strange as anything that was ever
written into a fairy story or acted out in a Christmas pantomime. There
are other things quite as convincing and even more thrilling to read
about, such as the little theatre in the chicken's egg where strange,
changing shadows re-enact the drama of ancient life; but these I am
here passing by because my pages are running out and I want the rest
of them to speak of what seems to me to be the greatest lesson of this
whole book; the greatest and most useful and happiest lesson Science
or any kind of book can teach; namely, that not only is the universe
governed by Laws and Mind, but that all these laws act together as one
Great Law and are working out one general result, the constant advance
of all things toward a higher life.
HOW MAN HAS RISEN AS HE DESCENDED
As there was a period in human history when there were no human beings
on earth higher than the cave-dweller, so there was a time when the
highest forms of animal and vegetable life were minute creatures and
plants consisting only of a single cell. It is such low forms of
vegetable life that make the scum on the still waters of a pond. Step
by step, in both the animal and vegetable world, rose the higher forms.
The descent of man from lower forms of life used to be considered
by many people as a thought that degraded humanity, but it is the
most promising fact in all nature. The striking thing is, not that
we are related in some way to the apes and the cavemen but that such
a creature as an ape or a caveman should have helped develop such a
beautiful thing as a little child.
This progress has not been steadily upward. The world of life, like
the surface of the globe itself, has had its ups and downs. Wonderful
nations like Greece and Rome have risen and flourished and passed
away, but they left the best of themselves, the part that time cannot
destroy. The Greeks taught us literature and art and the grace of life.
The Romans gave us a science of government and a solid way of doing
practical things, such as the building of good roads and bridges. The
great lesson of history is that civilization and human liberty and all
the things that make life worth living have not only survived the fall
of empires but stand to-day on higher and firmer ground than they ever
did before.
THE WORLD THAT MOTHER MADE
But do you know who was at the bottom of it all? Mother! All the things
that men have done in the development of national life, with its arts
and industries, everything we call civilization, grew out of the life
and industry of the home, and it was mother who finally made the home.
The mother idea came into the world with the first seed that ever
started out to make its own way; for the mother plant had provided it
with food enough to keep it going until it could get well-established
in business. But the kind of mothers we know, mothers who stay with
their babies and feed them, came very late in the long story of life.
In the early days the world was not only without flowers and birds
and the beautiful trees and varied landscapes we know, but it was
motherless, in the sense that we understand mothers. In the lowest
forms of life, such as the insects, the mothers and children never
saw each other at all; for among the insects just as it is to-day the
mother simply laid the eggs and then, before the little insects were
born, passed away. Even among the fish, who are much closer relations
of ours than the insects--since fish belong to the great brotherhood
of the backbone--the sense of motherhood doesn't get beyond looking
after the eggs. So with the next higher group to which the frogs
belong; and the next, the reptiles. Only with the birds, the next group
above the reptiles, do we begin to see what motherhood means. Then at
the very top of the list come the class of animals whose very name has
"mamma" in it; the "mammalia." Among these, even outside the human
race, we find very striking examples of family love and devotion. The
gorillas, for instance, although they haven't what one would call an
attractive face, are good to their folks. Not only does Mamma Gorilla
nurse her babies and carry them in her arms much as a human mother
does, and fight and die for them, but a famous African traveller tells
of a Mamma Gorilla who stayed safe with the babies in their humble home
of sticks in the fork of a tree while Papa Gorilla sat all night at the
foot of it, with his back against the trunk, to protect them from a
leopard that had been seen prowling around.
Among most animals below man the babies are soon able to leave mother
and shift for themselves, but in the case of human beings the baby is
helpless for a much longer time. So, even among the lowest savages, it
was necessary for father and mother to keep together and look after
their children. Thus grew up family life; and out of the family the
tribe; and out of many tribes living together and closely related, grew
first small and then larger nations. Yet, always at the beginning, it
was the mother, more than the father, who looked after the children and
taught them, so bringing before the world the idea of doing things, not
for one's self alone but for others. From this came the mutual giving
and helping which made national life possible, and that is making this
a better and better world to live in.
IV. The Great Unseen
So it is very plain not only that the end, the purpose of all this
machinery and march of things that we have been going through since the
beginning of Chapter I, is to make life better, more beautiful both
in form and character, but to show that "all nature is on the side of
those who try to rise."[59] It is plain also that this end must have
been foreseen and intended from the beginning; for, from the very start
each change in the world and in life was a preparation for another
and a greater change. The change from rock to soil made plant life
possible; the growth of plants made animal life possible, and so on up
through the long succession of changes in this tree of life by which
all things are related and which gave us the infinite variety of good
things we already have--fruit, homes, churches, schools, art galleries,
books, railroads and steamships that make the whole world neighbors;
the telegraph, the newspapers, and the magazines that carry thought and
knowledge and plans for the common good so fast and far that already
it is as if a whole nation with its millions had a heart and brain in
common.
[Footnote 59: Drummond: "The Ascent of Man."]
Man himself, you see, has become one of the great forces of nature in
the evolution of nature, in the blossoming out and fruit-bearing of
things. But now notice this: Back of all that man does and all that the
rest of nature does is the great controlling force called Mind; and
this Mind is invisible. If I should say of some great man that he had a
powerful mind you would know just what I meant; but if anybody should
ask "What did his mind _look_ like?" you would think that was an odd
question, wouldn't you?
[Illustration:
_From the painting by Burne-Jones_
THE FIRST DAY OF CREATION
]
THE MYSTERIOUS PRINCESS HIDDEN IN THE BUD
So it is and has been from the beginning. We can see the _results_ of
changes of one thing into another but never just how the changing is
done. While it is no longer believed that species were given a certain
form in the beginning and that they have always kept that form, it
is still true that each species comes into being from some unseen
cause--"all of a sudden," as it were. Because species thus seem to vary
of themselves, and not for any reason that we can see these changes are
called "spontaneous variations." Always back of the material nature we
can see is a nature that is not material; a part of nature that, like
the mind of man, we can neither see nor hear nor feel nor know by any
of our five senses. Some Unseen Power forms the baby plant out of the
seed; some power changes the leaves hidden away in the bud into the
petals of the flower. When the leaves gather to form the bud, like
little hands playing "button, button, who's got the button," where do
you suppose the flower is? It _isn't_. It has not yet begun to be. But
soon, as if some magician had waved his wand and said "Presto! Change!"
the pink petals begin to form there in the dark of the cup and, first
thing we know, out steps Miss Blossom, all in her pink and gold like a
princess dressed for a ball!
