<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></SPAN>CHAPTER II</h2>
<p class="center">(FEBRUARY)</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">Behold a strange monster our wonder engages!<br/></span>
<span class="i6">If dolphin or lizard your wit may defy.<br/></span>
<span class="i4">Some thirty feet long, on the shore of Lyme-Regis<br/></span>
<span class="i6">With a saw for a jaw and a big staring eye.<br/></span>
<span class="i4">A fish or a lizard? An Ichthyosaurus,<br/></span>
<span class="i6">With a big goggle-eye and a very small brain,<br/></span>
<span class="i4">And paddles like mill-wheels in chattering chorus<br/></span>
<span class="i6">Smiting tremendous the dread-sounding main.<br/></span>
<p class="right">—<i>Professor Blackie.</i><br/></p>
</div>
</div>
<h3>SOME EARLY SETTLERS AND THEIR BONES</h3>
<p>But a farm where nothing but plants grow isn't much
of a farm. Every good farmer knows that nowadays, and
so he stocks his place with horses and cows and chickens
and things. Mother Nature understood this principle
from the beginning, and the plants and animals on her
farm have always got on well together.</p>
<p>For one thing the plant and the animal each help the
other to get its breath. That is to say, plants, when they
take in the air, keep most of the carbon there is in it and
give back most of the oxygen, which is just what the
animal world wants; while the animals, when they breathe,
keep most of the oxygen and give back most of the carbon—just
the thing that plants grow on.</p>
<p>But the service of the animals to the plants is very important
after they have stopped breathing altogether;
since their flesh and bones, like the dead bodies of the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</SPAN></span>
plants, go back to enrich their common dust. The bones
and bodies and shells of members of the animal kingdom,
however, are far richer food for soils than is dead vegetation.
The shell creatures of the sea to which we owe our
wonderfully fertile limestone soils are—many of them—so
small that you can only make them out with a microscope;
while certain other contributors to our food-supply were
so big that one of them, walking down a country road,
would almost fill the road from fence to fence.</p>
<h4><span class="smcap">I. Mr. Dinosaur and His Neighbors</span></h4>
<h5>A STRANGE FACE IN THE MEADOW</h5>
<p>Now let's take a look at some of these
big fellows. How would you like to have
such a creature as the one at the right of
this page come ambling up to meet you at
the meadow gate of an evening when you went to milk the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</SPAN></span>
cows? Yet more than likely either this gentle animal, or
some of his kin, browsed over the very field where now the
cattle pasture, for he, too, was a grass-eater, and with an
appetite most hearty. If you kept him in a barn his stall
would have to be eighty feet long, and it would be necessary
to fill his rack with a ton of fodder every third day.
But, assuming there was a market for him in the shape
of steaks and roasts, you would be well repaid; for, in
prime condition, he weighed twenty tons.</p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN name="imagei032" name="imagei032"></SPAN><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i032.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">IN THE LAND OF HIS FATHERS</p> </div>
</div>
<p>These monsters who ate grass, and other monsters who
ate them, and still other monsters who lived in the sea,
appeared comparatively late in the life of the world.</p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN name="imagei033" name="imagei033"></SPAN><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i033.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">NO WONDER HE NEVER WORRIED!</p> <p class="ctext">Quite aside from the fact that he had so little brain to worry with, it seems highly improbable that the Stegosaurus ever felt any apprehension about attacks from the rear, in the
frequent military operations which distinguished the times in which he lived. In addition to
the horny plates down his back he had those horny spines which were swung by a tail some
ten feet long.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</SPAN></span></p>
<h5>TONS AND TONS OF ANCIENT BONES</h5>
<p>It is only about 15,000,000 years ago, for example, that
the biggest of them all, the Dinosaurs, lived, while the
earth itself is now supposed to be some 100,000,000 years
old. Their numbers were enormous, and it is probable
there is not an acre of ground from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, and from Alaska to the tip end of South America
that has not been fertilized by their bones. In fact, of
certain species I have found the bones scattered all the
way from Oregon to Patagonia; so this must have been
their pasture.</p>
<p>They were not only all over the land, but in the lakes
