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+Project Gutenberg's The Adventures of a Grain of Dust, by Hallam Hawksworth
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Adventures of a Grain of Dust
+
+Author: Hallam Hawksworth
+
+Release Date: November 20, 2011 [EBook #38066]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF A GRAIN OF DUST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Cathy Maxam, Joseph Cooper and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE ADVENTURES OF A GRAIN OF DUST
+
+
+
+
+  _STRANGE ADVENTURES IN NATURE'S WONDERLANDS_
+
+  THE ADVENTURES
+  OF A GRAIN OF DUST
+
+  BY
+  HALLAM HAWKSWORTH
+
+  AUTHOR OF "THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PEBBLE"
+
+  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+  NEW YORK      CHICAGO      BOSTON
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
+  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+  Printed in the United States of America
+
+  C
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+JUST A WORD
+
+
+I don't want you to think that I'm boasting, but I _do_ believe I'm one
+of the greatest travellers that ever was; and if anybody, living or
+dead, has ever gone through with more than I have I'd like to hear about
+it.
+
+Not that I've personally been in all the places or taken part in all the
+things I tell in this book--I don't mean to say that--but I do ask you
+to remember how long it is possible for a grain of dust to last, and how
+many other far-travelled and much-adventured dust grains it must meet
+and mix with in the course of its life.
+
+The heart of the most enduring grains of dust is a little particle of
+sand, the very hardest part of the original rock fragment out of which
+it was made. That's what makes even the finest mud seem gritty when it
+dries on your feet. And the longer these sand grains last the harder
+they get, as you may say; for it is the hardest part that remains, of
+course, as the grain wears down. Moreover, the smaller it gets the less
+it wears. If it happens to be spending its time on the seashore, for
+example, the very same kind of waves that buffet it about so, waves
+that, farther down the beach hurl huge blocks of stone against the
+cliffs and crack them to pieces, not only do not wear away the sand
+grains, to speak of, but actually save them from wear. The water between
+the grains protects them; like little cushions. And the sand in the
+finer dust grains carried by the wind is protected by the material that
+gathers on its surface.
+
+Why, if a pebble of the size of a hickory-nut may be ages and ages
+old--almost in the very form in which you see it,[1] think what the age
+of this long-enduring part of a grain of dust must be.
+
+    [1] "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble."
+
+Then remember what the ever-changing material on the surface of these
+immortal grains is made of; the dust particles of plants and animals, of
+buried Caesars and still older ancients, such as those early settlers of
+Chapter II.
+
+Finally, if what we call flesh and blood can think and talk, why not a
+grain of dust? In fact, what is flesh and blood but dust come back to
+life? Says the poet--and the poets know:
+
+    "The very dust that blows along the street
+    Once whispered to its love that life is sweet."
+
+You see it's as likely a thing as could happen--this whole story.
+
+THE GRAIN OF DUST.
+
+(Per H. H.)
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                 PAGE
+
+     I. _The Little Old Man of the Rock_                     1
+
+    II. _Some Early Settlers and Their Bones_               19
+
+   III. _The Winds and the World's Work_                    37
+
+    IV. _The Bottom-Lands_                                  55
+
+     V. _What the Earth Owes to the Earthworm_              75
+
+    VI. _The Little Farmers with Six Feet_                  92
+
+   VII. _Farmers with Four Feet_                           114
+
+  VIII. _Water Farmers Who Help Make Land_                 137
+
+    IX. _Farmers Who Wear Feathers_                        162
+
+     X. _The Busy Fingers of the Roots_                    186
+
+    XI. _The Autumn Stores and the Long Winter Night_      204
+
+   XII. _The Brotherhood of the Dust_                      225
+
+        _Index_                                            247
+
+
+
+
+THE ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+The author wishes to make special acknowledgment to the following
+publishers for their courtesy in supplying illustrations:
+
+The Macmillan Company for the pictures from Tarr and Martin's "College
+Physiography" on page 239; Darwin's "Formation of Vegetable Mould" on
+page 77.
+
+D. Appleton and Company for the pictures from Gilbert and Brigham's
+"Introduction to Physical Geography" on page 94; "Picturesque America"
+on page 243.
+
+J. B. Lippincott Company for the pictures from Beard's "American Boy's
+Book of Bugs, Butterflies, and Beetles" on page 229; McCook's "Natural
+History of the Agricultural Ant of Texas" on pages 206 and 213.
+
+_McClure's Magazine_ for the pictures on pages 149 and 157.
+
+Scientific American Publishing Company for the picture from "Scientific
+American Boy at School" on page 227.
+
+Harper and Brothers for the pictures from McCook's "Nature's Craftsmen"
+on pages 98, 105, 109, 207, and 208.
+
+_Strand Magazine_ for the pictures on pages 165, 182, and 204.
+
+Charles Scribner's Sons for the pictures from Yard's "Top of the
+Continent" on page 5; "Country Life Reader" on pages 9, 64, 85, 114,
+186, and 241; Osborn's "Men of the Old Stone Age" on page 33. Hornaday's
+"American Natural History" on pages 116, 117, 119, 123, 130, 144, and
+225; Seton's "Life Histories of Northern Animals" on pages 123, 129,
+147, and 151.
+
+Henry Holt and Company for the pictures from Beebe's "The Bird, Its Form
+and Function" on page 167; Salisbury's "Physiography" on pages 55, 71,
+and 167.
+
+Carnegie Institution of Washington for the pictures on pages 8 and 69.
+
+University of Nebraska for the picture on page 37.
+
+Columbia University Press for the picture from Wheeler's "Ants and Their
+Structure" on page 95.
+
+Houghton Mifflin Company for the pictures from Sharp's "Year Out of
+Doors" on page 11; "Riverside Natural History" on page 117; Mill's "In
+the Beaver World" on pages 152 and 153.
+
+Ginn and Company for the pictures from Breasted's "Ancient Times" on
+page 67; "Agriculture for Beginners" on page 47; Bergen's "Foundation of
+Botany" on pages 49, 190, and 197; Bergen's "Elements of Botany" on
+pages 193 and 195; Beal's "Seed Dispersal" on page 51.
+
+U. S. Geological Survey for the pictures on pages 21, 22, 23, 30, 31,
+and 59.
+
+New York Zoological Society for the pictures on pages 145, 159, and 216.
+
+_School Arts Magazine_ for the picture on page 221.
+
+U. S. Department of Agriculture for the pictures on pages 125 and 189.
+
+American Museum of Natural History for the pictures on pages 20, 24, 26,
+139, and 162.
+
+Cassell and Company for the pictures from "Popular History of Animals"
+on pages 118, 177, 179, and 217; "Popular Science" on page 242.
+
+Hutchinson for the pictures from "Marvels of the Universe" on pages 92,
+101, 103, 141, 169, and 173; "Marvels of Insect Life" on page 211.
+
+The Dunham Company for the picture on page 45.
+
+International Harvester Company for the picture on page 199.
+
+Northern Pacific Railway for the pictures on pages 235 and 237.
+
+
+
+
+THE ADVENTURES OF A GRAIN OF DUST
+
+
+
+
+It will be understood, as stated in the preface, that, like "The Strange
+Adventures of a Pebble," this is an autobiography. In other words, it is
+the grain of dust itself that tells the story of the life of the soil of
+which it is a part.
+
+
+
+
+THE ADVENTURES OF A GRAIN OF DUST
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+(JANUARY)
+
+    In truth you'll find it hard to say
+    How it could ever have been young
+    It looks so old and grey.
+
+    --_Wordsworth._
+
+THE LITTLE OLD MAN OF THE ROCK
+
+
+Some say it was Leif Ericson, some say it was Columbus, but _I_ say it
+was The Little Old Man of the Rock.
+
+And I go further. I say he not only discovered America but Europe, Asia,
+and Africa, and the islands of the sea. I'll tell you why.
+
+
+I. HOW LITTLE MR. LICHEN DISCOVERED THE WORLD
+
+As everybody knows, we must all eat to live, and how could either
+Columbus or anybody else--except Mr. Lichen--have done much discovering
+in a world where there was nothing to eat? When the continents first
+rose out of the sea[2] there wasn't anything to eat but rock. Rock, to
+be sure, makes very good eating if you have the stomach for it, as Mr.
+Lichen has. It contains sulphur, phosphorus, silica, potash, soda, iron,
+and other things that plants are fond of, but ordinary plants can't get
+these things out of the rock--let alone human beings and other animals;
+and that's why Mr. Lichen had the first seat at the table and always
+does.
+
+    [2] "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble."
+
+On bare granite boulders in the fields, on the rocky ruins at the foot
+of mountains, and even on the mountain tops themselves, on projecting
+rocks far above the snow line, you find the lichens. On rock of every
+kind they settle down and get to work. They never complain of the
+climate--hot or cold, moist or dry. When the land goes dry they simply
+knock off, and then when a little moisture is to be had they're busy
+again. A little goes a long way with members of the family who live in
+regions where water is scarce. Indeed, most of them get along with
+hardly any moisture at all. The very hardiest of them are so small that
+a whole colony looks like a mere stain upon the rock.
+
+While lichens are generally gray--they seem to have been _born_ old,
+these queer little men of the rock--you can find some that are black,
+others bright yellow or cream-colored. Others are pure white or of
+various rusty and leaden shades. Some are of the color of little mice.
+To make out any shapes in these tiny forms, you must look very close;
+and if you have a hand lens you will be surprised to find that this
+fairy-land of the lichens isn't so drab as it seems to the naked eye.
+For there are flower gardens--the tiny spore cups. Some of them are
+vivid crimson and, standing out on a background of pure white, they're
+very lovely. Some of the science people believe the colors attract the
+minute insects that the lens shows wandering around in these fairy
+flower gardens. But just what the insects can be there for nobody knows,
+since the lichens are scattered, not by insects, but by the wind.
+
+As a rule lichens grow only in open, exposed places, although some are
+like the violets--they enjoy the shade. Some varieties grow on trees,
+some on the ground, others on the bleached bones of animals in fields
+and wastes and on the bones of whales cast up by the sea.
+
+Of course the whole country was awfully wild when the continents first
+came out of the sea, but that just suited Mr. Lichen, for there is one
+thing he can't stand, and that is city life, with its smoke and bad air.
+
+"Why, one can't get one's breath!" he says.
+
+
+WHY THE LICHENS DISLIKE CITY LIFE
+
+So, while you will not meet Mr. Lichen in cities--at least, until after
+the people are all gone; that is to say, on ruins of cities of the
+past--you will find him beautifying the ancient walls of abbeys, old
+seats of learning like Oxford, and the tombstones of the cities of the
+dead.
+
+Mr. Lichen always travels light. On the surface of the lichens are what
+seem to be little grains of dust, and these serve the purpose of seeds.
+A puff of wind will carry away thousands of them, and so start new
+colonies in lands remote.
+
+You see, the fact that he requires so little baggage must have been a
+great advantage to Mr. Lichen in those early days, when he had to
+discover not only America but all the rest of the world map, spread out
+so wide and far. You can just imagine how the grains of lichen dust,
+the seed of the race, must have gone whirling across the world with the
+winds.
+
+But if a breath of wind would carry them away so easily, how could they
+_stay_ on a rock, these tiny lichen travellers? Especially as they have
+no roots? They have curious rootlike fibres which absorb food by
+dissolving the rock, and this dissolved rock, hardening, holds them on.
+The fibres of lichens that grow on granite actually sink into it by
+dissolving the mica and forcing their way between the other kinds of
+particles in the rock that they can't eat. Thus they help break it up.
+
+As we all know, little people are great eaters in proportion to their
+size, but it is said the lichens are the heartiest eaters in the world.
+They eat more mineral matter than any other plant, and all plants are
+eaters of minerals.
+
+Yet, you'd wonder what they do with the food they eat--most of them grow
+so slowly. A student of lichens watched one of them on the tiled roof of
+his house in France--one of the kind of lichens that look like plates of
+gold--and in forty years he couldn't see that it had grown a single bit,
+although he measured it carefully.
+
+
+HOW MR. LICHEN EATS UP STONES
+
+But how could such feeble creatures, as they seem to be, ever eat
+anything so hard as rock? Well, they couldn't if it wasn't for one
+thing--they understand chemistry. At least they carry with them, or know
+how to make, an acid, and it's this acid which enables them to dissolve
+the rock so that they can absorb it. The acid is in their fibres--what
+answer for roots. And the dissolved rock not only gives them their daily
+bread, but, as I said a moment ago, holds them on. This use of acid is
+their way of eating; chewing their food very fine, and mixing it with
+saliva, as all of us young people are taught to do.
+
+The first and smallest of the lichen family spread and decay into a thin
+film of soil. This decay makes more acid, just as decaying leaves do
+to-day--they learned it, no doubt, from the lichens--and this acid of
+decay also eats into the rock and makes more soil. (You see nature, from
+the start, has been helping those that help themselves, just as the old
+proverb has it.) Then, after the first tiny lichens--mere grains of dust
+that have just begun to feel the stir of life--come somewhat larger
+lichens which can only live where there is a little soil to begin with.
+These in turn die, which means a still deeper layer of soil, still more
+acid of decay, and so on up to larger lichens and later more ambitious
+plants. Then, on the soil made by these successive generations of
+lichens, higher types of plants--plants with true roots--get a foothold.
+
+Besides making soil themselves, the lichens help accumulate soil by
+holding grains of rock broken up by their fibres and loosened by the
+action of the heat and cold of day and night and change of season. These
+little grains become entangled in the larger lichens and are kept, many
+of them, from being washed away by the heavy rains. So held, they are in
+time crumbled into soil by the action of the acids and by mixture with
+the products of plant decay. To this day, go where you will, over the
+whole face of the earth, and you'll find the lichens there ahead of you,
+dressed in their sober suits, some gray as ashes, others brown, but some
+are as yellow as gold; for even these old people like a little color
+once in a while. As travellers they beat all.
+
+     "Their geographical range is more extended than that of any other
+     class of plants."
+
+That's how the learned lichenologists put it. For these lichens, these
+humble little brothers of our dust, that many of us never looked at
+twice on the stones of the field, or the gray stumps and dead limbs in
+the wood, are so interesting when you've really met them--been properly
+introduced--that a whole science has grown up around them called
+"lichenology." And exciting! You ought to hear the hot discussions that
+lichenologists get into. You read, for instance, that such and such a
+theory "was received with a storm of opposition" (as most new theories
+are, by the way, particularly if they are sound).
+
+But the tumults and the strifes of science, of politics, or of wars
+don't disturb little old Mr. Lichen himself. There on his rock he'll
+sit, overlooking the scenery and watching life and the seasons come and
+go for 100, 200, 500 years, and more. For while they grow so slowly the
+lichens make up for it by living to an extreme age.
+
+
+THE LICHENS AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE
+
+Why, do you know that during the lifetime of certain lichens that are
+still hale and hearty, not only a long line of Caesars might rise,
+flourish, die, and, with their clay, stop holes to keep the wind away,
+as Mr. Shakespere put it, but the vast Roman Empire could and did come
+into being, move across the stage with its banners and trumpets and
+glittering pomp and go back to the dust again.
+
+Some lichens, growing on the highest mountain ranges of the world, are
+known to be more than 2,000 years old!
+
+[Illustration: THE SEQUOIAS; THE SUNLIGHT AND THE SHADE
+
+Wonderful sunlight effect, isn't it? We are here in Sequoia National
+Park and those big trees are sequoias, members of the pine-tree family.]
+
+
+II. THE MARCH OF THE TREES
+
+Of course I don't mean to say it takes any 2,000 years for the average
+lichen to die and turn to dust. These long-lived lichens are the
+Methuselahs of their race. Most kinds die much younger, as time goes
+among the lichens, and in a comparatively few years, a century say,
+after their first settlement on the rock, the lichens have become soil.
+All this time the heating of the rock by day and the cooling off at
+night, the work of frost and the gases of the rain and the air[3] have
+also helped to make more soil and by and by there is enough for lichens
+of a larger growth; and mosses begin to get a foothold. These, in turn,
+die and, in decaying, make acids, as did the little lichens before
+them, and this acid joins hands with all the other forces to work up the
+rock into soil. Presently there is enough soil to let certain
+adventurers of the Weed family drop in. The picking is very thin, to be
+sure, but some of these Weed people have learned to put up with almost
+anything. Don't suppose, however, that all weeds are alike in this
+respect. Oh, dear, no! They come into new plant communities just as the
+trees do, not haphazard, but according to a certain more or less settled
+order. Some of them, the adventurer type, will, it is true, settle down
+and seem contented enough on land so poor that to quote the witty Lady
+Townshend "you will only find here and there a single blade of grass and
+two rabbits fighting for that"; while other weeds will have nothing to
+do with soil that, in their opinion, is not good enough for people of
+their family connections.
+
+    [3] All these things put together are called "weathering."
+
+[Illustration: EARLY SETTLERS IN THE DESERT
+
+Besides earning their own living under hard conditions, these sturdy
+pioneers of the desert are preparing the way for plants of a higher
+kind, as the next two pictures will tell you.]
+
+It has long been known that the character of soil may be told, to a
+considerable degree, by the kind of weeds that grow on it. An old
+English writer pointed this out in his quaint way some 200 years ago:
+
+     "Ground which, though it bear not any extraordinary abundance of
+     grass yet will load itself with strong and lusty weeds, as
+     Hemlocks, Docks, Nettles and such like, is undoubtedly a most rich
+     and fruitful ground for any grain whatsoever."
+
+But, he goes on to say:
+
+     "When you see the ground covered with Heath, Broom, Bracken, Gorse
+     and such like, they be most apparent signs of infinite great
+     barrenness. And, of these infertile places, you shall understand,
+     that it is the clay ground which for the most part brings forth the
+     Moss, the Broom, the Gorse and such like."
+
+Wherever soil is coarse and bouldery the weeds also are of a sturdy
+breed. In his long, delightful days among the mountains Muir[4] tells us
+what a brave show the thistles made in this new world of soil; how royal
+they looked in their purple bloom, standing up head and shoulders above
+the other plants, like Saul among the people.
+
+    [4] Muir. "The Mountains of California."
+
+[Illustration: WHAT THE DESERT PIONEERS DO FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
+
+Only the sturdiest kinds of shrubs and weeds, such as you see in the
+desert, can earn their keep in sandy soil, always thirsty, like that on
+the right. But the desert vegetation, dying and decaying--it is then
+called "humus"--not only knits the soil together but absorbs moisture
+and ammonia from the air and so helps grow good crops.]
+
+
+HOW PLANT PEOPLE PAY THEIR TAXES
+
+In all these plant republics each citizen must pay something into the
+common treasury for its board and keep. This fund not only meets
+"national expenses" during the lifetime of the ones who pay these taxes,
+but it helps prepare the land for the great citizens of the future--the
+trees. In another hundred years--making two hundred in all, after the
+arrival of the very first lichens--low shrubs and bushes often find
+spots in these new communities where the soil is thick enough for their
+needs.
+
+It is very curious how members of the plant world, growing side by side,
+seek their food at different depths, and send out their roots
+accordingly. It reminds one of the rigid class distinctions below stairs
+in a nobleman's household where the chef has his meals in his own
+private apartment, the kitchen maids in their quarters, the chauffeurs,
+footman, under butler, and pantry boys in the servants' hall.
+
+[Illustration: THE LEADERS OF THE GRAND MARCH]
+
+But most striking, it has always seemed to me, is the settled order in
+which trees march into the land. Why shouldn't the oaks come before the
+maples? Or the maples before the beeches? Or the beeches before the
+pines? Why is it that, with the exception of a straggler here and there,
+the first trees to climb the stony mountainsides are the pines? Then
+close behind come such trees as the poplars, and along the streams
+below, the willows. Still farther down the valley are the beeches;
+farther still the maples, and last of all the oaks.
+
+So it is they advance in a certain regular way, each in its own place in
+the ranks. At first it seems as strange as the coming of Birnam wood to
+Dunsinane that gave poor Macbeth such a turn that time. But, after all,
+the explanation is quite simple and no doubt you have guessed it
+already.
+
+The reason such trees as the pines, poplars, and willows come first is
+that the seeds are so light they are easily carried by the winds and so
+reach new soil ahead of other trees with winged seeds like the beeches
+and the maples; for, although these seeds also travel on the wind, they
+are much larger than the winged seeds of the pine and they travel much
+more slowly and for shorter distances.
+
+Moreover, at the end of their first journey, having once fallen to the
+ground, they are apt to stay. Then there is no further advance, so far
+as these particular seeds are concerned, until trees have sprung from
+them and they, in turn, bear seeds. In the case of very light seeds,
+like those of the pines, the wind not only carries them far beyond the
+comparatively slow and heavy march of the beech and the maple, but if
+they fall on rock with little or no soil the next wind picks them up and
+carries them farther, so that they may strike some other spot where
+there is soil and perhaps a little network of grass and weeds to secure
+them until they can take root and so hold their own. It is not only a
+great advantage to the pine seeds to be so small, so far as getting
+ahead of other trees is concerned, but it is an advantage in another
+way. Because they are so small they require comparatively little soil to
+start with, are more easily covered up, and so they soon begin to
+sprout. The very winds that carry them up among the mountain rocks are
+quite likely to cover them with enough dust to start on, and I myself
+have helped raise many a giant of the mountain forests in this way. It
+is really wonderful how little soil a pine-tree can get along with; if,
+say, its fortunes are cast on some mass of mountain rock. Somehow it
+manages to get a living among the cracks and at the same time to hold
+its own in the bitter struggle with the winds.
+
+"The pine trees," says Muir, "march up the sun-warmed moraines in long
+hopeful files, taking the ground and establishing themselves as soon as
+it is ready for them."
+
+[Illustration: _From the painting by Rousseau in the Metropolitan Museum
+of Art._
+
+THE EDGE OF THE WOODS
+
+Last of all come tramping along the sturdy old oaks.]
+
+Last of all come tramping along the sturdy old oaks and the nut-bearing
+trees. Their seeds are so heavy they get little help from the winds, and
+then only in the most violent storms. They must advance very slowly
+indeed, with occasional help from absent-minded squirrels who carry away
+and bury nuts and acorns and then forget where they put them.
+
+[Illustration: HOW SQUIRRELS HELP OAKS TO MARCH
+
+Sometimes they bury acorns and forget just where. When frightened they
+often drop them and run away.]
+
+
+ROUGH CITIZENS AMONG THE PIONEERS
+
+The beginnings of a forest are stunted because the soil is thin.
+Moreover, the company in which the trees find themselves is very
+miscellaneous, like the population of all pioneer communities--weeds,
+grasses, briers, shrubs. High up on a mountainside you can find all
+these types of vegetation. Pines growing clear to the snow line; farther
+down the mountain, in crannies, sumach and elder bushes with field
+daisies and goldenrod scattered among them; while on the barren rocks
+are the lichens and the mosses.
+
+Not only do the citizens of the plant world follow a certain fixed order
+in coming into new regions, but also in giving place to one another. All
+plants of a higher order can live only on the remains of those of a
+lower, and it is most interesting to note the process by which each
+lower form comes, does its work, passes on, and is replaced by a
+superior type. The shrubs, which can only grow after the weeds and
+grasses have made enough soil for them, at length shade out these
+smaller pioneers. Haven't you often noticed, when picnicing in deep
+woods, that the grasses and flowers are to be found only in the sunny
+spaces, where there are no trees?
+
+But these thickets themselves, after a while, disappear, and pines take
+their places. I am speaking now of the growth of forests, where the
+soil-making has so far advanced that forests are possible. The thickets,
+with their good soil and the shade which keeps it damp, are just the
+places for the pine seeds brought in by the wind to get a foothold and
+sprout up. When they grow into big trees they gather with their high
+branches so much of the sunshine for themselves that little of it gets
+through to the shrubs below, so these shrubs disappear, surviving only
+in the sunny open spaces or along the borders of the wood.
+
+But now notice what happens to the pines. When the trees become larger,
+the young pines that spring up beneath their shade can't get enough
+sunshine, so, as the big trees grow old and die, there are fewer and
+fewer young pines to take their places. Now comes the turn of the
+spruces. For spruces require more and better soil than the pines and
+they don't mind a reasonable amount of shade. So, as the woods grow
+thicker and shadier, the pines gradually disappear and the spruces take
+their places.
+
+At first, in the reign of the spruces, some of the old residents begin
+to come back. A spruce forest, not being so dense in the beginning as a
+pine forest, lets in a good deal of sunlight, and you'll find scattered
+through its aisles and byways gentians, bluebells, daisies, goldenrod.
+
+In course of time, however, the leaves and branches of the spruces
+become so thick that hardly a sunbeam can get through and you have a
+forest where noontime looks like twilight; a forest of deep shade and
+silence with its thick carpet of brown needles, and where all the shrubs
+and grasses and flowers have disappeared, except in the open spaces. It
+was in such a forest and in one of these sunny glades, no doubt, that
+the knight the little girl tells of in Tennyson:
+
+    "... while he past the dim lit woods
+    Himself beheld three spirits mad with joy
+    Come dashing down on a tall wayside flower
+    That shook beneath them as the thistle shakes
+    When three gray linnets wrangle for the seed."
+
+
+HOW NATURE RESTORES ABANDONED FARMS
+
+So it is that new lands pass from barren rock to forest, and deep rich
+soil, and so it is that worn-out soils, the result of reckless farming
+are finally restored. Hardly any soil is too poor for some kind of a
+weed. These weeds springing up, die and make soil that better kinds of
+weeds can use. Later come a few woody plants. In the course of fifteen
+or twenty years the soil is deep enough to support trees; and in fifty
+years there is a young forest. At the end of a century fine timber can
+be cut, the land cleared, and the old place may be as good as new.
+
+But it's a long time to wait! It's a much better plan to take care of
+the land in the first place.
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     One of the strangest things about Mr. Lichen, as you will see by
+     looking up the subject in any botany or encyclopaedia, is that he is
+     really _two_ people--two different plants that have grown into
+     partnership; and that one of the partners supplies water for the
+     firm while the other furnishes the food.
+
+     The part of "him" that supplies the food is green, or blue-green,
+     and that is why it is able to do this. This idea that Mr. Lichen is
+     really two people was one of those that was "received with a storm
+     of opposition," but certain lichenologists actually took two
+     different kinds of plants, put them together and _made_ a lichen
+     themselves, as you will see when you look the matter up.
+
+     As to just who among these two kinds of plants shall go into
+     partnership--that usually depends on chance and the winds; although
+     in the case of some lichens, the parents determine upon these
+     partnerships, just as they often do in human relations.
+
+     If you want to continue this interesting study and become Learned
+     Lichenologists, you will be interested to know that there are a lot
+     of things to be learned, including not only no end of delightful
+     names, such as _Endocarpon_, _Collema_, _Pertusaria_, not to speak
+     of _Xanthoria parietina_, and loads of others, but there are still
+     things unknown that _you_ may be able some day to find out. For
+     instance, while they know that the two kinds of vegetation that
+     together make a lichen, feed and water each other, it's not known
+     exactly _how_ they do it; although the "Britannica" article has a
+     picture showing the two partners in the very act of going into
+     partnership. The article in the "Americana" shows some striking
+     forms of lichens, and how nature from these very dawnings of life
+     begins to dream of beauty. You will be surprised at the forms shown
+     in the "Americana," they are either so graceful, symmetrical, or
+     picturesque. One of them looks like a very elaborate helmet
+     decoration, or plume of a knight.
+
+     This article also tells what an incredible number of species of
+     lichens there are--enough to make quite a good-sized town, if they
+     were all real people.
+
+     It also tells why the orange and yellow lichens take to the shady
+     side of the rock; and something about how the lichens get those
+     remarkable decorations and sculpturings, and what the weather has
+     to do with it.
+
+     There you will also get a probable explanation of the fact that the
+     manna which the Israelites found on the ground in the morning
+     appeared so suddenly.
+
+     In the article in the "International" you will find another picture
+     of how the two partners--the fungus and the alga--make the lichen,
+     and you will learn that Mr. Lichen's name, like Mr. Lichen himself,
+     is centuries old; being the very name given him by the Greeks, and
+     afterward by the Romans.
+
+     In the "Country Life Reader" there is an article on the soil that
+     has a very close relationship to the subject of the lichens and
+     their work. It tells, among other things, about the value of
+     humus--decayed leaves, grass, etc.--to the soil. It was the
+     lichens, you know, who _started_ the humus-making business.
+
+     The article in the reader on "Planting Time," by L. H. Bailey,
+     expresses the wonder we must all feel when we stop to think about
+     it, at the magic work of the soil in changing a little speck of a
+     seed into a plant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+(FEBRUARY)
+
+    Behold a strange monster our wonder engages!
+        If dolphin or lizard your wit may defy.
+    Some thirty feet long, on the shore of Lyme-Regis
+        With a saw for a jaw and a big staring eye.
+    A fish or a lizard? An Ichthyosaurus,
+        With a big goggle-eye and a very small brain,
+    And paddles like mill-wheels in chattering chorus
+        Smiting tremendous the dread-sounding main.
+
+    --_Professor Blackie._
+
+SOME EARLY SETTLERS AND THEIR BONES
+
+
+But a farm where nothing but plants grow isn't much of a farm. Every
+good farmer knows that nowadays, and so he stocks his place with horses
+and cows and chickens and things. Mother Nature understood this
+principle from the beginning, and the plants and animals on her farm
+have always got on well together.
+
+For one thing the plant and the animal each help the other to get its
+breath. That is to say, plants, when they take in the air, keep most of
+the carbon there is in it and give back most of the oxygen, which is
+just what the animal world wants; while the animals, when they breathe,
+keep most of the oxygen and give back most of the carbon--just the thing
+that plants grow on.
+
+But the service of the animals to the plants is very important after
+they have stopped breathing altogether; since their flesh and bones,
+like the dead bodies of the plants, go back to enrich their common dust.
+The bones and bodies and shells of members of the animal kingdom,
+however, are far richer food for soils than is dead vegetation. The
+shell creatures of the sea to which we owe our wonderfully fertile
+limestone soils are--many of them--so small that you can only make them
+out with a microscope; while certain other contributors to our
+food-supply were so big that one of them, walking down a country road,
+would almost fill the road from fence to fence.
+
+
+I. MR. DINOSAUR AND HIS NEIGHBORS
+
+
+A STRANGE FACE IN THE MEADOW
+
+Now let's take a look at some of these big fellows. How would you like
+to have such a creature as the one at the right of this page come
+ambling up to meet you at the meadow gate of an evening when you went
+to milk the cows? Yet more than likely either this gentle animal, or
+some of his kin, browsed over the very field where now the cattle
+pasture, for he, too, was a grass-eater, and with an appetite most
+hearty. If you kept him in a barn his stall would have to be eighty feet
+long, and it would be necessary to fill his rack with a ton of fodder
+every third day. But, assuming there was a market for him in the shape
+of steaks and roasts, you would be well repaid; for, in prime condition,
+he weighed twenty tons.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE LAND OF HIS FATHERS]
+
+These monsters who ate grass, and other monsters who ate them, and still
+other monsters who lived in the sea, appeared comparatively late in the
+life of the world.
+
+[Illustration: NO WONDER HE NEVER WORRIED!
+
+Quite aside from the fact that he had so little brain to worry with, it
+seems highly improbable that the Stegosaurus ever felt any apprehension
+about attacks from the rear, in the frequent military operations which
+distinguished the times in which he lived. In addition to the horny
+plates down his back he had those horny spines which were swung by a
+tail some ten feet long.]
+
+
+TONS AND TONS OF ANCIENT BONES
+
+It is only about 15,000,000 years ago, for example, that the biggest of
+them all, the Dinosaurs, lived, while the earth itself is now supposed
+to be some 100,000,000 years old. Their numbers were enormous, and it is
+probable there is not an acre of ground from the Atlantic to the
+Pacific, and from Alaska to the tip end of South America that has not
+been fertilized by their bones. In fact, of certain species I have found
+the bones scattered all the way from Oregon to Patagonia; so this must
+have been their pasture.
+
+They were not only all over the land, but in the lakes and in the great
+sea that once extended right through North America from the Gulf of
+Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. And they were along the shores of the sea
+and in the swamps. The bones of the ancestors of the whale were found
+in such quantities in some of the Southern States that they were used to
+build fences until it was found they were much more valuable to enrich
+the fields themselves.
+
+[Illustration: THE HEAD OF HESPERORNIS
+
+"Then there was a great toothed, diving creature with wings. They've
+named him the Hesperornis, which means 'western bird,' because the
+fossils of the best-known species were found in the chalk-beds of
+Kansas."]
+
+In the great American inland sea of those days swam one kind of fierce
+fish-lizard that took such big bites he had to have a hinge in his jaw.
+Because of this hinge he could open his mouth wider without putting
+anything out of place, don't you see? He was called the Mesosaur. But he
+never bit the Archelon, who was in his crowd, because he couldn't. The
+Archelon was the king of turtles, and, like all the turtle family, wore
+heavy armor. He was over twelve feet long. And sharks--no end of them! A
+shark at his best is bad enough, but the sharks of those days were
+almost too terrible to think about. Such jaws! And teeth like railroad
+spikes! Then there was a great toothed diving creature with wings.
+They've named him the "Hesperornis," which means "western bird." He was
+given the name because the fossils of the best-known species were found
+in the chalk-beds of Kansas.
+
+[Illustration: GREATEST OF ANCIENT FLYING MACHINES
+
+Mr. Pterodactyl, on his way to dinner, looked like this. He was the
+largest of all flying-machines before the days of the Wright brothers.
+He would have measured--if there had been anybody to measure him--twenty
+feet across the wings! Like the Hesperornis, he always dined on fish.]
+
+Over the waters flew another bird-like, fish-like, bat-like thing called
+the Pterodactyl. Look at his picture and you will see how he got his
+nickname. It means "finger-toe." He was the largest of all
+flying-machines until the days of the Wright brothers. It was over
+twenty feet across his wings, from tip to tip; and, like the
+Hesperornis, he always had fish for dinner.
+
+[Illustration: A BIG "LITTLE FINGER" AND WHAT IT WAS FOR
+
+Mr. Pterodactyl means "finger toe." What is our little finger was the
+longest of his five digits. It helped support and operate that big
+bat-like wing extending from his arms to his toes.]
+
+
+THE EARLIEST RULERS OF THE SEA
+
+The first monsters, like the first of almost everything else, including
+the land itself, were in the sea.[5] For a time giant fish, armor-plated
+like a man-of-war, and with awful appetites, just about ran everything.
+Then came the reign of the sharks. Some of them had jaws that opened to
+the height of a door--six feet or over. Next in succession, as rulers of
+the sea, were the fish-lizards, of whom that hinge-jawed Mesosaur was
+one. Of another of these fish-lizards a famous teacher of Edinburgh
+University, Professor Blackie, wrote that funny verse at the head of
+this chapter. The bones of this particular specimen were found sticking
+out of a cliff at Lyme-Regis, a popular watering-place in the English
+Channel, by a pretty English girl who was strolling along the beach.
+
+    [5] "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble."
