198 A SPRING RELISH. 



after the frost has turned over to them the moisture 

 it has held back and stored up as the primitive for- 

 ests used to hold the summer rains. Then they have 

 an easy, ample triumphant look, that is a feast to the 

 eye. A plump, well-fed stream is as satisfying to 

 behold as a well-fed animal, or a thrifty tree. One 

 source of charm in the English landscape is the full, 

 placid stream the season through; no desiccated 

 water-courses will you see there, nor any feeble, de- 

 crepit brooks, hardly able to get over the ground. 



This condition of our streams and rivers in spring 

 is evidently but a faint reminiscence of their condi- 

 tion during what we may call the geological spring- 

 time, the March or April of the earth's history, when 

 the annual rainfall appears to have been vastly greater 

 than at present, and when the water-courses were 

 consequently vastly larger and fuller. In pleistocene 

 days the earth's climate was evidently much damper 

 than at present. It was the rainiest of March 

 weather. On no other theory can we account for 

 the enormous erosion of the earth's surface, and the 

 ploughing of the great valleys. Professor Newberry 

 finds abundant evidence that the Hudson was, in for- 

 mer times, a much larger river than now. Professor 

 Zittel reaches the same conclusion concerning the 

 Nile, and Humboldt was impressed with the same 

 fact while examining the Orinoco and the tributaries 

 of the Amazon. All these rivers appear to be but 

 mere fractions of their former selves. The same is 

 true of all the great lakes. If not Noah's flood, then 