and in the great sea that once extended right through
North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic
Ocean. And they were along the shores of the sea and in
the swamps. The bones of the ancestors of the whale
were found in such quantities in some of the Southern<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</SPAN></span>
States that they were used to build fences until it was
found they were much more valuable to enrich the fields
themselves.</p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN name="imagei034" name="imagei034"></SPAN><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i034.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">THE HEAD OF HESPERORNIS</p> <p class="ctext">"Then there was a great toothed, diving creature with wings. They've named him the Hesperornis, which means 'western bird,' because the fossils of the best-known species
were found in the chalk-beds of Kansas."</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>In the great American inland sea of those days swam one
kind of fierce fish-lizard that took such big bites he had to
have a hinge in his jaw. Because of this hinge he could
open his mouth wider without putting anything out of
place, don't you see? He was called the Mesosaur. But
he never bit the Archelon, who was in his crowd, because
he couldn't. The Archelon was the king of turtles, and,
like all the turtle family, wore heavy armor. He was over
twelve feet long. And sharks—no end of them! A shark
at his best is bad enough, but the sharks of those days
were almost too terrible to think about. Such jaws! And
teeth like railroad spikes! Then there was a great toothed<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</SPAN></span>
diving creature with wings. They've named him the "Hesperornis,"
which means "western bird." He was given
the name because the fossils of the best-known species were
found in the chalk-beds of Kansas.</p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN name="imagei035" name="imagei035"></SPAN><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i035.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">GREATEST OF ANCIENT FLYING MACHINES</p> <p class="ctext">Mr. Pterodactyl, on his way to dinner, looked like this. He was the largest of all flying-machines before the days of the Wright brothers. He would have measured—if there had
been anybody to measure him—twenty feet across the wings! Like the Hesperornis, he always
dined on fish.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Over the waters flew another bird-like, fish-like, bat-like
thing called the Pterodactyl. Look at his picture and you
will see how he got his nickname. It means "finger-toe."
He was the largest of all flying-machines until the days of
the Wright brothers. It was over twenty feet across his
wings, from tip to tip; and, like the Hesperornis, he always
had fish for dinner.</p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN name="imagei036" name="imagei036"></SPAN><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i036.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">A BIG "LITTLE FINGER" AND WHAT IT WAS FOR</p> <p class="ctext">Mr. Pterodactyl means "finger toe." What is our little finger was the longest of his five digits. It helped support and operate that big bat-like wing extending from his arms to his toes.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</SPAN></span></p>
<h5>THE EARLIEST RULERS OF THE SEA</h5>
<p>The first monsters, like the first of almost everything
else, including the land itself, were in the sea.<SPAN name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></SPAN><SPAN href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</SPAN> For a time
giant fish, armor-plated like a man-of-war, and with awful
appetites, just about ran everything. Then came the reign
of the sharks. Some of them had jaws that opened to the
height of a door—six feet or over. Next in succession, as
rulers of the sea, were the fish-lizards, of whom that hinge-jawed
Mesosaur was one. Of another of these fish-lizards a
famous teacher of Edinburgh University, Professor Blackie,
wrote that funny verse at the head of this chapter. The
bones of this particular specimen were found sticking out
of a cliff at Lyme-Regis, a popular watering-place in the
English Channel, by a pretty English girl who was strolling
along the beach.</p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN name="imagei038" name="imagei038"></SPAN><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i038.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">A FAMILY PARTY</p> <p class="ctext">The imagination of the artist enables us to picture this family party—Mrs. Ichthyosaurus and her children out for a stroll in prehistoric waters.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>The Ichthyosaurus, as Professor Blackie says in his
verse, was some thirty feet long, with a comparatively
large head—like an alligator's—set close to his body.