But always hidden in a mystery these changes take place. We can peep
into the growing bud as often as we like and we will never catch the
fairies making the dress, nor the princess putting it on. We always see
the thing after it is done!
WONDERFUL ART BUT WHERE IS THE ARTIST?
Another thing: How do the fairies of Roseland remember every spring
just how a rose looked, when the roses of last year have been dead
and gone so long? You see they work without a model, something great
artists seldom do; and in some kinds of work, as busts and portraits
and landscapes, never do at all. Even the most powerful microscope
doesn't show any pattern in the seed for the seed to go by in growing
into the finished plant; or in an egg to tell it what kind of a bird it
is expected to be. No, not the trace of a pattern. What then, guides
the growth of the seed; of an oak, say, so that it finally and always
takes the family form? Some Power, evidently, as intelligent as the
power that moves the hand of the human artist when he paints that oak
into his landscape. How many of us have stopped to think that not only
in the world of mind but in the material world itself, all forms of
_power_ are as invisible as the fairies that work unseen in the rosebud
and the little birds' egg and the big rock? All power--what we call
steam power, wind power, electric power and the rest--are not only
unseen but unseeable, unfeelable, untastable. We know steam power only
when heat gets into the water and makes steam; electric power only when
it gets into a wire or a dynamo; or, passing by unseen ways through the
air, moves the wireless telegraph receiver; gravity power only when it
moves something as the water of a waterfall; or when it is helping to
hold things--the earth and the other worlds--in their appointed paths.
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
You can easily see why evolution is the most talked about of
all phases of science--of the study of this wonderful world we
live in. One reason is it's such an astonishing thing in itself,
this relationship of all forms of life, trees, kittens, birds,
and everything; another reason is that in reading the books on
evolution you're taken into every field of knowledge and into the
most curious and striking aspect of things in those fields. Could
anything be stranger, for example, than a little theatre in a
chicken's egg, over which pass strange shadowy forms that seem to
retell, in a kind of moving picture show, the story of how one form
of life developed out of another?
Drummond's "Ascent of Man" tells about that and covers the whole
subject of evolution. It is one of the books which no one who has
heard of this wonderful story of life should fail to read. Doctor
Drummond's way of telling the story is very attractive. Readers
from the Eighth Grade up to the Eightieth will delight in it,
and they won't stop until they read it from cover to cover. I'll
guarantee that!
Then take such a book as "The World of Life," by Wallace. "Alice in
Wonderland" is nothing to it. Here are some of the things you will
find in it:
How there got to be different kinds of rabbits and what islands
have to do with it.
(Islands are almost as prominent in the story of evolution as they
are in the story of adventure. There are Robinson Crusoes until you
can't rest!)
How the pig in the struggle of life won out as usual.
Why the peacock has such a fine tail and how he overdid it.
How the elephant saved his life by lengthening his nose.
How the birds traded their teeth for feathers.
How shelled creatures coiled and uncoiled their shells.
Why we miss the "missing links." (As you go into this subject of
evolution you will hear a good deal about missing links.)
How they know butterfly wings are made first and the coloring and
patterns laid on afterward.
How much of a butterfly's beauty is probably known to the
butterflies themselves.
How Nature seems to make things just to be pretty.
And these are just a few of the things in _one_ of Doctor Wallace's
books.[60]
[Footnote 60: In addition to all this curious and absolutely reliable
information that ought to be interesting to every one is the fact that
Wallace shows in "The World of Life" how there must have been Mind and
Purpose back of it all. Doctor Wallace was a great traveller as well
as a great student of nature--one of the most famous in the history of
science. His works include: "Travels on the Amazon and the Rio Negro,"
"The Malay Archipelago," "Natural Selection," "Darwinism," "Island Life
and the Geographic Distribution of Animals."
There are so many books on this biggest of all nature
topics--Evolution--that they make quite a library in themselves. The
most famous of these books is Darwin's "Origin of Species," and it
is not at all hard to understand. Other books bearing directly or
indirectly on evolution are "Animals of the Past," by Lucas, "Creatures
of Other Days," by Hutchinson, Fiske's "Destiny of Man," and "Evolution
and Religion." A book for older readers--one of the latest and most
comprehensive treatments of the subject--is Osborn's "Origin and
Evolution of Life."]
Then he was such a fine man personally. Why, what do you think
he did? Although he thought out the principle of evolution
independently of Darwin, and wrote an essay on it before Darwin
had ever given his views to the world, yet after Darwin's "Origin
of Species"[61] came out Wallace gave Darwin all the credit,
and in his own autobiography always referred to the theory of
evolution as the "Darwinian Theory." Yet Wallace had a very good
reason for taking this generous attitude, as you will see from his
autobiography and other writings, and you are quite likely to find
the reason in articles on Darwin or Wallace or Evolution.
[Footnote 61: Of "The Origin of Species" it has been said that no work
ever produced so profound a change in the opinions of mankind.]
The relations of Darwin and Wallace furnish one of the finest
examples in history of the best thing in the world--human
friendship.
Of course, like so many other great men, Wallace was one of those
boys whose minds never grow old. Read in his autobiography how on
the day he first discovered a new species of butterfly it gave him
a violent headache, and he had to go to bed to get rid of it and
quiet his nerves--he was that worked up!
Darwin was much the same sort of a man. Everything in the world was
interesting to him. He wrote a whole book about "Fish Worms," for
example. And although probably the most famous man in the history
of natural science he was as humble as could be, always looking for
the truth and ready to accept criticisms no matter how much they
might upset his own previous conclusions, provided these opposing
views were supported by evidence. Of course you will want to know
more about his life, and you will find more in the "Life and
Letters of Charles Darwin," edited by his son.
How do you suppose this boy began being a great man--by collecting
beetles! Beetles and outdoor sport were his chief delight.
USE OF THE INDEX
SOME THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH THIS INDEX
I shouldn't be surprised if you thought that an index was the dullest
part of a book.
But it all depends! As a matter of fact, with your help, I am sure I
can make this index of ours one of the most interesting things in the
whole story; for, like the H. & S., it gives you a chance to "come into
the game." The mind enjoys books and grows upon them much as the body
grows on food, but, as in the case of both food and books--and books
are food--the good you get depends not only on the food but _how you
season it and eat it_. You can't expect _everything_ of the cook!
Everybody knows, of course, how to use an index to look things up once
in a while and it saves time if the index not only tells the page on
which a given subject is referred to, but conveys some idea of what
that reference is about, as this index tries to do. If, for example,
you are studying the Alpine regions in school you may already have
covered the question of how flowing water carves mountain valleys, but
you may not have had anything about why the Alps don't run north and
south, as so many of earth's great ranges do; and so what could be a
more interesting thing for you to take into those delightful class
discussions?
