104 THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFOKNIA 



gardens, kalmia with its glossy leaves and purple 

 flowers, the arctic willow, making soft woven car 

 pets, together with the heathy bryanthus and cas- 

 siope, the fairest and dearest of them all. Insects 

 now enrich the air, frogs pipe cheerily in the shal 

 lows, soon followed by the ouzel, which is the first 

 bird to visit a glacier lake, as the sedge is the first 

 of plants. 



So the young lake grows in beauty, becoming 

 more and more humanly lovable from century to 

 century. Groves of aspen spring up, and hardy 

 pines, and the Hemlock Spruce, until it is richly 

 overshadowed and embowered. But while its shores 

 are being enriched, the soil-beds creep out with in 

 cessant growth, contracting its area, while the 

 lighter mud-particles deposited on the bottom cause 

 it to grow constantly shallower, until at length 

 the last remnant of the lake vanishes, closed for 

 ever in ripe and natural old age. And now its 

 feeding-stream goes winding on without halting 

 through the new gardens and groves that have 

 taken its place. 



The length of the life of any lake depends ordi 

 narily upon the capacity of its basin, as compared 

 with the carrying power of the streams that flow 

 into it, the character of the rocks over which these 

 streams flow, and the relative position of the lake 

 toward other lakes. In a series whose basins lie in 

 the same canon, and are fed by one and the same 

 main stream, the uppermost will, of course, vanish 

 first unless some other lake-filling agent comes in 

 to modify the result; because at first it receives 

 nearly all of the sediments that the stream brings 



