Read Ebook: The Romance of Golden Star ... by Griffith George Chetwynd Pearse Alfred Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 741 lines and 54897 words, and 15 pages

In the Greek myth stories what else was Mr. Apollo supposed to do for the world and its people besides turning on the light?

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?

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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" 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!

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.

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.

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?"

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.

"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?

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.

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:

"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."

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.

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.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet