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.