CLEANING UP AFTER THE DAY'S WORK
While the Agricultural Ants don't take a bath after the day's work they do the next best thing. They give each other a kind of massage, and they evidently find it very enjoyable. You know how the cat loves to be stroked, dogs and horses to be patted, and little pigs to have their backs scratched. The ants below are giving each other a massage (left, abdomen; right, legs and sides). The lady above who seems to be braiding her back hair, is cleaning her antennæ.
This particular kind of a farming ant is called the Attabara, but there's another kind more wonderful still. If we want to call on them by their scientific names—these remarkable little creatures I'm going to tell about now—we'll have to go to Texas and ask if the Pogononyrmex barbatus family are at home.
"Oh, to be sure," says the gentleman who first introduced them to scientific society,[25] "just come with me."
So he takes us over into Texas and shows us the ants at work. They destroy every plant on their little farms except that known as ant-rice. Compared to the size of the ants themselves, these grain-fields are giant forests, far bigger than the Sequoia Forests of California. The ants watch for rain at harvest-time as anxiously as a farmer, and on the first sunny day, they do their cutting and hurry the grain into the barn. Then on later sunny days, they bring it out to dry before finally storing it away.
"Well," you say, "is there anything left that these farmers don't do?"
I can't think of anything except the planting. One observer says that they do actually plant the seeds, and Doctor McCook says, he wouldn't be surprised if they did, but he never saw them do it.
THE OLD HOME PLACE
This is the farm of some Agricultural Ants in Texas. See the granary and the roads leading to it? They collect and store the seeds of a plant which from this fact is called "ant-rice." It looks like oats and tastes like rice. All plants growing around the nest—which is also called the granary—the ants cut away, so clearing a space for 10 or 12 feet. Roads 5 inches broad near the nest, but narrowing as they recede, are made for hundreds of feet in different directions.
In tropical America there is a species of ant that raises "mushrooms"; at least a kind of fungus that passes for mushrooms with the ants. They don't exactly set the mushrooms out, but they save time by planting both the mushrooms and the leaves that make them as one and the same job. This is how they do it. They climb the trees, cut circular pieces of leaf with their scissor-like jaws and carry them back to low, wide mounds in the neighborhood of which they allow nothing to grow; the purpose being, as it is supposed, to ventilate the galleries of their homes by keeping a clear space about the mound.
The leaves are used as a fertilizer on which grow a small species of mushrooms. The leaves are first left out to be dampened by the rain, and are carried into the ants' cellars before they are quite dry. In very dry weather the ants work only during the cool of the day and at night. Occasionally inexperienced ants bring in grass or unsuitable leaves, but these are carried out and thrown away by older members of the family. But you see how valuable all these leaves are to the soil.
ANTS CARRYING LEAVES FOR THE MUSHROOM CELLAR
You'd never guess what the ants are going to do with those leaves! Read what it says on this page about these six-legged epicures.
Of course, we always expect the ants to do extraordinary things, but one of those four-legged farmers I mentioned in the beginning of the chapter anticipated the principle of the very latest type of threshing-machine. It's a fact. This remarkable little animal threshing-machine is called the hamster. He is found in Europe east of the Rhine and in certain portions of Asia. He does both his cutting and threshing in his field; something the Gauls did in the days of the Romans in a crude way, but which men of our day have only got to doing in recent years. He pulls down the wheat ear, cuts it off between his teeth, and then threshes it by drawing the heads through his mouth. The grain falls right into sacks as fast as it is threshed; just as it does in those huge, combined reapers and threshers that you see on our big wheat farms. Mr. Hamster's sacks are his cheek-pouches, one on each side. When these are filled, this little threshing-machine turns itself into an auto, a commercial truck, and off it goes with its load of wheat to the little barn hidden in the ground. These cheek-pouches, by the way, reach from the hamster's cheeks clear back to his shoulders, and both of these pouches will together hold something like a thousand grains of wheat. He empties them by holding his paws tight against the side of his face and then pushing forward. Rather a clever unloading device, too; don't you think so? Just as good for Mr. Hamster's purposes as the endless-chain system at the Buffalo grain elevator that Mr. Kipling admired so much.
And in the mere matter of the amount of grain handled, the work of the hamster is not to be laughed at. The peasant farmers are very glad to find a hamster granary, which, of course, they promptly take possession of by due process of law:
One of Mr. Hamster's neighbors, the field-rat of Hungary and Asia, stores his grain right in the house—the place where he lives with his family. Mr. Hamster, however, has his barns separate from his home. Sometimes he has one, sometimes two; and the older members of the community may have four or five.
The farmer I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, who is so thrifty about his root crops and so neat, belongs to the Vole family. He lives away over in Siberia and his full name is Arvicola economus. In gathering his crop of roots, he first digs a little trench around them and lays them bare. Then he cleans them off nicely so as not to fill his storehouse with dirt; cuts them up in sizes convenient for carrying, and then hauls them home and piles them up in little cellars made specially for them.
He only takes one piece at a time, walking along backward and pulling it after him with his teeth. He travels long distances in this fashion, going around tufts of grass, stones, and logs that lie in the way. When he gets home, he backs in the front door and into the living-room, and then into the barns which are back of the living-room. There are several of these and they are at the end of a long crooked passage.
Some of the Vole family make a specialty of wheat. One species of these wheat harvesters used to be common in Greece. He made such a nuisance of himself—from the Greek farmer's standpoint—that the Greeks had a special god to get after him; Apollo Myoktonos, "Apollo, Destroyer of Mice."[26] For the vole is just a kind of field-mouse. The runs of these wheat-harvesting voles are eight to twelve inches below the ground, and are connected with the surface by vertical holes. The end of the run is enlarged into a big room for the nest, and there are special rooms leading from the main runway that are used for the storing of the grain. These voles do their harvesting in the evening. Standing on their hind legs and holding to the stock with their little paws as a beaver clasps a tree, they cut off the wheat head with their teeth. They work very fast.
Neither the voles nor any other of these interesting farmers and warehousemen used to get much credit for what they did. The fact that they helped themselves to some of the good things of earth annoyed Man, of course, and then, when it came to the matter of intelligence, conceited Mr. Man said: "Oh, that's just instinct." But nowadays when scientists have begun to study to find out what "instinct" really is, it is thought that man's brother animals, although they are born with more knowledge of how to do things—with more of what we call "instinct"—have also learned by experience just as man did. It is argued that the storing habit was forced on animals wherever the climate cut off the food-supply for a time—either because it was too cold or too hot. The idea of putting something by for a rainy day appealed particularly to the burrowers because they are a timid lot. Not being able to defend themselves very well against their enemies they were obliged to pack up what they could and hurry to some hidden eating-place. That is where the cheek-pouches, which many of them have, come in handy. They are also very industrious, and as the seeds and nuts on which they lived began to ripen, they just couldn't resist the impulse to gather and gather and gather more than they could possibly eat at the time. So, as a result of this habit, food piled up in their underground homes. Then, as they were kept indoors by cold weather or by their enemies, they took to eating more and more from the pantry shelf, and thus the members of the family that were the busiest and, therefore, had the most to eat would naturally survive and leave children of a similar disposition, while the less thrifty would die off.
Some of these forehanded people, instead of putting their Winter supply of food in the ground, put it on their bones. That is to say, before turning in for the Winter, they get as fat as can be and then live on this fat until Spring. A great advantage of this system of storage is that it is particularly pleasant work—you eat and eat and enjoy your meals, that's all. Another advantage is that you can't be robbed of your store as easily as the hamster, for example, frequently is. You carry it right with you wherever you go.
There are a lot of curious things about this hibernation. Not only will warmth arouse the sleepers but also extreme cold, and after the extreme cold may come another sleep from which the sleepers never awaken; in other words, too much cold kills them. So the object of burying one's self as the ground-hog does, or under the snow as rabbits do, or in hollow caves and trees as Brer Bear does, is to keep from getting too cold. Sometimes two or more "bunk" together, as little pigs do on cold March days. The body of each helps to keep his bedfellows warm.
It is the cold itself that seems to make hibernating animals feel sleepy; just as it does human beings. At a moderate temperature, say 45 or 50 degrees, dormice and hedgehogs will wake up, eat something, and then go to sleep again. The dormouse usually wakes in every twenty-four hours, while the hedgehog's Winter naps are two or three days long. Hunger seems to be the cause of their waking, just as it is with babies. The little dormouse, as the air grows colder, gradually dozes off, and his breathing is very deep and slow. As the temperature rises, he begins to take shorter and more rapid breaths and gradually wakes up. Then, if he is in his own little home under the ground, he feeds on the nuts and other foods that he stored in Autumn and drops off again. He sleeps from five to seven months, depending on the weather.
Moles and shrews, so far as observation goes, don't hibernate. The moles simply dig deeper, and there they find worms and insects that are buried away from the reach of frost. The shrews hunt spiders and hundred-legged worms and larvæ in holes and crannies of the soil or beneath leaves of ground plants and old logs.
A queer thing is that the hedgehog, which belongs to the same family as the shrew and the mole, is dead to the world all Winter. Like all complete hibernators he stops breathing entirely. The reason for this difference between the hedgehog and the mole is that the mole doesn't need to go to sleep, because he digs below the frost-line. As for the shrews, they have little bodies and are very active, and so get themselves food and keep warm, while the hedgehog is so much bigger and slower that, when there is so little to eat and it is so cold, he would either freeze or starve to death if he went about looking for food. He finds it cheaper to turn in and sleep than to work.
None of the tree-squirrels seem to take any unusually long naps in the Winter. We often see them around on pleasant days in the parks and in the woods. They run out, get a few nuts from their stores, and then back again to their nests, but the chipmunks and the gophers, who are closely related to the squirrels, stay from late Autumn to Spring in their burrows, where they have plenty of food stowed away, and they sleep most of the time. In the home of four chipmunks was found a pint of wheat, a quart of nuts, a peck of acorns, and two quarts of buckwheat, besides a lot of corn and grass seed; all to feed four fat chipmunks. So, with such plentiful supplies, it is not surprising that after their long Winter sleep the chipmunks are as sleek as can be and as fat as butter, while Mr. Bear comes out in the Spring lean and with his hair all mussed up and as hungry as—well, as hungry as a bear!
All the bear family, except the polar bears, retire to caves or some sheltered spot under a ledge of a rock or the roots of a big tree. Among the polar bears the rule seems to be that it's Mamma Bear only who goes to bed for the Winter. She is careful to put on enough fat not only for herself, but so that the babies that come along in the Spring will have plenty of milk. She is buried by snow that drifts on her and her breath melts a funnel up to the fresh air.
The woodchuck, like the bear, is a "meat-packer." People talk about him more or less in February. His other name is "ground-hog" and his shadow is quite as famous as he is. But is there anything in that old weather saw? Well, yes and no. You see, it's like this: Mr. Ground-Hog goes to bed very early in the Fall—long before the cold weather sets in—and so he is up very early the next Spring; long before the snow is all gone and, as it is with the other all-Winter sleepers, a little extra warmth may wake him up. Along toward morning, you know, we all begin to stir around in our beds and get half awake. So in addition to the fact that it is nearly daybreak for him—that is to say, Springtime—let there come along a bright, warm day in February—the second is as good as any other—and Mr. Ground-Hog is likely to come out of his hole. And, if he does, of course he will see his shadow, after which there is likely to be quite a lot of cold weather.
Not that his shadow makes any difference, but the point is that if you have much warm weather early in February you are likely to have colder weather later and running on into March. It's just the law of averages, that's all. You see it running through the year—this averaging up of weather; it just sways back and forth like a pendulum. Take it in any storm of rain or snow; first the clear sky, then the clouds, then the downfall, and after that the clear sky again. Take any month as a whole, or a year as a whole, and it's the same way; you get about so much rain, so much sunshine, so much heat and cold. The United States Weather Bureau went to work once and, from the records, classified the storms for the last thirty years, and they found that about fifteen storms each year start over the region of the West Gulf States, twelve begin over the mountains of Colorado, forty cross the country from the North Pacific by way of Washington and Oregon; and so on, just about so many from each region each year.
