PART II 



Studies for the Spring Term 



XVII. THE LAY OF THE LAND 



*^The hand that built the firmament hath heaved 

 And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes 

 With herbage, planted them with island groves, 

 And hedged them round with forests. Fitting floor 

 For this magnificent temple of the sky — 

 With flowers whose glory and whose multitude 

 Rival the constellations.'' 



— Bryant {The Prairies). 



Chief of all land laws is the law of gravity. 



The solid crust of the earth is overspread with a thin film 

 of loose materials that collectively we call the soil. How 

 thin a film it is as compared with the great mass of the earth ! 

 Yet it is the abode and the source of sustenance of all the 

 life of the land. It enfolds and nourishes the roots of all the 

 trees and herbage. It clothes itself with ever-renewing 

 verdure. On it we live and move. From it we draw our 

 sustenance. We usually mean this thin top layer when we 

 speak of the land. 



This film of soil covers the rocky earth-crust with great 

 irregularity as to distribution and depth; for its materials 

 are derived in the main from the weathering of the rocks. 

 Alternating frost and sun have broken them to fragments; 

 attrition and chemical action have progressively reduced 

 the fragments to dust; wind and flood have mixed them 

 and mingled with them the products of life and decay. 

 Sun and frost and rain and wind and life and decay act 

 intermittently, but gravity operates all the time. Weather- 

 ing and gravity are the great factors in the modeling of the 

 landscape. While weathering gleans the basic soil materials 



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