THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. IOI 
shrinking of the earth. We shall not speak of these 
to-day, but put them aside as belonging to the rough 
work of the statuary yard. But when once these large 
masses are put ready for water to work upon, then all 
the rest of the rugged wrinkles and gentle slopes which 
make the country so beautiful are due to water and 
ice ; and for this reason I have called them "sculptors." 
Go for a walk in the country, or notice the land- 
scape as you travel on a railway journey. You pass 
by hills and through valleys, through narrow steep 
gorges cut in hard rock, or through wild ravines up 
the sides of which you can hardly scramble. Then 
you come to grassy slopes and to smooth plains 
across which you can look for miles without seeing a 
hill ; or, when you arrive at the seashore, you clamber 
into caves and grottos, and along dark narrow pas- 
sages leading from one bay to another. All these 
hills, valleys, gorges, ravines, slopes, plains, caves, 
grottos, and rocky shores have been cut out by 
water. Day by day and year by year, while every- 
thing seems to us to remain the same, this industrious 
sculptor is chipping away, a few grains here, a corner 
there, a large mass in another place, till he gives to 
the country its own peculiar scenery, just as the 
human sculptor gives expression to his statue. 
Our work to-day will consist in trying to form some 
idea of the way in which water thus carves out the 
surface of the earth, and we will begin by seeing how 
much can be done by our old friends the rain-drops 
before they become running streams. 
Everyone must have noticed that whenever rain 
falls on soft ground it makes small round holes in 