Your teacher knows, although you may not have realized it, that these
class talks and debates by the pupils themselves are _the big thing_
in modern teaching. The best education, we know nowadays, isn't the
mere cramming down of facts, as people used to think. _It's training in
thinking, and in standing on one's own feet!_
But memory training is important too; and an index is the best
thing in the world for that. Take some subject you're studying in
school--mountains, for example--they're always studying such big
things as mountains, the work of rivers, and so on; or if they aren't
to-day they will be tomorrow. Look at the references _as questions to
yourself_ and see how well you can answer them: "How do mountains help
make water-gates for the rivers?" and "Why do they have earthquakes in
regions where mountains haven't got done with their growing?"
Then you can have a lot of fun with these questions at home and with
boy friends, after you have read the book together. For instance: Just
how _did_ the pebbles help dig the Grand Canyon? And that's a poser
for many grown people too--people who've travelled and met the Grand
Canyon face to face! Try it on Father. Yes, and Teacher too. There are
none of her boys that a teacher is so proud of as the boys that have
initiative--_go-aheaditiveness_--and can _ask_ good questions as well
as answer them.
But, best of all, you can find no end of things to write about for
your language work in school and for the little books of your own that
I've already suggested in the H. & S. Take the subject of pebbles,
for example. Although this whole book has to do with the life and
adventures of pebbles, I haven't put the facts together in just the
way _you_ will if you follow out the references under the heading
"Pebbles" in this index. If you don't happen to remember how pebbles
act as bankers for the farmers, how they helped make the Great Lakes,
built the Grand Canyon, and so on, look these things up and then, as
they thus become digested in your mind, write about them in your own
way--the way you'd talk if you were telling somebody about it. Do that
and you'll _have_ something! one of those things that mothers show to
the neighbors, and that teachers show to visitors.
Of course you'll have to have a name for your story and you'll think of
plenty: "What One of My Pebbles Told Me," "The Pebbles in the World's
Work," "What a Wonderful Thing a Pebble Is!" "Why Common Pebbles are
Worth More than Diamonds"; for of course a diamond is a kind of pebble.
GETTING ACQUAINTED WITH YOURSELF
In all this you will not only find you'll have a good time, but,
let me tell you, you'll be getting the best part of your education;
you'll be getting acquainted with yourself, your undeveloped powers of
memory--reasoning--expression. You'll find before you get so very old
that one of the most important elements of success, of doing _your_
part in the world's great work of making itself better all the time, is
in _having something worth while to say and being able to say it_.
This was the making of the Greeks; and the Greeks, you know, were the
most wonderful people that ever were. It all started with old "Know
Thyself" Thales of Miletus.
That's what did it!
INDEX
Africa, children's hand-work, illustrating home life of the natives,
including the elephants and the lions, 168
Agassiz, Louis, and his stone hut, 43;
adventure in the crevasse, 51;
on the height of ancient glaciers, 123
Air, origin of, 16;
how corals get their breath, 225
Alaska, the flowers and the snow line, 44
Albany, Atlantic tides at, 221
Alleghany Mountains, birth of, 10
Alps, mountain pastures, 41;
how rain drops helped carve the Alps, 67;
why the Alps don't run north and south, 136;
glacial "autographs" on their walls, 255
Amazon River, its stately flow, 74
Ants, how they help teach men how volcanoes are built, 123
Apollo, how he lighted the world, 2
Appalachian Mountains, birth of, 10
Arabian desert, physiognomy and complexion, 165
Arabian Sea, why its waves salute the Himalayas, 140
Arabs, life in the desert, 183;
and the Simoom, 184
Atlas Mountains, morning beauty of, 163
Atoms, defined, relation to molecules, 110
Aurora, the dawn goddess and her chariot, 2
Avalanches, impulsiveness of;
snap-shot at one in motion, 63
Bad Lands, why so called, 114
Bar Harbor, Nature's remarkable masonry in Castle Rock, 228
Bald Mountains, how they got their crowns shaved off, 26, 28, 123
Beavers, as lake makers, 192
Bedding planes, defined, 217
Bees, and Alpine flowers, 45;
why they hide from the cloud shadows, 56;
shape of honey cells and basaltic columns, 243
Beetles, varieties in desert places, 180;
use of poison gas, 182
Big Round Top Mountain, how it lost its peak, 248
Birds, life in the desert, 178
Bombs (volcanic), what they are and how they are made, 129
Boulders, Agassiz' monument, 54;
travels of Plymouth Rock, 64;
boulders on a New England hill, 145;
why the Indians worshipped a boulder, 146;
the strange stranger on Mount Abu, 147;
as mountain climbers, 147, 152;
why there are no big caves in boulder regions, 148;
how boulders help tell the secret of the Ice Age, 149;
how torrents help shape, 151;
how glaciers carry, 151;
how boulders ride on the water, 153;
how Jack Frost builds boulder walls, 154;
how the sun helps shape boulders, 155;
Geikie on the story told by a conglomerate boulder, 155;
Ruskin on boulders in art, 157;
why boulders sometimes jump up from the ground, 158;
how rain drops split boulders, 171;
how boulders shiver their skins off, 170;
boulders in the rock mills of the sea, 216;
how perched boulders are perched, 149;
the perched boulder in Bronx Park, in New York City, and its
autograph, 250
Bridal Veil Falls, how it got its name and why it hurries to "catch the
train," 74
Butterflies, how they help in Alpine flower gardening, 46;
why they hide from the cloud shadows, 56
Cactus, the desert water bottle, 174
Cactus wren, how she bars her front door against her bad neighbors, 177
Cæsar, Julius, his literary style compared to that of Mr. Glacier, 254;
how he and Mr. Glacier went into winter quarters, 256
Canada, her sea terraces for the gannets, 223
Canada thistles, and the Siberian "wind witches," 178
Canyons, deepened by glaciers, 26, 37;
how pebbles helped make the Grand Canyon, 82;
how long a mile is--straight down! 87;
how the Grand Canyon swallows you up, 88;
how rivers wrote the history of the Grand Canyon and how they cut the
leaves, 88
Caravan, the marching camels and their shadows, 185
Carbonic acid gas, and air making, 16;
how it helped make coal with one hand and the Ice Age with the
other, 20;
how it helps the volcanoes feed the world, 128
Carpathian Mountains, why they do not border the sea, 138;
their ups and downs under the sea, 230
Castle Head, a remarkable example of Nature's masonry, 228
Catskill Mountains, how they were made, 116
Cavemen, a caveman's art note on mammoths, 22;
why they were the handsomest men of their day, 267;