The Last Snow, by Lippincott
And records and old diaries, going back a hundred years, show that the longer the period you examine for weather facts, the closer the average. The weather for one ten-year period will be almost as much like any other ten-year period, as the peas in a pea shell are like each other. Coming back to the subject of February weather, we find in the diary of an old resident of Philadelphia in 1779: "The Winter was mild, and particularly the month of February, when trees were in bloom." He doesn't say anything about the ground-hog, but there is this to be said of the sharper changes of February and March, that at this season the earth is getting more and more warmed up and yet the cold winds from the North don't like to go; so there is a constant wrestling-match, and it is the wrestling of the winds one way and another that brings the changes of the weather. So if the South Winds get the best of it early in February, the North Winds, with their cold weather, are likely to win later in the month, and vice versa. Moreover, if you believe in the ground-hog proverb you are apt to notice the warm days (or cold days, as the case may be) for the next six weeks after February 2, and you won't notice so much the weather that doesn't fit your proverb! It's a way we all have; seeing the things that go to prove what we believe and overlooking the things that don't.
MR. GROUND-HOG AND HIS SHADOW
"But is there anything in the old weather saw? Well, yes and no. Mr. Ground-Hog goes to bed early in the Fall and is up early next Spring. Let there come a bright, warm day in February—the second is as good as any—and Mr. G.-H. is likely to come out and see his shadow. And if you have warm weather early in February you are likely to have colder weather later. It's the law of averages, that's all."
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
I don't care what it says in "Alice in Wonderland," dormice never drink tea; although dormice have been at table with people ever since the days of the Romans. Dormice are still eaten in some parts of Europe, and the Romans used to keep them as part of their live stock. The European dormouse is really a little squirrel. Varro's "Roman Farm Management" (of which you are apt to find a good translation in the public library) tells how the Romans put their dormice in clay jars specially made, "with paths contrived on the side and a hollow to hold their food."
Crocodiles and other tropical animals take very long naps during the hottest weather. Hartwig's "Harmonies of Nature" tells about an officer who was asleep in a tent in the tropics, when his bed moved under him, and he found it was because a crocodile, in the earth beneath, was just waking up! Imagine what the dried-up ponds and streams of the llanos of South America must look like when the rainy season comes on, after the dry spell, with crocodiles asleep just under the surface everywhere. Doctor Hartwig's book tells.
But the most remarkable case of drying up that ever I heard of was that of the Egyptian snail in the British Museum, that Woodward tells about in his "Manual of the Mollusca." This snail was sent to England, simply as a shell, in 1846. Never dreaming there was anybody at home, they glued him to a piece of cardboard, marked it Helix Desertorum, and there he stuck until March 7, 1850, when somebody discovered a certain thing that indicated that there was somebody "at home," and that he was alive. They gave him a warm bath and he opened his four eyes on the world!
In his "Animal and Vegetable Hedgehogs" ("Nature's Work Shop") Grant Allen tells why the hedgehog works at night and sleeps in the daytime.
How he fastens on his winter overcoat of leaves, using his spines for pins, and how funny it makes him look.
How Mother Nature manages to have breakfast ready for him in the Spring just when he is ready for it.
How hedgehogs use their spines when they want to get down from a high bank or precipice real quickly.
How their eyes tell how smart they are; for a hedgehog is smart.
You will also find interesting things about hibernation in Gould's "Mother Nature's Children" and Richard's "Four Feet, Two Feet and No Feet."
In one of his essays on nature topics—"Seven Year Sleepers"—Grant Allen tells how the toad goes to bed in an earthenware pot, which he makes for himself, and how this habit may have helped start the story that live toads are found inside of stones.
