HOW THE DEAD LAVA COMES TO LIFE
Lava, after it has been converted into soil, by the agents of decay, makes the richest land in the world. This picture shows a vineyard on the fertile plains overlooked by Mt. Ranier, which is an extinct volcano. In the days when Mt. Rainer was being built these plains were covered with molten lava.
Among the two principal gases of the air there is a working brotherhood; just as there is between the plants and the animals in their great breath exchange. The oxygen in the air makes a specialty of crumbling up rock containing iron. It rusts this iron into dust; while the CO2, as the High School Boy calls what I have called carbon, for short, goes after the rocks that contain lime, potash, and soda.
Working with both these gases is the frost that, with its prying fingers, enlarges the cracks in stones, and so allows the gases of the water and the air to reach in farther than they could otherwise do.
Every Winter, with its frost and its storing up of moisture in the great snow-fields of the mountains, is a benefit to the lands and their people, but the Ice Age, "The Winter that Lasted All Summer,"[33] not only worked wonders in other ways, but was of far greater benefit to the soil because it was so much more of a Winter.
Mr. Shakespere, in his day, didn't know anything about an Ice Age, but Brer Bear might have quoted certain lines of his, just the same:
"Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude.
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot."[34]