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!