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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