the joyous lesson they helped teach, 269
Caves, relation to natural bridges, 85;
why large ones are never found in boulder regions, 148;
their sightless inhabitants, 186
Centipede, his numerous feet and objectionable character 62;
how the trap door spider slams the door in his face, 182
Centrifugal force, and the birth of worlds, 4;
and the direction of mountain ranges, 137
Ceratosaurus, his dreadfulness and his name, 23;
and Nature's dream of the coming of man, 23;
one of our queer cousins, 264
Civilization, its constant advance, but with ups and downs, 269;
the civilization that Mother made, 270
Coal, did it help bring on the Ice Age? 20;
bad effect of coal making on plant and animal life--volcanoes to the
rescue! 226;
coal seams and the records of ancient life, 245
Colorado River, how it dug the Grand Canyon, 88
Conglomerate rock, why it is called "pudding stone," 96;
conglomerate boulders as historians, 155;
how made in the sea mills, 227
Continents, how they rose out of the sea, 8;
how the fact that they are still rising helps the rivers get back to
sea, 75;
the continents and Nature's accident insurance, 262
Copernicus, and the discovery that there are worlds of worlds, 4
Coral islands and reefs, how the sea helps the corals build them, 225
Coyotes, as ventriloquists, 179;
their night songs, 179;
how they get a living, 180
Crater Lake, the blue lake in the volcano's mouth, 194, 195
Crevasse, origin of the word, 51;
what a crevasse looks like, 51, 53;
Agassiz' adventure in, 51;
voices of, 54; their water-mills, 55;
picture of a crevasse swallowing an avalanche, 63
Crystallization and the fairy land of change, 93;
how the pebble caught cold and what came of it, 94;
crystals in sugar and granite, 94;
the great melting pot and the remaking of the rocks, 96;
how old rocks hatch new ones by sitting on one another, 96;
how mountain making helps, 97;
how Mother Nature uses salt and soda in cooking rocks over and how she
keeps these materials handy, 99;
an illustration of how men of science study things out for the fun of
it, 104;
the crystal fairies and their curious ways, 106;
how crystals help tell about dikes, 243
Dead Sea, its deadness and how it died, 207;
and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, 209;
what "Lot's Wife" looks like to-day, 210;
ancient history on the Dead Sea's walls, 249
Deltas, why delta river mouths always multiply by two, 167
Descent of Man, how man has risen as he descended, 269
Desert, origin of Lybian (myth), 2;
enigmas of, 161;
the desert and the Sphinx, 162;
physiography and coloring, 163;
"Baths of the Damned," 165;
river "skeletons," 166;
indications of former heavier rainfall, 166;
Roman aqueducts, 166;
"sand roses," 168;
how the desert makes its sands, 168;
its trade-mark on its sand grains, 172;
why deserts are so cold at night, 170;
how a simoom looks from the outside, 173;
how it begins business, 184;
the plant people of the desert, 174-175;
how the Rose of Jericho goes to sea, 176;
the cactus wren and how she bars her front door against her bad
neighbors, 177;
the "wind witches" of the steppes, 178;
animal life in the desert, 178;
the coyote as a ventriloquist, his night song, 179;
bird life, 180;
why the desert humming-birds have rusty coats, 180;
how the trap-door spider slams the door in the centipede's face, 182;
a beetle that uses poison gas, 182;
wonderful flight of the vulture, 183;
a day with the Arabs in the Sahara desert, 183;
the cat, the dog, the Arab, and the struggle for life, 187, 188
Diamonds, form of their crystals, 107
Dikes, what one in New York City tells about marble making, 97;
the iron walls near Spanish Peak, 235, 241;
dikes in the rocks at Marblehead, 242;
how dikes get their driving power, 244
Dinosaurs, their dreadfulness, their habits and their family name, 23
Diplodocus, his name, his gentle nature, his defensive tail and how it
helped him at his meals, 24
Domes (Mt.), 123
Drift theory, 120
Drowned valleys, 212
Drumlin, why an Irish boy would know what "drumlin" means, 122
Dunes, 163
Earth, story of the spoiled boy who set it afire, 2;
how much truth science finds in the Phaeton myth, 3;
theories as to the earth's origin and how they compare with the Bible
story, 17;
watching worlds in the making, 5, 6;
the sun and his pebble worlds, 6;
how you can watch the world turn round, 7;
how the continents came up out of the sea, 8, 14;
lands the seas have swallowed, 11;
reasons for thinking the continents won't go under again, 12;
how earth's slowing up helped make mountains, 137
Earthquakes, how growing mountains make them, 86;
earthquakes that travel incog., 158;
how earthquakes are recorded in the veins of marble, 239;
earthquakes and the earth's "faults," 243
Echoes, Arab superstitions about, 187
Electrons, how they act as messenger boys of the universe, 110
Emerson, on the industries of England, 214
England, her heavy losses of land to the sea, 214;
how her drowned rivers helped make her great, 224
Eskers, defined, 122
Esparto grass, 176
Europe, how most of her rivers get their start, 73;
her ragged outline and the "transgressions" of the sea, 219;
Europe's geological biography and her mountain chains, 230
Evolution, was Nature dreaming of man's legs and arms when she designed
the dinosaurs? 23;
"some call it Evolution and others call it God," 260;
answer of Science to the question "whither," 261;
why nothing "happens," in the great course of things--The Accident
Insurance System of the Universe, 262;
kinship of kittens and apple trees, 264;
universal acceptance of the evolution theory, 264;
the old "special creation" theory, 265;
and the mysterious special creation theory that Science has
substituted, 274;
facts that support the evolution theory;
the story of changing forms recorded in the rocks, 265;
the "rabbit" that turned into a horse, 266;
as to men being descended from monkeys, 267;
how evolution proves the world is getting better, 268;
how man has risen as he descended, 269;
the world that Mother made, 270
Family, the, and civilization, 271
"Faults," geological, defined, 243
Finland, its butterflies, and the left-over butterflies of the Ice
Ages, 48
Fiords, how they were made by the Old Men of the Mountain, 254
Florida, her sympathetic sister lakes, 200
Folds, how the story of the crumpling of mountains is told in the veins
of marble, 237
Fossils, how they help tell the story of marble, 100
Frost, how it helped build the stone "Temple of the Winds," 33;
how it builds boulder walls, 154
Fujiyama, Mt., why it resembles Mount Rainier, 124
Galileo, and the discovery that there are worlds of worlds, 4
Geikie, on the conglomerate boulder as an historian, 230
Geodes, Nature's pebble jewel boxes and how they are made, 101
Geography, when all our geography was at the bottom of the sea, 8;
how they study geography in Boston on rainy days, 68
Geysers, and the geyser basins, 165
Giant's Causeway, its architecture, 243
Gila monster, 181
Glacial Period. (See Ice Ages.)