Ingersoll, in that delightful book I have already referred to several times, "The Wit of the Wild," calls the pikas "the haymakers of the snow peaks." In his article on these interesting little creatures, he tells why you may often be looking right at one and still not see it; why the pikas gather bouquets and why they always lay them out in the hot sun; why their harvest season only lasts about two weeks, and why, although they usually go to bed at sunset, they work far into the night in harvest time.
"The Country Life Reader" has a good story of a woodchuck named "Tommy." Among other things it tells about the variety of residences a woodchuck has; and why animals that work at night, as all woodchucks do, have an unusually keen sense of smell. Can you guess why? The reason is simple enough.
Here's a clever bit of verse about the woodchuck by his other name, that I came across in some newspaper:
"The festive ground-hog wakes to-day,
And with reluctant roll,
He waddles up his sinuous way
And pops forth from his hole.
He rubs his little blinking eyes,
So heavy from long sleep,
That he may read the tell-tale skies—
Which is it—wake or sleep?"
Ingersoll's "Nature's Calendar" tells why Brer Bear stays up all winter when there is plenty of food, but goes to bed if food is scarce; how he uses roots of a fallen tree to help when he is digging his winter house; how he makes his bed and what he uses for the purpose; how the winds help him put on his roof, and how he locks himself in so tight that he can't get out until spring, even if he wants to.
(DECEMBER)
—Pope: "Essay on Man."
But whether they store it in their little barns, like the chipmunk, or on their bones, like Brer Bear, these farmers deserve more friendly understanding than they usually get from that two-legged farmer, Mr. Man.
Just think of the ages upon ages that they have been at work, these humble brothers of ours, and their ancestors—making the soil that gives us food—and yet after all this Mr. Man comes along and says:
"Get out of my fields!"
"Oh, but—please Mr. Man—we were here first!"
Was that the dormouse speaking? Anyhow, whoever it was, I think he was more than half right, don't you? Mr. Man, when he complains of these people, is apt not only to forget what he owes to them but in claiming that what they eat is wasted, to forget what a waster he is himself—wasting the soil and wasting the trees and everything.
"Now just don't you overdo this Lord-of-Creation business, Mr. Man," says a deep, growly voice. (It must be Brer Bear!) "Other people have rights as well as you! And if you'd tend to your work half as well as they've attended to theirs, for ages before you were born, this would be a better world to live in; a good deal better, and there'd be a lot more of the good things of life to go around.
"And now that you've waked me up I'm going to tell you something else. You human beings are not only a hard lot, but a stupid lot. You think you're mighty smart, don't you, with your bear-traps and your shooting machines that you shoot each other with, as well as shooting the rest of us! But do you know what I think? I think if some of us—the bears or the beavers or the ants, for example—had had half your chance they'd have been twice as smart; and then we bears might have gone around shooting at you, the way Mr. Beard showed once in one of those funny pictures of his."
HUNTING THAT DOESN'T HURT
Hunting with a gun is great sport. But now you know from my story what good the animals do in the world you may not like so well to kill them. And there is a new kind of hunting that is just as much fun—with a camera. This picture shows a boy in ambush, ready to shoot, by pressing a bulb; for the bird in the tree is exactly in front of the shutter of the camera.
You see, Brer Bear has a good tongue in his head as well as a wise old head on his shoulders, and I must say he's entirely right when he makes the statement that human beings aren't anywhere near as bright, according to the chance they've had, as the bears and the beavers and the ants and the bees, and many others that could be named. Why, do you know that in the whole history of the human race there have been only a few really bright people, like Mr. Shakespere and Mr. Kipling, Mr. Archimedes and Mr. Edison. It was such men as these—not over two thousand or three thousand out of the millions upon millions of human beings who have lived on the earth—that raised the rest up from the Stone Age to where they are to-day.
"Into the coarse dough of humanity an infrequent genius has put some enchanted yeast."
That's the way a recent English writer puts it. And then he goes on to say that if snakes and beasts of prey had been as clever as the bees and ants and beavers, men would have been exterminated. They could have saved themselves only by getting on with their education, climbing up the grades, a good deal faster than they have done.