+
+[Illustration: A FAMILY PARTY
+
+The imagination of the artist enables us to picture this family
+party--Mrs. Ichthyosaurus and her children out for a stroll in
+prehistoric waters.]
+
+The Ichthyosaurus, as Professor Blackie says in his verse, was some
+thirty feet long, with a comparatively large head--like an
+alligator's--set close to his body. Another fish-lizard, well and
+unfavorably known by his neighbors of the sea, was the Plesiosaurus.
+Instead of fins he had big paddles resembling those of the seal. He was
+a kind of side-wheeler, like the Mississippi River steamboats, and he
+could go like everything! His neck was long and he darted after the
+smaller creatures he lived on.
+
+
+REIGN OF THE LIZARD FAMILY
+
+But these queer fish seem to have just been getting ready to land; for,
+by being lizards, they after a while managed it. A lizard, you know,
+belongs to the reptile family, and out of these sea reptiles there
+grew, in course of time, reptiles which lived, not in the sea but in the
+swamps along the sea. These reptiles were the Dinosaurs, and they are
+related to the Minosaurs and the Ichthyosaurus, and the rest of the
+Saurs, as you can see by the family name; for "saur" means lizard.
+Dinosaur means "terrible lizard." Don't you think he looks it?
+
+Although some of these Dinosaurs were no larger than chickens, others
+were by far the largest creatures that ever were, on sea or land. Many
+of the biggest lived on grass, just like an old cow, while the
+flesh-eating Dinosaurs lived on them. Some of these Dinosaurs went on
+all fours, while others ran about on their hind legs, and when they
+stood still, propped themselves up on their big, thick tails as do
+kangaroos. The Camptosaurus, one of whose favorite resorts was the land
+that is now Wyoming, was thirty feet long. Another called the
+Brontosaurus, was sixty feet long. The Atlantosaurus, one of the
+pioneers of Colorado, measured eighty feet from the end of his nose to
+the end of his tail, and all of them were built in proportion. The
+Stegosaurus, also an early settler in Wyoming, had huge bony plates,
+like ploughshares, sticking out all along his back from the nape of his
+neck to the end of his tail. He seems to have gone about looking quite
+ugly and humpbacked, as our old cat does when she has words with the
+dog.
+
+After the swamps dried up and the lizards could no longer make a living,
+came the reign of the mammals; including the Mastodons and the Mammoths,
+marching in countless herds, trumpeting through the forests.
+
+
+HOW SOME MONSTERS PLOUGHED THE FIELD
+
+But besides what they did in the way of fertilizing the land with their
+flesh and bones some of the mammals did a good deal of ploughing. Among
+these early ploughmen were the Mastodons and the Mammoths, and another
+elephant-like creature with two tusks, that he wore, not after the
+fashion among elephants to-day, but curving down from his chin, somewhat
+like Uncle Sam's goatee. He used these tusks, it is supposed, not only
+for self-defense, but for grubbing up roots which he ate. If so, they
+must have been about as good ploughs as those crooked sticks that were
+used by the early farmers among men, and that are still in use among
+primitive peoples.
+
+
+THE ELEPHANT FAMILY AS PLOUGHMEN
+
+What makes it more likely that the creature with the down-curving tusks
+stirred the soil with them is that his cousins, the elephants of to-day,
+are themselves great ploughmen. Elephants feed, not only on grass and
+the tender shoots of trees, but on bulbs buried in the soil, which they
+hunt out by their fine sense of smell. In digging these bulbs they turn
+up whole acres of ground. Elephants also do a great deal of ploughing by
+uprooting trees so as to make it more convenient to get at their tender
+tops. Sir Samuel Baker, the explorer, says the work done by a herd of
+elephants in a mimosa forest in this way is very great and that trees
+over four feet in circumference are uprooted. In the case of the biggest
+trees several elephants work together, some pulling the tree with their
+trunks, while others dig under the roots with their tusks. To be sure,
+the mimosa-trees have no tap roots, but tearing them out of the ground
+is no small job, nevertheless. It takes strength and it takes
+engineering.
+
+Another early ploughman was a bird, the Moa. The Moa had no wings, but
+his muscular legs were simply enormous, and so were his feet. New
+Zealand seems to have been the headquarters of the Moas. There used to
+be loads of them as shown by the huge deposits of their bones. They are
+supposed to have been killed in countless numbers during the Ice Ages in
+the Southern Hemisphere; for there were Ice Ages in the Southern as
+well as the Northern Hemisphere. In one great morass in New Zealand
+abounding in warm springs, bones of the Moas were found in such
+countless numbers, layer upon layer, that it is thought the big birds
+gathered at these springs to keep warm during those great freezes.
+
+
+THE MILLSTONES OF THE MOAS
+
+Besides the work they did with feet and bills you may imagine how much
+nice fresh stone the Moas must have ground up in their crops during the
+millions of years they existed. It was a regular mill--the gizzard of a
+Moa--full of pebbles as big as hickory nuts. Scattered about the springs
+where their bones are found are little heaps of these pebbles, each the
+contents of a gizzard. Like miniature tumuli, they mark the spots where
+the bodies of the Moas returned to dust.
+
+Perhaps some of those flesh-eating Dinosaurs did a little ploughing once
+in a while, too; for one theory is that those ridiculous little arms
+were used for scratching out a nest for the eggs, just as the crocodiles
+and the alligators and the turtles dig nests for their eggs to-day. For
+all these animals, as did the Dinosaurs, belong to the reptile family,
+and show the family trait of digging out nests for their eggs.
+
+[Illustration: A PUZZLE PAGE FROM THE GREAT STONE BOOK
+
+Talk about your cut-out puzzles! Here is a specimen of the kind of
+puzzle Nature and the course of things in the darkest ages of world
+history have cut out for the paleontologists. It is a find of ancient
+bones in the asphalt deposits near Los Angeles.]
+
+Although the Dinosaurs roamed the swamps and lowlands of all the ancient
+world, their favorite resort was the territory now occupied by our
+Western States--judging from the quantities of bones they left--while
+that old Mediterranean Sea of ours was full of their kin, the
+sea-lizards. Professor Marsh, of Yale, who was among the first
+explorers of the graves of these monarchs of the past, says that one
+day, while riding through a valley in the Rocky Mountains, he saw the
+bones of no less than seven sea-lizards staring at him from the cliffs.
+Yet, only here and there by the wearing through of the rocks by flowing
+streams has nature opened up these vast mausoleums, the mountains and
+the cliffs. What enormous quantities of bones, then, must still be
+buried there, what tons and tons must have given their lime and
+phosphate to the soil. So you see this story of old bones, even from a
+farming standpoint, is no light matter.
+
+[Illustration: HOW THE WISE MEN ANSWER THE PUZZLES
+
+By their marvellous skill and their knowledge of the mechanics of
+monster anatomy the paleontologists fit one bone fragment to another,
+supply the missing parts in artificial material, and behold! the
+monsters take their places in the long procession of the ages. There has
+been nothing equal to it since the vision of the prophet in the Valley
+of Dry Bones. (Ezekiel 37:1-10.)]
+
+
+II. HOW THE MONSTERS DIED AND RETURNED TO DUST
+
+"But you said these monsters lived in the sea and in swamps. Then how,
+in the name of common sense, did their bones get up into the mountains?"
+
+
+WHEN THE INLAND SEA WENT DRY
+
+Well, it's like this: As I said a while back, in the days of the monster
+fish and the monster lizards, there was a great sea reaching clear from
+the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, and with swamps along the
+borders extending far into lands that afterward became the Rocky
+Mountains. When the land began to rise, due to the shrinking of the
+earth--a thing that has been going on ever since the earth was born--the
+sea and the swamps went dry, and far to the west the land wrinkled up
+into the Rocky Mountains. In these layers of rock that made the
+mountains were the bones of the monsters that had died when the rocks
+were still mud, in the swamps and along the borders of the inland sea.
+
+Not only did the land under the western portion of the sea slowly rise
+until the waters were completely closed in on the west, and the sea thus
+made that much narrower, but the rise of the land on the south cut off
+connection with the great salt ocean which surrounds the continents
+to-day. So the salt-water fish, for lack of salt water, died, and with
+them the monsters like the Ichthyosaurus that lived on the salt-water
+fish that lived in this salt sea.
+
+But it wasn't alone that the seas grew narrower and more shallow because
+of the elevation of the lands. The mountains rising in the west, cut off
+the rain-laden winds which blew from the Pacific in those days just as
+they do now. Thus the seas dried up so much the faster. But first,
+before the sea went entirely dry, its place was taken by the lakes and
+swamps into which it shrivelled up. Low, swampy land is just what
+reptiles like, so this was their Golden Age, just as the previous time
+of the wide, deep sea was the Golden Age of the big fish and the
+fish-lizards.
+
+Then, as the land still rose and the climate grew dryer, the reptiles
+passed away, and in came the mammal family, to which the cows and the
+horses and the cats and the kittens, and all the rest of us, belong.
+
+[Illustration: THE TIGER WITH THE SABRE TEETH
+
+Tigers like this lived ages ago in both the Old World and the New. They
+had canine teeth, curved like a sabre, in the upper jaw.]
+
+
+TOO MUCH BRAWN, TOO LITTLE BRAIN
+
+Of course, even where they didn't die with their boots on, so to speak,
+as so many of them did in those lawless days, there came a time for each
+monster, in the order of nature, when he drew his last breath. But what
+seems so strange is that all these monsters--the biggest and strongest
+of them--entirely disappeared and left no descendants![6] The whole of
+the mystery has not been unravelled yet, even by the wise men of
+science, but still they have learned a good deal. For one thing, they
+know that most of the reptiles and the fish-lizards disappeared because
+so much of the land where they lived went dry. They had to get a new
+boarding-place, and there wasn't any to get! Another thing was that
+these big fellows, although they _were_ so big, and got along finely
+while everything was just so, had so little brain they couldn't change
+their habits to meet new conditions, as our closer and cleverer cousins,
+the mammals, did. Why, do you know that one of these monsters, who was
+twenty-five feet long if he was an inch, and twelve feet high, had a
+brain no bigger than a man's fist? All the monsters of those days were
+like that--tons of bone and muscle, but a very small supply of brains.
+
+    [6] That is to say, no descendants worthy of them. It is now thought
+    some of the modern reptiles may be degenerate descendants of the big
+    reptiles of old.
+
+So when things went against them, they just had to give up, and, like a
+queer dream, they faded away. But their history makes one of the most
+interesting chapters in the whole wonderful story of the dust.
+
+Of all the live stock that have fed on the great world-farm and helped
+enrich it with their bones, these animals were surely the strangest that
+ever were seen!
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     "But since these monsters passed away many millions of years ago,
+     and all that is usually found is a piece of them here and there,
+     how do the men of science know so much about them--how they looked,
+     and how they ate, and how they treated one another?"
+
+     That's a good question. It _does_ seem strange. Why, to hear them
+     talk, you'd suppose these men, learned in ancient bones, had
+     actually _met_ the monsters! And, speaking of meeting them, I must
+     tell you a little story. It's a good story and it will answer your
+     question.
+
+     Baron Cuvier, one of the most famous of the paleontologists, awoke
+     from a deep sleep to see standing by his bed a strange, hairy
+     creature with horns and hoofs. And it said:
+
+    "Cuvier! Cuvier! I have come to eat you!" But the baron, taking in
+    the form of the monster at a glance, only laughed.
+
+    "Horns and hoofs? You can't. You're a grain-eater!"
+
+    See the point? The baron argued that because the monster had horns
+    and hoofs he must be a grain-eater; for all creatures with both
+    horns and hoofs are grain-eaters. This particular creature, to be
+    sure, was an eater of both meat and grain--being one of Cuvier's
+    students who was trying to play a trick on him. But the principle
+    holds good. The scientists, _knowing_ one thing, _infer_ another.
+    Because animals with both horns and hoofs eat no meat Cuvier knew
+    his visitor couldn't eat _him_, even if he'd been real and not just
+    made up.
+
+    For another instance, take our queer old friend that Professor
+    Blackie wrote the funny rhyme about--the Ichthyosaurus "with a saw
+    for a jaw and a big staring eye." The scientists figure, just from
+    looking into the hollow socket where the eye used to be, that he
+    could see at night like a cat--and right through muddy water, too;
+    that he spent most of his time in shallows near the shore; that it
+    didn't make any difference to him whether a fish was near or far,
+    provided it wasn't too far, of course, for he could see it and catch
+    it, just the same. They also said--these learned men, after peering
+    into the dark hollow where that remarkable eye used to be--that Mr.
+    Ichthyosaurus spent a great deal of time diving and a great deal of
+    time with his homely face just above the surface of the water.
+
+    Why they could reason all this from a hollow eye socket and some
+    bony, flexible plates around the outer edge of it, you will see by
+    referring to such books as "Animals of the Past," by F. A. Lucas,
+    director of the American Museum of Natural History; "Creatures of
+    Other Days" and "Extinct Monsters," by Hutchinson; "Extinct
+    Animals," by Lankester; "Mighty Animals," by Mix; the chapter "When
+    the World was Young," in Lang's "Red Book of Animal Stories," and
+    "Restoring Prehistoric Monsters" in "Uncle Sam, Wonder Worker," by
+    Du Puy.
+
+    Here are some more conclusions they draw from certain facts. See how
+    near you can come to reasoning them out for yourself before looking
+    them up in the books that tell.
+
+    Why it is supposed the Dinosaurs swam like Crocodiles. (Look at the
+    picture of Mr. I., and pay _particular_ attention to his tail.)
+
+    Why it is they say that the sea-lizards with long necks must have
+    had small heads.
+
+    Why it is argued that because the Mesosaurus had a hinge in his jaw
+    he must have had a big, loose, baggy throat.
+
+    "Keeping Up the Soil," in "The Country Life Reader," deals with the
+    subject of the use of fertilizers on the farm--how easy it is to
+    waste them, how easy it is to save them, and how important it is
+    that they should be saved; while the article on "Acid Soils" tells
+    how the lime in the bones of the monsters has helped keep the soil
+    from getting "sour stomach," and also how they unlocked the potash
+    and phosphorus in the soil so that the plants could get at them.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: FERTILE FIELDS THAT RODE ON THE WIND
+
+The winds that now help grow the corn and wheat on these broad fields by
+carrying the pollen from one plant to another, also brought the soil on
+which they grew. These are the loess plains of Nebraska. There are
+42,000 acres of them.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+(MARCH)
+
+              ... the busy winds
+    That kept no intervals of rest.
+
+    --_Wordsworth._
+
+    Except wind stands as never it stood
+    'Tis an ill wind turns none to good.
+
+    --_Tusser._
+
+THE WINDS AND THE WORLD'S WORK
+
+
+That saying "idle as the winds" must have started in the days when they
+didn't know; for if ever there was a busy people, it's the Winds.
+
+Not only do they help plant the trees of the forest, sow the fields with
+grass and flowers, and water them with rain, but they make and carry
+soil all over the world. And, like everything else in Nature, they have
+a sense of beauty and the picturesque. Rock, for example, weathered away
+into dust by the help of the winds, as it is, takes on all sorts of
+picturesque shapes. And, of course, the winds love music; everybody
+knows that. Before we get through with this chapter we're going to end a
+happy day outdoors with a grand musical festival in the forest, with
+light refreshments--spice-laden winds from the sea. There'll be nobody
+there but the trees and the winds and John Muir and us; all nice people.
+
+
+I. SUCH CLOUDS OF DUST!
+
+March leads the procession of the dusty months because the warming up of
+the land, as the sun advances from the south, brings the colder and
+heavier winds down from the north. These winds seem to have a wrestling
+match with the southern winds and with each other, and among them they
+kick up a tremendous dust, because there's so much of it lying around
+loose; for the snows have gone, and the rainy season hasn't begun, and
+the fields are bare.
+
+
+ABOUT THE DUST WE GET IN OUR EYES
+
+Most people think these March winds a great nuisance because some of us
+dust grains are apt to get into their eyes; but dust in the eye is only
+the right thing in the wrong place. Just think of the amount of dust
+going about in March that _doesn't_ get into your eye; and how nice and
+fine it is, and how mixed with all the magic stuff of different kinds of
+soil, thus brought together from everywhere.
+
+An English writer on farming says he thinks the fact that English farms
+have done their work so well for so many centuries is due, in no small
+degree, to the March winds that have brought us world-travelled dust
+grains from other parts of the globe.
+
+And the wind is a good friend to the good farmer, but no friend to the
+poor one; for it carries away dust all nicely ground from the fields of
+the farmer who doesn't protect his soil and carries it to farmers who
+have wood lots and good pastures and winter wheat, and leaves it there;
+for woods and pastures and sown fields hold the soil they have, as well
+as the fresh, new soil the winds bring to them.
+
+Most of the fine prairie soils in our Western States owe not a little of
+their richness to wind-borne dust. In western Missouri, southwestern
+Iowa, and southeastern Nebraska are deep deposits of yellowish-brown
+soil, the gift of the winds. And, my, what apples it raises! It is in
+this soil that many of the best apple orchards of these States are
+located. And now, of course, the apple-growers see to it that this soil
+stays at home.
+
+But there's another kind of dust that deserves special mention, and
+that's the kind of dust that comes from volcanoes. Volcanoes make a very
+valuable kind of soil material, often called "volcanic ash." It isn't
+ashes, really. It's the very fine dust made by the explosion of the
+steam in the rocks thrown out by the volcano. The pores of the rocks,
+deep-buried in the earth, are filled with water, and when these rocks
+get into a volcanic explosion, this water turns to steam, and the steam
+not only blows out through the crater of the volcano, but the rocks
+themselves are blown to dust. This dust the winds catch and distribute
+far and wide. Sometimes the dust of a volcanic explosion is carried
+around the world. In the eruption of Krakatoa, in 1883, its dust was
+carried around the earth, not once but many times. The progress of this
+dust was recorded by the brilliant sunsets it caused. It is probable
+that every place on the earth has dust brought by the wind from every
+other place. So you see if you happen to be a grain of dust yourself,
+and keep your eyes and ears open, you can learn a lot, as I did, just
+from the other little dust people you meet.
+
+
+THE WINDS AND VOLCANOES
+
+But that isn't all of this business--this partnership--between the
+volcanoes and the winds. Did anybody ever tell you how the volcanoes
+help the winds to help the plants to get their breath? It's curious. And
+more than that, it's so important--this part of the work--that if it
+weren't carried on in just the way it is, we'd all of us--all the living
+world, plants and animals--soon mingle our dust with that of the early
+settlers we read about in the last chapter. In other words, all the
+_plant_ world would die for lack of fresh air and all the _animal_ world
+would die for lack of fresh vegetables. So they say!
+
+According to that fine system--the breath exchange between the people of
+the plant and animal kingdoms--the plants breathe in the carbon gas that
+the animals breathe out; you remember about that. But the amount of
+carbon gas in the air is never very large, and if there were no other
+supply to draw on except the breath of animals and the release of this
+same gas when the plants themselves decay, we'd very soon run out.
+
+Now this needed additional supply comes from the volcanoes. Every time a
+volcano goes off--and they're always going off somewhere along the
+world's great firing-line--it throws out great quantities of this gas,
+and this also the winds distribute widely and mix through the
+atmosphere.
+
+And another thing: This carbon in the air helps crumble up the rocks
+already made, and it enters into the manufacture of the limestone in the
+rock mills of the sea. This limestone will make just as rich soil for
+the farmers of the future as the limestones of other ages have made for
+the famous Blue-Grass region of Kentucky, for example.
+
+All of which only goes to show how first unpleasant impressions about
+people and things are often wrong. A "dusty March day," you see, isn't
+just a dusty March day. It's quite an affair!
+
+
+II. THE DUST MILLS OF THE WIND
+
+But wind is not alone a carrier for other dust-makers; it has dust mills
+of its own. The greatest of these mills are away off among the mountains
+and in desert lands, but after making it in these distant factories the
+winds carry much of this fresh new soil material to lands of orchard and
+pasture and growing grain.
+
+Not long ago two of the professors at the University of Wisconsin found
+a good illustration of what an immense amount of soil is distributed in
+this way, and what long distances it travels. Among the weather freaks
+of a March day was a fall of colored snow that, it was found, covered
+an area of 100,000 square miles, probably more. The color on the snow
+was made by dust blown clear from the dry plains of the Southwestern
+States, a thousand miles away. The whole of this dust amounted to at
+least a million tons; and may even have amounted to hundreds of millions
+of tons, so the professors think.
+
+[Illustration: TYPES OF NATURE'S SCREW PROPELLERS
+
+You can see for yourself (from the picture on the left) that long before
+man ever thought of driving his ships through the water with screw
+propellers or pulling his flying machines through the air by the
+whirligigs on the end of their noses, some flying seeds, such as those
+of the ash here, had screw propellers of their own. And do you know that
+Nature also employs the propeller principle, not only in the operation
+of the wings of birds but in the wing feathers themselves? The two
+pictures on the right show the action of the wing and the wing feathers
+when a bird is in flight.]
+
+
+LITTLE MILLSTONES IN BIG BUSINESS
+
+For grinding rocks to get out ore, or for making cement in cement mills,
+men use big machines, somewhat on the style of a coffee-mill. These
+machines are called "crushers." The winds, in their enormous business of
+soil-grinding, however, stick to the idea you see so much in Nature,
+that of using _little_ things to do _big_ tasks; as in digging canyons
+and river beds, and spreading out vast alluvial plains by using
+raindrops made up into rivers; in working the wonders of the Ice Ages
+with snowflakes; and building the bones and bodies of those big early
+settlers, and of all animal life, and the giant trees of the forest out
+of little cells. For, what do you suppose the winds take for millstones
+in grinding down the mountains into dust? Little grains of sand!
+
+And with the help of the sun and Jack Frost it makes these fairy
+millstones for itself. The outside of a big rock grows bigger under the
+warm sun, in the daytime, and then when the sun goes down and the rock
+cools off it shrinks, and this spreading and shrinking movement keeps
+cracking up and chipping off pieces of rock of various sizes. Up on the
+mountain tops, among the peaks, the change of temperature between night
+and day is very great, and even in midsummer you can always hear a
+rattling of stones at sunrise. The heat of the rising sun warms and
+expands the rock, and so loosens the pieces that Jack Frost has pried
+off with his ice wedges during the night.
+
+Then also during periods of alternate freezing and thawing in Spring and
+Fall, the rock is slivered up. These changes in the weather as between
+one day and another are due to the winds. In January and February, for
+example, thaws and freezes are common. When the winds blow from the
+south, the snow melts, water runs into cracks in the rock and fills
+their pores; then a shift of the winds to the north, a freeze, and the
+water in the crevices and the pores turns to ice, expands, and breaks
+off more rock.
+
+And what muscles Jack has! Freezing water exerts a pressure of 138 tons
+to the square foot; so there's no holding out against him once he gets
+his ice wedges in a good crack. He sends huge blocks tumbling down the
+mountainside. The larger blocks, striking against one another, break off
+smaller fragments. The smallest fragments the wind seizes. Others are
+washed down by the rains. The largest, carried away by mountain
+torrents, bump together as they thunder along, and so break off more
+fragments and grind them so small that the wind can pick them up along
+the banks when the torrents shrink, or in their beds when these sudden
+streams go dry.
+
+
+RUNNING WATER AND THE WINDS
+
+In changing rock into soil, running water and the winds each have an
+advantage over the other. Water weighs a great deal more than air--over
+800 times as much--and so grinds faster with its tools of pebbles and
+sand. The winds, on the other hand, get over a great deal more
+territory, and they, like the lichens, understand chemistry. Two of the
+gases they always carry right with them--carbon dioxide and oxygen--help
+decay the rocks.
+
+As I said, the winds do most work in dry and desert regions, but when
+you remember that over a fifth of the globe is just that--dry as a bone
+most of the time--you see this is a great field. It has been so from the
+beginning, for it is thought probable that there was always about the
+same proportion of desert lands. Night and day the winds have been busy
+through all these ages. Dust is carried up by ascending air currents.
+Then the same force that keeps the earth in its orbit--gravity--pulls
+down on a grain of dust. But its fall is checked by the friction of the
+air. You see there's a lot of mechanics involved in moving a grain of
+dust; and Nature goes about it as if it were the most serious business
+in the world; handles every grain as if the future of the universe
+depended on it. In the case of sand or coarse dust, unless the winds are
+very strong, gravity soon gets the best of it, and down the dust grain
+comes to the ground again; then up with another current, then down
+again--carried far by stiff breezes, only a short distance by puffs--a
+kind of hop, skip, and jump. But fine dust getting a good lift into the
+upper currents at the start may stay in the air for weeks.
+
+[Illustration: _Courtesy of The Dunham Company._
+
+TO KEEP MOISTURE AND SOIL AT HOME
+
+In the broad fields of the West, where "dry-farming" is practised, they
+have these huge machines. They are called "Cultipackers." They are
+cultivators with big, broad-brimmed wheels that pack the surface of the
+soil after the blades of the cultivator have stirred it. This not only
+prevents the moisture in the soil from evaporating as fast as it would
+otherwise do, but keeps the winds from carrying away the soil itself.]
+
+In very wild wind-storms it has been figured out that there may be as
+much as 126,000 tons of dust per cubic mile; several good farms in the
+air at once, over every square mile of the earth below!
+
+
+III. THE STORM PLOUGHS OF THE WIND
+
+
+TWO KINDS OF WOODEN PLOUGHS
+
+They use wooden ploughs, these winds, just as primitive man did, and as
+primitive peoples do now; but not quite in the same way, and the
+ploughing they do is much better. For man's wooden plough is a crooked
+stick made from the branches of a tree while the winds use the whole
+tree--roots and all, and both on mountainsides and on level lands the
+amount of ploughing they do is immense.
+
+Almost all forests are liable to occasional hurricanes which lay the
+trees over thousands of acres in one immense swath. A large number of
+these trees, owing to their strong trunks, do not break off but uproot,
+lifting great sheets of earth. Soon, by the action of its own weight and
+the elements, this soil falls back. The depth to which this natural
+ploughing is done depends, of course, on the character of the tree, but
+as it is the older and larger trees that are most likely to be
+overturned, since they spread more surface to the wind, the ploughing is
+much deeper than men do with ordinary ploughs.
+
+The result is that new unused soil is constantly being brought to the
+surface; and not only this, but air is introduced into the soil far
+below the point reached by ordinary ploughing. The soil needs air just
+as we do; for the air hurries the decay of the soil and its preparation
+for the uses of the plant. The immediate purpose of ploughing is to
+loosen the soil so that the roots of the plants can get their food and
+air more easily. It also helps to keep the fields fertile by exposing
+the lower soil to more rapid decay.
+
+But here's the trouble: While the ordinary plough introduces air into
+the soil for a few inches from the surface, the subsoil, which is very
+important to the prosperity of the plant, is practically left out of it,
+so far as getting needed fresh air is concerned. The long roots of the
+trees that, among other things opened for it channels to the air, are
+gone. The burrowing animals that used to loosen up the earth, man has
+driven away. More than that, the foot of the plough which has to press
+heavily on the subsoil in order to turn the furrow, smears and compacts
+the earth into a hard layer, which shuts out the air, and also--to a
+certain extent--the water from the lower levels.
+
+[Illustration: HOW THE SOIL GETS ITS BREATH
+
+Plants must have air to breathe, both above and below the soil, and the
+microscope is showing us here how a sandy loam allows the air to reach
+the roots.]
+
+In mountain regions these "storm ploughs," as we may call them, not only
+help to renew and prepare the soil in the valleys, but are a part of the
+machinery of delivery of new soil from mountain to valley. When trees on
+the mountainside are overturned, they not only bring up the soil, which
+the mountain rains quickly carry to the valleys, but the roots having
+penetrated--as they always do--into the crevices of the rocks, bring up
+stones already partly decayed by the acids of the roots. These stones,
+as the roots die, decay and so release their hold, and also go tumbling
+down toward the valley.
+
+Consider how much of this storm-ploughing must be done in the forests of
+the world in a single year, and that this has been going on ever since
+trees grew big on the face of the earth. In a storm in the woods of
+California, Muir heard trees falling at the rate of one every two or
+three minutes. And, as I said, it is precisely the trees that can do the
+most ploughing--the older and larger trees--that are most apt to go down
+before the wind. Younger trees will bend while older and stiffer trees
+hold on to the last. Before a mountain gale, pines, six feet in
+diameter, will bend like grass. But when the roots, long and strong as
+they are, can no longer resist the prying of the mighty lever--the trunk
+with its limbs and branches--swaying in the winds, down go the old
+giants with crashes that shake the hills. After a violent gale the
+ground is covered thick with fallen trunks[7] that lie crossed like
+storm-lodged wheat.
+
+    [7] Muir: "Mountains of California."
+
+There are two trees, however, Muir says, that are never blown down so
+long as they continue in good health. These are the juniper and dwarf
+pine of the summit peaks.
+
+     "Their stout, crooked roots grip the storm-beaten ledges like
+     eagle's claws, while their lithe, cord-like branches bend round
+     completely, offering but slight holds for winds, however violent."
+
+
+AT THE STORM FESTIVAL WITH MR. MUIR
+
+Trees were among Muir's best friends, and he spent a large part of his
+life chumming with them. What do you think that man did once? He was
+always doing such things. He climbed a tree in a terrific gale so that
+he could see right into the heart of the storm and watch everything that
+was going on. Just hear him tell about it:
+
+     "After cautiously casting about I made choice of the tallest of a
+     group of Douglas spruces that were growing close together like a
+     tuft of grass, no one of which seemed likely to fall unless the
+     rest fell with it. Being accustomed to climb trees in making
+     botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top
+     of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration
+     of motion."
+
+And such odors! These winds had come all the way from the sea, over beds
+of flowers in the mountain meadows of the Sierras; then across the
+plains and up the foot-hills and into the piny woods "with all the
+varied incense gathered by the way."
+
+[Illustration: THREE KINDS OF SEED THAT THE WIND SHAKES FREE
+
+Here are three kinds of seed adapted for dispersal by the shaking action
+of the wind.]
+
+Though comparatively young, these trees--the one Mr. Muir climbed into
+and its neighbors--were about 100 feet high, and "their lithe, brushy
+tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy." In its greatest sweeps
+the top of Muir's tree described an arc of from twenty to thirty
+degrees, but he felt sure it wouldn't break, and so he proceeded to take
+in the great storm show.
+
+     "Now my eye roved over the piny hills and dales as over fields of
+     waving grain, and felt the light running in ripples across the
+     valleys from ridge to ridge, as the shining foliage was stirred by
+     the waves of air. Oftentimes these waves of reflected light would
+     break up suddenly into a kind of beaten foam and finally disappear
+     on some hillside, like sea waves on a shelving shore."
+
+This was his impression of the forest as a whole, a dark green sea of
+tossing waves. But if we study trees as long and lovingly as Muir did,
+we can pick out the different members of the family a mile away--even
+several miles away--by their gestures, their style of grave and graceful
+dancing in the wind.
+
+[Illustration: TYPES OF FLYING MACHINE
+
+Here is the type of flying machine that carries men. On the opposite
+page is the kind that carries the dandelion seeds.]
+
+[Illustration: THE DANDELION-SEED FLYING MACHINE
+
+The dandelion on the left shows how the seeds are kept in the "hangar"
+at night and on rainy days, shut up tight to prevent them from getting
+wet with rain or dew and so made unfit for flying.]
+
+Muir especially mentions the sugar-pines as interpreting that storm to
+him. They seemed to be roused by the wildest bursts of the wind music to
+a "passionate exhilaration," as if saying "_Oh_, what a glorious day
+this is!"
+
+This was the picture part of it--the glorious moving-picture show. Now
+listen to some of the music:
+
+     "The sounds of the storm corresponded gloriously with the wild
+     exuberance of light and motion. The profound bass of the naked
+     branches and boles booming like waterfalls, the quick, tense
+     vibrations of the pine-needles, now rising to a shrill, whistling
+     hiss, now falling to a silky murmur. The rustling of laurel groves
+     in the dells, and the keen metallic click of leaf on leaf--all this
+     was heard in easy analysis when the attention was calmly bent.
+
+     "Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch I
+     could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual
+     trees--spruce, fir, pine, and oak--and even the infinitely gentle
+     rustle of the withered grasses at my feet."
+
+When the winds began to fall and the sky to clear, Muir climbed down and
+made his way back home.
+
+     "The storm tones died away, and turning toward the east I beheld
+     the countless hosts of the forests hushed and tranquil, towering
+     above one another on the slopes of the hills like a devout
+     audience. The setting sun filled them with amber light, and seemed
+     to say while they listened:
+
+     "'My peace I give unto you.'"
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     Did you know that the ash and maple seeds actually have screw
+     propellers, like a ship, so that they can ride on the wind?
+     Pettigrew's great work, "Design in Nature," makes this very plain,
+     both in word and picture.
+
+     In what way does the wind help to _produce_ the seed of grasses as
+     well as carry and plant them? (Any encyclopaedia or botany will tell
+     you how plants are fertilized.)
+
+     How could a tempest that blew down a tree help its seeds to get a
+     start? Wallace, in his "World of Life," says that on a full-grown
+     oak or beech there may be 100,000 seeds that are thus given a
+     better chance of life.
+
+     Speaking of "wind ploughs," what is the object of ploughing anyway?
+     The article on preparing the seed bed in "The Country Life Reader"
+     tells about what ploughing means to the soil and also:
+
+     Why good soil takes up more room than poor.
+
+     Why it is a good thing to plough deep, but a bad thing, if you
+     don't do it just right.
+
+     And farther on there is a most inspiring poem about the history of
+     the plough from the days of early Egypt to the present. It begins
+     like this:
+
+     "From Egypt behind my oxen,
+         With their stately step and slow,
+     Northward and east and west I went,
+         To the desert and the snow;
+     Down through the centuries, one by one,
+         Turning the clod to the shower,
+     Till there's never a land beneath the sun
+         But has blossomed behind my power."
+
+     The deserts have helped to make western China fertile. How did they
+     do it? (Look at your geography map and remember that the prevailing
+     winds of the world are westerly.)
+
+     You'll find many interesting things about the winds and the soil in
+     Keffer's "Nature Studies on the Farm" and Shaler's "Outlines of
+     Earth's History." Shaler's "Man and the Earth" says a single gale
+     may blow away more soil from an unprotected field than could be
+     made in a geological age, and an hour's rain may carry off more
+     than would pass away in a thousand years if the land were in its
+     natural state. He also tells what to do to prevent the best part of
+     ploughed fields from being carried off by the wind.
+
+     Have you any idea how far seed may be carried by a hurricane?
+     Wallace, in his "Darwinism" deals with this question, and it's very
+     important in the story of the earth. Beal's admirably written and
+     illustrated little book on "Seed Dispersal" tells a world of
+     interesting things about the wind as a sower. For instance:
+
+     How pigweed seeds are built so that wind can help them toboggan on
+     snow or float on water;
+
+     How wind and water work together in the distribution of seeds;
+
+     About seeds that ride in an ice-boat;
+
+     About the monoplane of the basswood;
+
+     About the "flail" of the buttonwood, and how the wind helps it to
+     whip out the seeds; and how the seeds then open their parachutes.