Another fish-lizard, well and unfavorably known by his
neighbors of the sea, was the Plesiosaurus. Instead of fins
he had big paddles resembling those of the seal. He was a
kind of side-wheeler, like the Mississippi River steamboats,
and he could go like everything! His neck was long and
he darted after the smaller creatures he lived on.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="REIGN_OF_THE_LIZARD_FAMILY" id="REIGN_OF_THE_LIZARD_FAMILY">REIGN OF THE LIZARD FAMILY</SPAN></h5>
<p>But these queer fish seem to have just been getting ready
to land; for, by being lizards, they after a while managed it.
A lizard, you know, belongs to the reptile family, and out
of these sea reptiles there grew, in course of time, reptiles<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</SPAN></span>
which lived, not in the sea but in the swamps along the sea.
These reptiles were the Dinosaurs, and they are related to
the Minosaurs and the Ichthyosaurus, and the rest of the
Saurs, as you can see by the family name; for "saur" means
lizard. Dinosaur means "terrible lizard." Don't you
think he looks it?</p>
<p>Although some of these Dinosaurs were no larger than
chickens, others were by far the largest creatures that ever
were, on sea or land. Many of the biggest lived on grass,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</SPAN></span>
just like an old cow, while the flesh-eating Dinosaurs lived
on them. Some of these Dinosaurs went on all fours, while
others ran about on their hind legs, and when they stood
still, propped themselves up on their big, thick tails as do
kangaroos. The Camptosaurus, one of whose favorite resorts
was the land that is now Wyoming, was thirty feet
long. Another called the Brontosaurus, was sixty feet
long. The Atlantosaurus, one of the pioneers of Colorado,
measured eighty feet from the end of his nose to the end
of his tail, and all of them were built in proportion. The
Stegosaurus, also an early settler in Wyoming, had huge
bony plates, like ploughshares, sticking out all along his
back from the nape of his neck to the end of his tail. He
seems to have gone about looking quite ugly and humpbacked,
as our old cat does when she has words with the
dog.</p>
<p>After the swamps dried up and the lizards could no longer
make a living, came the reign of the mammals; including
the Mastodons and the Mammoths, marching in countless
herds, trumpeting through the forests.</p>
<h5>HOW SOME MONSTERS PLOUGHED THE FIELD</h5>
<p>But besides what they did in the way of fertilizing the
land with their flesh and bones some of the mammals did
a good deal of ploughing. Among these early ploughmen
were the Mastodons and the Mammoths, and another
elephant-like creature with two tusks, that he wore, not
after the fashion among elephants to-day, but curving down
from his chin, somewhat like Uncle Sam's goatee. He used
these tusks, it is supposed, not only for self-defense, but for
grubbing up roots which he ate. If so, they must have<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</SPAN></span>
been about as good ploughs as those crooked sticks that
were used by the early farmers among men, and that are
still in use among primitive peoples.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="THE_ELEPHANT_FAMILY_AS_PLOUGHMEN" id="THE_ELEPHANT_FAMILY_AS_PLOUGHMEN">THE ELEPHANT FAMILY AS PLOUGHMEN</SPAN></h5>
<p>What makes it more likely that the creature with the
down-curving tusks stirred the soil with them is that his
cousins, the elephants of to-day, are themselves great
ploughmen. Elephants feed, not only on grass and the
tender shoots of trees, but on bulbs buried in the soil, which
they hunt out by their fine sense of smell. In digging these
bulbs they turn up whole acres of ground. Elephants also
do a great deal of ploughing by uprooting trees so as to
make it more convenient to get at their tender tops. Sir
Samuel Baker, the explorer, says the work done by a herd
of elephants in a mimosa forest in this way is very great
and that trees over four feet in circumference are uprooted.
