LAST OF ALL COME THE TREES
Next after the lilies come the sedges, grasslike herbs that grow in marshy places. And after they are well established they get things ready for the next arrivals; for these plants come in a regular procession. The dense tufts of the sedges make mats on which soil gathers. In this soil shrubs begin to grow. From the decay of all this vegetation more soil is formed in which the seeds of spruce and tamarack spring up. Then come willows, then poplars and maples, and last of all the oaks and nut-bearing trees, which march into new lands slowly because they must depend on their heavy seeds to move them forward, while the little seeds of maple, willow, poplar, and pine are easily carried by the wind.
"The Lake." From the painting by Rousseau
HOW LAKES GROW OLD AND PASS AWAY
This picture, called "The Lake," is from a painting by Rousseau, a great French landscape artist, and illustrates the beautiful way in which lakes grow old, as described in the text. Already, as you see, Father Oak and his family have arrived.
But while fresh-water lakes and their surroundings are so beautiful and poetic, and never more so than when the lakes are passing away, there are dying lakes, whose surroundings are the very pictures of desolation. These are the lakes which have become bitter with salt because their waters are evaporated by the sun faster than fresh water comes in. The most famous of these salt lakes is the Dead Sea of the Holy Land, into which the Jordan flows. Lying in a rock-bound pit, in the deepest part of a vast trench, it is like a caldron into which for eight months of every year is poured the heat from a burning sun in a cloudless sky. Although Palestine, as you can see by the map, is in the temperate zone, the thermometer here often registers 130 degrees, because cooling breezes never come down into this pit except in those occasional storms due to the sudden rush of cooler and therefore heavier air from the surrounding heights.
THIS IS HOW THE DEAD SEA DIED
As shown by the wave-cut terraces on the surrounding rocks this lake was once a part of a great body of water that extended clear from Mount Hermon to the Red Sea. Then, by a series of heaving movements, widely separated in time (as shown by the depth of the beach terraces) the bottom of this greater sea was uplifted into the two parallel chains of limestone mountains which flank the Jordan Valley. At the same time a great block of earth crust between them settled down, step by step, and made the long trench running clear to Africa, one end of which is the Jordan Valley, in which the Dead Sea lies.
Later, during the different Ice Ages, as it is supposed, there was plenty of moisture, for the rock records show that the Sea of Galilee and what is now the Dead Sea were once parts of the same body of water. Then the climate gradually changed, the land went dry, and the Dead Sea water became far saltier than that of the ocean—so salty that all life died out of it. To-day the water tastes like a mixture of epsom salts and quinine, and any unfortunate fish swept into it by the fresh waters of the Jordan, in which fish are abundant, gives a few desperate gasps and dies.