+
+     Dandelions go through quite a remarkable process in preparing for
+     flight. I wonder if you have ever noticed it. Before the seeds get
+     ripe Mother Dandelion blankets them at night and puts a rain-cloak
+     on them on rainy days, and just won't let them get out, as shown on
+     page 51. And do you know how she opens the flowers for the bees on
+     sunshiny days?
+
+     There is no island, no matter how remote, that isn't supplied with
+     insects. How do you suppose they get there? You may be sure the
+     wind has something to do with it or I wouldn't mention the subject
+     at the end of this chapter. (Wallace: "Darwinism.")
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE WEST WINDS AND THE RAINS
+
+On the western slopes of this mountain the trees, with the help of the
+winds and the rain, climb to the very summit, while the other side of
+the mountain remains only a barren rock. The moisture-laden winds from
+the west glide up the slope, the air expands as it rises, the expansion
+cools it and down comes the rain! But the eastern slope gets little or
+none of it.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+(APRIL)
+
+          The higher Nilus swells
+    The more it promises; as it ebbs, the seedsman
+    Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,
+    And shortly comes the harvest.
+
+    --_Shakespere: "Antony and Cleopatra."_
+
+THE BOTTOM-LANDS
+
+
+All that wind was bound to blow up rain. I said so at the time. And,
+sure enough, here it is; right where we want it, at the beginning of
+April, a month famous for its rains.
+
+The work of the rains is going to make one of the most interesting
+chapters in the long story of the dust. At least I hope so. But don't
+think I intend to tell it all. Why, it would make a whole book in
+itself. But you can believe every single thing I do tell, no matter how
+it makes you open your eyes; for, if I've helped it rain once I've
+helped it rain a million times!
+
+
+I. THE MARCH DUST AND THE APRIL RAINS
+
+
+HOW RAIN GOES UP BEFORE IT COMES DOWN
+
+It's this way: You remember how you can "see your breath," as we say, on
+a cold morning? Well, that's because the moisture in your breath is
+condensed by the cold. Now as the waters of the earth--the seas, lakes,
+rivers, ponds, and so on--are warmed by the sun, the air above them is
+filled with moisture, for the heating of the air causes it to expand and
+draw in moisture from the water like a sponge. Expansion makes it
+lighter also, and it rises. Rising, it turns cooler, and the moisture
+condenses and comes down as rain. Mountains usually have clouds around
+them because moist air striking the mountainside is driven up the slope,
+cooling as it rises. So rain and snow fall often in mountain regions,
+and that's why so many rivers rise in mountains. The moist air is also
+condensed when it meets other and cooler air currents. But right here is
+where the work of the dust comes in. For to make rain you've got to have
+clouds, and clouds are due to this moisture collecting around the little
+particles of dust of which the air is full. When these little motes of
+matter become cooler than the air that touches them the moisture in the
+air condenses into a film of water around them. Fairy worlds with fairy
+oceans floating in the sky!
+
+Each of these baby worlds is falling toward the big world below. But
+very slowly; only a few feet a day, so that even if nothing happened it
+might be months--yes, years--before it would come to the ground, even in
+still air. But when air is very thick with moisture the water films on
+these dust particles grow rapidly, and thus increasing in weight, they
+fall faster and faster, and finally strike the earth as raindrops.
+
+But here's another thing that helps. On the way down two or more
+raindrops, falling in with each other, will go into partnership--melt
+into one--and then they hurry down so much the faster. That's why the
+sky grows darker and darker just before a rain, and why the lower part
+of a rain-cloud is the darkest: the little raindrops are forming into
+bigger raindrops as they fall.
+
+
+THE LITTLE ARTISTS THAT SHAPE THE CLOUDS
+
+But the shapes of clouds are supposed to be due to another thing, the
+mysterious force we call electricity, and that other mysterious force we
+call gravity. Just as the worlds attract each other by gravity so these
+raindrops--or dust grains growing into raindrops--are drawn toward one
+another. Here's where Electricity steps in. These rain particles are
+full of electricity and when two of these electrified particles meet in
+the air--unless they strike one another in falling, in which case, as I
+said a moment ago, they blend into one--they get very close together and
+yet keep dancing around one another without touching! It is this dancing
+about that makes all those strange and beautiful and ever-changing
+forms in the vast picture-gallery of the sky.
+
+Of course the wind currents help to change these shapes, but I'm talking
+about the original designs.
+
+
+II. THE RAINDROPS AND THE RIVER MILLS
+
+So much for the dust that helps make raindrops; now for the raindrops
+that help make dust. This the raindrops do in several ways. Falling on
+big rocks or decaying pebbles, for example, they pound loose with their
+patter, patter, patter, any little bits of soil and grains of sand that
+have been made by the other soil makers--the sun, the wind, the lichens,
+the chemists of the air, and so on. This soil and these sand particles,
+if there is already any depth of earth there, they carry down into the
+ground. Some of this soil, with various stops and mixings with other
+soils on the way, finally reaches the sea, where it helps to make the
+rich limestone soils for the Kentuckies of millenniums yet to be, by
+supplying food for sea creatures and lime for their shells. For these
+shells become limestone when the shell-fish are through with them.
+Mother Nature, in addition to feeding her big, hungry families of to-day
+in the plant and animal world, is always laying by something for the
+future. But before it gets back to the sea, by far the greatest part of
+the ground-up soil the rivers carry is spread out in the lowlands in
+those "alluvial plains" your geography tells about and that make a large
+proportion of the fertile farms of the world. If the raindrops fall on
+comparatively barren rock--in the mountains, say--they carry some of
+this fresh soil to the mountain valleys below, and some of it they may
+spread in bottom-lands a thousand miles away, where the new soil helps
+feed the plants. The sand grains in it not only help the soil to get its
+breath by making little air spaces, but these sand grains themselves
+slowly decay and so make more soil.
+
+[Illustration: WHAT IRRIGATION DOES FOR DESERTS
+
+It is such land as this, in the arid regions of the West, that
+irrigation converts from a desert to a garden of abundance. The soil is
+rich in all the substances that plant life needs.]
+
+But it isn't alone that they carry away the soil already made and bury
+the sand grains. Some of the raindrops soak into cracks in stones and
+dissolve the material that binds the rock particles together, and so get
+them ready to give way under the fairy hammers of the next shower that
+comes along.
+
+After Nature finally gets an original waste of barren rock all nicely
+set with grass and flowers and trees and things, the raindrops help to
+make soil in still another way. Soaking through the decaying leaves,
+they pick up acids which are just the thing for eating into rock and
+crumbling it into soil. To be sure, the water soaking into the soil and
+coming out of springs carries some plant food away with it; but it takes
+it to lands farther down the river valleys, and more than makes up for
+what it carries away by the new soil made by its acids from the rocks,
+as it soaks into their pores and runs among the cracks.
+
+
+HOW RAINDROPS MANAGE TO GRIND UP THE ROCKS
+
+Moreover, raindrops actually grind up rocks. In order to do this a lot
+of raindrops have to get together, to be sure, and become rivers; but
+after all it's the raindrops that do it. There'd never be any rivers if
+it weren't for the rains and, of course, the snows.
+
+Well, anyhow, the rivers, besides running other people's mills, have
+mills of their own; and millstones. Most of these stones originally came
+from mountains and were brought into the milling business by mountain
+streams, with the help of Jack Frost. For the frost not only pries
+stones from the mountains and so sends them tumbling down the slopes,
+but it keeps edging them along and edging them along, farther down,
+after they have fallen. You'd hardly think that, would you? Yet it's
+simple enough. The water in the pores of the rock expands when it
+freezes and that makes the whole rock expand, for the time being. Then
+when the frozen water in the rock pores thaws out, the rock contracts,
+and this spreading out and pulling together, small as it is, causes the
+rock to keep hitching along down the incline; oh, say a fraction of an
+inch a year. But still, in the course of the ages, these inches foot up,
+and after a while this tortoise-like gait lands the stone--lands tens of
+thousands of such stones--in the beds of the mountain torrents that run
+along at the bottom of these inclines. There they get ground together
+and so grind out more soil material, particularly when the floods are
+on, with the melting of the snows in spring and the falling of the heavy
+and frequent rains.
+
+[Illustration: AN OLD RIVER MILL
+
+It used to do a lot of business--this old river mill. Its grist was
+ground-up rock that helped make fine farming land in the bottoms along
+the river's course. Such mills, called "pot holes," are found in the
+rocky floors of rapid streams, where the eddying current or the water of
+a waterfall wears depressions in the bed. Into these depressions stones
+are washed, and then by the whirl of the flowing water kept going round
+and round, grinding themselves away and grinding out the sides and
+bottom of the mill.]
+
+Another curious thing is how the river mills help themselves to new
+millstones when they need them. If a river hasn't enough for its work,
+it has a way of drawing on its banks for more. Whenever the stones in
+its bed get scarce, so that it can make comparatively little new
+soil--having so few stones to grind together--it proceeds to dig its own
+bed deeper, since this bed is no longer protected by a rock pavement in
+the bottom. This, of course, deepens its channel, and so adds to the
+steepness of the slope of its banks. Then, owing to this increase in the
+incline of the slope, more rocks tumble in, and the "milling business"
+picks up again.
+
+
+THE GOVERNOR IN THE RIVER MILL
+
+But there may be too much of a good thing; the rocks may come in faster
+than the river mill can take care of them. Then the river bottom becomes
+so completely paved over that the channel stops wearing down at all, to
+speak of, and the river remains at the same level until the rains and
+the wind and other workers have worn the banks down and lessened the
+incline. Then, with fewer and fewer fresh stones tumbling in, the river
+gets a chance to catch up with its work.
+
+It is this ground-up rock stuff of the mountain river mills, made by the
+grinding of the running streams all the way down, that has helped form
+the rich bottom-lands of the Mississippi Valley. For uncounted ages, the
+water of the Mississippi and its tributaries have been at work, and by
+the time you get down into southern Louisiana you come to the delta
+where this rich soil has been piled up for more than 1,000 feet above
+the bottom of the old Mediterranean Sea, that used to reach north and
+south across the country.
+
+You remember the lines, don't you:
+
+    "Little drops of water, little grains of sand
+    Make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land."
+
+Well, this is how they do it; all this that I've been telling you.
+
+[Illustration: _Courtesy of the Scientific American._
+
+THOUSANDS OF FARMS POURED INTO THE GULF
+
+The Father of Waters is a good farmer in some respects but needs
+training in others. The Mississippi's floods, like those of Father Nile,
+enrich the bottom lands, but the river is apt to break all bounds and do
+a lot of damage. Moreover, every year it carries away thousands of acres
+of good soil and pours it into the Gulf. How to teach the Mississippi to
+work in harness, as the Nile has been taught to do in recent years, is
+one of the problems which will require all of Uncle Sam's ingenuity and
+skill to solve. A good deal of the yearly waste could be prevented,
+however, by the various means employed by good farmers.]
+
+
+III. HOW THE RIVERS ACT AS BANKERS FOR THE FARMERS AND THE SEA
+
+We speak of river banks and the kind of banks that handle those
+promissory notes our arithmetics tell about as if they were entirely
+different; and so they are, I suppose, if one just looks at the surface
+of the thing. But if we dig into the subject a little we shall see that
+they are much alike in the fact that one of the principal businesses of
+both kinds of banks is to make loans at interest. Men's banks loan
+money, to be sure, while the river banks loan pebbles, but if it were
+not for these pebble loans there would be a mighty sight less money for
+the banks to loan, or the farmer to borrow; and the way both banks do
+business ought to be a good lesson to certain farmers I know, who seem
+to think they can always be cashing checks on their banks--the farm
+lands--by hauling away the crops without ever putting anything back.
+
+[Illustration: WHERE THE RIVERS ACT AS BANKERS
+
+Here is a fine piece of bottom land, one of those "banks" where the
+rivers keep "checking accounts" for the farmers and the sea; using
+pebbles for currency, as explained in this chapter.]
+
+
+HOW THE RIVERS PLACE PEBBLES ON DEPOSIT
+
+The rivers make loans to the soil by depositing pebbles in the broad
+bottom-lands along their banks, and then draw interest by carrying along
+to other lands, from time to time, some of the fine rich soil these
+pebbles help make by their decay. And the river does this in regular
+banking style, "checking out" the pebbles from time to time, and then
+depositing other pebbles in their places. Take the banks and
+bottom-lands of the Mississippi River, for example. It has been
+estimated that it requires about 40,000 years for a pebble to make the
+journey to the Gulf from the mountains of a tributary stream where it
+was first broken from the rock as a sharp fragment.
+
+The first part of the journey in the mountains is over steep down
+grades, and so is comparatively fast, but as the river gets farther from
+the mountains, the slope of its bed becomes less and less, the onward
+movement is slower and slower, and more of the pebbles stop to rest. In
+times of flood they are carried far away from the regular channel and
+spread over the wide flood-plain of the river. Then, as the flood goes
+down, they are left buried there under a coating of mud. So buried, they
+decay and enrich the soil. Then the next flood that comes along sweeps
+the pebbles with it--checks them out of the bank--but at the same time
+carries away not only some of the soil richness which these pebbles
+helped to make but the soil material made by the decay of the vegetation
+these pebbles thus helped to grow, such as the roots and blades of wheat
+and corn and stubble and chaff left in the fields. That's the interest
+on the loan. Then, when the flood subsides, the pebbles are again
+deposited farther along in the river's course, but meanwhile the same
+flood has brought fresh deposits of pebbles from up-stream, and these
+are left in place of those taken away.
+
+
+RIVER BANKING AND HUMAN CIVILIZATION
+
+This banking business has been going on for ages and is a very important
+part of the history of civilization. Here and there along the sides of
+the older and larger river valleys are found the remains of ancient
+plains. These plains are now, many of them, quite a distance above the
+level of the stream. This means that they were at one time the
+bottom-lands of that same stream, but the stream, as it dug deeper and
+deeper into its bed, grew narrower, and so abandoned its old
+flood-plains. As savage man gradually settled down and took to farming,
+he found these bottom-lands, with their rich, mellow soil, just the
+thing for his crooked-sticks and stone hoes--the only kinds of ploughs
+and hoes there were in those days. With such crude farming tools he
+couldn't have managed to scratch a living on any other kind of soil.
+When the river floods came along, all these crooked-stick farmers had to
+do was to keep out of the way until the floods went down, and there were
+their fields all fertilized for them, as good as new, and they could go
+on for thousands of years working the same fields without ever bothering
+their heads as to whether they needed any lime or potash or nitrogen, or
+anything; for they didn't. The river floods attended to all that.
+
+[Illustration: FATHER NILE AND THE MAKING OF EGYPT
+
+"Egypt," said Herodotus, "is the gift of the Nile"; and it is true so
+far as her fertile lands are concerned. The ancients attributed the
+annual floods to the god of the Nile, as shown in that statue of Father
+Nile in the Vatican. Below is a threshing scene in Egypt painted by
+Gerome. The last picture, from a carving in the tomb of an Egyptian
+noble, shows how they ploughed and sowed in the Pyramid age.]
+
+So, in course of time, civilizations such as those of Egypt and India
+and Persia grew up, and in further course of time these civilizations
+spread into Europe, and finally to the New World.
+
+
+HOW RIVER BANKS GO BANKRUPT
+
+Now all this is very well, this leaving it to Nature to fertilize the
+fields, where everything is just right for it, as it is along the Nile,
+but in most lands it won't do it all. The trouble is that, in raising
+the grain foods, the ground must be kept free of grass and weeds, and
+well ploughed during the rainy season. But the same rains that water the
+fields wash more or less good soil into the streams; much more than
+Nature alone can put back. For instance, down in Italy where, if the old
+forests were still there, the rains wouldn't wash away more than a foot
+of soil in 5,000 years, this soil is being carried into the Po, and by
+the Po emptied into the sea so fast--a foot in less than 1,000
+years--that if you visit Italy to-day, say, and then go back in ten
+years, you'll see bare rocks on many a hillside that is now clothed in
+green. On such rocks the soil is already thin, and in ten years more it
+is all gone; all washed away! This thing is going on all around the
+shores of the Mediterranean. You are constantly coming on sections of
+country that used to be covered with great forests and prosperous
+farming communities where the soil has vanished, and many stretches of
+barren, rocky land where hardly a weed can find a foothold.
+
+[Illustration: WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LAND WHEN THE TREES ARE GONE
+
+Could anything be more desolate? You can see from this example how vital
+to our national life is the forest conservation work of our government.
+Trees, by the network of their roots, keep the soil from washing away,
+retain moisture by their shade, and absorb the water of the rains and
+the melting snows so that it reaches the rivers and the creeks
+gradually. But when the trees are gone the water, unchecked, rushes down
+the slopes in floods, washing away the precious soil and leaving them as
+barren as a desert.]
+
+"But, what are you going to do about it?" you say. "You can't change the
+slope of the hills, can you? And the farmer has _got_ to plough his
+land--you just said so yourself."
+
+Yes, he's got to plough his land, to be sure; but so has he got to have
+pasture for his live stock. If he hasn't any live stock, that just shows
+what kind of a farmer he is. Every farmer ought to have live stock. Corn
+always brings a great deal more when it goes to market "on four feet,"
+as the saying is; and, besides, the live stock give back to the fields,
+in the shape of manure, a large part of what they eat. Now, if you have
+live stock you must have pasture, and all land with a slope of more than
+one foot in thirty should be used partly for pasture and partly to grow
+wood for the kitchen stove, and hickory-nuts and walnuts for winter
+firesides. Although the land slopes, the mat made by the grass roots
+will keep it from washing away.
+
+"But suppose you lived where there wasn't any land to speak of that
+didn't tip up; in New England, say--what would you do then?"
+
+Leave the upper part of the slopes in the woods. Then the water that
+carries off the soil will not run entirely away, as it does in ploughed
+fields, but will creep down slowly, and, charged with the decay of the
+woods, help fertilize the lower lands and change the rocks beneath them
+into soil--the acids from the decaying vegetable matter eating into
+them.
+
+"But still," you say, "there are farm lands that must be ploughed even
+if they do wash away; they're all the land a man has, sometimes. What
+then?"
+
+Plough deep. Then the soil soaks up more of the rain and lets the water
+pass away in clear springs. This not only saves soil but, as we have
+just said, helps to decompose the subsoil and the bed rock.
+
+Then there's another thing that good farmers do in such cases. They
+plough ditches along the hillside leading by a gentle slope to the
+natural watercourses; so the water of the rains, instead of going down
+the hills with a rush, and going faster the farther it runs--like a boy
+on a toboggan--is caught and checked in these sloping ditches, and much
+of the soil it contains deposited before it reaches the streams.
+
+[Illustration: HOW THE FRENCH PROTECT THEIR HILLSIDE FARMS
+
+This is how the French peasant keeps the mountain torrents from carrying
+off his precious soil.]
+
+The best way of all, of course, is to build terraces, as they do in the
+thickly settled parts of Europe. But this is only profitable for the
+more valuable crops and not for ordinary grains.
+
+
+SUCH SPENDTHRIFTS OF GOD'S GOOD SOIL!
+
+My, but it's a shame the way we've wasted soil in this country. What
+spendthrifts! To start with--when the country was first settled--there
+seemed no end to the fine land, and every one could have a good farm for
+the asking. All he had to do was to make his wants known to Uncle Sam
+and then go out and help himself. What happened then? Why, what always
+happens? Easy come, easy go. These pioneer farmers worked their farms
+for all there was in them; didn't bother, many of them, even to haul the
+barn manure into the fields. Then when the old farm was exhausted they
+moved off to new lands and did the same thing over again.
+
+[Illustration: A HOME IN THE DESERT
+
+Doesn't look much like a home in the desert, does it? But it is--a
+lovely home in what the old geographies called "The Great American
+Desert." In the Sahara oases are few and far between, but modern
+irrigation engineering makes oases to order--thousands and thousands of
+acres of them!]
+
+They ploughed on steep hillsides; they allowed gulches to form, as they
+will quickly do on sloping ploughed land, if you don't watch out; they
+cut away the timber. It's easy in a hill country like the eastern part
+of the United States to have all the good top-soil washed away in
+twenty years after the forests have been destroyed; the good soil that
+it probably took 2,000 years to make.
+
+Doctor Shaler[8] estimated that in the States south of the Ohio and the
+James Rivers more than 8,000 square miles of originally fertile land
+had, by this shiftless and thoughtless way of doing things, been put
+into such a state that it wouldn't grow anything; and over 1,500 square
+miles of this, actually worn down to the subsoil, and even to the bed
+rock, so that it may never be profitable to farm again--at least not in
+our time--no matter what they do!
+
+    [8] "Outlines of Earth's History."
+
+I knew a farmer with a small son to whom he intended to leave the farm
+when he grew up, who did things like that for twenty years. By the time
+the little boy was old enough to vote, there was no farm to leave; all
+the good part of it was gone.
+
+Serious thing for that little boy, wasn't it?
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     What have burrowing animals to do with the drainage system of the
+     land? (Keffer's "Nature Studies on the Farm.")
+
+     How do angleworms help drain the soil?
+
+     How do the forests help make good use of the rain that falls, not
+     only for themselves but for the rest of us?
+
+     How do the rains help to warm the ground in the spring? The heat
+     they carry into the soil is produced in two ways. The book
+     mentioned above tells of one of these ways, and Russell's little
+     book, "The Story of the Soil," tells of another.
+
+     Beale's "Seed Dispersal" tells how the raindrops (working together,
+     of course) help plant maple, elm, sycamore, willow, and other trees
+     that grow by the waterside, to scatter their seeds.
+
+     You'd be surprised what a series of adventures the seeds of a
+     bladderwort have before they get planted on some new shore, after
+     having left the parent shrub. First, they float down-stream, as you
+     know, but when autumn comes on, what do you suppose they do? They
+     go to bed. Where? Right in the bottom of the stream. Then how do
+     they ever get up and get planted on the shore? Well, you just look
+     it up in that Beale book and see.
+
+     Do you know how the rains help to get the mineral food up into the
+     plant?
+
+     And why swamps are such poor producers?
+
+     And how the sun acts as a pump for the plant world?
+
+     You will find answers to all these questions in Shaler's "Outlines
+     of Earth's History" and in your books on botany and agriculture.
+
+     Russell's book on the soil tells how the ancient Gauls and Britons
+     used to fertilize their land with marl, and how the tides help to
+     fertilize England. It's just the reverse of the way Father Nile
+     looks after Egypt, as you will see.
+
+     If you want to read an interesting description of the difficulties
+     of farming on wet lands, you will find it in this meaty little
+     book.
+
+     If you don't know how serious a thing it is to let gullies form in
+     land, look it up in Shaler's "Man and the Earth" and you will see.
+
+     How do you suppose deserts that get so little rain themselves could
+     _help make it rain_ in other places? For example, the desert of
+     Thibet is the chief cause of the monsoon rains that do so much for
+     India. That part of your geography that explains the circulation of
+     the air will help you figure this out; particularly with a map
+     under your eye that shows the relative location of the desert and
+     the Indian Ocean, over which the monsoon winds blow.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: AN EXAMPLE OF MAN'S DEBT TO THE EARTHWORM
+
+Much of the earth's Maytime bloom and beauty is due to the labor of our
+humble little brother of the dust, the earthworm; a striking fact which
+was never recognized until the great Charles Darwin looked into the
+matter and wrote a book about him. This picture by Millet is called
+"Springtime" and hangs in the Louvre, in Paris.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+(MAY)
+
+     It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have
+     played so important a part in the history of the world as these
+     lowly organized creatures.
+
+     --_Darwin: "The Formation of Vegetable Mould."_
+
+WHAT THE EARTH OWES TO THE EARTHWORM
+
+
+Suppose father had a hired hand who would plough his fields, fertilize
+them at his own expense, build his own house, board himself, and for all
+this ask only the privilege of living on the place, studying Botany,
+Geology, and Geometry, and enjoying the scenery.
+
+"Where can I get a man like that?" I imagine father saying.
+
+"You've got him now," you might reply. "He's already working for
+you--thousands of him, and has been working for you--millions of
+him--for thousands and millions of years."
+
+We have all known him well from boyhood by several names--angleworm,
+fishworm, earthworm. He also, as you will find in the dictionary, has a
+nice long Latin title. And it is particularly fitting that his name
+should be so associated with antiquity, since he belongs to one of the
+oldest families in the world; a family far older than the Roman Empire
+itself, which his people long ago helped grind back into the dust from
+which it came.
+
+And, speaking of Romans, every few years Mr. Earthworm does what Julius
+Caesar did, captures the whole of England--all the best parts of it--and
+then, unlike Caesar, gives it back to the English, made over again,
+better than it was before, as you will see.
+
+
+I. THE CITIES OF WORMS
+
+If you happen to be a high school boy you, of course, know about a
+certain city of Worms and what great things took place there once upon a
+time, but there are many cities of worms on any good farm, and each has
+more inhabitants than the famous city of Worms of history--something
+like 25,000 to the acre; and, in garden soil, 50,000!
+
+[Illustration: ANOTHER "CATHEDRAL OF WORMS"
+
+In the story of the Reformation in your history you will read of a
+certain Cathedral of Worms and what took place there once upon a time.
+Here is a "cathedral of worms" as interesting to the student of nature
+as that famous edifice is to the historian and the architect. It is the
+tower-like casting of a big earthworm and was found in the Botanic
+Garden at Calcutta. The picture is "life-size."]
+
+Did you ever notice how big boulders in a field are frequently sunk into
+the ground as if dropped from a great height? It is the earthworms that
+help sink them in the course of their soil-making. They like the moist
+shelter of the stones and burrow under them. Finally the weight of the
+stones crushes the burrows, and so the stones sink down.
+
+
+PIONEER LIFE AMONG THE EARTHWORMS
+
+Poor soil, as every boy knows, is a poor place to look for fishworms.
+But you have noticed that the mounds the worm throws up on such soil are
+larger than those on rich soil. The reason is that the soil, being less
+nutritious, the worm must eat more of it and, in so doing, pulverizes
+and fertilizes it. But a menu of earth alone not being to the
+earthworm's liking, undesirable regions have fewer of these farmers
+working underground; and this, for the same reason that these regions
+are sparsely settled on the surface--it is so hard to make a living.
+
+So the earthworms may be said to have a decided taste in landscape. They
+don't care for desert scenery like Gerome's picture of the lion's big
+front yard,[9] but they are very fond of orchards where the soil is rich
+and leaves are plenty. The pathways artists are fond of putting in
+landscapes would also probably attract the eyes of earthworms--if they
+had any, for the worms prefer soil a little packed, as it is in
+pathways, because it makes more substantial burrows. And, singularly
+enough, the worms also like most the very thing that the artist
+emphasizes to lead the eye into his picture--the border lines that
+_define_ the path. It is along the edges of a pathway that you find most
+worms.
+
+    [9] "The Two Majesties." This painting, by a great French realist,
+    shows a lion getting home rather late, after his night out, stopping
+    for a look at the rising sun; a thing with which, owing to his
+    habits, he is not very familiar.
+
+[Illustration: _Painted by F. O. Sylvester._
+
+_Painted by Westman._
+
+THE EARTHWORM'S TASTE IN SCENERY
+
+Two features common to both these pictures--the trees and the
+pathways--appeal to earthworms as well as artists, for reasons you have
+learned in this chapter.]
+
+The earthworm, in addition to working over and fertilizing the soil
+already made, actually helps make soil out of rock. He does this in two
+ways: (1) With acids--for, like the Little Old Man of the Rock, he is a
+chemist; (2) by grinding up rock in a little mill he always carries with
+him.
+
+
+HOW THE EARTHWORM COOKS HIS MEALS
+
+The earthworm's favorite diet is leaves and he has a way of cooking
+them. It is not quite like our way of cooking beet or dandelion leaves,
+but it answers the same purpose--it partially digests them. In glands,
+in his "mouth," he secretes a fluid which, like our saliva, contains an
+alkali. But the earthworm's alkaline solution is much stronger, and when
+he covers a fresh green leaf with it--as he is usually obliged to do in
+Summer when there are so few stale vegetables, the kind he prefers, in
+his market--the leaf quickly turns brown and becomes as soft as a boiled
+cabbage.
+
+Of course, there are always dead leaves in the woods, and these, which
+even the cow with her fine digestive outfit cannot handle, are a delight
+to the earthworm; for he also has a much larger supply of pancreatic
+juice than the higher animals, and this takes care of the leaves after
+he has swallowed them. He swallows bit by bit; just like a nice little
+boy who has been taught not to bolt his food.
+
+The acids in the earthworm's "stomach," acting on the leaves, help make
+other acids which remain in the soil after it has passed through the
+earthworm's body and help dissolve those fine grains of sand which make
+your bare feet so gritty when mud dries on them. And, not only that, but
+this coating of soil lying upon the bed rock hastens its decay; for the
+earthworm's burrow runs down four to six feet, sometimes farther.
+
+Besides the soil he thus grinds up and fertilizes so well with
+leaf-mould--what your text-book on agriculture calls "humus"--the
+earthworm does a lot of useful grinding in connection with the building
+of his house. He begins, as we do, by digging the cellar; but there he
+stops, for _his_ house is _all_ cellar! He makes it in two ways: (1) By
+pushing aside the earth as he advances; (2) by swallowing earth and
+passing it through his body, thus making the little mounds you see on
+the surface.
+
+
+THE EARTHWORM SYSTEM AT PANAMA
+
+A principle similar to his swallowing operations is frequently employed
+in engineering; as in making the Panama Canal, where dredging machinery
+dug out swamps and pumped the mud through a tube into other swamps to
+fill them up and help get rid of the mosquitoes.
+
+In pushing the earth away the worm uses the principle of the wedge,
+stretching out his "nose"--as you have often seen him do when
+crawling--and poking it into the crevices in the ground; much as the
+wheat roots poke _their_ little noses through the fertile soil the
+earthworm makes.
+
+And, as in human engineering and the work of the ant, the earthworm
+doesn't throw the dirt around carelessly. He casts it out, first on one
+side and then on the other; using his tail to spread it about neatly.
+
+
+THE TILING IN THE EARTHWORM'S HOUSE
+
+The walls of the earthworm's house are plastered, too. At first they are
+made a little larger than his body. Then he coats them with earth,
+ground very fine, like the clay for making our cups and saucers, and for
+making the beautiful white tiling on the walls at the stations of a city
+subway. When this earthworm "porcelain" dries it forms a lining, hard
+and smooth, which keeps the earthworm's tender body from being scratched
+as he moves up and down his long hallway. It also enables him to travel
+faster because it is smooth, and it strengthens the walls.
+
+The burrows which run far down into the ground, as all finally do toward
+Autumn, end in a little chamber. Into this tiny bedroom the worm retires
+during the hot, dry days of August and there he spends the
+Winter--usually with several companions, all sound asleep, packed
+together for warmth.
+
+
+AND RUGS ON THE FLOORS!
+
+Sometimes the Summer and Winter residences are quite ambitious, several
+burrows opening into one large chamber and each tunnel having two,
+sometimes three, chambers of its own--like a fashionable apartment with
+its main reception-room, and still more like the central sitting-rooms
+in Greek and Roman palaces. And the earthworm seems even to have some
+idea of mosaics, for it is the general practice to pave these chambers
+with little pebbles about the size of a mustard-seed. This is to help
+keep the worm's body from the cold ground. In addition to the mosaic
+floors the earthworms have rugs with lovely leaf patterns like the
+Oriental rugs that are so highly prized; and, as in the case of genuine
+Oriental rugs, no two patterns are alike. These rugs are leaves which
+the earthworm drags into his burrow, not for food but for house
+furnishing. When used for house furnishing they are placed in the
+entrance-hall; that is to say, they are used to coat the mouth of the
+burrow to prevent the worm's body from coming in contact with the
+ground. The mouth of the burrow, of course, is just where it is coldest
+at night in the Summer, the time of year when the earthworm spends a
+great deal of his time in the front of his house. The surface of the
+earth, you know, cools very rapidly after sunset and the dew on the
+grass in the morning is so cold it makes your bare feet ache. The worm
+requires damp earth around him because he breathes through his skin and
+must keep it moist, but at the same time he is sensitive to cold.
+
+And to drafts. Ugh!
+
+
+PEBBLE-FORT DEFENSES AGAINST THE FOE
+
+So he is very careful to keep the front door closed. This he does by
+stopping it up with leaves, leaf stems, and sticks. He also protects the
+door with little heaps of smooth round pebbles; but these pebbles are of
+a larger size than those he uses for paving the floor of his chamber.
+Besides helping to keep out drafts these pebbles serve another purpose.
+As our ancestors, the cave-builders, barred the door with boulders to
+keep out bears and other unwelcome callers, so the earthworms are
+protected by the pebbles, to a certain extent, from one of their
+enemies--the thousand-legged worm. Because of these little forts, the
+earthworms can remain with more safety near the doorway and enjoy the
+warmth of the morning sun. (So we might have reproduced Corot's
+"Morning" as a kind of landscape the earthworm enjoys!)
+
+
+II. THE MIND OF THE EARTHWORM
+
+From all of which you can see the earthworm, for what small schooling he
+gets, is a very bright boy! If we were as bright, according to our
+opportunities, we would probably have answered long ago such puzzles as
+the question whether there is really anybody at home in Mars, how to
+keep stored eggs from tasting of the shell, and other great scientific
+problems of our day.
+
+
+WHERE MR. EARTHWORM KEEPS HIS BRAIN
+
+Just as we have little brains in the tips of our fingers, the earthworms
+have brains in the ends of their "noses." They have neither eyes nor
+ears, but, like that wonderful girl, Helen Keller, they make up for the
+lack of these senses, to a remarkable degree, by the development of the
+sense of touch. They acquire quite a little knowledge of Botany, for
+example. They not only know that leaves are good to eat, but they know
+which is the "petiole" and which is the "base." They always drag leaves
+into their burrows by the smallest ends, because this makes it easier to
+get them through the door. And it is not by mere instinct that they do
+this. Supply worms with leaves of different form from those which grow
+in the region where they live, and they will experiment with them until
+they find just the best way in which to pull them into the burrows.
+After that they will always take hold of them so, without further
+experiment. That is the majority of them will do this; for earthworms
+are like other little people--all of them are not equally ambitious or
+studious.
+
+And the earthworm also knows something about Geometry. Cut paper into
+little triangles of various shapes and pretend to the worms that they
+are leaves by scattering them near the mouths of the burrows. Then
+remove the leaves with which the burrows are stopped. The worms will
+pull in the slips to close the door and they will--most of them--take
+hold by the apex of the triangle because that is the narrowest point.
+
+
+THE EARTHWORM'S TASTE IN MUSIC
+
+So you see the earthworm is a very cultivated country gentleman with his
+knowledge of Botany and Geometry, and his taste for landscape. But this
+is not all. He also has opinions about music. There are certain notes
+that apparently get on his nerves. Put worms in good soil in a
+flower-pot, and some evening when they are lying outside their burrows
+set the pot on the piano and strike the note C in the bass clef.