Glacial tables, how stones go walking in glacier land, 62
Glacier Mills, 55
Glaciers, how snow changes itself to ice, 26;
glaciers in their "working clothes," 29;
how to make glaciers and icebergs in the schoolroom, 32;
how glaciers helped make the gray stone "Temple of the Winds," 33;
how the glaciers of the Ice Ages made the Great Lakes, 34;
songs of the glacier and how it sings, 42, 56;
a day's visit with the Alpine glaciers, 49;
the crevasses and the adventure of Agassiz, 51;
how long it took Agassiz to determine the nature of glacial
movements, 52;
why the peasants think the glacier has a soul, 54;
Mr. Glacier's caterpillar tractor, 62;
how the glaciers start Europe's rivers in business, 73;
how pebbles tell on what part of a glacier they travelled, 251
Golden Gate, entrance to San Francisco harbor, how it was made, 224
Gorges, 26, 82
Grand Canyon, 88
Granite, ancient lineage and social standing among earth's rocks, 17;
the Granites and the Fairyland of Change, 94;
how they crystallize their neighbors, 103;
how they help make sand, 170
Gravitation, how it pulls the worlds into roundness, 5;
and helps them to grow up, 8;
how it helps sea waves to salute the mountains, 139;
equally careful in handling big worlds and little seeds, 261;
like all power it is invisible and intangible, 276
Great Basin, records of the two great lakes it used to hold, 249
Great Lakes, how they were made in the Ice Ages, 34;
an Ice Age lake that was greatest of all, 193;
tides in the Great Lakes and tides in a teacup, 201;
how the glaciers of the Ice Age tipped the Great Lakes up, 253
Great Salt Lake, ancient weather records on its walls, 249
Greek civilization, one of the things that do not die, 270
Harbor engineering of the rivers and the sea, 221, 222
Hieroglyphics, picture language of the Egyptians and how it was read, 258
Himalaya Mountains, glacial table on, a lesson in picture-reading, 59;
why some of the Himalayas are called "hills," 117
Horse, evolution of, 266
Hot Springs (cause of), 165
Hudson River, action of the tides, 221;
the Palisades, 241
Hydrogen, and the making of earth's air, 16
Ice Ages, theories as to their origin, 20;
the three union stations of the ice trains, 27;
how the glaciers put the Missouri River together, 29;
how they pushed the Mississippi about, 30;
how they turned rivers around and made waterfalls for New England, 31;
how they chiselled out stone bowls for the Great Lakes, 34;
how they made other lakes, 194;
the thousand-year clock at Niagara Falls and what it tells about the
Ice Age, 35;
how the glaciers set Niagara Falls up in business, 36;
Muir's eloquent tribute to the marvellous "busy work" of the
snowflakes, 37;
how the Ice Age glaciers went off and left the butterflies and the
flowers in the Alps, 47;
how the butterflies missed the train, 48;
how Agassiz discovered the Ice Age, 52;
how the glaciers moved the hills about, 117;
travels of the boulders and how the glaciers rounded them, 146, 155;
why there are no big caves in glaciated regions, 148;
relation of the Ice Ages to the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee, 206;
Burroughs's theory as to future Ice Ages, 219;
what rain-drop autographs tell of the Ice Age, 246;
a perched boulder and its autograph in a New York City park, 250;
records of the Ice Age glaciers compared with Cæsar's Commentaries--
curious similarities, 252
Icebergs, how to make them in the schoolroom, 32;
how the icebergs of the Ice Age gave the boulders a ride, 153
Ice wells, huge ice water tanks that the Ice Age glaciers left, 49
Indian Ocean, why its waves rise to salute the Himalayas, 140
Islands, oceanic, the tops of volcanoes, 133;
islands on the Maine coast and how they were made, 212;
how the sea helps the corals build their islands, 225
"Joints," places where rocks don't join, how made, 33;
how they help make "perched rocks," 60;
joints in the "Marble Rocks" at Jabalpur, 105;
joints and the work of the sea's rock mills, 216;
use of joints in Nature's stone architecture, 228
Jordan River, why it was born partly grown, 73:
why the making of the Jordan Valley was the death of the Dead Sea, 206
Jungfrau, summer pastures on, 41;
its beauty, 44
Jupiter, how as rain god he put out the world, 3;
place of the planet in the Solar system, 6
Keewatin, one of the central stations of the Ice Age, 28
Kentucky, the sink holes in the cave regions, 200
Kepler and the discovery that there are worlds of worlds, 4
Kettle lakes, how the glaciers of the Ice Age made them, 196
Labrador, one of the central stations of the Ice Age, 28;
how the butterflies of Labrador tell that their ancestors missed the
train, 49
Lakes, the Ice Age lake and the "Temple of the Winds," 33;
how the Ice Age glaciers made the Great Lakes, 34;
how they helped Lake Erie in making Niagara Falls, 36;
the sleep of lakes and how it brightens them up, 80;
how Mirror Lake shows Mount Rainier how beautiful he is, 130;
how, with Jack Frost's help, lakes build boulder walls, 134;
the empty lake beds of the desert, 162;
"trade-marks" on lake-shore sand, 173;
how lakes are born, 192;
moods of lakes, 198;
why the ducks overlook some lakes, 198;
where mountain lakes get their coloring, 199;
sympathetic action of sister lakes, 200;
how some lakes act as barometers, 201;
tides in lakes, 201;
why lake storms are particularly dangerous, 202;
peculiarity of storms on the Sea of Galilee, 202;
and of storms on mountain lakes, 203;
how lakes grow old and pass away, 204;
why lilies come to dying lakes, 204;
the procession of the trees to the margins of dying lakes, 204;
why they have a regular marching order, 204;
the Dead Sea and how it died, 205;
what science says of the legend of Sodom and Gomorrah, 209;
"Lot's Wife" as she looks to-day, 210;
records of ancient weather on the walls of Great Salt Lake, 249;
how the Great Lakes were tipped up and how they tell about it, 253
Lake Agassiz, a great lake of yesterday which could swallow all the Great
Lakes of to-day, 193
Lake Baikal, its great depth, 193
Lake Erie, how the glaciers helped it make Niagara Falls, 36
Lake Superior (size), 193
Laplace, his great theory of the origin of worlds, 4
Lapland, strange stories its butterflies tell, 48
Laurentian Highlands, how they rose out of the sea, 9
Lava, how it makes dikes and what a New York City dike has to say about
the origin of marble, 97, 241;
how lava plays "grandfather" in the Porphyry family, 102;
