WATER

SOME INTERESTING THINGS ABOUT RIVERS.

JENKIN LLOYD JONES.

DID THE rivers make the valleys or did the valleys make the rivers? This is not only an interesting but a very difficult question to answer correctly. Ask your teachers about it. Be sure you do not make any mistakes, because when you answer it correctly you have found out a great deal about geology. And geology is a hard name for a subject that contains many interesting and easy things, and the study of the river will help you understand many of these things.

However, it may be about the valleys, we are very sure that the river made many, many other things that we know about. Did you ever hear of the orator in the New York Legislature, who wondered how it was that the rivers most always flowed by the big cities? He certainly got his "cart before the horse," for it is the big cities that always grow by the big rivers. History has always grown along the banks of rivers, because all civilization has grown along their banks. The boundaries of nations change. The political maps of Europe that I studied when I was a boy are now out of date, and you would find they are all wrong, because the boundaries of kingdoms, states, and empires have changed so often; but the life of the world continues to be found largely along the banks of the rivers.

Why is this? And here is another question for you to talk with your teachers about. If you get the answer, you will have the key that will let you into much of the wonders and triumphs of art, architecture, and commerce.

Of course, the very earliest man would keep close to the river's edge, because he would have no other sure way of getting water to drink, and the fish in the water, the birds on the water, and the birds' eggs in the nests along the edge of the river offered him a sure supply of food. And then along the river the grass grows greenest, and this afforded good grazing for his cows, and his horses, and, may be, his camels. What kind of food does the camel like best, anyhow? Primitive man must have learned to swim early, and it must have been fun for the little boys of barbarism, as it is for the little boys of civilization, to plunge into the cooling water on a hot day. Man must have found out very early how to make a raft which would carry him down stream, and soon after he learned how to make a canoe that he could paddle up stream. So the river became his first road. On it he traveled when he went hunting, and with its help he protected his property and that of the tribe. The enemies were driven across the river, and kept on the other side.

A good way to study what a river does for man is to find out all you can about the life that gathered about some particular river, for that will tell you more or less of what happened along the banks of all the great rivers. The best of all rivers for such study is the Nile. It is one of the long rivers of the world, so long that its sources have only been recently discovered by those who make geographies. Read the stories of Livingstone and Stanley, and the early explorers, who went in search of the head waters of the Nile.

A MOUNTAIN RIVER.CHICAGO COLORTYPE CO.

But there are two Niles. One runs through the continent of Africa, and empties into the Mediterranean Sea. Another begins in the very earliest dawn of history, and runs through the human story of thought, feeling, and life. Along the banks of this Nile, in history, we see how human life was developed; all human life beginning away back there, so far back we cannot count it by years; when man made knives of flints and hatchets of stone. And then, because the Nile gently overflowed its banks two or more times a year, leaving after each freshet a soft layer of fertile mud on either side, primitive man began to plant his seed in this field plowed by a river, and to raise his millet, and peas, and beans, and some kind of wheat and corn. He was able to feed his cattle, and to raise chickens and geese along the banks of this river, which was only a green ribbon, from six to ten miles wide, four or five hundred miles long. On this green ribbon a great civilization, so great and so wonderful that only very learned men can understand how wonderful and how great it was, grew up.