+Instantly they will pull themselves into their burrows. They will do the
+same thing at the sound of G above the line in the treble clef. Although
+they cannot hear, they are sensitive to vibrations, and these are
+carried from the sounding-board of the piano into the pot. They are less
+sensitive when the pot itself is tapped. The music seems to go right
+through them.
+
+
+WHY THE EARLY BIRD GETS THE WORM
+
+Except in rainy weather worms ordinarily come out of their burrows only
+at night. By early morning they have withdrawn into their holes and lie
+with their noses close to the surface to get the warmth of the morning
+sun. Then the early bird gets _them_! The reason a robin cocks his head
+in such a funny way--like a lord with a monocle--just before he captures
+a worm, is not because he is _listening_, as many people think; for the
+worm isn't saying a word and he isn't moving, and wouldn't make a bit of
+noise if he did move. The robin's eyes are on each side of his head and
+not in the middle of his face like ours, so he must turn his head in
+order to bring his eye in line with the hole where he sees the tip of
+Mr. Earthworm's nose.
+
+[Illustration: THREE EARLY BIRDS. FIND THE THIRD
+
+Don't they look happy--these two tow-heads? They are evidently going
+fishing in the early morning. Another early bird--several of him--that
+we are saying a good deal about in these pages is to be found in the
+can. Still another, the one at the bottom of the page, is taking
+advantage of the earthworm's family habit of warming his "nose" in the
+early sun rays.]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+And many people also believe that earthworms come down with the rain.
+Even park policemen believe it. At least, one said to me, in Central
+Park:
+
+"In dhry spells ye won't see wan. But let there come a little shower an'
+th' walks and the dhrives will be covered wid them; like the fairy
+stones that fall wid the rain in the ould counthry."
+
+
+DO EARTHWORMS COME DOWN WITH THE RAIN?
+
+The reason you see so many worms after a rain is that earthworms like
+moisture, and the rain seems to make them feel particularly good and
+breed a spirit of adventure. So out of their holes and away they go! A
+rain is their shower-bath; and you know how a shower-bath makes you
+feel. The mornings when the earthworms are apt to be thickest are those
+following a comparatively light rain in early Spring when the worms have
+recently awakened from their long Winter nap. With the beginning of the
+rainy season in the Fall, the worms also do a good deal of travelling
+into foreign lands, but in both Spring and Fall you will usually find
+more worms after a light shower than after a long, heavy downpour. If
+the worms were drowned out it would be the other way around, don't you
+see?
+
+To be sure, you will often find dead worms in shallow pools by the
+roadside; particularly after Autumn rains. These are sick worms and the
+chill was too much for them. But it's remarkable how low a temperature a
+good husky angleworm can stand. A professor in the University of
+Chicago, near which I live, tells me he has often found the ground in
+the neighboring park covered with worms after November rains when his
+hands, and those of the students who were helping him gather them for
+study, were numb with the cold.
+
+And how much work do you suppose these farmers do in grinding up and
+fertilizing the soil? In many parts of England the whole of the best
+land--the vegetable mould--passes through their bodies every few years,
+and they are doing similar work all over the world.
+
+They not only fertilize the earth by mixing it with the leaves they eat
+and those that decay in their burrows, but their castings help to bury
+fallen leaves and twigs and dead insects, and they also bring up lower
+soil to the surface, thus increasing its fertility. And by loosening the
+soil they let in more air. Remember that roots, like people, must have
+air.
+
+
+III. THE MILL OF THE EARTHWORM
+
+For the grinding up of the earth and the leaves, the earthworm has, as I
+have already said, a little mill that he always carries with him. Do you
+know what a gold mill is? Well, a gold mill is a mill that grinds up
+rock and so grinds out the gold. The earthworm's mill, in a manner of
+speaking, also grinds out gold, for it grinds the little particles of
+stone in the soil, and this soil grows fields of golden grain.
+
+The earthworm's mill is his gizzard. This gizzard is made and works very
+much like the gizzard of the chicken. And like the chicken the earthworm
+swallows little stones to help his digestion. So these stones, too, are
+ground into soil.
+
+Like the chicken's gizzard the gizzard of the earthworm is lined with a
+thick, tough membrane, and it has muscles--such muscles! There are two
+sets of these muscles and they cross each other somewhat like the warp
+and woof of the cloth in your clothes. The muscles that run lengthwise
+are not so very strong, for all they have to do is to help the earthworm
+swallow, but the muscles that run around the gizzard are wonderfully
+strong. They are about ten times as thick as the other muscles. One of
+Mr. Earthworm's French biographers[10] calls these muscles "veritable
+armatures"; that is, freely translated, "veritable hoops of steel."
+
+    [10] When you study French, if you want to read this book--like most
+    French works on science it is very interesting--ask for Perrier's
+    "Organization des Lumbricus Terrestris."
+
+I said, in the second paragraph above this, that worms swallow grains
+of sand and stones to help their digestions, as chickens do. But the
+earthworm saves time, for he takes the stones with his meals; just as
+some Englishmen, fat old squires, when they get along in years, or for
+any other reason are a little weak in their digestive regions--keep
+pepsin on the table with the pepper and salt.
+
+And--believe it or not--the earthworm actually makes his _own_
+millstones sometimes! The chalk in the chalky fluid of the glands that
+help him digest his meals frequently hardens into little grains in
+grinding the food. It's almost as if the saliva in our mouths, in
+addition to acting directly on the food, also made a new set of teeth
+for us!
+
+Suppose we had a stomach like the earthworm, wouldn't it be fun? We
+could digest the biggest dinners at Thanksgiving and Christmas and
+picnics and birthdays. We could even eat apples without waiting for them
+to get quite ripe. Haven't you done it to your sorrow? And no
+stomachache and no mince-pie nightmares!
+
+
+WHY THE EARTHWORM NEVER HAS NIGHTMARES
+
+By the way, the earthworm, although he has his troubles like the rest of
+us, never _has_ nightmares. For one thing he has that stomach[11] and--a
+still better reason, perhaps--he never sleeps at night. Like the moths
+and the bats and the burglars and members of Parliament, he makes night
+his busy day.
+
+    [11] Just listen to this: "Worms," says Mr. Darwin, in that
+    remarkable book of his, "are indifferent to very sharp objects, even
+    rose thorns and small splinters of glass."
+
+And, in other ways, while he is so much like the rest of us worms of the
+dust, his life differs from that of most people. For instance, he not
+only works by night while we work by day, and works underground while we
+work on top, but he takes his vacation in the Winter while we take ours
+in Summer. In that respect Mr. Earthworm is like the millionaires at
+Palm Beach; for in Winter he, too, goes in the direction we call south
+on the map--that is to say _down_.
+
+But, as you say, it takes all kinds of people to make a world; including
+earthworms and millionaires!
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     Who was that in Mother Goose that went a-fishing "for to catch a
+     whale"? Anyhow, there are fishworms so big that one might suppose
+     they were made for catching whales. How long do you suppose they
+     are, these big fishworms? A foot?
+
+     Pshaw! We have fishworms of our own a foot long. Two feet? More.
+     Three feet? More. You look it up in the article on the earthworm in
+     the "Britannica."
+
+     And how many kinds of earthworms do you suppose there are? You will
+     be surprised to learn.
+
+     Also, you will find that the earthworms have relatives who live in
+     the water all the time.
+
+     The article in the "International" tells why these modest neighbors
+     of ours don't come to the surface in the daytime. That will be an
+     interesting thing to know. Don't you think so?
+
+     And did you ever count an earthworm's rings? Other scientists have.
+     (All live boys and girls are scientists; they want to _know_.) Try
+     counting the rings of an earthworm and then compare your figures
+     with those given in the article in the "International."
+
+     How many hearts do you suppose an earthworm has? You will find in
+     the "International's" article they have a good many of what are
+     sometimes called "hearts," and how different the earthworm's
+     circulation system is from ours.
+
+     Does our saliva do for us anything like what it does for the
+     earthworm; and our pancreatic juice?
+
+     Compare the earthworm's method of digging his subway with that of
+     the armadillo. How do they differ in the way of using their noses?
+
+     Do you know how men dig subways; like those under New York City and
+     Boston, for instance? Books that tell about this phase of human
+     engineering and tell it in a very interesting way are "On the
+     Battle-front of Engineering" ("New York's Culebra Cut") and
+     "Romance of Modern Engineering" ("City Railways"), "Travelers and
+     Traveling" ("How Elevated Roads and Subways Are Built").
+
+     Speaking of the earthworm's wedge and how he uses it, do you know
+     that all of man's complicated machinery is the result of only a few
+     simple mechanical principles combined; and that the wedge is one of
+     the most important? Look up "_wedge_," "_machine_," "_simple
+     machine_," etc., in the dictionary or encyclopaedia.
+
+     How does the earthworm's method of pushing his way in the world
+     with the end of his nose compare with the way a root works along in
+     the ground? (See Chapter X.)
+
+     The earthworm's neat way of disposing of the dirt he casts out
+     reminds me of how the beaver handles dirt when he builds a canal,
+     and the way of the ants in digging their underground homes.
+     (Chapters VI and VIII.)
+
+     We have little brains in our finger-tips just as the earthworm has
+     on the end of his nose. How much do you know about the little
+     brains scattered through our bodies (_Ganglia_)?
+
+     You see the simple earthworm is the A, B, C of a lot of things; and
+     even Mr. Darwin's famous book doesn't contain all there is to be
+     learned about him in books and in personal interviews with Mr.
+     Earthworm himself. A farm boy to whom the writer read the story of
+     the earthworm, when asked how he thought the worm could turn in his
+     burrow when it fits him so closely, said, "Why, he turns around in
+     that little room at the end of the hall," thereby solving, as I
+     think, a problem that puzzled Mr. Darwin, and which he left
+     unsolved.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: SINFUL TACTICS OF A SACRED BEETLE
+
+The beetle pushing backward is the owner of the ball and is on his
+way--as he thinks--to his burrow. The other is altering the direction
+toward his own burrow. Fabre's book on the Sacred Beetle--the tumblebug
+of our fields and roadways--tells how the thing came out.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+(JUNE)
+
+    Go to the ant, thou sluggard;
+    Consider her ways, and be wise.
+
+    --_Proverbs_ 6:6.
+
+THE LITTLE FARMERS WITH SIX FEET
+
+
+I don't believe I've ever heard anybody say anything against an
+angleworm; although not many people, even to this day, I'll be bound,
+realize what a useful citizen the angleworm is.
+
+But now we come to a class of farmers that, as a class, are positively
+disliked; farmers that nobody has a good word for, that nobody wants for
+neighbors. The charge against them is that, like the man in the Bible,
+they are always reaping where they have not sown; always helping
+themselves to other people's crops--bushels of wheat, bushels of rye,
+tons of cotton, loads of hay and apples and peaches and plums; and nice
+garden vegetables; and even the trees in the wood lot. It is estimated,
+for instance, that the chinch-bug helps himself every year to
+$30,000,000 worth of Uncle Sam's grain; while other insects make away
+with 10 per cent of his hay crop, 20 per cent of mother's garden
+vegetables, $10,000,000 worth of father's tobacco; and the Hessian fly
+sees to it that between 10 and 25 per cent of the farmer's wheat never
+gets to mill.
+
+"Yes, and sometimes it's 50-50 between the farmer and the fly," said the
+high school boy, who often spends his vacation with a country cousin.
+
+Then there are insects that injure and destroy forest trees because they
+like to eat the leaves or the wood itself; and some 300 kinds of insects
+that make themselves free with other people's orchards.
+
+
+I. CONSIDERING THE ANT
+
+But, as I said a few moments ago, it takes all sorts of people to make a
+world; and as there are good and bad citizens among men, so there are
+good and bad among insects. Indeed there are so many useful insects that
+help make or fertilize the soil by grinding up earth and burying things
+in it, that even this chapter, which is rather long, as you see, can't
+begin to tell about all of them. So suppose we give our space to a few
+by way of example, and then look up others in other books in the
+library.
+
+
+AMOUNT OF WORK DONE BY ANTS
+
+First of all let us consider the ways of the ant (as the Bible tells us
+to). The ant's work may be said to take up where the earthworm leaves
+off. Mr. Earthworm, as we have seen, is a little fastidious about the
+kind of land he tills. Among other things, he is inclined to avoid sandy
+soil, while the ants will be found piling up their pretty cones of sand
+or clay as well as of black earth. And in some soils the ants do more
+important work than the worm that helped make Mr. Darwin famous. In the
+course of a single year they may bring fresh soil to the surface to the
+average depth of a quarter of an inch over many square miles. This not
+only helps to keep the farmer's fields fertile by adding fresh, unused
+earth, but enriches them by burying the vegetation--such as leaves and
+twigs and branches broken from dead trees by storms--so that it decays.
+This burying of vegetation is the very thing the good farmer does when
+he spreads his fields with manure from the barnyard, or when he ploughs
+under the stubble.
+
+[Illustration: A HEAP OF GRIST FROM AN ANT SOIL MILL
+
+Something of an ant-hill, isn't it? It is a foot high and measures
+nearly three feet across. You will find such ant hills in the Arkansas
+Valley in Colorado, where the photograph of this one was taken.]
+
+Ants are very glad to do this for the farmer because it isn't any extra
+trouble for them. Their little heaps of fresh earth are thrown out in
+connection with the building of their homes. The mining ants dig
+galleries in clay, building pillars to support the work and covering
+them with thatches of grass. The red and yellow field ants are the
+masons. They first raise pillars and then construct arches between
+them, covering these arches with the loose piles of soil which we know
+as ant-hills. The carpenter-ants bore their cells in the dead limbs of
+trees, and the wood dust they make from them hurries on the process of
+returning these dead limbs to the soil. One kind of carpenter-ant covers
+its walls with a mixture of sawdust, earth, and spiders' webs. An ant in
+Australia builds its home of leaves fastened together with a kind of
+saliva. One kind of ant, whose calling card among scientific people is
+Formica fusca,[12] adds new stories to old houses as the colony grows;
+much as in the growth of cities and hamlets the buildings grow taller
+with the growth of the town. Just as men do, such ants first build the
+side walls and then the ceilings. As if these ants are working under
+contract and must get their job done by a certain time, two groups are
+employed on the ceiling at the same time, each group working toward the
+other from the opposite wall and meeting in the middle.
+
+    [12] In the world of science, the ant goes by her Latin name,
+    _Formica_, and the whole family is known as the _Formicidae_. To a
+    Roman boy _Formica_ simply meant "ant." _Fusca_ is also Latin, and
+    means "dark"; so you can see this part of the story is about a
+    species of dark ant. As a matter of fact he is dark brown.
+
+[Illustration: THE DESERTED VILLAGE UNDER THE STONE
+
+If Oliver Goldsmith had been as much interested in ants as was the
+French "Homer of the insect," Henri Fabre, he might have written of
+another kind of "Deserted Village," its "desert walks" and its
+"mouldering walls." This is a deserted village of ants. The little
+citizens that built it lived under a stone. When the stone was lifted it
+took the entire roof off the place.]
+
+
+THE ANT WHO DIDN'T KNOW HIS TRADE
+
+As you may suppose, this is real architectural engineering and no place
+for amateurs. I once saw a foolish worker starting a roof from the top
+of one of the side walls without paying any attention to the fact that
+the other wall was much higher. The result was he struck the middle of
+it, instead of joining it at the top. Another ant passing, possibly the
+supervising architect, saw what was going to happen. So what does he do
+but stop and tear down the other's work and build the ceiling over
+again!
+
+"There! _That's_ the way to put in a ceiling," he seemed to say. "For
+goodness sake, where _did_ you learn your trade?"
+
+Huber, the famous student of ants, saw two of these wonderful insects do
+the very same thing.
+
+Sometimes the situation is such that it is necessary to build a very
+wide ceiling, so wide that it would fall of its own weight unless
+supported in some way. Then what would you do; that is, if _you_ were an
+ant?
+
+"Why, I'd put up pillars to hold it."
+
+That's exactly what the ants do; they put up pillars; but instead of
+using steel beams, as men do in this day of steel, the ant architects
+make pillars of clay--build them up with pellets, little clay bricks
+which they shape with their mandibles--their jaws.
+
+But the ants seem to have some of the methods of steel construction,
+too; the use of girders and things. Ebrard, a French student of ants,
+tells how, when a certain roof threatened to fall, some Sir Christopher
+Wren of the ant world used a blade of grass as a girder, just as Sir
+Christopher in his day put in girders to support the roof of Saint
+Paul's Cathedral, and as men use steel girders to-day. The ant fastened
+a little mass of earth on the end of a grass stalk growing near to bend
+it over; then gnawed it a little at the bottom to make it bend still
+more, and finally fixed it with mud pellets into the roof.
+
+But here's something that will make you smile! You have heard about the
+lazy man down in Arkansas with the hole in his roof? You remember he
+never mended it in dry weather because it didn't need it, and when it
+rained he _couldn't_ mend it on account of the rain!
+
+
+RAINY-DAY WORK IN THE ANT WORLD
+
+Well, these _Formica fusca_ folks are as different from that Arkansas
+man as anything you could imagine. First of all, being ants, they are
+anything but lazy; secondly, they never put off needed work on their
+roofs on account of rain. In fact, they _choose_ the first wet day to do
+it. As soon as the rain begins they build up a thick terrace on the roof
+of the old dwelling, carrying in their jaws little piles of finely
+ground earth which they spread out with their hind legs. Then, by
+hollowing out this roof, they turn it into a new story. Last of all they
+put on the ceiling. You see the rain helps them in mixing their clay.
+There are ants that build up vaulted viaducts or covered ways, and they
+use clay for that.[13] They make the clay by mixing earth with saliva.
+Some of these viaducts reach out from the house--the ants' house--to
+their "cow" pasture.
+
+    [13] The scientific name for this particular kind of ant is _Lasius
+    niger_.
+
+[Illustration: AN ANT CARRYING ONE OF HER COWS]
+
+You know about how ants keep cows, little bugs called aphids? The aphids
+feed on plants, and the clay viaducts protect the ants from their
+enemies and from the sun in going to and from the pasture; for this
+particular family of ants doesn't like the sun. They make clay sheds for
+their cattle, too. Here and there along the clay viaduct are large roomy
+spaces, cow-sheds, so to speak--where the little honey cows gather when
+they aren't feeding. Another kind of ant builds earth huts around its
+cow pastures. The large red ants (_F. rufa_), sometimes called "horse
+ants," build hills as large as small haycocks.
+
+
+II. THE TERMITES AND THEIR TOWERS OF BABEL
+
+But speaking of big buildings, did you ever hear of a skyscraper a mile
+high? Well the home of the six-footed farmer I am going to tell you
+about now is as much taller than he is as a mile-high skyscraper would
+be taller than a man. The remarkable little creatures that build these
+skyscrapers are called "termites." Termites are also known as "white
+ants." This seems funny when we know that they are neither "ants" nor
+are they white. The young of the workers are white, to be sure, but the
+grown-ups are of various colors, and never milky white as they are when
+young. The termites were first called "white ants" in books of travel
+because the termites the travellers saw were the young people.
+
+
+HOW TERMITES ARE LIKE THE ANTS
+
+The termites are really closer relatives of dragon-flies, cockroaches,
+and crickets than of the ants, but they do look a great deal like an
+ant, and they have many of the ways of the ants. As in the case of ants,
+all the members of one community are the children of one queen. The king
+lives with the queen in a private apartment. Sometimes--as with human
+royalties--the king and queen will have separate residences, but the
+termite royalties always live in the same house with their people; they
+are very democratic.
+
+Some kinds of termites live in rotten trees, which they tunnel into, and
+that is their contribution to soil-making; while others build great, big
+solid houses of earth and fibres, mixed. These houses are called
+"termitariums," and are six, eight, ten, even twenty-five feet high;
+fully 1,000 times the length of the worker. Think of a man five feet
+high, and then multiply by 1,000, and you see you have got nearly a
+mile!
+
+[Illustration: SKYSCRAPERS A MILE HIGH
+
+"Some kinds of termites build great, solid houses of earth and fibres
+mixed. These houses are six, eight, ten, even twenty-five feet high,
+fully one thousand times the length of the worker. Think of a man five
+feet high and then multiply by one thousand, and you see you have got
+nearly a mile."]
+
+These termite skyscrapers aren't much to look at on the outside, but
+inside they're just fine; they have everything the most particular ant
+could want. For instance, the termites are right up-to-date in their
+ideas about fresh air, their houses being well ventilated through
+windows left in the walls for that purpose. You can see the importance
+of this fresh-air system when you know there are thousands of termites
+under the same roof. They also have a sewage system for carrying off the
+water of the rains. And a fine piece of mechanical engineering the
+building of it is, too; for these "water-pipes" are the underground
+passages hollowed out in getting the clay to build the homes. The
+termites build their homes with one hand and dig the sewer with the
+other, so to speak.
+
+
+THE THERMOSTATS FOR THE NURSERIES
+
+The termitarium has as many rooms in it as a big hotel--oh, I don't know
+_how_ many--and they are all built around the chambers of the king and
+queen. Next to the royal apartments are the pantries, a lot of them,
+and they are all stored with food. In the upper part of the termitarium
+are the nurseries--many nurseries--for no one nursery could care for any
+such numbers of babies as the queen has. Between the nursery and the
+roof is an air-space, and there are also air-spaces on the sides and
+beneath. The nursery thus being surrounded by air, the eggs and, when
+they come along, the babies are protected from changes of temperature.
+It's the same principle that's employed in making refrigerators and
+thermos bottles. The rooms in which the eggs are kept are divided by
+walls made of fragments of wood and gum glued together. This mixture is
+a bad conductor[14] of heat or cold. And so the eggs are kept at an even
+temperature.
+
+    [14] A "bad" conductor is often a _good_ thing, as you'll see by
+    looking it up in the dictionary.
+
+While we cannot see any of the termite skyscrapers in the United States,
+because we have none of the species of termites that build them, we can
+see a member of the termite family. This is the common white ant that
+digs into joists of houses. On the outside of these same joists, and up
+in the attics of old farmhouses, if there happens to be a broken
+window-pane, or some other hole through which she can get in, you can
+see the nest of another tiller of the soil, the wasp. The mason-wasps or
+mud daubers are the most common. You will find their nests on the
+rafters of the barn when you go to throw down hay, or when you go into
+the corn-crib. They have all sorts of fancies--these wasps--about their
+clay homes and where to build them. Some build on the walls and some in
+the corners of rafters, others prefer outdoor life. Some want to live
+alone, others like society. What are known as "social" wasps sometimes
+build their nests in tiny hollows that they dig in the ground; others
+fasten their nests to the boughs of trees. The work of these wasps, from
+the farming standpoint, is useful not alone in grinding the soil, but
+helping to supply it with humus; for their nests are made of wood fibre,
+which they tear with their mandibles from gateposts, rail fences, and
+the bark of trees.
+
+[Illustration: NESTS OF MASON-WASPS]
+
+The carpenter-wasp is both a wood-worker and a clay-worker. He cuts
+tubular nests in wood and divides them by partitions. We think we're
+pretty smart, we humans, because we are always picking up ideas, but
+here's a creature, no bigger than the end of your finger, who has
+picked up an idea from the carpenter-bee, grafted it on his native trade
+of clay-worker, and made himself as nice and cosey a country place as
+you'd want to see!
+
+
+ABOUT THE WASP, THE FOX, AND THE BUMBLEBEE
+
+Here's another example of the same thing, this spreading of good ideas
+among the neighbors. It's about the fox, the digger-wasps, and the
+bumblebee. The fox can dig his own burrow when he has to, but if he
+finds somebody else's that he can use, he just helps himself--provided,
+of course, the owner isn't Brer Bear, or some other big fellow that Brer
+Fox doesn't care to have any words with. In the same way the
+digger-wasps make their own little burrows if they are obliged to, but
+prefer to help themselves to ones they find already made, although they
+don't drive anybody else out. They simply take possession of holes left
+by field-mice. The bumblebee does the same thing. The bumblebee digs a
+hole a foot or more deep, carpets it with leaves, and lines it with wax.
+Leading up to the home is a long, winding tunnel. As Bumblebeeville
+grows bigger there may be two or three hundred bees in one nest. As the
+bumblebee babies keep coming and coming, the burrow has to be dug bigger
+and bigger, to take care of them.
+
+
+III. THE HOUSE THAT MRS. MASON BUILT
+
+But the greatest of bee workers in the soil is the mason-bee. You can
+get an idea of what a useful citizen the mason-bee is when I tell you
+that one of the little villages of one species sometimes contains enough
+clay to make a good load for a team of oxen. Yet for all that, they
+might have gone on with their work for years and years to come--just as
+they have for ages in the past--and people wouldn't have thought much
+about it, if it hadn't been for some boys.
+
+One time, in a village in southern France, a school-teacher, who was
+getting on in years, took his small class of farmer boys outdoors to
+study surveying--setting up stakes and things, you know, the way George
+Washington used to do. It's a stony, barren land--this part of
+France--and the fields are covered with pebbles. The teacher noticed
+that often when he sent a boy to plant a stake, he would stoop every
+once in a while, pick up a pebble and _stick a straw into it_! That's
+what it looked like! Then he would suck the straw.
+
+Well, to make a long story short,[15] these pebbles had on them the
+little clay cells of the mason-bee. Mrs. Mason-Bee fills these cells
+with honey, lays an egg in the honey, and when the babies come
+along--don't you see? In other words, Mother Bee not only puts up their
+lunch for them, but puts them right into the lunch! This makes it
+convenient all around; for, like almost all insect mothers, Mrs.
+Mason-Bee is never there after the babies come.
+
+    [15] The whole story is told in the famous book, "The Mason Bee," by
+    Henri Fabre. He was the teacher.
+
+[Illustration: MASON-BEE CELLS AMONG THE ROCKS]
+
+There were so many of these pebbles scattered over the plain, and the
+bees that were building new homes or repairing old ones flew so straight
+and so fast between the pebbles and a near-by road that "they looked
+like trails of smoke," as Fabre expresses it.
+
+Now, you may well wonder why the bees flew clear over to that road to
+get dirt to build their nests when there was plenty of loose earth right
+at their own door-steps; right around the pebbles themselves. Isn't that
+queer?
+
+Well, here's something that sounds stranger still. Mrs. Mason-Bee takes
+those extra trips because a roadway is so much harder to dig in! It's
+not because she needs the exercise, goodness knows--this busy Mrs.
+Mason-Bee--but because the hard earth of the roadway makes the strongest
+homes; that is, when she finally gets it dug out and worked up. And
+here's another thing that will seem odd at first; although the soil she
+thus works over must be dampened before she can plaster it into the
+walls of her home, she just won't use damp soil to begin with. Nothing
+will do her but dust, and dust that she herself scrapes from the
+roadway. The reason of this is that the moisture already in the soil
+will not answer at all. She has got to knead the soil carefully and
+thoroughly with saliva, which acts as a kind of mortar. This saliva, of
+course, she supplies.
+
+And the dust she works with must be as fine as powder and as dry as a
+bone. Then it absorbs the saliva, and when it dries it is almost like
+stone. In fact it's a kind of cement, like that men use for sidewalks
+and for buildings and bridges.
+
+[Illustration: _Copyright by Brown Brothers._
+
+FABRE STUDYING THE MASON-BEE]
+
+But this wonderful old teacher and his boys[16] found that even this
+isn't all this little house-builder and house-keeper has to think of.
+She must have dust that is really ground-up stone! So she digs in the
+roadway where the bits of stone in this stony soil have been ground to
+powder and then packed hard by the wheels of the farmer's cart and by
+the hoofs of horses and oxen drawing their heavy loads. But what did
+Mrs. M. B. do for ground-up stone in the long ages before man came along
+with his carts? Mr. Earl Reed, who, beside being the distinguished
+etcher of "The Dunes," is a close observer of nature in general, tells
+me he has often seen a mason-bee gathering the pulverized stone at the
+base of cliffs. Evidently the mills of the wind and rain, that we have
+read of in previous chapters, had Mrs. B's wants in mind too.
+
+    [16] The boys were a great help. You ought to see what Fabre himself
+    says about them in that famous book of his.
+
+
+BEING A MASON-BEE FOR A LITTLE WHILE
+
+Now, just to show you one more thing about Mrs. Mason-Bee as a
+house-builder--how clever she is--let's try something right here. Let's
+suppose ourselves--yourself and myself--Mrs. Mason-Bees. We have got a
+home to build for some baby mason-bees that will be along by and by. Say
+we already know that we must use this stone dust of the roadway, and
+that we must make our mortar not with _water_ but with _saliva_. Here's
+the _next_ problem:
+
+Shall the mixing be done where the building is going up over there?
+That's the way human masons do it. But Mrs. Mason-Bee evidently thinks
+otherwise, for at the very time she is prying up those atoms of dust
+with so much energy, you notice she is doing her mixing. She rolls and
+kneads her mortar until she has it in the shape of a ball as big as she
+can possibly carry. Then "buz-z-z-z!" Away she goes, straight as an
+arrow, back home, and the mortar is spread where it is needed.
+
+You see, after all, this is the best way. If she didn't turn the dust
+into mortar before she started, so a good-sized lump of it would stick
+together, she couldn't carry much of it at a time, and it would be
+forever and a day before she could get her house built. As it is, the
+pellets she carries are of the size of small shot; a pretty big load,
+let me tell you, for a little body no bigger than Mrs. Mason-Bee.
+
+And remember, this goes on all day long from sunrise to sunset. Without
+a moment's rest, she adds her pellets to the growing walls and then back
+she goes to the precise spot where she has found the building material
+that best suits her needs.
+
+In building a nest, the mason-bee, in going to and fro, day after day,
+travels, on the average, about 275 miles; half the distance across the
+widest part of France. All in about five or six weeks, she does this.
+Then her work is over. She retires to some quiet place under the stones,
+and dies. As I said, she never sees the babies she has done so much for.
+
+[Illustration: SURFACE MOUNDS OF THE MASON-ANT
+
+There are mason-ants as well as mason-bees. This illustration shows the
+works thrown up by some mason-ants that Dr. McCook found in a garden
+path one morning in May.]
+
+And although they are so stoutly built, the houses of the mason-bees,
+like those "cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces" that Shakespere
+speaks of, finally go back to the dust. But while one of these little
+mothers is building a new home or repairing an old one left by a mother
+of the previous year, you would suppose the fate of the world hung on
+it; as indeed the fate of the world of mason-bees does.
+
+Scrape! Scrape! Scrape! With the tips of those little jaws, her
+mandibles, she makes the stony dust.
+
+Rake! Rake! Rake! With her front feet she gathers and mixes it with the
+saliva from her mouth.
+
+How eager and excited she gets, how wrapped up in her work as she digs
+away in the hard-packed mass in the tracks of the roadway! Passing
+horses and oxen, and the French peasants with their wooden shoes, are
+almost on her before she will budge. And even then she only flits aside
+until the danger has passed. Then down she drops and at it again!
+
+But sometimes, the boys and the teacher found, she starts to move too
+late--so absorbed is she, it would seem, in the thought of that tiny
+little home over there among the pebbles.
+
+Poor little lady!
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     Perhaps nothing in nature is more wonderful than an insect;
+     particularly when you consider that he _is_ only an insect! So, of
+     course, whole libraries have been written about insects. Here are a
+     few of the most interesting books dealing with the subject: Beard's
+     "Boy's Book of Bugs, Butterflies and Beetles"; Comstock's "Ways of
+     the Six-Footed"; Crading's "Our Insect Friends and Foes";
+     Doubleday's "Nature's Garden"; Du Puy's "Trading Bugs with the
+     Nations." This about trading bugs is an article in "Uncle Sam:
+     Wonder Worker," and tells how Uncle Sam "swaps" with other nations
+     to get rid of injurious insects and bring in useful ones.
+
+     Grant Allen's "Sextons and Scavengers" ("Nature's Work Shop") tells
+     many curious things about the sexton beetles; how, by tasting bad,
+     they keep birds and things from eating them; why you will always
+     find an even number--never an _odd_ number--of sextons at work
+     together; what they use for spades in their digging; why male
+     sextons bury their wives alive, and why there is reason to believe
+     that these weird little insects have a sense of beauty and of
+     music.
+
+     The same essay tells about the sacred beetle of the Egyptians, the
+     insect that we know as the "tumblebug"; why first the Egyptians and
+     then the Greeks regarded this bug as sacred; and why men and women
+     wear imitation beetles for brooches and watch-charms to-day.
+
+     But the greatest work on this famous beetle has been written by the
+     famous French observer Fabre, "The Homer of the Insect." You will
+     find this book, "The Sacred Beetle," in any good public library.
+     Among other things Fabre gives a very minute description of the
+     variety of tools used by the beetle; tells how two beetles roll a
+     ball;[17] how they dig their holes; how they "play possum," and
+     then (I'm almost ashamed to tell this) rob their partners! How they
+     wipe the dust out of their eyes; about a tumblebug's wheelbarrow;
+     why their underground burrows sometimes have winding ways; why
+     there are fewer beetles in hard times; about their autumn gaieties;
+     their value as weather-prophets, and how Fabre's little son Paul
+     helped him in writing his great book.
+
+       [17] You've often noticed them, haven't you? Now read Fabre's
+       wonderful book and see how much you _didn't_ notice.
+
+     Allen's essay, "The Day of the Canker Worm" in "Nature's Work
+     Shop," tells many interesting things about the Cicada, the locust
+     that only comes once in seventeen years;[18] about Lady Locust's
+     saw (it looks like a cut-out puzzle); about the clay galleries the
+     locusts build when they come up out of the ground; how many times
+     they have to put on new dresses before they finally look like
+     locusts; why, at one stage of the process, they look like ghosts,
+     and how they blow up their wings as you do a bicycle tire.
+
+       [18] "And that's once too many," as the old farmer said; and we must
+       agree with him when we think only of the damage they do.
+
+     (Fabre's book on the sacred beetle also deals, incidentally, with
+     the Cicada.)
+
+     Often one thing is named after another from a merely fanciful
+     resemblance, as, for instance, the "sea horse." But the mole
+     cricket really seems to have been patterned on the mole; either
+     that, or both the four-legged and the six-legged moles were
+     patterned after something _else_. Mole crickets are very useful
+     little people to know. You should see how they protect their
+     nest-eggs from the weather and how and why they move their nests up
+     and down with the change of the seasons.
+
+     What good to the soil do the insects do that eat up dead-wood?
+     Scott Elliott, in his "Romance of Plant Life," deals with this
+     subject.
+
+     The mining bees are very interesting, and some of these days,
+     perhaps millions of years hence, they will be still more
+     interesting, for they are learning to work together, although not
+     to the extent that the bees and ants do. Working together seems to
+     develop the brains of insects just as it does human beings.
+     Thomson's "Biology of the Seasons" tells how the mining bees are
+     learning "team-work."
+
+     The tarantula spider is a relation of the six-footed farmers, you
+     should know, although he is not an insect himself. In "Animal Arts
+     and Crafts" in the "Romance of Science" series you will find how,
+     in his digging, he makes little pellets of earth, wraps them up in
+     silk, and then shoots them away, somewhat as a boy shoots a marble.
