The Strange Adventures of a Pebble

by Hallam Hawksworth

CHAPTER VII

(JULY)

They flung them over to Roxbury Hills;

They flung them over the plain;

And all over Milton and Dorchester too

Great lumps from the pudding the giants threw.

They tumbled about like rain.

—The Ballad of the Boulders.

THE STONES OF THE FIELD

In our rambles during the summer vacation season we are constantly coming across boulders; in the mountains, in the fields and by the sea. In the mountains and near rocky headlands or at the foot of the cliffs we take them for granted; they have evidently fallen from the rock walls above them. But haven't you often wondered how they got out on the prairies far from any rock masses? This chapter tells about that and other curious things in the lives of the great Boulder family.

I. Big Chief Boulder

Even the Indians who, in those early days, had never gone to school or studied geography, used to wonder how these big stones had travelled to the places where they found them.

Once upon a time the Indians in the wilds of Minnesota found an unusually big granite boulder lying among the hills. So what did they do but paint a head with eagle feathers on one end of the stone. Then they put stripes around its body. You see they thought of Mr. Boulder as a big chief in feathered head-dress and painted for war.

WONDER THE BEGINNING OF KNOWLEDGE

It may seem foolish to make all this fuss about finding a big stone in a field. But these ignorant red men were much wiser than we are if we don't wonder about it too. Wonder is the beginning of knowledge; and the Indians thus took the first step toward one of the great discoveries of geology.

It was just such wondering on the part of scientific men that led to their finding out not only how these big stones got into strange lands but how certain kinds of hills that we have just been reading about were made. For, as you must have already guessed, the moving of these boulders was one of the many jobs Mr. Glacier did for us during the Ice Age. But pretend you don't know the answer. It took the wise men a long time to find it and that's where the fun comes in—in the hide and seek.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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]

[27] "Modern Painters."

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!

[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.

[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.