The Strange Adventures of a Pebble

by Hallam Hawksworth

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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 [Chagter 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?

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.

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:

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]

[7] "The Mountains of California." John Muir.

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]

[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]

[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.

[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!

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.