+
+     The same book tells why the trap-door spider usually builds on a
+     slope. It also tells why she puts on the front door soon after
+     beginning her house. (This looks funny, but you wouldn't think it
+     was so funny if _you_ were a trap-door spider and you had a certain
+     party for a neighbor, as you will agree when you look it up.)
+
+     The door, by the way, has a peculiar edge to make it fit tight.
+     What kind of an edge would _you_ put on a door to make it fit
+     tight? (Look at the stopper in the vinegar-cruet and see if it will
+     give you an idea.)
+
+     This book also tells about a certain wasp that makes pottery and
+     gets her clay from the very same bank that certain other people
+     depend on for _their_ potter's clay. This wasp sings at her work
+     and has three different songs for different parts of the work.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE FIELD MOUSE AND THE FARMER
+
+When we remember how much soil the field mouse worked over, and so made
+better, long before man's time on earth--to say nothing of what the mice
+have done since--doesn't it give an added and deeper meaning to the
+lines of Burns?
+
+    "I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve.
+    What then? Poor beastie, thou maun live."
+]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+(JULY)
+
+    Well said, old mole! Canst work i' the earth so fast?
+
+    --_Shakespere: "Hamlet."_
+
+FARMERS WITH FOUR FEET
+
+
+Before we start this chapter--it's going to be about the farmers with
+four feet, you see--I want to say something, and that's this: _Don't let
+anybody tell you moles eat roots._ They don't! They eat the cutworms
+that do eat the roots. Haven't I been in mole runs often enough to know!
+Of course, the moles do cut a root here and there occasionally when it
+happens to be in the way, as they tunnel along, but what does that
+amount to?
+
+Why, in France they put Mr. Mole in vineyards--on purpose! He's one of
+the regular hands about the place, just like the hired man.
+
+
+I. MR. MOLE AND HIS RELATIONS
+
+Moles do a lot of good work for the farmer. Not only were they ploughing
+and ploughing and ploughing the soil--over and over again--thousands of
+centuries before man came along to plant seed in it, but they are all
+the time eating, among other things, destructive worms and insects in
+the soil. They work all over the world, that is to say, in the upper
+half of it--the Northern Hemisphere; and there's where the biggest half
+of the land is, if I haven't forgotten my geography.
+
+
+WONDERFUL LITTLE MACHINES ON FOUR LEGS
+
+Closely related to the moles are the shrews--quaint little mouse-like
+creatures with long, pointed heads and noses that they can twist about
+almost any way in hunting their meals and finding out other things in
+this big world that concern them. On these funny, long noses they have
+whiskers like a pussy-cat; and that helps, too, when you want to keep
+posted on what's going on around you. Like the moles the shrews are
+found all over the Northern Hemisphere. What is known as the
+"long-tailed shrew," is the very smallest of our relations among the
+mammalia. Why, they're no bigger than the end of a man's little finger;
+and the smallest watch _I_ ever heard of was a good deal bigger than
+that. Yet, inside these wee bodies is as much machinery as it takes to
+run any other mammal--an elephant, say.
+
+[Illustration: THE COMMON AND THE SHORT-TAILED SHREW]
+
+The shrews get around very fast, considering their size; and they're on
+the go all the time. I never saw such busy-bodies; nosing about in the
+old leaves and dead grass and under logs and boring into loose loam,
+punky wood, decayed stumps--anywhere you'd be likely to find a worm, a
+grub, a beetle, or a slug. Hard workers, these shrews, but _so_
+quarrelsome! When two Mr. Shrews meet there's pretty sure to be trouble.
+They're regular little swashbucklers among themselves; and--the queerest
+thing, until you know why--they don't seem to be afraid even of cats.
+Fancy telling Cousin Mouse that! But it isn't because the shrews
+_wouldn't_ be afraid if the cats got after them, but because cats always
+let shrews alone. They don't taste good!
+
+[Illustration: THE CILIATED SHREW]
+
+Shrews are so nimble on their tiny feet and so quick of hearing, they
+are very hard to catch. And please don't try! You simply _can't_ tame
+them, and in spite of the fact they're so fierce and bold at home--among
+their own kind--they're easily frightened to death. A shock of fear and
+that wonderful little heart engine of theirs stops short--never to go
+again.
+
+
+MR. MOLE'S PAWS AND HOW HE WORKS THEM
+
+But while the shrews can get around so much faster above ground the
+moles are the most remarkable travellers _under_ ground. The mole's
+paws, you notice, are turned outward, as one's hands are when swimming.
+In fact he does almost swim through the soft, loose soil--so fast does
+he move along! His two shovels, with the muscles that work them, weigh
+as much as all the rest of his body. Why, he has a chest like an
+athlete! He pierces the soil with his muzzle and then clears it away
+with his paws. His skull is shaped like a wedge. He has a strong, boring
+snout and a smooth, round body.
+
+This snout, by the way, has a bone near the tip. You see how handy that
+would come in, don't you? At the same time, although it's so hard--this
+snout of his--it's very sensitive, like the fingers of the blind; for
+Mr. Mole must always be feeling his way along in the dark, you know.
+
+[Illustration: SECTION OF MR. MOLE'S CASTLE
+
+This is a cross-section of a mole-hill, showing the central chamber and
+the rooms leading into it.]
+
+The kind of moles you find in Europe live in what seem to be little
+earthen fortresses, and the tops, sticking above ground, make hillocks.
+In each of these little forts there is a central chamber; then outside
+of this, running all the way around, are two galleries, one above the
+other. The upper gallery has several openings into the central chamber.
+The galleries are connected by two straight up-and-down shafts. From the
+lower galleries several passages, usually from eight to ten, lead away
+to where the moles go out to feed; and if there is a body of water near
+by--a pond or a creek, say--there's a special tunnel leading to that.
+
+Mr. Mole works hard and he sleeps hard. The big middle room in his home
+is the bedchamber of Mr. Mole and his family. Usually he sleeps soundly
+all night, but occasionally, on fine Summer nights, he comes out and
+enjoys the air.
+
+[Illustration: THE COMMON AND THE STAR-NOSED MOLE]
+
+You'd think he'd get awfully dirty, wouldn't you, boring his way along
+in the ground all the time? But he doesn't. His hair is always as spick
+and span as if he'd just come out of the barber-shop. Do you know why?
+It's because he wears his hair pompadoured. It grows straight out from
+the skin. So you see he can go backward and forward--as he is obliged to
+do constantly in the day's work--without mussing it up at all. If it
+lay down, like yours or like pussy-cat's, it would get into an _awful_
+mess! In France the children call Mr. Mole "The Little Gentleman in the
+Velvet Coat."
+
+
+II. FOUR-FOOTED FARMERS THAT WEAR ARMOR
+
+But, speaking of coats, I want to introduce you to a still more rapid
+worker in the soil, who wears a coat of mail. He is called the
+armadillo. There used to be a species of armadillo in western Texas.
+Whether there are any there still I don't know,[19] but go on down to
+South America and you'll find all you want. The woods are full of them,
+and so are those vast prairies--the pampas. The plates in the
+armadillo's coat of mail are not made of steel, of course, but of bone.
+These bony plates are each separate from the other on most of his body
+but made into solid bucklers over the shoulders and the hips. The
+armadillos have very short, stout legs and very long, strong claws, and
+how they can dig! They can dig fast in any kind of soil, but in the
+loose soil of the pampas they dig so fast that if you happen to catch
+sight of one when out riding and he sees _you_, you'll have to start
+toward him with your horse on the run if you want to see anything more
+of him. Before you can get to him and throw yourself from the saddle,
+he'll have buried himself in the ground. And you can't catch him; not
+even if you have a spade and dig away with all your might. He'll dig
+ahead of you, faster--a good deal faster--than you can follow.
+
+    [19] One of my friends in the faculty of the University of Chicago
+    tells me there are still a good many armadillos in Texas.
+
+
+MR. ARMADILLO'S REMARKABLE NOSE DRILL
+
+For all he looks so knightly, so far as his armor is concerned, the
+armadillo is timid, peaceful, and never looking for trouble with
+anybody, but once aroused fights fiercely and does much damage with his
+long hooked claws. His chief diet is ants. These he finds with his nose.
+He locates them by scent and then bores in after them. You'd think he'd
+twist it off, that long nose of his; he turns it first one way and then
+the other, like a gimlet. And so fast!
+
+The armadillo dislikes snakes as much as all true knights disliked
+dragons. That is, he doesn't like them socially; although he's quite
+fond of them as a variation in diet. He'll leap on a snake, paying not
+the slightest attention to his attempts to bite through that coat of
+mail, and tear him into bits and eat him.
+
+Another armored knight that eats snakes and that other animals seldom
+eat--much as they'd like to--is the hedgehog. If you were a fox, instead
+of a boy or girl, I wouldn't have to tell you about how hard it is to
+serve hedgehog at the family table. One of the earliest things a little
+fox learns in countries where there are hedgehogs is to let the hedgehog
+alone.
+
+"Hedgehogs would be very nice--to eat, I mean--if they weren't so ugly
+about not wanting to be eaten."
+
+We can imagine Mamma Fox saying that to the children. Then she goes on:
+
+"The whole ten inches of a hedgehog--he's about that long--are covered
+with short, stiff, sharp, gray spines. He's easy to catch--just ambles
+along, hardly lifting his short legs from the ground. And he goes about
+at night--just when we foxes are out marketing. That would be so handy,
+don't you see; but the trouble is about those nasty spines of his. Try
+to catch him and he rolls up into a ball with all his spines--they're
+sharp as needles--sticking out everywhere, and every which way.
+And--well, you simply can't get at him, that's all. So just don't have
+anything to do with him. It's only a waste of time."
+
+Hedgehogs live in hedges and thickets and in narrow gulches covered with
+bushes. They do their share of ploughing when nosing about with their
+pig-like snouts for slugs, snails, and insects, and when they dig places
+for their home nests. These homes they line with moss, grass, and
+leaves, and in them spend the long Winter, indifferent to the tempests
+and the cold.
+
+But there's another place to look for hedgehogs, and you never would
+guess! In people's kitchens. If you ever go to England you'll find them
+in many country homes, helping with the work. They're great on
+cockroaches, and they're perfectly safe from the cat and the dog. Both
+Puss and Towser know all about those spines, just as well as Mrs. Fox
+does.
+
+When they've eaten all the cockroaches, give them some cooked
+vegetables, porridge, or bread and milk, and they'll be perfectly
+content. They're easy to tame and get very friendly.
+
+In the wild state, besides the insects and things I mentioned, they eat
+snakes; and poison snakes, too! The poison never seems to bother them at
+all. Their table manners are interesting, also, when it comes to eating
+snakes. They always begin at the tail.[20] They'd no more think of
+eating a snake any other way than one would of picking up the wrong fork
+at a formal dinner.
+
+    [20] Isn't that the way a toad swallows an angleworm? Or how _does_
+    he do it?
+
+
+UNDER THE HEDGEHOG'S WATER-PROOF ROOF
+
+That's one of the things about good manners Mamma Hedgehog teaches the
+babies, I suppose. Of these she has from two to four, and she makes a
+curious nest especially for them; a nest with a roof on it that sheds
+rain like any other roof. Just as it is with puppies and kittens, the
+babies are born blind; and not only that, but they can't hear at first,
+either. While they are young their spines--I don't mean their
+back-bones, but their other spines--are soft, but they become hard as
+the babies grow and open their eyes and ears on the world. The muscles
+on their backs get very thick and strong, so that when they don't want
+to have anything to do with anybody--say a fox, or a dog, or a
+weasel--they just pull the proper muscle strings and tie themselves up
+into a kind of bag made of their own needle-cushion skins, with the
+needles all sticking out, point up!
+
+
+III. A VISIT TO SOME FARM VILLAGES
+
+
+TWELVE LITTLE MARMOTS ALL IN ONE BED
+
+Next I'd like you to visit with me certain other farmers who remind us
+of the Middle Ages also; not because they wear armor, like the
+armadillos and the hedgehogs and the lords of castles, but because they
+live in farm villages as the farmer peasants used to do around the
+castles of the lords. Moreover, one reason they live together in this
+way is for protection--just as it was with the peasants--only among
+these little democrats there's no overlord business; each one's home is
+his castle. Another reason for this village arrangement is that it's
+such a sociable way to live; and they're great society people, these
+farm villagers. The marmots, for example, the largest and heaviest of
+the squirrel family, just love company. In their mountain
+country--they're mountain people, the marmots--they play together, work
+together, and during the long, cold night of Winter snuggle together in
+their burrows. Their burrows are close by each other among the rocks.
+They have both Summer and Winter residences. In Summer they go away up
+in the mountains, hollow out their burrows and raise their babies. When
+the snows of late Autumn send them down the mountainsides, twelve or
+fifteen of them, all working together, pitch in and make a tunnel in the
+soil among the rocks, enlarging it at the end into a big room. Next they
+put in a good pile of dry hay, carefully close the front door and lock
+it up with stones caulked with grass and moss. Then they all cuddle down
+together, as snug as you please, and stay there until Spring.
+
+[Illustration: HIGHWAYS OF GROUND-SQUIRREL TOWN
+
+Almost as crooked as the streets of London town, aren't they? And as
+hard to find one's way about in--unless, of course, one were a
+ground-squirrel. This is the burrow of a Richardson ground-squirrel
+sketched by Thompson Seton, near Whitewater, Manitoba.]
+
+Another member of the marmot family who is very fond of good company is
+the prairie-dog. There may be thousands in a prairie-dog town. Each
+little prairie-dog home has in front of it a mound something like an
+Eskimo's hut. The prairie-dogs make these mounds in digging out their
+burrows. They pile the dirt right at the front door. This may not look
+neat to us, but you'll see it's just the thing--this dirt pile--when you
+know what the prairie-dog does with it. He uses it as a watch-tower.
+
+When, from this watch-tower, he spies certain people he doesn't want to
+meet, you ought to see how quickly he can make for his front door and
+into the house! The times are still lawless where the prairie-dog lives,
+and he has to be on the lookout all the while for coyotes, for foxes,
+for badgers, for the black-footed ferret and the old gray wolf; to say
+nothing of hawks and brown owls.
+
+
+SUCH NEAT CHAMBERMAIDS!
+
+The prairie-dogs like sandy or gravelly soil for their homes, and in
+making them they do a lot of ploughing. And besides they supply this
+same soil with a great deal of humus--the grass that they use for
+bedding. They're very particular about changing their beds every day;
+always clearing out the old bedding and putting in new. They do this
+along about sundown. You can see them do it right in New York City, for
+there is a flourishing colony of them at the zoo.
+
+[Illustration: THIS MUST BE A PLEASANT DAY
+
+In nice weather the Prairie Dog's front door stands wide open like this,
+but before a rain he stuffs it tight with grass because, when it _does_
+rain in the arid regions where he lives, it comes down in bucketfuls!]
+
+Mr. Prairie-Dog is about a foot long and as fat as butter. The reason
+he's called a dog isn't because he is a dog or even looks like one, but
+because he has a sharp little bark like a very much excited puppy. He
+thinks he sees something suspicious: "Yap! Yap!"
+
+Or he spies a neighbor down the street: "Yap! Yap! Hello, neighbor!
+Looks like another fine day, doesn't it?"
+
+"Yap! Yap!" says neighbor. (This "yap" passes for "yes," no
+doubt--although it isn't quite the way Mr. Webster would say it,
+perhaps.)
+
+Then maybe a neighbor from away over on the avenue, that he hasn't seen
+for some time, comes calling--as they're always doing, these neighborly
+little chaps. Then it's:
+
+"Yap! Yap! Yap! Yap! Why, how _are_ you? And what have you been doing?
+And how are the little folks?"
+
+And so it goes, all day long.
+
+The prairie-dog's native home is on our Western plains, but he has a
+cousin away off in South America--although he may never have heard of
+him--called the viscacha.
+
+The viscachas live on the great grassy plains of the La Plata in
+colonies of twenty or more, in villages of deep-chambered burrows with
+large pit-like entrances grouped close together; so close, in fact, that
+the whole village makes one large irregular mound, thirty to forty feet
+in diameter and two to three feet high. These villages being on the
+level prairie, the viscachas are careful to build them high enough so
+that floods will not reach them. They make a clear space all around the
+town. In doing this these little people seem to have two purposes: (1)
+To make it more difficult for enemies to slip up on them unnoticed, and
+(2) to furnish a kind of athletic field for the community; for it is in
+these open spaces that they have their foot-races, wrestling matches,
+and the like.
+
+If you ever happen down their way, the first thing that will strike you
+is the enormous size of the entrances to the central burrows. You'd
+think somebody as big as a bear lived in them. The entrance is four to
+six feet across and deep enough for a tall man to stand in up to the
+waist.
+
+Like our prairie-dogs, the viscachas are very sociable, and little
+paths, the result of neighborly calls, lead from one village to another.
+They are neighborly indeed; and in the Bible sense. Of course, they like
+to get together of an evening and talk things over and gossip and all
+that, but that isn't the end of it. To take an instance: These South
+American prairie-dogs, like our prairie-dogs up North, are not popular
+with the cattlemen; and the cattlemen, to get rid of them, bury whole
+villages with earth. Then neighbors from distant burrows come--just as
+soon as the cattlemen go away--and dig them out!
+
+[Illustration: MR. P. GOPHER AS THE MASTER PLOUGHMAN
+
+Thompson Seton calls the pocket-gopher "the master ploughman of the
+West," and this is how he illustrates the extent of his labors.]
+
+Another ploughman besides the prairie-dog and the viscacha, who isn't
+popular with farmers--although Thompson Seton calls him "The Master
+Ploughman of the West"--is the pocket-gopher. He has farmed it from
+Canada to Texas, all through the fertile Mississippi Valley. The reason
+he has that queer expression on his face--you couldn't help noticing
+it--is that each cheek has a big outside pocket in it; and, like the big
+pockets in a small boy's trousers, they're there for business. On each
+forefoot he has a set of long claws; and dig, you should see him! He's a
+regular little steam-shovel. He sinks his burrow below the frost-line
+and into this, stuffed in his two pockets, he carries food to eat when
+he wakes up during the following Spring, before earth's harvests are
+ripe.
+
+[Illustration: POCKETS OF THE POCKET-MOUSE]
+
+
+IV. THE HOME OF THE RED FOX
+
+Another country gentleman, not as popular with his neighbors, I must
+say, as he might be, but whose people, in the course of the ages, have
+done a good deal of ploughing, is Brer Fox. I mean particularly the red
+fox, for the gray fox usually lives in hollow trees or in ready-made
+houses among the rocks of the mountainside.
+
+
+THE THREE ROOMS IN THE FOX HOUSE
+
+The red fox is the cunningest of his tribe. One of the ways he shows his
+cunning--and also his lack of conscience, in dealings outside the fox
+family--is in his way of getting a home. Whenever he can find a burrow
+of a badger, for example, he drives the badger out and then enlarges
+the place to suit his own needs. For Mr. Fox's residence is quite an
+affair. Usually it has three rooms; the front room where either Mr. or
+Mrs. Fox--depending on which is going marketing--stops and looks about
+to see if the coast is clear; back of that the storeroom for food, and
+behind this the family bedroom and nursery.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Fox are among the thriftiest folks I know. They not only
+provide for to-day, but for to-morrow and the day after. For example,
+when Mr. Fox visits a poultry-yard, he doesn't simply carry off enough
+for one meal. He keeps catching and carrying off chickens, ducks, or
+geese--whatever comes handy--all night; working clear up to daybreak.
+And the fresh meat he thus gets for the family table he buries--each
+fowl in a separate place--not so very far away from the poultry-yard.
+Then later he comes and gets this buried treasure and takes it home to
+be shared with mother and the babies.
+
+Of these babies there are from three to five. Young foxes are very
+playful and think there's no such sport as chasing each other about in
+the sunshine, while mother sits in the doorway keeping an eye out for
+possible danger and watching their antics with a complacent smile, as
+much as to say: "_Aren't_ they the little dears!"
+
+If just one little fox wants to play while his brothers and sisters want
+to sleep--and that sometimes happens--he goes off by himself and chases
+his own tail around, just like a kitten.
+
+Little foxes are very nice and polite that way.
+
+[Illustration: THE KANGAROO RAT AND THE POCKET-MOUSE
+
+The kangaroo rat and the pocket-mouse live in the arid regions of the
+United States. Both have pockets in their cheeks, but the mouse is named
+for his pockets and the rat for his long kangaroo hind legs.]
+
+
+V. WORK AND PLAY IN CHIPMUNKVILLE
+
+It isn't often one gets a chance to see little foxes at play, except
+occasionally in the big city zoos, for foxes are now so scarce; and,
+besides, their papas and mammas in the wild state are suspicious of
+human spectators, but there are certain nimble four-legged babies to be
+found all over the country that play in much the same way.
+
+If, along in July, you should see a certain little body in a lovely
+striped suit chasing another little body in a striped suit, exactly like
+it, along the old rail fence or over the boulder wall or across the
+meadow, ten to one, it will be two baby chipmunks playing tag. When one
+bites the other's tail--they're always trying to do that in these tag
+games--it means he's "it," I think. In fact, I'm quite sure, for always,
+when one little Mr. Chipmunk bites another little Mr. Chipmunk on the
+tail, little Mr. Chipmunk No. 2 turns right around and chases little Mr.
+Chipmunk No. 1, and tries to bite _his_ tail.
+
+They keep this up on sunshiny days all through July and along into early
+August. Then the serious business of life begins. They sober down, these
+chipmunk children--they were only born last May--and learn to make homes
+for themselves. You never would think the way they love the sunshine
+that the homes of all the chipmunks are under the ground, and as dark as
+can be. But they are. You notice the chipmunks have rather large feet,
+considering what dainty little creatures they are. These feet, like the
+feet of the mole, are for digging. The chipmunk digs deep under the
+roots of trees and stone walls, if there happens to be either handy by,
+but, so far as I've seen, he's quite contented to make his burrows in
+the open meadows. The round nest at the end of the burrow is lined with
+fine grass. It has two entrances, one right opposite the other, like
+front and back doors. Sometimes there are as many as three doors; four,
+maybe, in case of a chipmunk of a particularly nervous disposition. All
+chipmunks are easily frightened and dive into their holes, quick as a
+wink, when there's any danger; and often when there's really nothing to
+be scared at at all.
+
+
+WHEN THOSE EXTRA DOORS COME HANDY
+
+But you can't blame them. There are times when it's no fun being a
+chipmunk, I tell you. The hawks get after you, and the minks and the
+foxes and the weasels. Those extra doors into the nest are very useful
+places to dodge into when you're outside and a savage old hawk swoops
+down on you, or a fox makes a jump at you. And they're just as
+handy--these extra doors--to run _out_ of when a mink or a weasel
+follows you in. They'll do that, if you're a chipmunk; chase you right
+into your own house!
+
+When a pair of grown-up chipmunks start housekeeping for
+themselves--that is to say when they are about ten weeks old--they first
+dig a little tunnel, almost straight down for several feet. Then they
+make a hall that runs along horizontally--like anybody's hall--for a few
+yards. Then, supposing you're Mr. or Mrs. Chipmunk in your new place,
+after it's all done--you go up a slant--a flight of stairs, you might
+say, although, of course, there aren't any stairs--and there you are in
+the family bedroom, the nest.
+
+Not long after the chipmunks stop their outdoor games in the Fall you
+might think it was because they had the mumps; they go around with their
+faces all swelled out in such a funny way. The reason is they have their
+cheeks full of nuts and seeds that they are storing for the Winter. They
+don't put these stores in the nest--for then where would they sleep, the
+nest is so small--but in special cellars that they build near the nest,
+with connecting passages. These cellars, like the nests, are well below
+frost-line, so that Jack can't get the nuts or nip the noses of the
+chipmunks while they are asleep.
+
+[Illustration: PICTURESQUE HOME OF A CONNECTICUT WOODCHUCK
+
+This is the truly artistic residence of a Connecticut woodchuck which I
+found in a rocky knoll by the wayside during a summer vacation at Kent
+and reproduced as well as I could with my fountain-pen. Mr. W. as he
+often does in digging his burrows, had availed himself of the protection
+of the roots of a tree. Here there were two projecting roots, forming a
+curious arch over the doorway, which was tastily decorated by a little
+overhanging vine, on its way up the knoll, along the stones, and up the
+foot of the tree.]
+
+When Winter finally sets in, the chipmunks get very drowsy and go up to
+bed. And there they stay until Spring--one great long nap, except that
+they wake up and stir around occasionally on bright days and if it
+happens to warm up a little.
+
+"Such sleepyheads!" you say. "And what about all those nuts? I should
+think they'd be fine for Winter parties."
+
+They would, I dare say. But you know a body doesn't have much of an
+appetite when he doesn't get any outdoor exercise, and that's why the
+chipmunks only take a few bites now and then, during the Winter. And,
+besides, if they ate up everything in the Winter--you know how folks
+eat at parties--what would they do in the Spring, with no good nuts
+lying around on the ground, as there are in the Fall; and nothing else
+to be had that chipmunks care about? So they keep most of the nuts and
+seeds and things for the great Spring breakfast, and all the other
+meals, until berries are ripe. The berries they eat until the next nut
+harvest comes along.
+
+Until then, you see, they haven't much of anything to do but play around
+and sit in the sun and chat. So why shouldn't they?
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     You will find some most readable things about foxes in Burrough's
+     "Squirrels and Other Fur Bearers"; Comstock's "Pet Book"; Cram's
+     "Little Beasts of Field and Wood"; Wright's "Four-Footed
+     Americans"; Jordan's "Five Tales of Birds and Beasts"; Long's "Ways
+     of Wood Folk"; and Seton's "Wild Animals I Have Known."
+
+     Comstock's "Pet Book" also tells about the prairie-dog; and Seton,
+     in his "Wild Animals I Have Known," tells about "The Prairie Dog
+     and His Kin."
+
+     It's a very common superstition among English country folk that
+     shrews always drop dead if they attempt to cross a road. How do you
+     suppose such a strange idea ever got started? Allen, in his
+     "Nature's Work Shop," reasons it out, and his reasons seem very
+     plausible. It's a fact that their dead bodies are nearly always
+     found in roadways. You'll also find some interesting information
+     about shrews in Johonnott's "Curious Flyers, Creepers and Swimmers"
+     and Wright's "Four-Footed Americans."
+
+     There's some little dispute about squirrels as tree-planters; that
+     is to say as to just how they do it, for there's no question that
+     they _do_ plant oaks and other trees. Thoreau, in his "Walden,"
+     gives the squirrel credit for doing an immense amount of
+     tree-planting, but Ernest Ingersoll, in his article on squirrels in
+     "Wild Neighbors," thinks the squirrel leaves comparatively few
+     acorns or hickory-nuts, and that he doesn't forget where he puts
+     them, as other writers on nature say. "They seem to know precisely
+     the spot," says Mr. Ingersoll, "where each nut is buried, and go
+     directly to it; and I have seen them hundreds of times when the
+     snow was more than a foot deep, wade floundering through it
+     straight to a certain point, dive down, perhaps far out of sight,
+     and in a moment emerge with a nut in their jaws."
+
+     But _how_ the squirrel knows it's there--that's the mystery! Read
+     what Ingersoll says about it. The whole essay is extremely good
+     reading, and will tell you a number of things to watch out for in
+     squirrels that you perhaps never have noticed.
+
+     In Pliny's "Natural History" you will find, among other quaint
+     stories, one to the effect that mountain marmots put away hay in
+     the fall by one animal using itself as a hay-rack--lying on his
+     back with his load clasped close while he is pulled home by the
+     tail. "Animal Arts and Crafts" tells what a simple little thing
+     originated this idea. Many of the peasants of the Alps still
+     believe it.
+
+     Hornaday, in his "Two Years in the Jungle," gives an interesting
+     account of how one of the four-footed knights in armor--the
+     pangolin--does himself up in a ball, and how next to impossible it
+     is to "unlock" him.
+
+     Ingersoll, in discussing the various uses of tails in "Wild
+     Neighbors," tells how a gerboa kangaroo brings home grass for his
+     nest, done up in a sheaf of which his own little tail is the
+     binder.
+
+     An interesting four-footed burrower, when he can't rob a
+     prairie-dog of his hole--or some other body smaller than
+     himself--is the coyote. There is a long talk on the coyote and his
+     ways in "Wild Neighbors." This little book also gives pictures of
+     the different kinds of shrews in the United States, and a lot of
+     detail about them and their little paws and their noses and their
+     tails.
+
+     It's a queer thing how systematic and prompt shrews and moles are
+     in business. You can actually set your watch by them, as you will
+     see in the same book.
+
+     In the article on the gopher in the "Americana" you will find how
+     the gopher got his name. Can you guess, when I tell you it's from a
+     French word meaning "honeycomb"?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+(AUGUST)
+
+    'Till he came unto a streamlet
+    In the middle of the forest
+    To a streamlet still and tranquil
+    That had overflowed its margin,
+    To a dam made by the beavers,
+    To a pond of quiet water,
+    Where knee-deep the trees were standing,
+    Where the water-lilies floated,
+    Where the rushes waved and whispered.
+
+    --_Longfellow: "Hiawatha."_
+
+WATER FARMERS WHO HELP MAKE LAND
+
+
+As we all spend more or less time in the water in August I thought it
+would be a good idea to take as the subject of this chapter the lives of
+the water farmers. Some of these--the crayfish and the turtle, for
+example--you know well, and everybody has heard of the beaver family,
+but they will all bear closer acquaintance. I know, for I've spent a
+good deal of time among them.
+
+
+I. THE TURTLE PEOPLE
+
+Every boy who has tramped along creeks and ponds knows the mud-turtle.
+We ought to call him a tortoise, perhaps, but the name turtle is more
+common. I don't know why; perhaps because it's a little easier to say.
+Strictly speaking, the name "turtle" is applied to the members of the
+family that have flippers, and spend nearly all their time in the
+water; while the tortoises are the ones that have feet and put in much
+of their time on land. (And then, of course, there are the tortoises of
+fables that run races with hares, and so teach us not to be too
+confident of ourselves because we think we are cleverer than some other
+people.)
+
+[Illustration: A HAWKSBILL TURTLE]
+
+The common box-turtle of the United States you'll meet in the woods in
+the evening and early morning, wandering about looking for something to
+eat. He spends practically all his time on land in Summer; and in the
+Winter, all his time in bed. As soon as cold weather comes on he digs a
+hole in the ground, or scoops out a place under some brush, and turns
+in.
+
+But the box-turtle--he's really a tortoise--is what some of his
+relatives would call a "landlubber," no doubt, for many of the tortoises
+who live in the sea rarely leave it; as if they had half a mind to go
+back and be only flipper people, as the ancestors of both the turtles
+and the tortoises must have been; since all life is supposed to have
+begun in the sea.
+
+All the tortoises of temperate regions dig in for the Winter, but one
+Southern member of the family makes his home in a dugout throughout the
+year. He's called the "gopher" turtle. The gopher turtles are natives of
+Florida, and live in pairs in burrows. Other members of the turtle tribe
+do not pair, but there's one time in their lives when both land and
+water turtles dig into the soil and that's when they are laying their
+eggs. The females scoop out hollows with their hind legs, kicking up the
+dirt, first with one leg and then with the other. But they're as careful
+of the dirt they dig out as a beaver is when he digs a canal. They
+scrape it up in a little ridge all around the hole.
+
+What for? Just watch.
+
+
+HOW MOTHER TURTLE "TAMPS" HER NEST
+
+As soon as she has finished laying her eggs, Mother Turtle carefully
+scrapes this dirt back over them and tamps it down, much as a foundryman
+tamps the sand in a mould. You can guess what she uses for a tamper--the
+under side of her shell, raising and lowering herself on her legs like a
+Boy Scout taking his morning setting-up exercises in a Summer camp.
+After that she doesn't pay any more attention to her eggs. She leaves
+the sun to do her hatching for her. Both land and sea turtles--or, more
+properly speaking, the tortoises and the turtles--hatch their young in
+this way. The sea-turtles scramble up out of the water on their
+flippers, much as a seal does in climbing on a rock, and make their way
+back from the shore, great crowds of them, at nesting-time, to some
+stretch of sand, and there lay their eggs. This march of the mother
+turtles always takes place at night. When the young are hatched they dig
+their way up through the sand and make for the sea.
+
+
+II. THE CRAB FAMILY
+
+Another one of the water people who help make land and one that
+everybody knows, is the crayfish. Every small boy is afraid Mr. Crayfish
+will catch his little big toe sooner or later, when he goes swimming;
+although I never heard of a crayfish that did. But they never worry
+about _their_ toes--the crayfish don't. When they lose a whole foot
+even--as they often do--it grows right out again. The science people say
+this is because they belong to a low order in the animal world, but I
+think it would come in right handy for any of us--this way of regrowing
+not toe-nails alone, but toes and all--don't you?
+
+The crayfish, as you may know, love to burrow in the mud, for you are
+always coming across their little mud towers along the margins of the
+brooks. Related to the crayfish are the crabs. Mother Nature seems to
+have been very fond of crabs--she has made them after so many different
+patterns and scattered them all over the world; in the deep sea, along
+the shallows of its shores, and on land. Those you are most apt to meet
+must have more or less business on land, for the shape of their legs
+shows that they are formed for walking rather than swimming. But go
+far out to sea and you'll find crabs with paddles on all four pairs of
+legs, like banks of oars; while others, living on the borders of the
+sea, have paddles only on the last pair.
+
+[Illustration: SOUTH SEA ISLAND AND COCOANUT COLUMBUS
+
+Here we are on an island of the Southern Seas--the home of a colony of
+cocoanut crabs. One of the members of the colony is climbing a tree to
+get a nut. "And who has a better right?" says he. "This tree," he might
+continue, "is the descendant of a nut that some of my ancestors sailed
+upon to this island; for a cocoanut, dropping into the water from a tree
+near some far shore, often carries on it the crab who had started to eat
+it. Then a current of the sea carries the nut and its passenger to some
+other island. Later cocoanut Santa Marias and their Columbuses reach the
+island in the same way, and so it becomes populated with both cocoanuts
+and crabs--which makes it very nice for the crabs!"]
+
+One of the big families of crabs live on land most of the time and make
+burrows in which they live. These have legs specially fitted for
+digging. Like most of the crab family, the land-crab earns its living at
+night and, except in rainy weather, seldom leaves its burrow by day.
+Like small boys, these crabs seem to love to play in the rain. The fact
+is they do this to keep their gills wet; for, although they spend most
+of their time on land, crabs breathe with their gills, like fish; and
+while some of them--as the mountain crab of the West Indies--live quite
+a distance back from the sea, they must have some moisture for their
+gills, and this they get, in part, in their damp cellars--the burrows.
+
+But it's queer, isn't it, what different ways people have of looking at
+things? Take land crabs and turtles, for example. Turtles, when they lay
+their eggs, think the only thing is to get clear away from the water and
+put their eggs in an incubator, as we saw them do a few pages back. The
+land-crabs evidently think just the opposite; for no matter how
+far they may live away from the sea--one, two, even three miles
+sometimes--nothing will do but they must go to the water to lay their
+eggs. In April and May you'll see them swarming down by hundreds and
+thousands. And they'll climb right over you if you don't get out of
+their way!
