20 



WATER 



SOME INTERESTING THINGS ABOUT RIVERS. 



lENKIN LLOYD TONES. 



DID THE rivers make the valleys or 

 did the valleys make the rivers ? This is 

 not only an interesting but a very difficult 

 question to answer correctly. Ask your 

 teachers about it. Be sure you do not 

 make any mistakes, because when you an- 

 swer it correctly you have found out a 

 great deal about geology. And geology 

 is a hard name for a subject that contains 

 many interesting and easy things, and the 

 study of the river will help you under- 

 stand many of these things. 



However, it may be about the valleys, 

 we are very sure that the river made 

 many, many other things that we know 

 about. Did you ever hear of the orator 

 in the New York Legislature, who won- 

 dered how it was that the rivers most al- 

 ways flowed by the big cities? He cer- 

 tainly got his "cart before the horse," for 

 it is the big cities that always grow by the 

 big rivers. History has always grown 

 along the banks of rivers, because all 

 civilization has grown along their banks. 

 The boundaries of nations change. The 

 political maps of Europe that I studied 

 when I was a boy are now out of date, 

 and you would find they are all wrong, 

 because the boundaries of kingdoms, 

 states, and empires have changed so 

 often ; but the life of the world continues 

 to be found largely along the banks of 

 the rivers. 



Why is this? And here is another 

 question for you to talk with your teach- 

 ers about. If you get the ans\yer, you 

 will have the key that will let you into 

 much of the wonders and triumphs of art, 

 architecture, and commerce. 



Of course, the very earliest man would 

 keep close to the river's edge, because he 

 would have no other sure way of getting 

 water to drink, and the fish in the water, 

 the birds on the water, and the birds' 

 eggs in the nests along the edge of the 

 river offered him a sure supply of food. 



And then along the river the grass grows 

 greenest, and this afforded good grazing 

 for his cows, and his horses, and, may be, 

 his camels. What kind of food does the 

 camel like best, anyhow ? Primitive man 

 must have learned to swim early, and it 

 must have been fun for the little boys of 

 barbarism, as it is for the little boys of 

 civilization, to plunge into the cooling 

 water on a hot day. Man must have 

 found out very early how to make a raft 

 which would carry him down stream, 

 and soon after he learned how to make a 

 canoe that he could paddle up stream. 

 So the river became his first road. On it 

 he traveled when he went hunting, and 

 with its help he protected his property 

 and that of the tribe. The enemies were 

 driven across the river, and kept on the 

 other side. 



A good way to study what a river does 

 for man is to find out all you can about 

 the life that gathered about some par- 

 ticular river, for that will tell you more 

 or less of what happened along the banks 

 of all the great rivers. The best of all 

 rivers for such study is the Nile. It is 

 one of the long rivers of the world, so 

 long that its sources have only been re- 

 cently discovered by those who make 

 geographies. Read the stories of Living- 

 stone and Stanley, and the early explor- 

 ers, who went in search of the head 

 waters of the Nile. 



But there are two Niles. One runs 

 through the continent of Africa, and emp- 

 ties into the Mediterranean Sea. An- 

 other begins in the very earliest dawn of 

 history, and runs through the human 

 story of thought, feeling, and life. Along 

 the banks of this Nile, in history, we see 

 how human life was developed ; all 

 human life beginning aw.^.y back there, so 

 far back we cannot count it by years ; 

 when man made knives of flints and 

 hatchets of stone. And then, because the 