lava and the flame effects on volcanic clouds, 126;
lava plains, 126;
how lava helps raise the fine fruit and wheat of Washington and
Oregon, 128;
how it increases the violence of delayed volcanic explosions, 130;
the lava and the "fire from heaven" in the story of Lot, 209;
the iron wall near Spanish Peaks, 235;
remarkable architecture of the Giant's Causeway, 243;
theory as to what makes the lava climb, 244
Libyan desert, Greek myth as to its origin, 2
Limestone, how it turns to marble, 97, 104;
how the shelled creatures of the sea help make it, 101;
the "Marble Rocks" at Jabalpur, 105;
the place of limestone in the rock-making system of the sea, 227;
limestone and the story marble tells of mountain making, 237, 239
Little Round Top (Mt.), the battles that rounded it, 248
Lizards, varieties in the Arizona desert, 181
London, how it owes its greatness to the transgressions of the sea, 224
Los Angeles River, how one of its tributaries plays hide-and-seek, 80
Lowell, Mass., how the Old Men of the Mountain helped build it, 34
McCloud River, why it is born half grown, 73
Maine, advance of the sea upon its coasts, 219
Mammoth, art note on, from the "Cavemen's Diary," 22;
ancient members of the elephant family that wore underclothes, 24
Manchester, Mass., how the Old Men of the Mountain built its falls, 34
Marble, how a New York City dike helps tell how marble is made, 97;
what the fossils have to say, 100;
how it is quarried, 103;
the mysteries in marble walls, 235;
when marble flows, 238;
the cloud effects in marble, 239;
how marble tells of earthquakes and other exciting things, 239
Mars (planet), 6
Meanders, engineering work of wandering rivers, 81;
meanders and the making of natural bridges, 83
Mediterranean Sea, its connection with the making of the Alps, 136
Mercury (planet), 6
Metamorphism (defined), 98
Miller, Hugh, how he found a fish inside of a stone and so found Hugh
Miller, 159
Mississippi River, how the Old Men of the Mountain pushed it about, 30;
how you can jump across it, 69;
the mountains of soil it carries into the sea, 84
Mississippi River System (map), 67
Mississippi Valley, when it was at the bottom of a mediterranean sea, 10;
why the sea went away, 138
Missouri River, how it was pieced together and pushed about in the Ice
Age, 29
Mohawk River, why it grew taller as it grew older, 72
Molecules, their relations to atoms and electrons, 109
Moraines, how the glaciers take them on their backs, 56
Moulins, the "mills" of the glaciers and how they are made, 55
Mountains, earliest arrivals in the mountain world, 9;
origin of bald mountains, 26;
Muir on the marvellous mountain sculpture of the snowflakes, 37;
how mountain peaks are kept sharp, 43;
rain-drops as mountain sculptors, 67;
mountains and the origin of river valleys, 69;
and the birth of partly grown rivers, 72;
mountain streams and their waterfalls, 77;
storm chorus of the mountain torrents, 78;
how mountain lakes and baby rivers go to sleep together and the
liveliness of the rivers afterward, 80;
how mountains help make the water gates, 86;
why growing mountains make earthquakes, 86;
why almost all granite is found in mountain regions, 97;
the different kinds of mountains, 115;
why mountains border the sea, 134;
why they run north and south, 137;
why sea waves rise to greet the mountains, 139;
Ruskin on mountain drawing, 140;
resemblance of mountains to sea waves, 140;
how mountains helped solve the mystery of the stones of the field, 151;
sunrise in the Atlas Mountains, 163;
why desert mountains look so gaunt and hungry, 164;
why the desert winds are constantly blowing them away, 171;
mountain shapes and the law of the picturesque in Nature's art
work, 229;
how the mountain chains are the making of Europe, 230;
their ups and downs, 230;
why the markings in marble tell the story of mountain building, 237;
and of mountain shaking, 239;
ancient weather records on mountain walls, 248
Mountain lakes, the blue lake in the volcano's mouth, 195;
why mountain lake storms are particularly dangerous, 202;
and why they are apt to come at night, 202
Mountain meadows, how rapidly their flowers follow the snow, 44
Mount Fujiyama, its striking resemblance to a mountain 3,000 miles
away, 124
Mount Hermon, its spring that gives birth to the Jordan, 73
Mount McKinley, remarkable snap-shot of one of its avalanches, 63
Mount Pelée, its discharge of huge rocks and whirling bombs, 129;
the mysterious shaft that rose and fell, 132
Mount Ritter, its resemblance to the sacred mountain of Japan, 124
Mount Shasta, how it gives birth to a river that has no babyhood, 73;
how the mountain itself was born at the crossroads and why this is apt
to happen in the case of volcanic mountains, 127
Mount Vesuvius, why, like other active volcanoes, it seems to smoke but
doesn't, 126, 127
Mount Washington, its interesting colony of descendants of butterfly
pilgrims of the Ice Age who missed the train, 48
Muir, John, on the wonderful team work of the snowflakes, in the Ice
Age, 37;
on the liveliness of mountain streams after a little nap in mountain
lakes, 80;
on the winter sleep of the mountain lakes and their glad awakening in
the spring, 198
Natural bridges, various ways in which they are made by the very streams
they bridge, 83, 85
Nebular Hypothesis, one of the theories as to how the world was made, 4;
how it differs from the latest theory, 6;
the Bible story compared with both theories, 17
Neptune (planet), 6
New England, how the Old Men of the Mountain plowed its farms away, 31;
and then made up for it by putting in New England's waterfalls, 32
Newton, his connection with the theory of the origin of worlds, 4
New York City, what one of its big rocks tells about marble making, 97;
what its harbor owes to the engineering of the sea, 221, 222;
the perched boulder in Bronx Park and its autograph, 250
Niagara Falls, its thousand-year clock and what it tells about the Ice
Age, 35;
how the Old Men of the Mountain set the falls up in business, 36
Nitrogen, how it helped to make fresh air for the new-born world, 16
Norway, interpretation of the handwriting on the walls of its fiords, 254
Ogden Canyon, curious example of a rock fold, 238
Ohio River, how the Old Men of the Mountain helped it by turning some
rivers around, 31
Omar Khayyam, answer of Science to the universal riddle that puzzled
him, 261
Origin of Species. (See Evolution.)