+
+"This is my busy day and I can't stop for anything," says Mrs. Crab.
+
+Besides the work they do for the soil in grinding and mixing it, the
+crab people, like all the crustaceans, help a lot by adding lime to it,
+and that's one of the very best things you can do to soil, you know.
+They add this lime when they change their clothes; that is, when they
+moult or cast their shells. The shell they take off as if it were indeed
+a dress. They "unbutton" it down the back. Sometimes, in trying to get
+out of the legs of the suit, they leave not only the leg covering but
+the leg itself. That leg is good for the soil, too, of course, and the
+loss of a leg doesn't bother a crab so very much. He just grows a new
+one, that's all!
+
+These shells--particularly the shells of the largest species of
+crabs--not only contain a great deal of lime but carbon and phosphorus,
+also, and these are splendid soil stuff, too. In the smaller kinds of
+crabs--of crustaceans, generally--these shells are mostly chitin, the
+stuff that the coverings of insects is made of.
+
+The crustaceans, by the way, are closely related to the insects. You may
+_suspect_ this by comparing their shapes, but then you'll see there
+isn't any doubt about it when I tell you that in getting born from the
+egg, the crabs and their kin don't come out dressed in their final
+shape, but change after they are born, first into one shape and then
+into another, just as insects do. Each shape, as it comes along, looks
+funnier than the rest; that is, it looks funny to us, but not,
+naturally, to the crabs. It must seem just the thing to them, for they
+always dress the same way and look as solemn about it as a man does when
+he wears a monocle. In fact, they do something almost as funny as
+wearing a monocle. For many of them carry their eyes about, not on the
+end of a cord, to be sure, but on the end of a stick. These "sticks" are
+called foot stalks. And they're not a bad idea either--for a crab. By
+moving them around the crabs can keep much better posted on what is
+going on about them than they could otherwise; particularly as a crab
+always moves sidewise or backward. What good a monocle does, though,
+nobody knows.
+
+
+III. THE STRANGER THAT MADE LONDON LAUGH
+
+But if we can hardly look a crab in the eye and keep a straight face,
+what would we do if we met a duck-billed mole? We'd laugh right out! I'm
+sure of it, for that's what even the men of science did when they saw
+the first one that came to England. This strange foreigner--it came to
+London all the way from Australia--had a body like a mole. But you
+couldn't call it a mole. For one thing, it had a bill like a duck. Yet
+no more could you call it a duck; for, besides having a body like a
+mole, it had a tail like a beaver. Still I'm afraid the beavers wouldn't
+have owned it--hospitable as they are--even if they could have
+overlooked that bill. For--can you believe it?--this duck-billed,
+mole-bodied, beaver-tailed creature lays eggs!
+
+[Illustration: THE ANIMAL X FROM THE ANTIPODES
+
+A mole's body, a duck's bill, a beaver's tail, this strange citizen of
+that land of strange animals, Australia, lays eggs like a bird and
+suckles its young like a pussy-cat! Do you wonder that the wise men of
+London laughed at the idea that there is any such creature--even when
+they were looking right at one?]
+
+Yet the ducks just couldn't take it into their families either, for what
+else do you think it does? It suckles its young, like a pussy-cat! Talk
+about your sensations; it made the hit of the season--this Animal X from
+the Antipodes. The learned men of London town, they looked him up and
+they looked him down, and they came to the same conclusion, at first,
+that the old gentleman did when he saw the dromedary. They said: "They
+_ain't_ no such animal!" (Only, of course, being learned men, they used
+good grammar.)
+
+They really did say that in effect, and you can't blame them; for, as if
+to complete the joke, the first member of the duck-billed mole family to
+move in scientific society came in like a Christmas turkey; in other
+words, he was a stuffed specimen. So the men of science said he wasn't
+_real_ at all; that he was just made up of the parts of _other_ animals.
+But being true men of science, after all, they finally began looking up
+the stranger's record among his neighbors back in Australia, and they
+found there actually are living creatures in that land of strange
+creatures, just like that specimen, and that they live in burrows which
+they dig in the banks of the streams.
+
+[Illustration: COUSIN ECHIDNA
+
+The echidna--you can see one in the New York Zoo--is closely related to
+our duck-billed friend and is also a native of Australia. It uses that
+long, tapering nose and those claws to burrow for the ants on which it
+lives.]
+
+Still the scientists didn't know what to call this paradox of the animal
+kingdom; so they named him just that--paradoxicus, _Ornythoryncus
+paradoxicus_. A little Greek boy, without having to look it up in a
+dictionary, would have told us that "ornythoryncus" means "bird-billed";
+for it's like those Greek picture words that always told their own story
+to the little Greeks. As for "paradox" if you don't know what that
+means, look it up in the dictionary and then look at the _Ornythoryncus
+paradoxicus_, and you'll understand.
+
+
+IV. THE BEAVERS
+
+Of course you wouldn't like to be a duck-billed mole--nobody would, but
+I always thought it would be rather nice to be a beaver. The beaver
+is, in many ways, the most remarkable of all the water people that help
+make the lands that give us bread.
+
+[Illustration: BEAVERS AT WORK AND AT PLAY
+
+Whether he's working because he is more industrious than those beavers
+in the water or because it's recess time with them, the young beaver
+gnawing the tree seems to be having quite as good a time practising his
+profession as the others do in playing about.]
+
+But it is not alone for the amount of work he does that I admire Mr.
+Beaver so much; it is for his intelligent, not to say brilliant, way of
+doing it. Suppose, for instance, you had to build a house out in the
+water, the way our great, great-grandparents, the lake-dwellers, did, to
+protect yourself from enemies and for other reasons. And then suppose
+you didn't have any _tools_; nothing but a pair of paws and a set of
+teeth. Could you do it?
+
+Another thing: The lake-dwellers had plenty of water to build in;
+plenty, but not too much. The beavers don't have this advantage. They
+usually build in the water of flowing streams, and they have to make
+their _own_ lakes. How would you do it; even if you had tools? But
+remember, being a beaver, you've got nothing to use but two honest paws
+and a set of teeth. It was with these Mr. Beaver did it all--with his
+teeth, his paws, and his head; the inside of his head, I mean--his
+brain. Take the matter of water arrangements. He gets the water to lie
+quietly and at just the right depth by building his dam across the
+stream. This dam not only provides him with water of just the right
+depth to protect his front door from enemies and to keep rushing
+torrents from carrying his house away, but the spreading out of the
+original stream bed into a pond helps in gathering the Fall harvest of
+trees, since it brings the trees nearer to the water's edge, and water
+transportation among beavers, as among men, is always cheapest.
+
+Although dams are usually built of trees which the beavers cut down
+themselves, they also use cobblestones where trees are scarce; for Mr.
+Beaver is a very thrifty soul; he doesn't waste material nor time nor
+effort. Many books about beavers say they cut the trees so they will
+fall across the stream, but Mills says, in his book on the beaver,
+written after many years of patient observation, that beavers don't seem
+to care how the tree falls, just so it doesn't fall on _them_! Not but
+what they _could_ cut trees to fall in the water if they thought best;
+for just watch them build a dam and see how clever they are; cleverer,
+possibly, than some of us.
+
+[Illustration: BEAVERS AT WORK ON A DAM
+
+See how many of the features of the building of a beaver dam, as
+described in our story of these wise little people, you can make out in
+this picture.]
+
+Let's see. Say you've got your trees up to where the dam is to be; now
+how are you going to set them in building the dam?
+
+
+SEE IF YOU'RE AS CLEVER AS MR. BEAVER
+
+"Right across the dam," you would say, wouldn't you? That is what most
+people have said when I have asked them that question; for that is the
+way men do it. But remember, if you built the dam as men build dams you
+would have to drive stakes or do something to keep the logs from washing
+away. Years ago, when writers used to theorize a great deal on how
+things were done, instead of getting outdoors and watching patiently to
+see how they actually _were_ done, it was said that Mr. Beaver in
+building his dam did really drive stakes and that he did it with that
+big tail of his. But what Mr. Mills found was that the beaver lays his
+trees lengthwise of the stream. You see why that is, don't you? When the
+trees are laid lengthwise, the water, instead of striking them
+broadside, strikes only the end and so there is less likelihood of their
+being carried away.
+
+Another thing, two things, about the trees in the dam--in fact four:
+
+1. It wouldn't do, you see, to lay the trees broadside to the stream,
+but what position could we give them that would help still further in
+keeping the water from carrying them away?
+
+2. Shall we use trees with the branches still on them or trees trimmed
+down like sticks of cord-wood? (What kind do you see in the picture of
+the beaver dam?)
+
+3. Or shall we use both trimmed and untrimmed trees? If so, why? And
+how?
+
+4. If we use untrimmed trees, which end shall we put up-stream? The butt
+or the tip?
+
+[Illustration: SECTION OF A BEAVER DAM
+
+You can see that there was a sufficient flow of water in the stream from
+which this sketch of a section of a beaver dam was taken; otherwise the
+dam would have been plastered with mud to conserve the supply. The
+longest slope, of course, was up-stream--a fundamental principle in
+beaver bridge engineering.]
+
+In building his dam the beaver uses, for the most part, slender green
+poles trimmed and cut in lengths; but mixed with these are small
+untrimmed trees which he places with the butt end up-stream, and propped
+with mud and sticks so that the up end will be a foot or so higher than
+the down end. In this way, you see, the branches are made to resist the
+push of the waters against the butt end; while, if they were placed the
+other way, the current would have a pulling purchase on the butt end.
+The raising of the ends also lessens the pushing force of the water as
+it doesn't strike the butt of the tree "full on," as it would otherwise
+do. And the branches not only help to hold the trees in place, but,
+together, form a kind of foundation on which to pile and intermix the
+trimmed poles.
+
+The timbers, being cut green, become water-soaked. This makes them
+heavier and so causes them to sink and helps to hold them in place;
+while the branches and twigs of the untrimmed trees form a kind of
+basketwork that catches the sediment and drift of the stream, and so the
+dam lets less and less water through. The upside stream is plastered by
+the beavers with mud in cases where the flow of water in the stream is
+meagre. Otherwise it is left unplastered. You see Mr. Beaver's idea is
+not to make the dam absolutely water-tight, for then it would be running
+over all the time and so be worn away. What he wants is a dam that will
+let the water through slowly and at the same time keep a proper level.
+
+[Illustration: BEAVER HOME WITHOUT TIME LOCK
+
+Here is a beaver home as it looks before the time lock is put on in the
+Fall.]
+
+Mr. Beaver's chief purpose in building these dams seems to be to keep
+his front-door yard full of water. This may look like a funny idea at
+first, but in this, as in other things, Mr. Beaver shows he has a very
+wise head on his shoulders; for one peculiarity of his life is that he
+is obliged to come and go through the cellar door. As he doesn't want
+any of his enemies--the wolf, the coyote, and all that class of
+people--to use this door, he keeps it under water. And in winter-time,
+when he goes out to the wood-pile to get something to eat, the water
+must be deep enough so that the pond doesn't freeze solid to the bottom.
+
+[Illustration: A BEAVER HOME WITH TIME LOCK
+
+Here, as it looks after being made secure against hungry wolves and the
+Winter winds.]
+
+As for those professional highwaymen, the wolves and coyotes, that are
+so much bigger than he is, Mr. Beaver keeps out of their way in Summer,
+when they don't bother much about him, anyway, as he sticks so close to
+the water and is hard to catch. In the Winter, when they get hungry and
+desperate and would break into his house, if they could, he makes it
+practically burglar-proof, by putting on a time lock; a lock that just
+won't open, even to a wolf's sharp claws, until Spring.
+
+And in the simplest way.
+
+Just before Winter sets in Mr. Beaver plasters the outside of his house
+with mud, and the mud freezes as hard as a stone. But sometimes, even
+among the beavers, there are shiftless characters, like that Arkansas
+man who just _wouldn't_ look after his roof. These careless beavers
+don't plaster their roofs. But then, just see what happens! Some hungry
+wolf comes along and breaks through and has a nice fat beaver for
+supper, maybe. And maybe not; for, even in that case, if Mr. Beaver
+wakes up in time, he dives down through the cellar door and into the
+tunnel and out under the ice.
+
+"Aha! You got fooled that time, didn't you? You mean old thing!" (Can't
+you almost hear him say it?)
+
+In putting the mud coating on their houses or dams the beavers carry it
+in their fore paws. Sometimes, in a very steep place, they climb up the
+roof with three feet and hold the mud with one. When they have delivered
+the mud they use these same little paws to pat it down--not their
+trowel-like tails, as one would naturally suppose.
+
+
+THAT MYSTERY ABOUT THE BEAVER'S TAIL
+
+Then what _do_ they do with those tails? Well, for one thing, they
+sometimes use them to carry mud by curling them between their legs and
+holding the mud against their bodies. Perhaps they resort to this way of
+carrying mud where they have such a steep climb up the roof they need
+all four legs to climb with; or it may be just an individual fancy of
+some beavers. For, being really _thinkers_ and not mere machines, acting
+entirely on what is called instinct, different beavers have different
+ways of doing things. The beaver's tail is also very useful in swimming,
+and Mr. Beaver is a great swimmer. You should see him. He swims mostly
+with his hind feet and tail, holding his fore paws against his breast as
+a squirrel does when he's sitting up looking at you. His tail he uses as
+one uses an oar in sculling, turning it slightly on edge as he works it
+back and forth.
+
+But he has two other important uses for this big tail, as we shall now
+see; for the beavers of this colony we are watching, having put up their
+dam and built their big house, are now ready for the Fall harvest that
+is to provide for the long Winter. The beavers are strict vegetarians.
+Their diet consists of the tender bark of young trees and roots dug from
+the bottom and along the banks of the ponds in which they live.
+
+"But, for mercy's sake, where are they going to get the tender bark of
+trees in the dead of Winter, when all the trees are frozen solid and the
+beavers can't get from under the ice anyhow?"
+
+Well, Mr. Beaver has thought out just how to do it and we didn't. That's
+the beauty of being a beaver. What he does is to cut down small trees,
+trim them, divide them into lengths, and then heap them up in a great
+pile at his door, under the water.
+
+By the time they are three years old beavers feel grown-up; as, indeed,
+they are in size, although, like certain other young people I could
+name, they have a great deal yet to learn. At this age they choose their
+mates and either settle down in the home colony or go away somewhere
+else.
+
+School takes up with the beavers in September. All through September and
+October the harvest is gathered and preparations made for the long
+Winter. The baby beavers of the Spring, who by this time are four or
+five months old, take part in the harvesting; at least they play at it.
+They don't do much, but they learn a great deal. Now let's all be little
+beavers for a few minutes and see what we can learn. We are out in the
+harvest-field--the woods--with father, and he's going to cut down a tree
+for the Winter food-pile. Watch him.
+
+He picks out a young tree something less than six inches thick. Then he
+looks up as if he wanted to see what kind of a day it was going to be;
+although the fact is he never bothers his head about the weather. What
+he is really looking up for is to see if the top of the tree he is going
+to chop down is likely to get tangled in the tops of other trees when it
+falls. (All beavers, I should add, don't take this precaution; only the
+older and wiser ones.) After this inspection he either cuts the tree in
+two with his long sharp chisel teeth so that it will fall clear of the
+tangling branches of other trees, or, if he sees he can't prevent this,
+he moves away to another tree.
+
+Just before the tree is ready to fall he thumps the ground several times
+with his tail to warn other beavers working near by. They all scamper
+as fast as their fat bodies and short legs will let them. If they are
+near water, as they usually are--they "plunk" into it. After the tree
+falls the limbs are cut off, the trunk gnawed into sections four to six
+feet long, depending on the size of the trunk, the distance from the
+water, and the number of beavers that are going to help move it.
+Although, as a rule, only one beaver works on a tree in cutting it down,
+they all pitch in and help in getting the sections home; dragging them
+across the ground and into the pond or into one of their wonderful
+canals.
+
+
+THE BEAVERS AND THEIR PANAMA CANALS
+
+The beavers knew all about digging canals long before the days of
+Colonel Goethals. They dug them for much the same reason we dug the
+great Panama Canal, to save time and expense in moving freight and for
+protection from possible enemies. On land the beaver is easy prey for
+wolves and such, but once in the water he can laugh at them. These
+canals not only enable him to haul his wood easily and safely, but are
+just the things to dive into when somebody is after you. Another purpose
+of the canals is to fill ponds where water is getting low; or to make a
+pond where there isn't any at all, as in a dry ravine.
+
+Whether you look at them from the standpoint of their intelligence and
+good habits, or their usefulness, beavers are the most interesting of
+all our little four-legged brothers of field or wood, and it is pleasing
+to know that many States have passed laws to protect them.
+
+[Illustration: SUN BATH AFTER THE SWIM
+
+Boys, after an hour or so in the "ole swimmin' hole," like to take a sun
+bath. That's what these young beavers are doing on a nice grassy spot by
+the pond.]
+
+And besides he is such a good fellow, Mr. Beaver is; peaceable,
+industrious, dependable, and with the best heart in the world! Why, do
+you know what they do--the beavers--when neighbors get burned out by
+forest-fires or their houses broken into by a mean old wolf or coyote or
+anything? Take them right in, children and all!
+
+If you were a little beaver you'd have from two to four twin brothers
+and sisters to start with, and then two to four more for each of the
+remaining two years before you left home to make your own way in the
+world. You'd be born with your eyes open and not like a puppy or kitten.
+And, what do you think, _in less than two weeks_ you could go swimming.
+Mother would be right with you in case anything happened. Then when you
+were tired swimming you'd climb up on top of the house and rest and doze
+in the sun; take your afternoon nap just like any other baby.
+
+[Illustration: LITTLE BEAVERS IN THEIR HOME]
+
+But maybe it wouldn't be your own mamma that would be with you; for lots
+of sad things happen to beaver people, and when one little beaver's
+mother dies another mother beaver will take care of him, and all his
+brothers and sisters besides! Mr. Mills tells in that most interesting
+book of his about how one day a mother beaver was killed by a hunter who
+thought he didn't have anything better to do than kill poor little
+beavers; and the very next evening a lady beaver, who _already_ had four
+babies of her own, travelled a quarter of a mile with them to the house
+of her dead neighbor and stayed there and brought all the little orphans
+up!
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     The crayfish is a thing you've got to take seriously if you want to
+     get the most out of it. Huxley says that a thorough study of a
+     crayfish is almost a whole course in zoology. Think of going to
+     school to a crayfish! But you'd enjoy it, I'm sure. For just
+     look--and these are only a few of the interesting things you will
+     find in Huxley's famous book on "The Crayfish":
+
+     How they swim backward (no doubt you know this already), and how
+     they walk on the bottom of the water.
+
+     Why they seem to know the points of the compass--for they prefer
+     rivers that run north and south.
+
+     Why they are most active toward evening.
+
+     Where they spend the winter.
+
+     Why they eat their old clothes.
+
+     How early in the spring you may expect to find them.
+
+     When they hatch their eggs and how the mother crayfish uses her
+     tail for a nursery.
+
+     In what respect they resemble moths.
+
+     How they chew their meals with their feet and work their jaws like
+     a camel from side to side--only more so!
+
+     How they grow by fits and starts, and what this has to do with the
+     way they change their clothes.
+
+     How you can tell the age of a crayfish. (You don't do it by looking
+     at its teeth. You couldn't see its teeth anyway, because they are
+     in its stomach.)
+
+     And all this in less than the first fifty pages of a book, which
+     has more than 350.
+
+     One of the most famous of the crab family, not only on account of
+     his part in agriculture, but because of his funny ways, is the
+     robber-crab. You should read about the wild life of adventure some
+     of these crabs lead--regular Robinson Crusoes who get wrecked on
+     islands far away from home and build houses there and shift for
+     themselves in many ingenious ways, just as the human Robinson
+     Crusoe did. Kingsley's "Madam How and Lady Why" has some
+     interesting pages about them; and so has Darwin's "Voyage Around
+     the World."
+
+     Of the many things that have been written about beavers the
+     following are among the most interesting: The story of the beaver
+     in "Stories of Adventure," edited by Edward Everett Hale; "The
+     Forest Engineer," by T. W. Higginson, in Johonnott's "Glimpses of
+     the Animal World"; "How the Beaver Builds His House," in "The
+     Animal Story Book," edited by Lang; "The Builders," in Lang's "Ways
+     of Wood Folks"; and "The House in the Water," by Roberts.
+
+     The most interesting book of all on beavers, however, is "The
+     Beaver World," by Mills, referred to in this chapter. I have not
+     told you one-half of the remarkable things you will find about them
+     in this book.
+
+     One of the most curious is about how a beaver sometimes gets his
+     breath in the winter time. He may have to travel quite a distance
+     under the ice, and one good breath has to last him to the end of
+     the journey.
+
+     "But does he hold his breath all this time? How can he?"
+
+     He can't. He just uses the same breath over again. See how he does
+     it. The Mills book tells.
+
+     Look up the muskrat and compare his ways with those of the beaver.
+
+     In the "Country Life Reader" you will find a graphic description of
+     one of the perils of life for the beavers and their cousins the
+     muskrats; namely in attacks by the great horned owl.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: CITY LIFE AMONG THE FLAMINGOES
+
+We don't have to go to Florida to get this bird's-eye view of a flamingo
+city. It is one of the habitat groups in the American Museum of Natural
+History in New York, and reproduces perfectly the architecture and the
+social life of these interesting people.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+(SEPTEMBER)
+
+    On the housetop, one by one
+    Flock the synagogue of swallows
+    Met to vote that Autumn's gone.
+
+    --_Gautier: "Life."_
+
+FARMERS WHO WEAR FEATHERS
+
+
+Sh! Go easy! Pretend you're a horse or a cow.[21] We've gone south with
+the swallows--it's September you see--and those queer birds over there
+are flamingoes. The flamingoes are a shy lot; I don't know why. I can't
+think it's on account of their looks; for there's the kiwi, the
+hornbill, and sakes alive--the puffins! _They_ all have funny noses,
+too, but none of them are particularly shy, and you can walk right up to
+a Papa Puffin almost. Whatever the reason is, the flamingoes are very
+easily frightened and they're particularly suspicious of human beings.
+Yet we've simply got to meet them and have them in this chapter, for
+they are among the most interesting of the feathered workers of the
+soil. They just live in mud; build those tower-like nests out of it,
+walk about in it, and get their meals by scooping up mud and muddy water
+from the marshes where they live, on the borders of lakes and seas. They
+strain out the little creatures wiggling about in these scooped-up
+mouthfuls.
+
+    [21] Observers find that flamingoes can be successfully approached
+    by putting on the skin of a cow or a horse.
+
+
+I. FEATHERED FARMERS WITH QUEER NOSES
+
+"What a funny nose! What happened to it?"
+
+I knew you'd say that. Everybody does. But just watch now and see. That
+flamingo over there, stalking about on his stilt-like legs, sticks his
+long neck down to the muddy water, turns that funny nose upside down
+and----
+
+"Why, of all things, is he going to stand on his head?"
+
+
+WHY FLAMINGOES HAVE SUCH FUNNY NOSES
+
+No, not that. Don't you see, he's getting his dinner? After that crooked
+scoop bill--for that's what it really is, a scoop--is filled, the water
+strains out through ridges along the edge of the bill and what's left is
+his food.
+
+That picture looks as if it had a tremendous lot of flamingoes in it,
+doesn't it? It has. It's quite a town, Flamingoburg is. Although
+flamingoes are so wary about meeting two-legged people without
+feathers--that is, human beings--they're very sociable among themselves
+and there may be a thousand, even two thousand, pair in a single
+flamingo city, such as Doctor Chapman studied in the Bahama Islands some
+years ago.
+
+Their nests are cupped-out hollows in little towers of dried mud raised
+a foot or so to keep high tides from swamping them. They scrape up the
+mud with that shovel-like bill. After the conical-tower nest is made,
+the mud piled up and patted into shape with her bill and feet, Mother
+Flamingo lays one or two eggs--and then she goes to setting. You notice
+there's just one little chick in the nest in the lower left-hand corner
+of the picture, and just one egg in the nest near by.
+
+With such a low stool to sit on you wonder what the mother bird does
+with her long legs. In some pictures in children's nature books of not
+so many years ago you'll find her represented as sitting on the nest
+with her legs hanging down the sides--but you see that couldn't be; the
+nest isn't tall enough. What she really does is to fold her legs under
+her body; just once, of course, at the joint. But they're so long that,
+even when folded, they reach out beyond her tail. While setting, the
+lady birds reach around with their long necks shovelling up things to
+eat and gossiping, more or less, with the neighbors; for the nests, you
+notice, are very close together. Sometimes two of them will reach across
+the narrow alley that separates the residence of Mrs. Flamingo Smith
+from Mrs. Flamingo Jones, take each other playfully by the bill and hold
+together for a while. Maybe this is their way of saying "Good morning,"
+or "How do you do?"
+
+[Illustration: FLAMINGO SOCIETY NOTES FROM THE ZOO
+
+THE TOILETTE
+
+You'd expect a lady wearing so many nice feathers to be particularly
+careful about her dress, wouldn't you?
+
+A LITTLE NAP
+
+Queer notion, sleeping on one leg like that, isn't it? But then
+flamingoes _are_ queer!
+
+A TOUCH OF RHEUMATISM
+
+Of course flamingoes don't go around like that even in zoos. This is the
+artist's joking way of telling that in our northern climate they are
+subject to rheumatism. And the keepers actually do oil their legs.]
+
+You'd hardly think it--with those long legs of theirs--but the
+flamingoes swim beautifully. With their long necks drawn back--the way
+swans do it, you know--they are very graceful, and a flock of them
+floating about is one of the loveliest sights in the world. They look
+like a big, fleecy, pink cloud resting right on the surface of the
+water. You can now find only a few flamingoes in Florida, where there
+used to be so many; but go on south into Central and South America and
+there are thousands of them. They are still fairly numerous in countries
+bordering the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In Persia they are
+called "red geese." And the name isn't so far wrong as you'd think. You
+notice that, unlike those stilt-walkers, the herons, the flamingoes have
+webbed feet. Like geese and ducks, also, they have those rows of
+tooth-like ridges on the edges of their bills. It is these "teeth" that,
+coming together, act as strainers.
+
+But a queer thing about their bills, besides the funny-way they have of
+crooking down all of a sudden, is that the upper bill is smaller and
+fits down into the lower. Stranger still, the birds can raise and lower
+this upper bill like the cover of a coffee-pot.
+
+They can move the under bill a little, too, but not to amount to
+anything; so you see there was even more to the upside-downness of that
+bill than there seemed to be at first. The whole arrangement looks odd
+to us, but it works out beautifully for the birds. When they turn their
+heads upside down they can stir the ooze to various depths, as required,
+by using the upper bill as a ploughshare and setting it at different
+angles.
+
+Although they've borrowed some ideas from both the goose and the heron
+families, the flamingoes are so different from either they are put into
+a family by themselves, the _Phoenicopteridae_. This family name is from
+two Greek words meaning "red-winged." If you want to be formal in
+speaking of or to a goose you must refer to her family as the _Anserinae_
+which is Latin for "geese."
+
+[Illustration: WHERE THE FLAMINGO KEEPS ITS TEETH
+
+While teeth, like those of the Hesperornis, went out of fashion ages
+ago, the flamingoes have substitutes for teeth which answer their
+purposes much better. They have little horny spines on their bills and
+on their tongues. These spines serve as fences to prevent the escape of
+the minute creatures which the flamingo scoops up with its bill. You
+notice the spines on the tongue are pointed backward toward the throat;
+and that's a help--to the flamingo, I mean, for once on that tongue
+there's no turning back.]
+
+
+A LATE BIRD, BUT HE GETS THE WORM
+
+Another of the long-nosed earth workers, as curious in his make-up as
+the flamingoes, is the kiwi of New Zealand. Like the flamingo, the kiwi
+uses his queer bill to get his living out of the soil. You've heard the
+saying "it's the early bird that gets the worm"; but while this is true
+of most birds it doesn't apply to the kiwis. Although they live on
+worms, as does Mr. Early Bird of the proverb, they do their feeding by
+night.
+
+And such a funny thing for a bird to do, the kiwis go about with their
+noses to the ground like a dog smelling after a rat. The reason they do
+this is that their nostrils are situated, not next to their heads, as in
+most birds, but at the end of the bill--and on purpose; for they locate
+their suppers, the worms in the earth, by the sense of smell, although
+most birds have a very poor sense of smell. Just after sunset, you'll
+see the kiwis moving about softly (as if they were afraid of scaring
+away the worms!), and with the tips of their bills against the ground.
+
+"Sniff! Sniff!" (You actually can hear them sniff.)
+
+There, he's found one! His bill is not only long, but bends rather
+easily and that's why, perhaps, he's able to follow up so closely the
+hints he gets from his nose as to the location of worms, for he usually
+brings the worm out whole, and not all pulled apart as the robins do it
+sometimes. He works in soft earth, where most worms are found, and
+generally drives his bill in up to his forehead. If all goes well he
+pulls it right out with the worm at the end; but if there is any
+likelihood of an accident, the kiwi gently moves his head and neck to
+and fro until he has the soil loosened up and so clears the way. Once
+the worm is fairly out of the ground, he throws up his head with a jerk
+and swallows it whole.
+
+Because they roam about so much at night, the kiwis sleep much of the
+day. You'll find them in thickets or in among the forested hills, where
+they make their homes. Sometimes, however, you'll see one standing,
+leaning on his long bill, like a street-idler propping himself up with
+his cane. If you disturb him, he yawns, as if to say:
+
+"Oh, these bores! Why can't they let a fellow alone?"
+
+But don't you go too far and annoy him or he'll get real peevish and
+strike at you with his foot.
+
+Both Mr. and Mrs. Kiwi drill the earth every day--or rather every
+night--in their search for worms, but Lady Kiwi does all the excavating
+when it comes to making the nest. This she does by digging a tunnel,
+generally under the roots of a tree fern. There she lays two eggs and
+then her family cares are practically over for the time being, since it
+is the male kiwi who does most of the setting.
+
+[Illustration: MR. HORNBILL LOCKS THE DOOR
+
+In Africa, Southern Asia, and the East Indies live the Hornbills. After
+the nest is built and the eggs laid in the hollow of some big tree like
+that, Mrs. Hornbill begins to set; and Mr. Hornbill, to protect her from
+enemies, walls up the nest with mud--all but that hole through which she
+puts her bill and gets food from the devoted father and husband.]
+
+Other long-nosed tunnel diggers you must have seen many a time when
+you've been fishing, for they are fishers, too--Mr. and Mrs. Kingfisher.
+Their home is at the end of a tunnel in the banks of the stream where
+they do their fishing.
+
+While we're visiting them and making a study of their household
+arrangements, it's a good thing for us that we're not kingfishers
+ourselves; for if there's anything that makes the kingfishers mad it's
+to have other kingfishers fooling around their place or even coming into
+their front yard. Each pair of kingfishers lays claim to the part of the
+creek in the neighborhood of their nest, as their fishing preserve, and
+woe betide any other kingfisher that trespasses!
+
+Human fishermen and hunters give it out sometimes that kingfishers eat
+big fish that might otherwise be caught with a hook or a seine, but the
+fact is these birds catch only minnows and little shallow-water fish.
+
+In digging the tunnels for their nests the two birds work together, and
+these tunnels are sometimes fifteen feet long. So you see that with
+kingfishers scattered around the world as they are--some 200 species in
+all--they must have done an enormous amount of ploughing in the course
+of time; to say nothing of what they have done in the way of enriching
+the soil with fish-bones, one of the very best of all fertilizers.
+
+The kingfisher's nest wouldn't be at all attractive to some birds--the
+swallows, for example, who are so particular about having feather-beds.
+It has just a hard-earth floor like the cabins of the American pioneers,
+but the little kingfishers are perfectly contented and happy; for their
+meals are very plentiful, fairly regular, and the fish are always fresh.
+
+
+FISHING DAYS AND OTHER DAYS
+
+But some days even the kingfishers don't have fish for dinner. Instead
+they serve crayfish and frogs. This is on cloudy days, or when the wind
+is stiff and the water rough. On such days even the keen eyes of the
+kingfisher can't see a fish or make out exactly where the fish is when
+he does see one. But on clear, quiet days, you should see him fish. He
+often dives from a perch fifty feet or more above the creek and strikes
+the water so hard you'd think it would knock the breath out of him. But
+up he comes with his fish, nearly every time!
+
+Of course he misses occasionally, but just think of seeing a fish that
+far away--under the water, mind you; and not a big fish, but a little
+minnow, only two or three inches long.
+
+
+II. UNDER THE OVEN-BIRD'S FRIENDLY ROOF
+
+Another great little farmer is the oven-bird. We can't afford to miss
+him and his wife for anything; and although we have to go to South
+America to meet them, we'll do it. So here we are! The oven-birds build
+a nest of clay mixed with some hair or grass or real fine little roots.
+This nest, when it's all done--it takes a good while to build it--is so
+big you'd hardly believe it was the home of so small a bird. It's a
+dome-shaped affair, like a Dutch oven. In the United States we have what
+we call an "oven-bird," too--one of the water-thrushes; but as its
+dome-shaped nest is made of grass and leaves and has no clay in it, we
+will not include this bird among the feathered farmers. The oven-bird of
+South America knows how to build its dome of clay without any
+scaffolding, which isn't easy.
+
+
+OVEN-BIRD DOORS AND THE FRIENDLY ROAD
+
+While the big flamingoes are so shy, the little oven-birds don't care
+who sees them--provided they can see _him_ first. This is possibly
+because they want to keep an eye on any suspicious movements; for they
+make it an invariable rule to build so that their front doors will face
+the road. But really I think they do this, not because they are
+suspicious, but because they want to be neighborly and arrange their
+homes so they can sit on their front stoop and watch the crowd go by.
+They not only have their doors where they can see what's going on, but
+they nearly always build near the country road or the village street,
+and in the most conspicuous place they can find, instead of staying off
+by themselves in those vast, lonesome woods of Brazil where they lived
+before man came.
+
+When a nest is to be built the oven-bird picks up the first
+likely-looking root fibre, or a horsehair, or a hair from an old cow's
+tail, carries it to some pond or puddle and, with this binding
+material, works bits of mud into a little ball about the size of a
+filbert. Then he flies with this pellet to the place where the nest is
+going up. With clay balls like this laid down and then worked together,
+the two birds make the floor of their little house. On the outer edge of
+the floor they build up the walls. These walls they gradually incline
+inward, just as the Eskimos build their snow-block huts, until they form
+a dome with a little hole in it. The last little ball they bring goes to
+fill that little hole and then the house is done, so far as the walls
+and roof are concerned. Next, a front door is cut through the wall that
+faces the road.
+
+[Illustration: THE FRIENDLY DOOR THAT FACES THE ROAD
+
+Oven-birds make it a rule to build their adobe homes so that the front
+door will face the road. And they nearly always build near the road or
+the village street. Neighborly little creatures!]