In the case of the biggest trees several elephants work together,
some pulling the tree with their trunks, while others
dig under the roots with their tusks. To be sure, the mimosa-trees
have no tap roots, but tearing them out of the
ground is no small job, nevertheless. It takes strength and
it takes engineering.</p>
<p>Another early ploughman was a bird, the Moa. The
Moa had no wings, but his muscular legs were simply
enormous, and so were his feet. New Zealand seems to
have been the headquarters of the Moas. There used to
be loads of them as shown by the huge deposits of their
bones. They are supposed to have been killed in countless
numbers during the Ice Ages in the Southern Hemisphere;
for there were Ice Ages in the Southern as well as<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</SPAN></span>
the Northern Hemisphere. In one great morass in New
Zealand abounding in warm springs, bones of the Moas
were found in such countless numbers, layer upon layer,
that it is thought the big birds gathered at these springs
to keep warm during those great freezes.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="THE_MILLSTONES_OF_THE_MOAS" id="THE_MILLSTONES_OF_THE_MOAS"></SPAN>THE MILLSTONES OF THE MOAS</h5>
<p>Besides the work they did with feet and bills you may
imagine how much nice fresh stone the Moas must have
ground up in their crops during the millions of years they
existed. It was a regular mill—the gizzard of a Moa—full
of pebbles as big as hickory nuts. Scattered about the
springs where their bones are found are little heaps of these
pebbles, each the contents of a gizzard. Like miniature
tumuli, they mark the spots where the bodies of the Moas
returned to dust.</p>
<p>Perhaps some of those flesh-eating Dinosaurs did a little
ploughing once in a while, too; for one theory is that those
ridiculous little arms were used for scratching out a nest
for the eggs, just as the crocodiles and the alligators and
the turtles dig nests for their eggs to-day. For all these
animals, as did the Dinosaurs, belong to the reptile family,
and show the family trait of digging out nests for their
eggs.</p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN name="imagei042" name="imagei042"></SPAN><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i042.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">A PUZZLE PAGE FROM THE GREAT STONE BOOK</p> <p class="ctext">Talk about your cut-out puzzles! Here is a specimen of the kind of puzzle Nature and the course of things in the darkest ages of world history have cut out for the paleontologists.
It is a find of ancient bones in the asphalt deposits near Los Angeles.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Although the Dinosaurs roamed the swamps and lowlands
of all the ancient world, their favorite resort was the
territory now occupied by our Western States—judging
from the quantities of bones they left—while that old Mediterranean
Sea of ours was full of their kin, the sea-lizards.
Professor Marsh, of Yale, who was among the first explorers
of the graves of these monarchs of the past, says<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</SPAN></span>
that one day, while riding through a valley in the Rocky
Mountains, he saw the bones of no less than seven sea-lizards
staring at him from the cliffs. Yet, only here and
there by the wearing through of the rocks by flowing streams
has nature opened up these vast mausoleums, the mountains
and the cliffs. What enormous quantities of bones,
then, must still be buried there, what tons and tons must
have given their lime and phosphate to the soil. So you
see this story of old bones, even from a farming standpoint,
is no light matter.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="figcenter"> <SPAN name="imagei043" name="imagei043"></SPAN><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i043.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">HOW THE WISE MEN ANSWER THE PUZZLES</p> <p class="ctext">By their marvellous skill and their knowledge of the mechanics of monster anatomy the
paleontologists fit one bone fragment to another, supply the missing parts in artificial material,
and behold! the monsters take their places in the long procession of the ages. There
has been nothing equal to it since the vision of the prophet in the Valley of Dry Bones. (Ezekiel
37:1-10.)</p>
</div>
</div>
<h4><span class="smcap"><SPAN name="II_How_the_Monsters_Died_and_Returned_to_Dust" id="II_How_the_Monsters_Died_and_Returned_to_Dust"></SPAN>II. How the Monsters Died and Returned to Dust</span></h4>
<p>"But you said these monsters lived in the sea and in
swamps. Then how, in the name of common sense, did
their bones get up into the mountains?"</p>
<h5>WHEN THE INLAND SEA WENT DRY</h5>
<p>Well, it's like this: As I said a while back, in the days of
the monster fish and the monster lizards, there was a great
sea reaching clear from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic
Ocean, and with swamps along the borders extending far
into lands that afterward became the Rocky Mountains.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</SPAN></span>
When the land began to rise, due to the shrinking of the
earth—a thing that has been going on ever since the earth
was born—the sea and the swamps went dry, and far to
the west the land wrinkled up into the Rocky Mountains.