Oxygen, its use in making the world's air, 16;
how the sea feeds oxygen to the corals, 225
Pack Rat, his remarkable fortress in the desert, 187
Paleontologists, the wizards of queer anatomies and the strange forms
they conjure up from the fragments of old bones, 266
Palestine. (See Dead Sea.)
Palisades, how they were made in the "Middle Ages," 241
Pebbles, how they tell of old sea beaches on inland mountain and
hill, 14;
their enormous age, 18;
dramatic stories the pebble scratches tell, 26;
how the Old Men of the Mountain used pebbles in turning New England
rivers around, 31;
how pebbles helped deepen the basins of the Great Lakes, 34;
how they still help run the thousand-year clock at Niagara Falls, 35;
how they help the glaciers talk, 56;
why the pebbles of Glacier Land can't walk as the big stones do, 62;
how the river pebbles act as bankers for the farmers and the sea, 80;
how the pebbles helped dig the Grand Canyon, 82;
how they tell about doings in the Fairyland of Change, 97;
how a pebble may, in its time, play many parts, 99;
how they help unravel the secrets of the hills, 119;
how they help dying rivers multiply by two, 167;
how they report the fact that the storms on the Sea of Galilee are
particularly severe, 203;
their fixed place in the rock-making system of the sea, 227;
how they tell of rough experiences in river travel, 250;
and of high winds at sea, desert sandstorms, rides on glaciers, and in
what compartments they travel, 251
Peninsulas, how the drowning of rivers helps to make them, 212
Pennsylvania, autographs left by ancient reptiles in the sandstone under
the coal seams, 245
Perched boulder, in Bronx Park and its autograph on its rock-bed, 250
Quartz, how it helps to make the pebble jewel-boxes--the geodes, 101
Quartzite, (defined), 98
Rain, what fossil rain-drops tell of ancient weather, 224
Rat, desert, 186
Reclus, on the motion of glaciers, 62;
on the mountain whirlpools of stones, 141;
on the severity of lake storms, 202
Reefs, coral, how the sea helps the little people build them, 225
Reptiles, with bird feet, 246
Rivers, how the Mississippi River and others were pushed about in the
Ice Age, 26;
how the Old Men of the Mountain helped the Ohio by turning some rivers
around, 31;
how they helped make New England a great manufacturing section by
turning some other rivers around, 32;
how they helped build the "Temple of the Winds," 33;
the little boy's definition of a river system, 66;
how the sea and the rivers take turn about in emptying into each
other, 66;
their wonderful work in the mountains, 67;
the Mississippi River system, 67;
how they study the work of rivers on rainy days in Boston, 68;
how you can jump across the Mississippi, 69;
what springs do for rivers, 69;
how the springs act as regulators of river flow, 72;
how rivers grow at the top, 72;
why some rivers are born partly grown, 72;
how most of Europe's rivers get their start, 73;
why many little rivers have to jump to catch the train, 74;
why all rivers flow toward the sea, 75;
beautiful way in which Ruskin tells of the response of rivers to the
call of the sea, 76;
the human nature in rivers, 76;
baby ways of baby rivers, 76;
why waterfalls are found only in young streams and more often as you
near the source, 76;
how rivers play in the rain, 78;
storm chorus of the mountain torrents, 78;
where to look for hiding rivers, 78;
how rivers sleep in mountain lakes and how lively they are when they
wake up, 80;
why rivers grow more thrifty as they grow older; how, with the help of
the pebbles, they act as bankers for the farmers and the sea, 80;
the machinery of rivers includes circular saws and dirt-spreaders, 82;
how a river dug the Grand Canyon, 82, 88;
the automatic stop in the river machinery, 83;
enormous amount of soil carried by the Mississippi into the sea, 84;
how rivers cut mountains in two, 85;
how rivers help in mining granite, 97;
how they help make hills, 117;
how they combine with the boulders to help out the artists, 157;
the land in which there are river beds without rivers and rivers
without mouths, 162;
the skeletons of dead rivers and what they tell of the past history of
the desert, 166;
why dying rivers multiply by two, 167;
harbor engineering of the rivers and the sea, 221;
how rivers made the Golden Gate of San Francisco and so made San
Francisco, 223;
the rivers and the rock mills of the sea, 227;
the river's trade-mark on its pebbles, 250
Rocky Mountains, how they were born, 10;
their relation to the Mediterranean Sea that is no more, 135;
why they are now so far from the sea, 138;
how the mountain waves of stone resemble the waves of the sea, 140;
folded strata that illustrate Ruskin's line about the strange quivering
recorded in mountain rocks, 142
Romans, some of the big things we owe to them, 270
Rose of Jericho, what it is like and how it puts to sea, 176
Round Tops (Mt.), how they are formed, 123
Ruskin, on the response of rivers to the call of the sea, 76;
on the sleep of lakes, 80;
on mountain drawing, 140;
on the strange "quivering of substance" of mountains, 141;
on the art lessons to be learned from stones, 158;
on the correct drawing of boulders, 160
Sahara Desert. (See Desert.)
