180 SIGNS AND SEASONS 



waters run deep" is not so true as "deep waters 

 run still." I rode for half a day along the upper 

 Delaware, and my thoughts almost unconsciously 

 faced toward the full, clear river. Both the Dela- 

 ware and the Susquehanna have a starved, impov- 

 erished look in summer, — unsightly stretches of 

 naked drift and bare, bleaching rocks. But behold 

 them in March, after the frost has turned over to 

 them the moisture it has held back and stored up 

 as the primitive forests 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 ani- 

 mal or a thrifty tree. One source of charm in the 

 English landscape is the full, placid stream the sea- 

 son through; no desiccated watercourses will you 

 see there, nor any feeble, decrepit 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 

 condition during what we may call the geological 

 springtime, the March or April of the earth's his- 

 tory, when the annual rainfall appears to have 

 been vastly greater than at present, and when the 

 watercourses 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 plowing of the great val- 

 leys. Professor Newberry finds abundant evidence 

 that the Hudson was, in former times, a much 



