(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.