(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.