In these layers of rock that made the mountains were the
bones of the monsters that had died when the rocks were
still mud, in the swamps and along the borders of the
inland sea.</p>
<p>Not only did the land under the western portion of the
sea slowly rise until the waters were completely closed in
on the west, and the sea thus made that much narrower,
but the rise of the land on the south cut off connection with
the great salt ocean which surrounds the continents to-day.
So the salt-water fish, for lack of salt water, died, and with
them the monsters like the Ichthyosaurus that lived on the
salt-water fish that lived in this salt sea.</p>
<p>But it wasn't alone that the seas grew narrower and
more shallow because of the elevation of the lands. The
mountains rising in the west, cut off the rain-laden winds
which blew from the Pacific in those days just as they do
now. Thus the seas dried up so much the faster. But
first, before the sea went entirely dry, its place was taken
by the lakes and swamps into which it shrivelled up. Low,
swampy land is just what reptiles like, so this was their
Golden Age, just as the previous time of the wide, deep
sea was the Golden Age of the big fish and the fish-lizards.</p>
<p>Then, as the land still rose and the climate grew dryer,
the reptiles passed away, and in came the mammal family,
to which the cows and the horses and the cats and the
kittens, and all the rest of us, belong.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="figcenter"> <SPAN name="imagei045" name="imagei045"></SPAN><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i045.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">THE TIGER WITH THE SABRE TEETH</p> <p class="ctext">Tigers like this lived ages ago in both the Old World and the New. They had canine
teeth, curved like a sabre, in the upper jaw.)</p>
</div>
</div>
<h5>TOO MUCH BRAWN, TOO LITTLE BRAIN</h5>
<p>Of course, even where they didn't die with their boots
on, so to speak, as so many of them did in those lawless
days, there came a time for each monster, in the order of
nature, when he drew his last breath. But what seems so
strange is that all these monsters—the biggest and strongest
of them—entirely disappeared and left no descendants!<SPAN name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></SPAN><SPAN href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</SPAN>
The whole of the mystery has not been unravelled yet,
even by the wise men of science, but still they have learned
a good deal. For one thing, they know that most of the
reptiles and the fish-lizards disappeared because so much<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</SPAN></span>
of the land where they lived went dry. They had to get a
new boarding-place, and there wasn't any to get! Another
thing was that these big fellows, although they <i>were</i> so big,
and got along finely while everything was just so, had so
little brain they couldn't change their habits to meet new
conditions, as our closer and cleverer cousins, the mammals,
did. Why, do you know that one of these monsters,
who was twenty-five feet long if he was an inch, and twelve
feet high, had a brain no bigger than a man's fist? All the
monsters of those days were like that—tons of bone and
muscle, but a very small supply of brains.</p>
<p>So when things went against them, they just had to
give up, and, like a queer dream, they faded away. But
their history makes one of the most interesting chapters
in the whole wonderful story of the dust.</p>
<p>Of all the live stock that have fed on the great world-farm
and helped enrich it with their bones, these animals
were surely the strangest that ever were seen!</p>
<p class="center"><SPAN name="HIDE_AND_SEEK_IN_THE_LIBRARY_34" id="HIDE_AND_SEEK_IN_THE_LIBRARY_34">HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY</SPAN></p>
<blockquote><p>"But since these monsters passed away many millions of years
ago, and all that is usually found is a piece of them here and there,
how do the men of science know so much about them—how they
looked, and how they ate, and how they treated one another?"</p>
<p>That's a good question. It <i>does</i> seem strange. Why, to hear