He says it—this Englishman—almost in the very words of Brer Bear. And we can imagine Brer Bear going on, taking up where the Englishman leaves off.
"In other words," says Brer Bear, "it was because the bees and ants and beavers went on minding their own business, neither hurting you nor giving any pointers to the wolves and the lions and the snakes, that you're still here, Mr. Lord Man! That's part of the story of how you got to be lord of creation. Now listen to the rest of it:[27]
"'The cave-dwellings of men were stolen from cave-lions and cave-bears; their pit-dwellings were copied from the holes and tunnels burrowed by many animals; and in their lake-dwellings they collected hints from five sources: natural bridges, the platforms built by apes, the habits of waterfowl, the beaver's dam and lodge, and the nests of birds. In the round hut, which was made with branches and wattle-and-daub, stick nests were united to the plaster work of rock martins. Yes, a good workman in the construction of mud walls does no more than rock martins have done in all the ages of their nest-building.
"'Suppose primitive man cut down a tree with his flint axe, choosing one that grew aslant over a chasm or across a river; or suppose he piled stepping-stones together in the middle of a waterway, and then used this pier as a support for two tree trunks, whose far ends rested on the bank sides. Neither of these ideas has more mother wit than that which has enabled ants to bore tunnels under running water, and to make bridges by clinging to each other in a suspension chain of their wee, brave bodies.'"
So you see that isn't just Mr. Bear's way of putting it; there are human beings who think a good deal as he does. Myself, I agree with Brer Bear and Brer Brangyn.[28] For man certainly, take him by and large, doesn't always set a good example to his fellow animals, either in making the best of his opportunities or in giving his humble brothers a square deal.
From "Bugs, Butterflies and Beetles," by Dan Beard. By permission of J. B. Lippincott
IF BEETLES WERE AS BIG AS BOYS
Our six-footed brothers are wonderfully strong in proportion to their size, and it would go hard with us if beetles, for example, were as big as boys.
Do you know what I felt like saying, back there in Chapter IX, when we were speaking of kingfishers, and how certain parties had given it out that kingfishers eat big fish that otherwise might be caught with a hook or a seine? This is what I felt like saying:
"What if they do? Who's got a better right?"
Then they'd say—these men—I suppose:
"Why, we have; we're sportsmen!"
"Oh, yes," I'd say, "you're the kind of sportsman that's so afraid somebody else will see and kill something before you do; particularly if that somebody is itself a wild creature that has to earn its living that way and only takes what it needs for its family!"
And they're so good-natured about it, most of these country cousins of ours, that we walked right in on and ordered out, Cousin Woodchuck, for instance.
"The woodchuck can no more see the propriety of fencing off—though he admits that stone walls are fine refuges, in case he has to run for it—a space of the very best fodder than the British peasant can see the right of shutting him out of a grove where there are wild rabbits, or forbidding him to fish in certain streams. So he climbs over, or digs under, or creeps through, the fence, and makes a path or a playground for himself amid the timothy and the clover, and laughs, as he listens from a hole in the wall or under a stump, to hear the farmer using language which is good Saxon but bad morals, and the dog barking himself into a fit."[29]
I don't mean to say, mind you, that the farmer hasn't any rights in his own fields, and that he should turn everything over to the woodchuck and the rest, but I do mean to say that our wild kinsmen have rights and that there is a lot more to be got out of them than their flesh or their hides or the pleasure of killing them.
For one thing, the ant and the angleworm, the birds and the woodchucks, the little lichens and the big trees, the winds and the rains, are all teachers in the Great School of Out-of-Doors, and in this school you can learn almost everything there is to be learned. It's really a university. Nature study, as you call it in the grades, besides all the facts it teaches you, trains the eye to see, and the ear to listen, and the brain to reason, and the heart to feel.