+
+From the front door a partition is built reaching nearly to the back of
+the house, shutting off the front room from the family bedroom. After
+the eggs are laid Papa Oven-bird stays in the front room--or
+thereabouts--while mamma sets in the back room. The object of the little
+partition seems to be to protect mother and the eggs and, when they
+come, the babies from wind and rain. When the four or five baby birds
+arrive both papa and mamma put in most of their time, of course, feeding
+them.
+
+The nests of the oven-birds weigh eight or nine pounds. The work of
+these little feathered farmers and their wives reminds us in more ways
+than one of that of Mrs. Mason-Bee,[22] but they evidently have quite
+different notions about housekeeping; for, although their residences are
+so big, the oven-birds would evidently rather build than clean house,
+while with Mrs. Bee it's just the other way. The nests of the oven-birds
+are so thick and strong they often stand for two or three years in spite
+of the rains; but the birds build a new nest every year, nevertheless.
+
+    [22] Chapter VI.
+
+
+III. THE MOUND-BUILDERS
+
+Another class of birds that have a fancy for big dome-like nests are the
+mound-birds. We find them in Australia, the Philippines, and the islands
+of the South Seas. Their scientific nickname is _Megapoddidae_, the
+"big-footed." It's with their big feet that they pile immense heaps of
+leaves, twigs, and rotten wood over their eggs.
+
+And what for, do you suppose?
+
+To hatch them! This heap of material not only absorbs the heat of the
+sun, but, in decaying, makes heat of its own. These mounds, of course,
+contribute tons and tons of fertilizer to the soil, but what interests
+the birds is that these warm heaps hatch their eggs. It's a kind of an
+incubator system, you see. As it is with many tens of thousands of our
+own little chickens, these days, the baby megapodes are born orphans.
+That heap of dead sticks, leaves, and earth is all the mother they ever
+know. As soon as the mother birds have laid their eggs in the mounds and
+covered them up, they go off gossiping with other lady megapodes, and
+don't bother their heads any more about their babies.
+
+
+WHY LITTLE BIG FOOT NEVER SAYS "MAMMA"
+
+But it really doesn't seem to matter. It's more of a question of
+sentiment than anything else, for the babies get on very well by
+themselves. When the time comes they not only make their own way out of
+the shell, as all birds do, but they work their way up through the
+rubbish-heap and run off at once into the woods to hunt something to
+eat.
+
+It's all right, after all, I suppose; but if _I_ were a little
+mound-builder's baby, I'd rather have a mamma that would stay around and
+go places with me, wouldn't you?
+
+There's one nice thing about these mamma mound-builders, though; they're
+so neighborly and sociable. It's like a regular old-fashioned quilting
+party to see them build a nest. The birds look like turkeys, and one of
+the species is called the "brush turkey," but they are no bigger than an
+ordinary chicken--than a rather small chicken, in fact. When I tell you,
+then, that these mounds of theirs are often six feet high and twelve
+feet across in the widest part, the middle, you can see it takes good
+team-work to put them up.
+
+[Illustration: BRUSH TURKEYS BUILDING THEIR INCUBATORS
+
+It's like an old-fashioned quilting party--the co-operative mound
+building of the brush turkeys. The text tells you about that back kick
+of theirs.]
+
+So a lot of the lady mound-builders get together in woodsy places, where
+there's plenty of leaves and twigs lying around and together build a
+mound. One will run forward a little way, rake up and grasp a handful of
+sticks and leaves--I mean to say a footful--and kick it backward. The
+motion is much like that of an old hen scratching. Then another bird
+gathers a footful; then another, and soon they are all throwing the
+rubbish toward the same pile; all as busy as a sewing-circle,
+but--curiously enough--nobody saying a word! Before the mounds are quite
+done, they all begin laying their eggs in them; as many as forty or
+fifty, before they are through.
+
+Some species frequent scrubby jungles along the sea. These scratch a
+slanting hole in the sandy soil about three feet deep and lay their eggs
+on the bottom, loosely covering up the mouth of the hole with a
+collection of sticks, shells, and seaweed. The natives say these birds,
+before they leave, go carefully over the footprints leading to this
+treasure-house, scratch them out and make tracks leading in various
+directions away from the nest. And all species lay their eggs at night.
+You see why, don't you? They're just that cautious.
+
+
+SUCH AN EGG FROM SUCH A BIRD
+
+But if you should find one of their nests full of brick-red eggs you'd
+never guess who laid them, they're so big! Away back in 1673, an English
+missionary to China who had stopped off at the Philippines, on his way,
+wrote a little book when he got back home about where he had been and
+what he had seen, and he just couldn't get over the wonder of the
+mound-builders. Among other things he says, in one place in his book:
+
+     "There is a very singular bird called Tabon. What I and very many
+     more admired[23] is that being in body no bigger than an ordinary
+     chicken, it lays an egg larger than a goose's."
+
+      [23] "Admire," in those days, meant "to wonder at."
+
+"So," he adds, "the egg is bigger than the bird itself!"
+
+
+IV. THE SWALLOWS
+
+To make the acquaintance of either the mound-builders or those dear
+little oven-birds--_aren't_ they dear?--we must be travellers, of
+course, for with their short wings neither the mound-builders nor the
+oven-birds ever could come all the way up here to see us. But another
+feathered farmer--and, like the oven-bird, a clay-worker and most
+neighborly--everybody knows; the swallow. Like Kim, the swallow is the
+little friend of all the world.
+
+Swallows of one kind and another are found everywhere--almost everywhere
+that people can live; usually where people _do_ live. And if all the
+soil they've helped pulverize and mix--even since the days when the
+swallows built under the eaves and rafters of the ark--was spread out,
+it would easily make another Egypt, I do believe!
+
+But, speaking of the way swallows take to human society, do you know
+where our barn-swallows came from? They were originally cliff-dwellers
+away out West. The early explorers found enormous collections of their
+nests plastered all over the perpendicular cliffs and along the bluffs.
+Just as soon, however, as the country settled up and men put up barns
+these little cliff-dwellers, deserting rocks and bluffs, began building
+their bottle-shaped nests under the eaves. The swallows live on
+insects--including squash-bugs, stink-bugs, shield-bugs, and jumping
+plant-lice; and that's supposed to be one of the reasons for the curious
+fact that they left their ancient family seats--they found so many more
+insects about the barns and the farmer's fields and the gardens and the
+orchards.
+
+
+TINY SOIL MILLS OF THE BABY SWALLOW
+
+Haven't you often watched them and listened to them, diving and
+chattering around the barn in their busy season; that is to say, in the
+spring and summer time? Then the air is full of insects and is fairly
+woven with their darting wings. Some keep busy picking up the insects
+that are always hovering about in a barnyard, while others dash away to
+some near-by marsh or to the meadow or to the creek. Over the
+grain-fields they go, over the meadows and back again straight to the
+nest where downy babies are cheeping for them. The parents feed them,
+stop and chatter a moment, and then off they go. Follow that one down to
+the marsh. See how she flies high, round and round in circles, and then
+swoops for an insect. She missed him! Then she wheels, darts up--darts
+down--to right--to left. There, she's got him! Then off like an arrow to
+the nest. The soft-bodied insects are chosen and chewed up for the
+babies, while the parents eat the tougher ones. And to help digestion
+they give the babies little bits of gravel, although they don't use it
+themselves. So, in grinding up this gravel the baby birds help make soil
+before they are old enough to do any nest-building.
+
+[Illustration: THE SAND MARTIN AND HIS HOME IN THE BANK]
+
+You've noticed, of course, that all the swallows about a barn don't
+build under the eaves. Some build under the rafters inside the barn.
+That isn't just a matter of taste; it's family tradition. The
+eave-builders are descendants of the cliff-swallows, while the birds
+known to bird students as "barn" swallows build under the rafters.
+
+But they don't take to the fine, new modern barns--all spick and
+span--the barn-swallows don't. If there's an old gray barn with doors
+that never shut quite snug, a board off here and there, and several
+panes in the cob-webbed windows broken out----
+
+"Oh, just the thing!" say Mr. and Mrs. Swallow, and they turn their
+backs on the new barn and proceed to build their cute little nests of
+clay among the rafters of that old tumbled-down affair. In their
+preference for the old gray barns, the swallows are like the artists,
+the painters that Mr. Dooley told about. He was talking about artists to
+his friend, Mr. Hennessey:
+
+"I don't mane the kind of painther that paints yer fine new barn," said
+Mr. Dooley. "I mane the kind of painther that makes a pitcher of yer
+_old_ barn and wants to charge ye more'n the barn itself is worth."
+
+
+WHY ARTISTS AND SWALLOWS PREFER OLD BARNS
+
+The reason the artists prefer old barns is that they look better in
+pictures, but the reason the barn-swallow shows the same taste is that,
+with windows that have panes in them and doors that shut tight you'd no
+sooner start to build a nest than, coming back with a pellet of clay, or
+bringing a feather for the little feather-bed, you'd be liable to find
+the door shut and you could no more get in until chore time than you
+could open the time-lock in the First National Bank. And suppose there
+were babies and you'd just _got_ to get back--you see it wouldn't do at
+all!
+
+But both the barn-swallows and the old gray barns will be seen only in
+pictures before long, if things keep on; what with these new barns and
+the cats always trying to catch the few swallows there are left--when
+you're swooping low to catch a squash-bug, say--and those hateful
+sparrows that tear your nest to pieces. And for several years swallows
+were killed by thousands to make ornaments for women's hats until this
+shameful business was stopped by law!
+
+On the Pacific Coast, if you're out there even as early as March, you'll
+see a purplish-bronze swallow, with bronze-green markings. These
+swallows make a specialty of orchard insects and that's why, perhaps,
+they build under the eaves of the farmhouse rather than the barn. But,
+like the rest of the swallow family, they think nothing quite so nice as
+a bed of feathers to raise babies in, and they know as well as the
+cliff-swallows and the barn-swallow that a barnyard is a great place for
+feathers.
+
+And besides, there's a man out there, in one place, that keeps a supply
+of feathers just to give away when the swallows are nesting. Watch him,
+over on the hillside. He takes a little bunch of feathers and throws
+them up into the air from his open hand. A swallow skims by and catches
+one of these feathers before it touches the ground. But soon the word
+passes along:
+
+"Here's that nice man with the feathers!"
+
+And, pretty soon, there are a half-dozen in the game. They flit closer
+and closer to that generous hand, seizing the feathers almost the moment
+they are in the air. Then one, bolder than the rest, snatches a feather
+right from the man's thumb and finger. The little rogue!
+
+By the way, do you know who that man is? It's Mr. W. L. Finley, State
+Ornithologist of Oregon. "Our little brothers of the air," as Olive
+Thorne Miller calls the birds, are getting to be so much appreciated,
+not only as the friends of man, but for their beauty and the usefulness
+of their lives, that both our State and national governments have laws
+to protect them, and such men as Mr. Finley are employed to look after
+their interests.
+
+Of course, he doesn't _have_ to furnish feather-beds for the baby
+swallows--he just does!
+
+[Illustration: OFF FOR THE SOUTH]
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     If you want to get better acquainted with ostriches you should read
+     Olive Thorne Miller's "African Nine Feet High," in "Little Folks in
+     Feathers and Fur." Carpenter deals with the ostrich in his "How the
+     World is Clothed" and in his "Geographic Reader on Africa";
+     Johonnott's "Neighbors with Wings and Fins" gives a chapter to
+     "Giants of Desert and Plain," among which you may be sure he
+     includes the ostrich.
+
+     Allen, in writing about "Some Strange Nurseries" ("Nature's Work
+     Shop"), tells why it is Papa Ostrich has most to do with the
+     hatching of the eggs when the sun is not on the job.
+
+     Lucas, in his "Animals of the Past," speaks of ostriches and
+     crocodiles as the nearest living relatives of--guess what--the
+     dinosaurs! (Yet look at the dinosaur in "The Strange Adventures of
+     a Pebble" and see if you can't make out a good deal of the ostrich
+     and the crocodile in him.)
+
+     But, speaking of Papa Ostrich's parental duties, did you know that
+     it's _Mr._ Puffin, and not _Mrs._ Puffin, who digs the family
+     burrow? Arabella Buckley's "Morals of Science" tells that and many
+     other interesting things about devoted husbands among the birds,
+     including how Papa Nightingale feeds Mamma Nightingale.
+
+     In the "Children's Hour," Volume 7, page 310, you will find an
+     interesting article about the puffins of Iceland.
+
+     "The Romance of Animal Arts and Crafts" tells about one of the
+     feathered clay-workers, the nuthatch of Syria, and why he makes his
+     nest look like a rock. These nuthatches love to build so well that
+     they often make nests that they never use; and they even help put
+     up nests for their neighbors!
+
+     This book also gives interesting details about the hornbill, and
+     how and why he walls up his mate in her nest in the hollow of a
+     tree. Father Hornbill, of course, gets all the meals for Mother
+     Hornbill, while she's setting. She simply _can't_ get out, and you
+     should see him by the time the babies are old enough to leave the
+     nest. He's worn to a shadow!
+
+     Rooks, it seems, do a little digging under certain circumstances.
+     Selous tells about it in his "Bird Life Glimpses." In this book you
+     will find a delightful description of martins building. It almost
+     makes you want to _be_ a martin. It also tells about the work of
+     the sand martins. You will hardly believe how fast they work. The
+     house-martin's nest is more elaborate than the swallow's. This book
+     tells why the house-martins begin work so early in the morning, and
+     why they have to delay their nest-building if the weather is either
+     too wet or too dry.
+
+     White, in his famous "Natural History of Selbourne," tells how
+     worried he was because certain swallows just _would_ build facing
+     southeast and southwest.
+
+     Birds, besides being workers of the soil, are great sowers of
+     seeds. Darwin tells how he reared eighty seedlings from a single
+     little clod on a bird's foot. What do you suppose he did that for?
+     You just look it up in the index to his "Origin of Species."
+
+     Doesn't it seem funny that one of the little farmer birds--a
+     burrower--should go into partnership with a lizard? There is one in
+     New Zealand that does that very thing. He is called the titi. What
+     the titi does for the lizard is to provide him with a home in his
+     burrow, but what do you suppose the lizard does in return to pay
+     for his lodging? Read about it in Ingersoll's "Wit of the Wild," in
+     the chapter on "Animal Partnerships."
+
+     Do you know why the phoebe bird so often uses moss in building her
+     nest? And how the phoebes that make green nests keep them green?
+     And how Mrs. P. puts a stone roof on her house? You will find all
+     about it in "Wit of the Wild."
+
+     The same chapter, "The Phoebe at Home," tells why the phoebe bird
+     took to building under bridges, and why she builds in a carriage
+     shed instead of a barn, as the barn-swallow does.
+
+     "Bird Life," by Chapman, is a guide to the study of our common
+     birds. The beauty about this book is that it has seventy-five
+     full-page plates in the natural colors, with brief descriptions, so
+     that all you have to do is to bring the _mind_ picture of the bird
+     you have seen alongside the picture in the book, and there's the
+     answer! Nobody has written more delightful books on birds than
+     Olive Thorne Miller. "Little Brothers of the Air" is one of them.
+     You couldn't keep your hands off a book with a name like that,
+     could you? Then there is her "Children's Book of Birds," "True Bird
+     Stories," illustrated by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and "Little Folks
+     in Feathers and Fur," which, as you can see, goes outside the bird
+     family. John Burroughs's "Wake Robin" deals not with robins alone,
+     but with birds and bird habits in general.
+
+     But the greatest book about birds--the wonder of the bird and his
+     relations to the whole animal world--is very properly called "The
+     Bird," by C. William Beebe, who is at the head of the bird
+     department of the great New York Zoo. Among other things it tells:
+
+     How Nature practised drawing--so to speak--for years before she
+     could finally make a proper bird. (If you have ever tried to draw a
+     bird from memory and realized what a bad job you made out of it,
+     you will sympathize with her.) How they know that the earliest
+     birds Nature made, as well as being very homely, weren't at all
+     smart; not to be mentioned in the same breath with clever Jim Crow,
+     for example. How "a bird's swaddling clothes and his first
+     full-dress are cut from the same piece," the very words of the
+     book. About certain birds that have one set of wings to play in and
+     a new set for flying, like a child wearing jumpers to save his nice
+     clothes! About the world of interesting things you can discover
+     with the bones of a boiled chicken.
+
+     And so on for nearly five hundred pages, and as many illustrations;
+     the most striking collection of pictures explaining birds that I
+     ever saw.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE END OF A BUSY SEASON
+
+"And there's the corn and the pumpkins and the carrots and the turnips
+and the potatoes in the root cellar and the jelly in the
+jelly-glasses--we helped make them all."]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+(OCTOBER)
+
+     It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of a root acts
+     like the brain of the lower animals.
+
+     --_Darwin._
+
+THE BUSY FINGERS OF THE ROOTS
+
+
+This has been a very busy season for Mr. Root and his family. It always
+is, and you can imagine they're all glad when Fall comes and they can
+lay by for the Winter.
+
+"There's your apple crop, I helped make that," Mr. Root might say. "And
+there's the corn and the wheat in the granary, and the rye and the oats
+and the barley; and the hay in the mow; and the pumpkins and the
+carrots, and the turnips, and the potatoes in the root cellar; and the
+jelly in the jelly-glasses, and the jam, and the preserves--we helped
+make them all.
+
+"And we've been working for you almost since the world began; almost,
+but not quite--for the earliest plants, the Lichens, for example--didn't
+have true roots.
+
+"Yes, and--well, I don't want to say anything--Mr. Lichen has been a
+good neighbor--but he never did amount to much; never could. No plant
+can amount to much without roots. But with roots and a good start a
+plant can do almost anything--raise flowers and fruit and nuts, and help
+grow trees so tall you can hardly see the tops of them. And, it isn't
+alone what we do for the plants we belong to, but for the soil, for
+other plants and roots that come after we're dead and gone. For them we
+even split up rocks, and so start these rocks on their way to becoming
+soil."
+
+
+I. ALL IN THE DAY'S WORK
+
+It's a fact. Roots do split rocks. Hundreds of times I've been in the
+cracks of rocks that were split in that way. I mean right when the
+splitting was going on. This happened oftenest where trees grew on the
+stony flanks of mountains. Seeds of the pines, say, dropped in crevices
+by the wind, sprout in the soil they find there, and then, as these
+shoots grow up into trees, the enlarged roots, in their search for more
+soil, thrust themselves deeper and deeper into the original
+lodging-place, and so split even big rocks. The tap-roots do the
+heaviest part of this pioneer work. After the older and larger roots
+have broken up the rock, the smaller roots and fibres, feeling their
+way about among the stones, enter the smaller openings and by their
+growth divide the rock again and again.
+
+But it's a lot of hard work for little return, so far as these early
+settlers are concerned; just a bare living. All these rock fragments, in
+the course of the years, become soil, but the amount of decay is small
+in the lifetime of the tree that does the breaking.
+
+A root, as you doubtless know, tapers. This enables it to enter a rock
+crevice like a wedge. As it pushes its way in farther and farther it is
+growing bigger and bigger, and it is this steady pressure that breaks
+the rock. Even the tiny root of a bean grows with a force of several
+pounds, and the power exerted by the growth of big roots is something
+tremendous. At Amherst Agricultural College, one time, they harnessed up
+a squash to see how hard it could push by growing. From a force of sixty
+pounds, when it was a mere baby, what do you suppose its push amounted
+to when it had reached full squashhood in October? Nearly 5,000 pounds;
+over two tons!
+
+[Illustration: HOW A LITTLE ROOT SPLIT A GRANITE BLOCK
+
+The little winged seed from which this pine-tree grew was carried by the
+wind one day into a tiny crack in that big granite block. As the treelet
+grew the tap root split the rock, penetrated to the earth below and fed
+the trunk until it became, as you see, a tree 40 feet high and 18 inches
+in diameter!]
+
+But don't think because roots can and do split rocks, if need be, that
+they go about looking for such hard work. On the contrary. In travelling
+through the soil they always choose the easiest route, the softest
+spots. They use their brains as well as their muscles, and what they do
+with these brains is almost unbelievable.
+
+Yet the roots are such modest, retiring folks, always hiding, that it
+was a long time before the wise men--the science people--found out what
+all they do. It took a lot of science people and the wisest--including
+the great Darwin--to get the story, and they haven't got it all yet, as
+you will see. It was Darwin who first thought of having Mr. Root write
+out his autobiography--or part of it--the story of his travels; for he
+does travel, not only forward--as everybody knows--but around and
+around. A regular globe-trotter!
+
+[Illustration: WHY BABY PLANTS BACK INTO THE WORLD
+
+Most plants back into the world out of the seed like that. Why? To
+protect their tender first leaves. Suppose you were taking some very
+valuable thing, easily injured--baby brother, say--through a swinging
+door and you had to use both hands to carry him. You wouldn't open the
+door by pushing that dear, little tender head of his against it, would
+you? You'd open it by backing through.]
+
+Mr. Darwin was a wonderful hand at that sort of thing--getting nature
+people to tell their stories. He was an inventor, like Mr. Edison; only,
+instead of inventing telephones for human beings to talk with, he
+invented ways of talking for nature people. You saw how he fixed it so
+that the earthworms could tell what they knew about geometry and botany.
+Well, in the case of the roots, what did he do one day but take a piece
+of glass, smoke it all over with lampblack--you'd have thought he was
+going to look at an eclipse--and then set it so that Mr. Root could use
+it as a kind of writing-desk. In a hitching, jerky sort of way roots
+turn round and round as they grow forward. In the ground, to be sure, a
+root can't move as freely nor as fast as it did out in the open and over
+this smooth glass, but it does turn, slowly, little by little. The very
+first change in a growing seed is the putting out of a tiny root, and
+from the first this root feels its way along, like one trying to find
+something in a dark room. Thus it searches out the most mellow soil and
+also any little cracks down which it can pass.
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN
+
+The great naturalist.]
+
+"Here's a fine opening for a live young chap," we can imagine one of
+these roots saying when it comes to an empty earthworm's burrow or a
+vacancy left by some other little root that has decayed and gone away.
+Roots always help themselves, when they can, to ready-made openings, and
+it is this round-and-round motion that enables them to find these
+openings.
+
+But even this isn't all. A root not only moves forward and bends
+down--so that it may always keep under cover and away from the
+light--but it has a kind of rocking motion, swinging back and forth,
+like a winding river between its banks, and for a somewhat similar
+reason.
+
+"It's looking for a soft spot!" says the high school boy, "just as the
+river does."
+
+
+NO HIT-OR-MISS METHODS FOR MR. ROOT
+
+Exactly. But not in the sense that this phrase is used in slang. The
+root has certain work to do, and it does it in the quickest and best
+way. It can get food more quickly out of mellow soil than out of hard,
+and so it constantly hunts it up. I mean just that--_hunts it up_. For
+it isn't by aimless rocking back and forth that roots just _happen_ upon
+the mellow places. It's the other way around; it's from a careful
+feeling along for the mellow places that the rocking motion results.
+
+"But how on earth do the roots do this? What makes them do it?"
+
+That's what any live boy would ask, wouldn't he? So you may be sure
+that's what the science people asked, and this is the answer:
+
+The roots, like all parts of the plant--like all parts of boys and girls
+and grown people, for the matter of that--are made up of little cells.
+Well, these cells, first on one side of the root and then the other,
+enlarge, and so pump in an extra flow of sap. Now, as we know, the sap
+contains food for the plant, just as blood contains food for our bodies;
+and more food means more growth. So the side of the root where the cells
+first swell out grows fastest and thus pushes the root over on the
+opposite side. Then the cells on this opposite side swell, and the root
+is turned in the other direction again. So it goes--right and left, up
+and down. And when these two motions--the up and down and right and
+left--are put together, don't you see what you get? The round-and-round
+motion!
+
+Precisely the same thing happened right now when you turned your finger
+round and round to imitate the motion of the root. (I saw you!) The
+muscles that did the work swelled up first on one side and then on the
+other, just as they do when you bend your elbow, when you walk, when you
+breathe, when you laugh.
+
+And more than that: You know how tired you get if you keep using one set
+of muscles all the time--in sawing fire-wood, for example. Yet you can
+play ball by the hour and never think of being tired until it's all
+over; because, for one thing, you are constantly bringing new muscles
+into action as you go to bat, as you strike, as you run bases. It's the
+same way with the roots, it seems. For the theory is that after the
+cells on one side have swelled, they rest; then the cells on the other
+side get to work.
+
+"But what starts the movement?" you may say. "The idea of moving my arms
+and legs starts in my brain."
+
+
+WHERE MR. ROOT KEEPS HIS BRAINS
+
+Just so again. The root has a brain, too, or what answers for a brain.
+And the root's brain, is in its head; at least in the vicinity of its
+nose--that is to say, its tip. It's the tip that first finds out which
+side of the road is best, and passes the word back to the part of the
+root just behind it to bend this way or that. It's also the tip that
+feels the pull of gravity and knows that it's the business of roots to
+keep under cover. And Mr. Root just _will_ have it that way! You can't
+change his mind. Mr. Darwin tried it and he couldn't; although he
+finally changed human people's minds a lot.
+
+[Illustration: WHERE MR. ROOT WEARS HIS CAP
+
+A root wears its cap right where you do--over its brain department; that
+is to say, the tip. It is called the "root cap" and protects the tip
+from injury.]
+
+This is how he tried it on a root. He took a bean with a little root
+that had just started out into the world. He cut off the tip and then
+set the bean so that the root stuck straight up. It continued to grow
+that way for some little time. Finally, however, a new tip had formed.
+Then there was a general waking up, as if the tip said to the rest of
+the root:
+
+"Here, here, this will never do! Where are you going? You must bend
+_down_!"
+
+Anyhow that's what the root proceeded to do. One side seemed to stop
+growing, almost, while the other side grew rapidly and so the bending
+was done.
+
+"Did you ever! But how does the tip send back word?"
+
+"Don't ask me!" says the science man; say all the science men, even to
+this day. "We don't know yet just _how_ it's done. But we're studying
+these things all the time, and we'll know more about it by and by.
+Meanwhile, perhaps you'll tell _us_ why you say 'ouch' and pull your
+finger away when you touch something hot."
+
+"Oh," you reply, "I say 'ouch' because it hurts; and teacher and the
+Physiology say my arm pulls my hand away because my head tells it to."
+
+"Yes, but how does the head make the arm do the pulling? What's the
+connection?" says the science man.
+
+Well, I guess we'll have to tell him we don't know, won't we?
+
+But all the root's brains aren't in the tip, any more than all _our_
+brains are in our heads. Scattered through our bodies, you know, are
+_little_ brains, the ganglia, that control different parts of the body.
+So it is with roots. For instance, a root at a short distance from the
+tip, is sensitive to the touch of hard objects in such a way that it
+bends toward them instead of turning away, as the tip does. The result
+is that when a root comes to a pebble, say, under ground, the sides of
+the root press close up to the sides of the pebble--turn around corners
+sharply, by the shortest route--and so get over the obstruction as soon
+as possible and resume their course in the soil.
+
+[Illustration: BUT THEY COULDN'T CHANGE ITS MIND
+
+Some sprouting seedlings were attached to a disk like that, and when the
+roots started to grow down, the disk was turned to make them point
+upwards. But, no Sir! The roots just _wouldn't_ grow upward. They turned
+downward. Every time!]
+
+And different parts of a plant's root system respond in different ways
+to the pull of gravity, and some don't respond at all. The tap-root, for
+example, which always grows down, has roots growing out from it
+horizontally. They just won't grow any other way, and yet this is also
+supposed to be due to the influence of gravity. Then, from these
+horizontal roots, grow out a third set, and they don't seem to pay any
+attention whatever to gravity. They grow out in all directions--every
+which way--so that if there is a bit to eat anywhere in the neighborhood
+they are reasonably sure to find it. You see it works out all right.
+
+When a plant first begins to peep into the world out of that wonder box
+we call the seed, it's the root, as we know, that does the peeping; it
+comes first. And its first business is to get a firm hold in the soil.
+So a lot of fine hairlike fibres grow right and left and all around and
+take a firm grip. There is an acid in the root that dissolves whatever
+the root touches that has any food in it--including pebbles and old
+bones--and so makes a kind of sticky stuff that hardens. In this way
+these fibrous roots not only get good meals for themselves and the rest
+of the plant, but they hold the plant firmly in the soil, against the
+strain of the winds. They also give the tap-root something to brace its
+back against, as it were, while it pushes down for water, for the
+moisture in the damper portion of the soil beneath.
+
+As you may have noticed, a seed merely lying loose on the ground is
+lifted up by its first little root in its effort to poke its nose into
+the soil. But Nature makes provisions for covering seeds up. They are
+covered by the castings of the earthworms, the dirt thrown out by
+burrowing animals and scratching birds. Some seeds fall into cracks
+where the ground is very dry and others are washed into them by the
+rains; while these as well as seeds lying on the surface are covered by
+the washings of the rain. Then come the roots that grip the soil.
+
+Always growing just back of the tip, are thousands of root-hairs, as
+fine as down. These get food from the soil. They soon disappear from the
+older parts of the root, so that it stops gathering food itself and puts
+in all its time passing along to the stem and leaves the food gathered
+by the finer and younger roots. This is why plants are so apt to wilt if
+you aren't careful when transplanting them; the root-hairs get broken
+off. For the same reason, corn, after it grows tall, is not ploughed
+deeply. The fine roots reach out between the rows and the ploughshare
+would cut them off.
+
+
+II. MR. ROOT'S PRESENCE OF MIND
+
+All these things and more the roots do in their daily work--in the
+ordinary course of business. And it's wonderful enough. Don't you think
+so? But there are even stranger things to tell; things that would almost
+make us believe roots have what in human beings we call "presence of
+mind." That is to say, the faculty of thinking just what to do when
+something happens that one isn't looking for; when the house takes fire,
+for example, or the baby upsets the ink.
+
+[Illustration: THREE SCHOOLS OF STRATEGY]
+
+
+A ROOT'S WAY OF CROSSING A ROAD
+
+Take the case of tree roots crossing a country road for a drink of
+water. They do it just as you or I would, I'll be bound. Just suppose
+you and I were roots of a big tree that wanted to reach the moist bank
+of a stream, and there was a hard road-bed between. We can't go over the
+top, and the road-bed is so hard we can't go straight through on our
+natural level so we'll just stoop down and go under, won't we? That's
+exactly what the roots do. They dip down until they get under the
+hard-packed soil, and then up they come again on the other side and into
+the moist bank they started for.
+
+The roots of each kind of plant or tree have their natural level; that's
+one reason, as we know, why so many different kinds of plants--grass,
+trees, bushes, and things--get on so well together in the fields and
+woods. The tree roots that we have just seen crossing the road only went
+down below their natural level because they had to, as if the tip said:
+
+"This soil is too hard. We can never get through. Bend down! Bend down!"
+
+So the roots bent down until they came to softer soil, then forward, but
+always working up toward their natural level, and so it was at their
+natural level they came out on the other side.
+
+
+A ROOT'S STRANGE ADVENTURE WITH A SHOE
+
+But here's an example of "presence of mind," that nobody has accounted
+for. A good-sized root, working along through the soil, like Little
+Brother Mole, to earn its board and keep, came right up against the sole
+of somebody's old shoe that had got buried in the soil. In the sole were
+a lot of holes where the stitches used to be. The root divided into many
+parts, and many of these smaller roots found their way through the
+stitch holes. Then, coming out on the other side, these little roots got
+together and travelled on, side by side!
+
+[Illustration: HOW THE RAG BABIES TELL THE FORTUNE OF THE SEED CORN
+
+In what is popularly called "the Rag Baby Test" the seed corn is placed
+on squares marked on cloth with numbers corresponding to the numbered
+ears. Then they are rolled up in one of those moistened rags until they
+sprout.]
+
+Isn't that a story for you? But there's no accounting for it. As we have
+seen, the men of science know a little bit about how a root manages to
+turn round and round and away from the light and so on, but what kind of
+machinery or process is it that could tell the root if it would split
+up into little threads it could get through the stitch holes in that old
+boot? You can't imagine; at least, nobody so far has thought how it was
+done. But it's all true. We'll find the story and a lot of other things
+about the ways of roots in one of the books we'll get acquainted with
+when we come to the "Hide and Seek."
+
+[Illustration: (C) _International Harvester Company_
+
+THIS IS THE ANSWER
+
+The seed from Ear No. 12 came out beautifully, didn't it? That from Ear
+No. 13 looks as if they were superstitious in Corn Land; but of course
+it was the fault of the seed and not of the number.]
+
+Here's another example of the same thing; what we have called "presence
+of mind," resourcefulness, invention. This example is even more
+striking, if possible, because, for one thing, it is a case where roots
+still more completely altered their habits to save a tree struggling for
+its life on a stony mountain cliff. Maeterlinck tells about it in his
+picturesque and dramatic style. The subject--the hero, as it were--of
+this story was a laurel-tree growing on some cliff above a chasm at the
+bottom of which ran a mountain torrent.
+
+     "It was easy to see in its twisted and, so to say, writhing trunk,
+     the whole drama of its hard and tenacious life. The young stem had
+     started from a vertical plane, so that its top, instead of rising
+     toward the sky, bent down over the gulf. It was obliged, therefore,
+     notwithstanding the weight of its branches, stubbornly to bend its
+     disconcerted trunk into the form of an elbow close to the rock, and
+     thus, like a swimmer who throws back his head, by means of an
+     incessant will, to hold the heavy leaves straight up into the sky."
+
+This bent arm, in course of time, struggling with wind and storm, grew
+so that it swelled out in knots and cords, like muscles upholding a
+terrific burden. But the strain finally proved too much. The tree began
+to crack at the elbow and decay set in.
+
+     "The leafy dome grew heavier, while a hidden canker gnawed deeper
+     into the tragic arm that supported it in space. Then, obeying I
+     know not what order of instinct, two stout roots, issuing from the
+     trunk at some considerable distance above the elbow, grew out and
+     moored it to the granite wall."
+
+As if the roots, naturally so afraid of light, had heard a frantic call
+for help and, regardless of everything, had come to the rescue.
+
+To be sure, certain roots--the prop-roots of corn-stalks, for instance,
+as you have noticed--habitually reach from above ground down into the
+soil, and serve to brace the tall stem swaying in the winds, but trees
+usually have no such roots and no such habits. Yet, here a tree seems
+suddenly to have learned, somehow, that elsewhere in the land of plants
+this thing is done. But how did it learn it? Did the brownies or the
+gnomes tell it; or was it some of the spirits of the wind that go
+everywhere and see everything? It might have been the same wind sprites
+that carry the seeds of the laurel and the pine so far up the mountain
+flanks. Or it might have been the dryads, those beautiful creatures of
+the wood the Greeks knew so much about.
+
+I tell you there are some mighty queer things going on in the plant
+world, and perhaps Bud was right!
+
+    "Some peoples thinks they ain't no Fairies _now_,
+    No more yet! But they _is_, I bet!"