St. Lawrence River, how the Old Men of the Mountain took some of its
rivers away, 30;
how the Old Men used it in making the Great Lakes, 34
Salt, how Mother Nature uses it in warming over rocks, 99;
how Father Neptune uses it in his rock mills, 217
Sand, how it helped build the stone "Temple of the Winds," 33;
how Mother Nature dissolves it out of sandstone in her rock
cookery, 99;
how the crystal fairies give sand grains a new lease of life, 108;
how the sand helped shape the old Indian of Mt. Abu, 147;
color of desert sand, 165;
how the desert makes its sand, 168;
"sand roses," 168
Sandstone, its place in the rock-milling system of the sea, 227
San Francisco Bay, how it was made, the two rivers that opened its Golden
Gate, 222
Saturn (planet), 5, 6
Sea, when the seas were all in the sky, 16;
how its stratification of rock helped build the "Temple of the
Winds," 33;
the Alps, like sea waves turned to stone, 50;
how the sea flows into the rivers, the endless circuit of the
waters, 66;
why the rivers always get back to sea, 75;
how the pebbles help feed the sea fish and furnish material for the
sea's rock mills, 81;
the Grand Canyon and the ancient sea, 88;
how the sea helps Mother Nature do the work in her rock cookery, 99;
why volcanoes and mountains border the sea, 133, 134;
why sea waves rise to greet the mountains, 139;
how sea sand grains differ from those of the desert, 173;
the rock mills of the sea, method in the madness of the on-shore
waves, 212;
why the sea's chief business at first seems to be that of eating us
up, 213;
the sea in literature and art, 213;
England's heavy losses to the sea, 214;
how helpless the Old Man of the Sea is without his tools, 215;
how he uses the stone-throwing engines and the battering-ram of the
Romans, 216;
what he knows about wedges and pneumatic tools, 216;
the hidden enemies in the rocks of the sea, 216;
planing-mills of the winter seas, 217;
how stones are carried out to sea, 218;
how the sea has shaped Europe, 219;
the sea as a builder, why Father Neptune is like Old King Cole, 220;
harbor engineering of the rivers and the sea, 221, 222;
how the sea helped teach shore engineering to man, 223;
how it has helped make London, New York, and other great cities, 223,
224;
how Father Neptune feeds the coral people, 225;
the art work of the sea, 227, 228;
Nature's building blocks and the sea, 228;
the ups and downs of Europe's mountains under the sea, 230;
how sea tides help in recording rain-drop marks in stone, 244
Sea caves, what they told about how the continents came up out of the
sea, 14
Sea of Galilee, why its storms come so suddenly and usually at night,
202, 203;
how the pebbles on its shores tell that these storms are severe, 203;
why it parted company with the Dead Sea, 206
Sea-shells, how some of them tell how marble is made, 100
Seismograph, the device for getting the autograph of earthquakes, 240
Shakespere, how he emphasizes the rough side of Father Neptune's
nature, 213;
on the man and the swallowing waves, 219;
his reference to the greatness of Mr. Cæsar, 252
Shaler, Dr., on the stone autographs of rain-drops, how they throw light
on the climate of ancient days, 246
Shasta River, why it is born partly grown, 73
Sierra Nevada Mountains, Muir on how the snowflakes helped carve them, 37
Silica, its use by Mother Nature in making sandstone, grass, wheat, and
corn, 99
Slate, and the Fairyland of Change, 98;
its place in the rock mills of the sea, 227;
ancient autographs found in slate, 245
Sodom and Gomorrah, the Bible story of their destruction and what Science
has to say about it, 208
Soil, how it was made in the beginning of things, 11;
how the Old Men of the Mountain carried New England's best farms
away, 31;
how river pebbles act as bankers for the farmers, 80;
how the sea helps make good farming land, 222;
Nature's art work and the making of soil, 229
Solar system, how it was discovered that there are worlds of worlds, 4;
Laplace's theory as to the origin of the Solar system, 4;
the planetessimal theory, 6
Soldanella, the flower of the Alps that blooms its way up through the
ice, 45
Special Creation theory, 265
Spiders, the tarantula and the tarantula killer, 181;
the spiders of the Arizona desert, 182;
how the trap-door spider slams the door in the centipede's face, 182
Spontaneous variation, the scientific modification of the old "Special
Creation" theory, 274
Springs, not only start rivers in life but go on feeding them, 69;
how rain-drops stored in big stone safes keep the springs going, 69;
springs that work like a town pump, 70;
hot springs and the geysers, 165
Stratification, defined; how it helped make the "Temple of the
Winds," 33;
how it helps in marble quarrying, 103;
as shown in the "Marble Rocks" at Jabalpur, 105;
how it helps in the making over of rock in the sea's mills, 217
Stratus clouds, their counterparts in marble and what these marble cloud
pictures mean, 239
Striæ, scratches made in rocks by glaciers, and how they helped to
disclose the great secret that there was an Ice Age, 121;
the big boulder's autograph in Bronx Park, New York City, 250
Tarantula, and the life struggle in the desert, 181
Terraces, what they tell about the tipping up of the Great Lakes once
upon a time, 253
Tides, in lakes and in teacups, 201;
and the harbor and shore engineering of the sea, 221, 225;
how they help preserve the autographs of ancient rain-drops, ancient
reptiles, and other things, 244
"Transgressions" of the sea, defined, 218;
how they help to make great cities, 223;
how they help in the art work of the sea, 227
"Umbrella Parties," an interesting form of geography study in Boston, 68
Uranus (planet), 6
Valleys, how crooked rivers broaden them, 82
Venus (planet), 6
Vesuvius, why it seems to smoke but doesn't, 126, 127
Volcanoes, what they tell about the inside of the earth, 3;
why volcanoes were more numerous in early days, 16;
difference between ordinary mountains and volcanic mountains, 114, 123;
the volcanic mountains in the Sahara and the "Baths of the
Damned," 165;
the blue lake in the volcano's mouth, 194;
volcanoes and "the fire from heaven" in the Bible story of Lot, 209;
how volcanic explosions help to cause transgressions of the sea, 219;
Mr. Vulcan's famous castle on the Hudson, 241
Vulture, his wonderful abilities as a flying machine, 182
Wasp, desert, how it disposes of the tarantula, 181
Waterfalls, how the Old Men of the Mountain put them in for New England,
to make up for carrying her farms away, 31;
how they set Niagara Falls up in business and started the thousand-year
time clock, 35, 36;
why the Bridal Veil Falls in the Yosemite has to jump to catch the
train, 74;
why waterfalls are found only in young streams and oftenest near the
source, 76
Water Gaps, how the rivers cut them with the help of pebbles, 85
Weathering, examples of, 33, 60, 97, 147, 228, 229, 231, 241, 243, 248
Wind, how it helped carve the "Temple of the Winds," 33;
how it helps make pillars for perched rocks, 60;
how it helped carve the strange old Indian of Mt. Abu, 147;
how it helps the desert in trade-marking its sand, 173;
the wind witches of the Steppes, 178;
why lake wind storms are particularly dangerous, 202;
the winds and the night storms on the Sea of Galilee, 202;
how winds help fill up the sea, 219;
stone autographs of ancient breezes, 247;
pebble faceted by wind-blown sand, 252;
wind ripples, 248
Wren, desert, how she locks her front door against her bad neighbors, 177
Wyoming, the ancient bones found in its soil and the wonderful story they
told about horses, 266
Xenophanes, the wise old Greek who first suggested that the mountains had
risen out of the sea, 13
Yosemite Valley, why the rivers of the little valleys have to jump to
catch the train, 74
* * * * *
Transcriber Note
Minor typos corrected. Paragraph break inserted at the top of page
116 to accommodate placement of image related to the text therein. In
the original book, Mt. Fujiyama and Mount Rainier were on page 124 and
125 respectively with the caption spanning the two pages. The words "top"
and "bottom" were substituted for "left" and "right" respectively for their
orientation here. Also, the caption has been updated to say "FOUR THOUSAND".
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A
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