Once there was a London banker who used to go around with—what do you think—in his pockets? Money? Yes, I suppose so; but what else? You'll never guess—ants! He was a lot more interested in ants than he was in money; and so, while the business world knew him as a big banker, all the scientific world knew him as a great naturalist. He wrote not only nature books but other books, including one on "The Pleasures of Life," and among life's greatest pleasures he placed the "friendship," as he puts it, of things in Nature. He said he never went into the woods but he found himself welcomed by a glad company of friends, every one with something interesting to tell. And, in speaking of the wide-spread growth of interest in Nature in recent years, he said:
"The study of natural history indeed, seems destined to replace the loss of what is, not very happily, I think, termed 'sport.'"
And isn't it curious, when one comes to think of it, why a man should take pleasure in seeing a beautiful deer fall dead with a bullet in its heart? You'd think there would be so much more pleasure in seeing him run—the very poetry of motion. Or, why should a boy want to kill a little bird? You'd think it would have been so much greater pleasure to study its flight or to listen to the happy notes pour out from that "little breast that will throb with song no more."
Among other animals that this banker naturalist studied was man himself; man when he was even more of an animal than he is to-day, and he came to the conclusion that this curious killing instinct is a survival of the long ages when man had to earn his living by the chase.
Not a very pretty picture, is it? Yet it's true. But, fortunately, so is this one of the happiest hours of the caveman's grandchild.
Some boy wrote to John Burroughs once, and asked how to become a naturalist. In his reply, Burroughs said:
"I have spent seventy-seven years in the world, and they have all been contented and happy years. I am certain that my greatest source of happiness has been my love of nature; my love of the farm, of the birds, the animals, the flowers, and all open-air things.
"You can begin to be a naturalist right where you are, in any place, in any season."[32]
WHOSE AUTOGRAPH IS THIS?
If you're a boy scout you will probably recognize this autograph in the snow. If not look it up in the Boy Scout Handbook.
It is the wholesomest, most inspiring reading in all the world, this Book of Nature. And there is simply no end to it. Just see what all we've been led into merely in following out the story of a grain of dust; and even then, I've only dipped into it here and there, as you can see by the hints of things to be looked up in the library. If we had gone into all the highways and byways of the subject—for it's all one continued story, from the making of the planets, circling in the fields of space, to the making of the little dust grains that are whirled along in the winds of March—if we followed the story all through we would have to have learned professors to teach us Astronomy, Geology, Chemistry, Zoology, with its subdivisions of Paleontology, Ornithology, Entomology, and so on; a whole college faculty sitting on a grain of dust!
An obvious thing in Nature is what is called "the struggle for existence"; animals and plants fighting among themselves and against enemies of their species in the universal struggle for food. What is not so obvious, is how the whole world of things works together toward the common good.
For example, working with those quiet little people, the lichens, is one of the biggest and noisiest things in the world—the volcano. The volcanoes not only pour into the air vast quantities of carbon-gas, which is the breath of life to plants, but help the lichens and the rest of the soil-makers with their work in other ways. And as the volcanoes help the lichens get their breath, the lichens forward the world service of the volcanoes by turning their lava into soil; in course of time, hiding the most desolate of these black iron wastes under a rich garment of green. It is thus the dead lava comes to life, and it is the very smallest of the lichen family that starts the process.
Courtesy of the Northern Pacific Railway
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:
With all the work the other agencies do in changing the rock into soil, and fertilizing and refreshing it with additions from the subsoil, there still remains an important thing to be done, and that is to mix the soil from different kinds of rock. This is still done constantly by the winds and flowing waters, but every so often, apparently, there needs to be a deeper, wider stirring and mixing. This the great ice ploughs and glacial rivers of the Ice Ages did. And they do it every so often, probably; for there was more than one Ice Age in the past, and, as Nature's processes do not change, it is more than likely there will be more ice ages and more deep ploughing and redistribution of the soil in the future. As you will see, if you take the trouble to look it up in "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble," it is thought we may now be in the springtime of one of those vaster changes which bring Springs lasting for ages, followed by long Summers and Autumns, and by the age-long Winters and the big glaciers and all.