them talk, you'd suppose these men, learned in ancient bones, had
actually <i>met</i> the monsters! And, speaking of meeting them, I
must tell you a little story. It's a good story and it will answer
your question.</p>
<p>Baron Cuvier, one of the most famous of the paleontologists,
awoke from a deep sleep to see standing by his bed a strange,
hairy creature with horns and hoofs. And it said:</p>
<p>"Cuvier! Cuvier! I have come to eat you!" But the baron,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</SPAN></span>
taking in the form of the monster at a glance, only laughed.</p>
<p>"Horns and hoofs? You can't. You're a grain-eater!"</p>
<p>See the point? The baron argued that because the monster
had horns and hoofs he must be a grain-eater; for all creatures with
both horns and hoofs are grain-eaters. This particular creature,
to be sure, was an eater of both meat and grain—being one of
Cuvier's students who was trying to play a trick on him. But the
principle holds good. The scientists, <i>knowing</i> one thing, <i>infer</i>
another. Because animals with both horns and hoofs eat no meat
Cuvier knew his visitor couldn't eat <i>him</i>, even if he'd been real
and not just made up.</p>
<p>For another instance, take our queer old friend that Professor
Blackie wrote the funny rhyme about—the Ichthyosaurus "with a
saw for a jaw and a big staring eye." The scientists figure, just
from looking into the hollow socket where the eye used to be, that
he could see at night like a cat—and right through muddy water,
too; that he spent most of his time in shallows near the shore;
that it didn't make any difference to him whether a fish was near or
far, provided it wasn't too far, of course, for he could see it and catch
it, just the same. They also said—these learned men, after peering
into the dark hollow where that remarkable eye used to be—that Mr.
Ichthyosaurus spent a great deal of time diving and a great deal
of time with his homely face just above the surface of the water.</p>
<p>Why they could reason all this from a hollow eye socket and
some bony, flexible plates around the outer edge of it, you will see
by referring to such books as "Animals of the Past," by F. A.
Lucas, director of the American Museum of Natural History;
"Creatures of Other Days" and "Extinct Monsters," by Hutchinson;
"Extinct Animals," by Lankester; "Mighty Animals," by
Mix; the chapter "When the World was Young," in Lang's "Red
Book of Animal Stories," and "Restoring Prehistoric Monsters"
in "Uncle Sam, Wonder Worker," by Du Puy.</p>
<p>Here are some more conclusions they draw from certain facts.
See how near you can come to reasoning them out for yourself before
looking them up in the books that tell.</p>
<p>Why it is supposed the Dinosaurs swam like Crocodiles. (Look
at the picture of Mr. I., and pay <i>particular</i> attention to his tail.)</p>
<p>Why it is they say that the sea-lizards with long necks must
have had small heads.</p>
<p>Why it is argued that because the Mesosaurus had a hinge in<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</SPAN></span>
his jaw he must have had a big, loose, baggy throat.</p>
<p>"Keeping Up the Soil," in "The Country Life Reader," deals
with the subject of the use of fertilizers on the farm—how easy it is
to waste them, how easy it is to save them, and how important it is
that they should be saved; while the article on "Acid Soils" tells
how the lime in the bones of the monsters has helped keep the soil
from getting "sour stomach," and also how they unlocked the
potash and phosphorus in the soil so that the plants could get at
them.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN name="imagei049" name="imagei049"></SPAN><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i049.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">FERTILE FIELDS THAT RODE ON THE WIND</p> <p class="ctext">The winds that now help grow the corn and wheat on these broad fields by carrying the pollen from one plant to another, also brought the soil on which they grew. These are the
loess plains of Nebraska. There are 42,000 acres of them.</p>
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