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     And, what is more, real live fairies have been found right down in
+     the world of roots! The science people call them "Bacteria," but
+     what of that? The thing about a fairy that makes it a fairy is
+     that it is always changing something into something else. Isn't
+     that right? Well, that's exactly what is done by the bacteria on
+     the roots of certain kinds of plants--clover roots, for one; and
+     the roots of beans, peas, peanuts, and alfalfa. These plants belong
+     to the legume family, and if you will look up the word _Legumes_
+     you will find out all about these fairy factories on the roots.
+
+     Among other things you'll learn how small these fairies are. Why,
+     100,000 of the bacteria that live on clover roots, marching single
+     file, wouldn't much more than reach across this typed page.[24] And
+     in their little "villages" on one system of clover roots there are
+     so many that all of them put together would make a city as big as
+     London or New York; if the bacteria were as big as people, I mean.
+
+       [24] By the way, the funny thing is that, while the bacteria that
+       live on roots of the legumes are plants and not animals, most of
+       them _do_ move about.
+
+     Of course you have to take a microscope to see them--a very
+     powerful microscope--and even then some kinds of bacteria you can't
+     see until you put colored clothes on them. (Every high school boy
+     who has worked in the "lab" knows how this is done.)
+
+     And when you finally see them, a strange thing happens. You've
+     hardly got your eye on a little Mr. Bacteria before he's two!
+
+     "What's this! What's this!" you say. "Am I seeing double?"
+
+     You look again and he's _four_! But don't be alarmed, you aren't
+     seeing double; it's just the little Mr. Bacterias multiplying by
+     division. How they multiply by division is one of the interesting
+     things you can learn by looking them up.
+
+     But it's a good thing that the bacteria people in the little
+     nitrogen factories on the clover roots can get more farm-hands in
+     this way, for they have a lot to do, and their work is one of the
+     most interesting things that goes on about the place.
+
+     The article in the "Country Life Reader" on "The Smallest Plant on
+     the Farm" will tell you how important these nitrogen farmers are.
+
+     You would hardly believe how great their work is, they're so quiet
+     about it. Do you know what a human nitrogen factory is like? Well,
+     for one thing, it's the _noisiest_ place in the world. Men, as do
+     the bacteria, capture the nitrogen out of the air, but they do it
+     by keeping up continual thunder and rain storms in big barrels.
+     You will find one of these factories described in an article in
+     _St. Nicholas_, Volume 45, page 1137.
+
+     But what a fuss these human factories make! Why, in growing-time,
+     out in the clover field, where the loudest sound you hear is the
+     drone of the bumblebee among the blossoms, the little bacteria
+     people down among the roots are making nitrogen so much cheaper
+     than the big noisy factories that it only costs the farmer about
+     one-fifth as much as the storm-barrel nitrogen. And yet, of course,
+     it often pays to buy the artificial nitrogen, too.
+
+     There are many more striking things about the habits of roots than
+     I have had room to tell about here, which you will find in such
+     books as Elliot's "Romance of Plant Life," Coulter's "Plant
+     Studies," Coulter's "First Book of Botany," Allen's "Story of the
+     Plants," Chase's "Buds, Stems and Roots," Atkinson's "First Studies
+     of Plant Life," Darwin's "Power of Movement in Plants," France's
+     "Germs of Mind in Plants," Gray's "How Plants Behave," Carpenter's
+     "Vegetable Physiology," Detmer's "Plant Physiology," and Parsons's
+     "Plants and Their Children."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THANKSGIVING DINNER OF THE DORMICE
+
+They don't sit at the dinner table like that, to be sure, but along in
+the Fall and up to nearly the time of our Thanksgiving dinners, the
+dormice eat unusually heavy meals and put fat on their little bones to
+help them through the long, cold, and barren months of winter.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+(NOVEMBER)
+
+    All-cheering plenty, with her flowing horn
+    Led yellow Autumn, wreathed with nodding corn.
+
+    --_Burns: "Brigs of Ayr."_
+
+      There's silence in the harvest field,
+      And blackness in the mountain glen,
+    And clouds that will not pass away
+    From the hill tops for many a day;
+      And stillness round the homes of men.
+
+    --_Mary Howitt: "Winter."_
+
+THE AUTUMN STORES AND THE LONG WINTER NIGHT
+
+
+When the caveman was still living from hand to mouth; before he had even
+got as far as his first crooked stick for a plough, and when Mrs. Cave
+couldn't have canned a bean or a berry to save her life, even if she had
+had the cans, a certain little farmer already knew how to get root
+crops in the Fall and clean them and cut them and put them away in his
+little barn under the ground for Winter use.
+
+Several of these forehanded folk we have already met--the beaver and the
+chipmunk, among others--but since we are now at the end of the harvest
+year I thought we might spend this evening--the last but one, I am sorry
+to say, that we shall be together--in a little chat about these thrifty
+brothers of the wild, and how some of them are going to spend the long
+Winter that begins in the Autumn and lasts until Spring.
+
+
+I. LITTLE GRANARIES UNDER THE GROUND
+
+I was going to begin by saying that one of the most _fore_-handed of
+them all has _six_ feet, but as that would be almost as bad as a pun, I
+decided not to. You would have known, of course, that by people with six
+feet I meant the insects.
+
+
+ANTS THAT THRESH AND STORE
+
+Among the six-legged farmers, you may be sure, there have always been
+many who took thought for the morrow--the ants, for example. One can
+believe almost anything of ants. If that sluggard had gone to the ant,
+as wise King Solomon told him to, and learned all their ways, he would
+have found, among other things, how one species harvests the seeds of
+the plant known as the "shepherd's-purse," by twisting off the pods with
+its hind legs. These members of the ant family store grains of oats,
+nettle, and other plants. They pick up all the seeds they can find that
+the Autumn winds have already threshed for them, but they're not the
+least like that lazy man who wouldn't have the corn that was offered by
+kind neighbors to keep him from starving, because it wasn't shelled. If
+they don't find enough seeds on the ground when it comes time to think
+about the Winter stores they climb up and gather in the seeds
+themselves. On the shepherd's-purse, for example, the ant climbs up,
+selects a well-filled pod which is not sufficiently dried to have had
+its seeds threshed out by the winds, takes the pod in its little jaws
+and then--watch him--turns round and round on his hind legs until he
+twists it off! Then with it he carefully moves down the stem, like a
+baggageman carrying a big trunk from the third apartment; only the
+baggageman carries the trunk in front of him or on his shoulders, while
+the ant backs his way down. Sometimes two ants work together, one
+twisting, the other cutting away the fibres with its teeth. Sometimes
+they drop the pods to companions waiting below, and these other helpers
+never run off with it, but carry it to the common granary; for ants
+always play fair.
+
+[Illustration: HOW THE ANTS WORK IN DIGGING OUT THEIR GRANARIES]
+
+And they have granaries, these ant farmers--hundreds of them, made just
+for that, each about the size of father's watch.
+
+[Illustration: THE INSIDE OF THE GRANARY
+
+Underneath the dome of the ant house you see in the previous picture,
+are flat chambers like these, connected by galleries, in which the grain
+is stored. One is prepared not to be surprised at anything about ants,
+but listen to this: The Agricultural Ants not only gather and store this
+grain, but they actually plant and cultivate it. They sow it before the
+wet season in the Fall, keep it weeded, and gather it in June of the
+following year. Seems incredible, doesn't it? But I'm only telling you
+what McCook, an ant student, recognized everywhere as a reliable
+observer, saw these six-footed Texas farmers actually do.]
+
+Now here's a thing; you stow away a lot of seeds in a little hill where,
+of course, there's moisture, and what's going to happen? Those seeds are
+going to sprout and grow and spoil, and this, of course, destroys their
+value as food. Then what are you going to do? Of course, a human farmer
+would put his grains in a dry granary where they couldn't sprout, but
+you see the ants haven't any granary of that sort; nothing but those
+little holes in the moist ground. Just what they do to these seeds has
+not been discovered. They do something that keeps them from either
+spoiling or sprouting. But, when they get ready for these seeds to grow,
+they let them grow; not so that they can raise a crop, but for the same
+reason that the Chinaman lets the barley sprout that he uses in making
+chop-suey; so that it will be nice and soft to eat. This growing digests
+the starch in the seeds into sugar. When the sprouts have grown as far
+as the ants want them to, they gnaw the stalk a little, and cut off the
+roots with their mandibles. When this sugar-making has gone on long
+enough the ants bring all the plants out into the sun and let them lie
+there until they are nice and dry. Then they put them in their barns,
+and as long as Winter lasts they live on this sweet flour, grinding it
+in their mouth mills as they go along.
+
+Why, it's like living on cookies, almost! Only the ants have been used
+to this steady diet of sweets for ages, and it doesn't hurt _their_
+little stomachs as it would ours.
+
+[Illustration: 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 antennae.]
+
+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."
+
+    [25] Rev. H. S. McCook: "The Agricultural Ant of Texas."
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+HOW THE ANTS RAISE MUSHROOMS
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.]
+
+
+MR. HAMSTER'S THRESHING HARVESTER
+
+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:
+
+    "The good old rule, the simple plan
+    That they shall take who have the power,
+    And they shall hold who can."
+
+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.
+
+
+II. MR. VOLE AND HIS ROOT CELLAR
+
+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.
+
+    [26] Strictly speaking, I presume this was the same Apollo who
+    carried the sun about in his chariot, and "Destroyer of Mice" was
+    one of his many nicknames.
+
+
+HOW DID THESE FARMERS LEARN TO STORE?
+
+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.
+
+
+III. THE LONG WINTER SLEEP
+
+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'S THE COLD THAT MAKES ONE DROWSY
+
+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 larvae in holes and crannies of the soil or beneath leaves of
+ground plants and old logs.
+
+[Illustration: LITTLE HEDGEHOG IN MAN'S HAND]
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: A HEDGEHOG AND HER BABIES]
+
+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.
+
+
+IV. MR. GROUND-HOG AND HIS SHADOW
+
+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.
+
+
+HOW WEATHER AVERAGES UP
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: _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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "IT MUST BE BRER BEAR!"]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+(DECEMBER)
+
+    While man exclaims "See all things for my use!"
+    "See man for mine!" replies the pampered goose.
+
+    --_Pope: "Essay on Man."_
+
+THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE DUST
+
+
+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!"
+
+
+I. THE LORD OF CREATION
+
+"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.
+
+
+BRER BEAR GIVES MR. MAN A PIECE OF HIS MIND
+
+"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."
+
+[Illustration: 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]
+
+    [27] Here imagine Brer Bear putting on his specs and reading from
+    the book.
+
+     "'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.'"
+
+
+HOW MAN HELPED HIMSELF TO OTHER PEOPLE'S IDEAS
+
+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.
+
+    [28] That's the name of the Englishman I've just been quoting. He's
+    a famous artist, but, like most cultivated Englishmen, can also
+    write a good book when he feels like it.
+
+[Illustration: _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]
+
+       [29] Ingersoll: "Wild Neighbors."
+
+
+II. THE SCHOOL OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS
+
+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.
+
+
+STORY OF THE LONDON BANKER AND HIS ANTS
+
+[Illustration: SIR JOHN LUBBOCK
+
+The great London banker who carried ants in his pocket.]
+
+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."
+
+
+WHY MAN KILLS AND CALLS IT "SPORT"
+
+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.
+
+    "Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave
+    When the night fell o'er the plain
+    And the moon hung red o'er the river bed,
+    He mumbled the bones of the slain.
+
+    Loud he howled through the moonlit wastes,
+    Loud answered his kith and kin;
+    From west and east to the crimson feast
+    The clan came trooping in.
+    O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof,
+    They fought and clawed and tore."[30]
+
+    [30] Adapted from Langdon Smith.
+
+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.
+
+    "Oh, for boyhood's painless play,
+    Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
+    Health that mocks the doctor's rules,
+    Knowledge never learned of schools:
+    Of the wild bee's morning chase,
+    Of the wild flower's time and place;
+    Flight of fowl, and habitude
+    Of the tenants of the wood;
+    How the tortoise bears his shell,
+    How the woodchuck digs his cell
+    And the ground-mole sinks his well.
+
+    Of the black wasp's cunning way,
+    Mason of his walls of clay
+    And the architectural plans
+    Of gray hornet artisans.
+    For, eschewing books and tasks,
+    Nature answers all he asks."[31]
+
+    [31] Whittier's "Barefoot Boy."
+
+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]
+
+       [32] "Pictured Knowledge."
+
+[Illustration: 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!
+
+
+III. THE WORLD BROTHERHOOD
+
+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.
+
+
+HOW THE LICHENS AND THE VOLCANOES WORK TOGETHER
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: _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 CO_{2}, 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.
+
+    [33] "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble."
+
+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:
+
+    "Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
+    Thou art not so unkind
+    As man's ingratitude.
+
+    Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
+    Thou dost not bite so nigh
+    As benefits forgot."[34]
+
+    [34] "As You Like It."
+
+[Illustration:
+
+    _Courtesy of the Northern Pacific Railway_
+
+ASTER GROWING IN VOLCANIC ASH ON MT. RANIER]
+
+
+THE GREAT PLOUGHS OF THE ICE AGES
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: HOW THE MOUNTAINS FEED THE PLAINS
+
+"The elevations of the earth's surface provide for it a perpetual
+renovation. The higher mountains suffer their summits to be broken into
+fragments and to be cast down in sheets of massy rock, full of every
+substance necessary for the nourishment of plants, and each filtering
+thread of summer rain is bearing its own appointed burden of earth to be
+thrown down on the dingles below."]
+
+The glaciers, moving over thousands of miles and often meeting and
+dumping their loads together on vast fields, did the very same thing for
+everybody that England does for herself to-day in bringing different
+kinds of fertilizers from all over the world to enrich her farms. I'm
+very glad to speak of this because the author of the story of the pebble
+may have left a bad impression of the glaciers--"The Old Men of the
+Mountain"--as farmers, by what he said about their carrying off the
+original farm lands of New England, and leaving a lot of pebbles and
+boulders instead. While these pebbles have not produced what you would
+call a brilliant performer among soils, they have made a good, steady
+soil that in New England has helped greatly in growing farm boys into
+famous men, while the pebbles of Wisconsin have been of immense service
+to her famous cows. In the counties in Wisconsin where there are plenty
+of pebbles scattered through the soil, the production of cheese and
+butter is something like 50 per cent greater than it is in regions where
+there are comparatively few pebbles.[35]
+
+    [35] Martin: "Physiography of Wisconsin."
+
+[Illustration: _From Tarr and Martin's "College Physiography." By
+permission of the Macmillan Company_
+
+GOOD CROPS FROM NEW ENGLAND'S STONY FIELDS
+
+While the stones, big and little, with which the fields of New England
+are so richly supplied have not produced what you would call a brilliant
+performer among soils, they have made a good steady soil that can turn
+its hand to almost anything, and that has helped greatly in growing farm
+boys into famous men. In building those stone fences, for example, the
+boys learned that it always pays to do your work well. A hundred years
+is merely the tick of a watch in the life of a fence like that!]
+
+The soils of New England are like the New Englander himself, they can
+turn their hands to almost anything; raise any kind of crop suited to
+the climate, while richer soils are often not so versatile. The reason
+is that these pebbles were originally gathered by the glaciers from
+widely separated river-beds, and so contain all varieties of rock with
+every kind of plant food in them. It takes a long, long time to make
+soil out of bed-rock, but in the case of soils in which there are a
+great many pebbles it is different; and you can see why. On a great mass
+of rock there is comparatively little surface for the air and other
+pioneer soil-makers to get at, and so decay is slow; while the same
+amount of rock broken up into pebbles presents a great deal of surface
+for decay.
+
+If you will examine with a glass--an ordinary hand-glass will do--one of
+these decaying pebbles lying embedded in the grass you can trace on it a
+number of wrinkly lines--sometimes even a network. These are the marks,
+the "finger-prints," of little roots. Little roots, as we have seen, are
+very wise. They always know what they are about, and the fact that they
+cling to the pebbles in this way means that they are getting food out of
+them.
+
+And that's right where the cows of Wisconsin come in. The rootlets of
+the grasses get a steady supply of food from the decaying surfaces of
+these pebbles scattered through the pastures, and then pass it on to the
+cows.
+
+[Illustration: HOW PEBBLES HELP FEED THE COWS
+
+You'll think I'm joking at first, but it's the truth: _Pebbles are good
+for cows._ Otherwise how are you going to account for the fact that in
+the counties in Wisconsin where there are plenty of pebbles the
+production of cheese and butter is something like 50 per cent greater
+than it is in regions where there are comparatively few pebbles?
+Examine, with a hand-glass, the "finger prints" of the little roots on a
+decaying pebble, and see if you can't guess why. Then read the
+explanation in this chapter.]
+
+
+TEAMWORK BETWEEN MOUNTAINS AND PEBBLES
+
+But now, going from little things to big things again, notice how the
+mountains and the pebbles are linked together in this chain of service.
+The mountains, too, continually feed the plains. Ruskin, in speaking of
+this great service, says:
+
+     "The elevations of the earth's surface provide for it a perpetual
+     renovation. The higher mountains suffer their summits to be broken
+     into fragments, and to be cast down in sheets of massy rock, full
+     of every substance necessary for the nourishment of plants. These
+     fallen fragments are again broken by frost and ground by torrents
+     into various conditions of sand and clay--materials which are
+     distributed perpetually by the streams farther and farther from the
+     mountain's base. Every shower which swells the rivulets enables
+     their waters to carry certain portions of earth into new positions,
+     and exposes new banks of ground to be mined in their turn. The
+     turbid foaming of the angry water--the tearing down of bank and
+     rock along the flanks of its fury--these are no disturbances of the
+     kind course of nature; they are beneficent operations of laws
+     necessary to the existence of man, and to the beauty of the earth;
+     ... and each filtering thread of summer rain which trickles through
+     the short turf of the uplands is bearing its own appointed burden
+     of earth to be thrown down on some new natural garden in the
+     dingles below."
+
+[Illustration: THE MILL OF THE EARTHWORM AND THE EARTH MILLS OF THE SEA
+
+"From the gizzard mills of the earthworm to the great earth mills of the
+sea, all are--most evidently--parts of one great system." (In the
+picture on the left an earthworm has been laid open to show its grinding
+apparatus.)]
+
+So we find a wonderful variety of things working together in making and
+feeding the soil that feeds the world: mountains and pebbles, volcanoes
+and lichens, the breath of the living and the bones of the dead; the
+sun, the winds, the sea, the rains; the farmers with four feet, the
+farmers with six feet; the swallow building her nest under the eaves,
+the earthworms burrowing under our feet, each bent on its own affairs,
+to be sure, but at the same time each helping to carry on the great
+business of the universe. From the little gizzard mills of the earthworm
+to the great earth mills of the sea, that renew the soil for the ages
+yet to come, all are--most evidently--parts of one great system; are
+together helping to work out great purposes in the advance of men and
+things; purposes which require that
+
+     "While the earth remaineth, summer and winter, seed-time and
+     harvest, shall not cease."
+
+
+HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
+
+     As I said, most people not only think that they're smarter than
+     their fellow animals, but when you point out to them how clever
+     some of these other animals are, they say: "Oh, _that's_ just
+     instinct!" As if animals don't think and learn by experience, and
+     all, just as we do! You look up "instinct" in the encyclopaedia, and
+     you'll see. Then read Long's "Wood Folk at School."
+
+     There's really a lot more fun in shooting animals with a camera
+     than with a shotgun or a rifle. Did you ever try it? "Hunting with
+     a Camera" in "The Scientific American Boy at School," by Bond, will
+     tell you how to get the best results. Other good pointers on animal
+     photography will be found in Verrill's "Boy Collector's Hand Book"
+     ("Photographing Wild Things") and in "On the Trail," by A. B. and
+     Lina Beard.
+
+     And if you ever feel like killing a bird "just for fun," read in
+     the diary of "Opal" about the farmer boy who shot the little girl's
+     pet crow; it was "only a crow," he said, and he wanted to see if he
+     could hit it. That will cure you, I think. The diary of "Opal"
+     reads like a fairy-tale, but it's all true, and although it was
+     written--every word of it--by a little girl of seven, it is one of
+     the most remarkable books that anybody ever wrote. The crow's name,
+     by the way, was "Lars Porsina of Clusium." The little girl used to
+     give her pets names like that.
+
+     Don't forget what the great naturalist, Agassiz, said about the
+     pencil being "the best eye"; that is to say, you can get a more
+     accurate knowledge of things and come nearer to seeing them as they
+     really are, by drawing them. Drawing, in the best schools, is a
+     part of Nature Study, and when you get so that you can draw fairly
+     well--as everybody can with practice--you will find there is even
+     more of a thrill in thus _creating_ forms--out of nothing, as you
+     might say--than there is in taking photographs. The pencil is a
+     magician's wand! As an example and inspiration for taking your
+     pencil and sketch-book into the fields, get "Eye Spy," by Gibson,
+     and, of course, Seton's animal books. I do believe Seton drew his
+     pictures with those simple, expressive outlines so that young folks
+     could redraw them. The difference between redrawing a drawing and
+     simply looking at it, is a lot like the difference between
+     _reading_ a book and merely glancing at the print.
+
+     You are sure to be interested in Sir John Lubbock's book on "Ants,
+     Bees and Wasps," and you will find a world of interesting things
+     about the earlier animal days of man in his "Origin of
+     Civilization" and "Pre-Historic Times."
+
+     And who do you suppose had most to do with teaching men they were
+     really brothers, and so bringing them up to the civilized life we
+     know to-day? Mother! (See Drummond's "Ascent of Man," or Chapter
+     XII of "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble," where the whole
+     marvellous story of evolution is told in simple form.)
+
+     If Nature Study proves half as delightful and profitable to you as
+     I am sure it will, the following list of books will be very useful
+     in building up your library on the subject, and in selecting books
+     from the public library:
+
+     "Among the Farmyard People," by Clara D. Pierson, deals with
+     various things you probably never noticed about chickens and pigs,
+     and other domestic animals. "Among the Meadow People," by the same
+     author, tells about birds and insects. You can see what her "Among
+     the Pond People" tells about--tadpoles, frogs, and so on. Really,
+     it's a perfect fairy-land, an old pond is! "Among the Moths and
+     Butterflies," by Julia P. Ballard, is about fairies, too, as the
+     title shows.
+
+     For children of the seventh to eighth grades, and up, Hornaday's
+     "American Natural History" will be a delight, and it has loads of
+     pictures which, as in all well-illustrated scientific books, are as
+     valuable as the text. You know who Hornaday is, don't you? He is
+     the man at the head of the great Zoo in New York City.
+
+     Margaret W. Morley's "The Bee People" is worthy of its subject, and
+     that's about the highest praise you could give to a book about
+     bees, I think. Then don't forget, when you are in the library, to
+     look up her "Grasshopper Land." The grasshopper book also treats of
+     the grasshopper's cousins, which include the crickets and the
+     katydids; yes, and the "walking sticks"; and the "praying mantis."
+     (Did you know that whether you spell this weird little creature's
+     first name, "praying," with an "e" or an "a" you'd be correct?)
+
+     Every boy and girl, of course, is supposed to know about Ernest
+     Thompson Seton's books, but for fear some of them don't, I'll
+     mention a few that it simply wouldn't do to miss. "Animal Heroes"
+     gives the history of a cat, a dog, a pigeon, a lynx, two wolves and
+     a reindeer; "Krag and Johnny Bear" is made up from his larger book,
+     "Lives of the Hunted"; "Lobo, Rag and Vixen" is from his "Wild
+     Animals I Have Known," and "The Trail of the Sandhill Stag."
+
+     John Burroughs is very different from Seton and Long, but the older
+     you get the better you will like him. His is one of the great names
+     in the study of Nature's pages at first hand and, as literature,
+     ranks with the work of Thoreau. Get his "Birds, Bees and Other
+     Papers," "Squirrels and Other Fur-bearers."
+
+     Darwin, one of the greatest men in the whole history of
+     science--the man whose name is most prominently identified with the
+     greatest discovery in science, the principle of evolution--how do
+     you suppose he started out? Just by looking around! Read about it
+     in "What Mr. Darwin Saw in His Voyage around the World."
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+(For numerous practical suggestions as to the use of an index the reader
+is referred to the preface to the index in the author's "Strange
+Adventures of a Pebble.")
+
+  Africa, one country where the Hornbills live, 169
+
+  Ants, their interesting habits in relation to the history of the soil, 94;
+    ants that thresh and store, 205, 213;
+    how they clean up after the day's work, 208
+
+  Aphids, how they supply the ants with honey, 99
+
+  Armadillo, a four-footed farmer who wears armor;
+    how fast he can dig, 120;
+    the funny gimlet nose that helps him travel so fast under the ground, 121
+
+  Asia, one of the countries where the Hornbills live, 169;
+    home of a farmer who stores grain for the winter, 212
+
+  Australia, home of that animal paradox, the Duck-billed Mole, 144;
+    and of birds that hatch their babies with an incubator, 174
+
+
+  Bears, how they go into winter quarters, 216, 219
+
+  Beavers, their work and their wisdom, 148
+
+  Bees. (See Mason Bee and Bumblebee.)
+
+  Beetle, Sacred (Tumble Bug), sinful tactics of, 92
+
+  Birds, their ancestors among the ancient monsters, 24;
+    service of the Moas in ploughing and in grinding up rock, 28;
+    other farmers who wear feathers, 162
+
+  Bumblebees, their homes under the ground, 104
+
+
+  Caveman, what he learned from his fellow animals, 228
+
+  Central America, a good place to look for Flamingoes, 166
+
+  Chipmunks, work and play in Chipmunkville, 131;
+    why they have large feet for such little people, 132;
+    inside the Chipmunk's home, 132;
+    why they have several front doors, 133;
+    how they spend the winter, 218
+
+  Clouds, how dust helps make them, 56;
+    and shape them, 57
+
+  Colorado, once the home of prehistoric monsters, 27
+
+  Corn, how the "rag babies" tell the fortune of the seed, 199
+
+  Crabs, water farmers who help make land, 140
+
+  Crayfish, their habits and their service in helping get land ready for
+    the farmer, 140
+
+  Crustaceans, their relation to insects, 143
+
+  Cuvier, Baron, the famous paleontologist, and his adventure with a
+    "monster," 34
+
+
+  Dandelions, flying machines of, 51
+
+  Darwin, Charles, on the importance of earthworms in the history of human
+      civilization, 75;
+    what he said about the intelligence of roots and why he said it (the
+      whole chapter is about that), 186;
+    how he taught roots to write their autobiographies, 190
+
+  Deserts, plant pioneers in, 8;
+    rich in plant food, 59;
+    how irrigation transforms them, 72
+
+  Dormice, their Thanksgiving dinners and their long winter naps, 204, 217
+
+  Duck-billed Mole, the Animal X that lays eggs like a bird and yet suckles
+    its young like a pussy-cat, 144
+
+  Dust, how it helps the rain come down, 56
+
+
+  Earthworms, great importance of their work in pulverizing and fertilizing
+      the soil, 75;
+    their habits and remarkable intelligence, 75;
+    how the great sea and the little earthworms work together, 242
+
+  East Indies, home of some of the Hornbills, 169
+
+  Electricity, how it helps in the shaping of the clouds, 57
+
+  Elephants, their ancestors among the prehistoric monsters, 27;
+    elephants as ploughmen, 28
+
+
+  Fabre, Henri, his study of the Mason Bee and how his schoolboys helped
+     him, 108
+
+  Farms, abandoned, how Nature restores them, 16
+
+  Fish, monster fish of other days, 23
+
+  Flamingoes, habits of some feathered farmers with queer noses, 162
+
+  Florida, one place where you may find flamingoes, 166
+
+  Fox, home life and habits, 128
+
+  Frost, Jack, how he helps convert rock into soil, 43;
+    how he makes stones "walk" and in other ways co-operates with the river
+      mills in making soil, 60
+
+
+  Geese, their relation to the flamingoes, 166
+
+  Groundhog. (See Woodchuck.)
+
+
+  Hamster, a four-footed farmer who uses a threshing-machine, 210
+
+  Hedgehogs, why they are so unpopular as food, 121;
+    their homes and how they do their ploughing, 122;
+    pictures of baby hedgehogs, 216, 217;
+    why they go into winter quarters, 216, 218
+
+  Hibernation, "The Autumn Stores and the Long Winter Night," 204
+
+  Hornbills, why Mr. Hornbill shuts his wife up in their home in a hollow
+    tree, 169
+
+  Hungary, home of the field rat, a farmer who stores grain for the
+    winter, 212
+
+
+  Ice Ages, how the glaciers ploughed and mixed the soil, 237
+
+  Insects, their service in pulverizing and fertilizing the soil, 92;
+    damage done by injurious insects, 93;
+    relation of insects to crustaceans, 143
+
+
+  Kangaroo rat, 131
+
+  Kingfishers, their tunnel homes in the bank and how their fishing habits
+    help enrich the soil, 171
+
+  Kiwi, a late bird that nevertheless gets the worm, 167
+
+
+  Lichens, first of the soil makers--how they helped Columbus discover the
+      world by discovering it first, 1;
+    how the volcanoes and the lichens work together, 235
+
+  Lizards, reign of the lizard family in the days of the prehistoric
+    monsters, 25
+
+  Lubbock, Sir John, the great London banker who carried ants in his
+    pocket--what he had to say about the pleasures of Nature Study, 231
+
+
+  Maeterlinck, on the presence of mind of a tree and its heroic struggle
+    against adverse circumstances, 200
+
+  Marmots, their farm villages, 124
+
+  Mason-Bees. The house that Mrs. Mason-Bee built and its relation to the
+    story of the soil, 104
+
+  Moles, their work as ploughmen, 115;
+    how they do their tunnelling, 117;
+    Mr. Mole's castle under the ground, 118;
+    how he keeps his hair so sleek, 119;
+    where he spends the winter, 218
+
+  Monsters, prehistoric, what they looked like, their habits and how they
+    help the farmers of to-day with their farming, 20
+
+  Mosses, as soil makers, 8
+
+  Mound-Birds, how they build their incubators;
+    other interesting habits, 174
+
+  Mountains, how the trees climb them, 13;
+    why you always hear a rattle of stones in the mountains at sunrise, 43;
+    how the winds help trees to climb the western slopes, 55;
+    how the mountains help the rain to come down and why so many rivers
+      rise in mountains, 56;
+    why the bones of the monsters are found in the mountains, 31;
+    how the mountains helped kill off the monsters, 32;
+    farm villages of the marmots in the mountains, 124;
+    team-work between mountains and pebbles, 240
+
+
+  Nature Study, its great value, 231;
+    how it is taking the place of cruel sport, 232
+
+  New England, why its soil is so versatile and dependable, and how it helps
+    grow farm boys into famous men, 239
+
+  New Zealand, home of a bird that is a very late riser but nevertheless
+    gets the worm, 167
+
+
+  Oven-Birds, of South America, how they differ from the American
+      oven-birds, 172;
+    their remarkable adobe homes and their friendliness toward man, 172
+
+
+  Pebbles, how they help feed the Wisconsin cows, 239, 240;
+    team-work between mountains and pebbles, 240
+
+  Philippines, one of the regions where mound-birds live, 174, 176
+
+  Ploughing, Nature's system: work of the squirrels, 14;
+    of the elephants and their ancestors among prehistoric monsters, 27;
+    of the Moas, 28;
+    of the Dinosaurs, 29;
+    storm ploughs of the winds, 46;
+    use of the plough to prevent soil waste, 70;
+    the great ploughs of the Ice Ages, 237
+
+  Pocket Gopher, Thompson-Seton's "master ploughman," 128;
+    why he has that queer expression on his face, 128;
+    how he spends the winter, 218
+
+  Pocket-Mouse, 130, 131
+
+  Pot Holes, soil-grinding mills of the rivers, 61
+
+  Prairie-Dog, his watch tower and how it protects him from his enemies, 126;
+    his great sociability, 127
+
+
+  Rains, their work in making and transporting soil, 44, 55
+
+  Rivers, work of the river mills in soil making, 60
+
+  Roots, how lichens get along without them, 4;
+    how and why they work at different levels, 11;
+    how they make their way about (you won't wonder that Darwin said their
+      actions suggested intelligence!), 186
+
+
+  Sand, how it helps the soil to breathe, 59
+
+  Seeds, how they determine the order of march of the trees, 12;
+    use of screw-propellers and other devices, 42, 49, 51;
+    how and why baby plants back into the world, 190;
+    how they tried to change a sprouting seedling's mind but couldn't, 195;
+    how "rag babies" tell the fortune of corn, 199
+
+  Shrews, their work as ploughmen, 115;
+    where they spend the winter, 218
+
+  Siberia, there you will find the voles and their root cellars, 212
+
+  South America, home of the four-footed farmers that wear armor, 120;
+    and of the viscacha, 127;
+    a good place to look for flamingoes, 166;
+    and for oven-birds, 171
+
+  South Sea Islands, one of the regions in which you find birds that hatch
+    their babies with an incubator, 174
+
+  Squirrels, how they help the trees to march, 14;
+    the winding streets of Ground-Squirrel Town, 123;
+    marmots, the largest of the squirrel family, 124;
+    how the tree-squirrels spend the winter, 218
+
+  Swallows, their habits and their service as soil makers, 177
+
+
+  Termites, insects improperly called "white ants";
+    their habits in relation to the history of the soil, 100
+
+  Terracing, how employed to prevent waste of soil, 71
+
+  Texas, you can still find armadillos there, 120
+
+  Trees, their settled order of march into new lands, 8;
+    how the winds and the rains help trees to climb the western slopes of
+      mountains, 55;
+    how waste of trees causes waste of soil, 69
+
+  Turtles, how turtles differ from tortoises;
+    habits of both these water farmers, 137;
+    how turtles differ from crabs in their notions about laying eggs, 142
+
+
+  Viscachas, South American relatives of the prairie-dogs;
+    their villages and their athletic fields, 127;
+    how they rescue their buried comrades, 128
+
+  Volcanoes, their contribution to soil making, 39;
+    how they help the plant world to get its breath, 40;
+    team-work between volcanoes and lichens, 235
+
+  Voles, four-footed farmers who fill root cellars for the winter, 212
+
+
+  Wasps, their habits in relation to the history of the soil, 102
+
+  Weather and the groundhog's shadow, 219
+
+  Weeds, as soil makers, 9
+
+  Winds, how they helped Mr. Lichen to discover the world, 1;
+    how they help the trees to march, 12;
+    their work in making, mixing, and transporting soil, 37
+
+  Winter in the animal world, under the ground, 204
+
+  Woodchuck (Groundhog), picturesque home of a Connecticut woodchuck, 134;
+    Mr. Woodchuck's winter quarters and his shadow, 219
+
+  Wyoming, one of the homes of the prehistoric monsters, 27
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+In the scanned version of this book, there is apparently a printer error
+in the acknowledgments for sources of illustrations (page x) where the
+author refers to an illustration on page 125. There is no illustration
+on page 125 in the original text. However the closest illustration
+(caption: This Must Be a Pleasant Day) is located on page 126 in the
+original text.
+
+Another possible printer error occurred on page 52, where the phrase
+"branches and holes" appears in the original text. In an effort to
+relate the context of the phrase, this has been changed to "branches and
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