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Adventures of a Grain of Dust

<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2> (DECEMBER) <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> While man exclaims "See all things for my use!" "See man for mine!" replies the pampered goose. —Pope: "Essay on Man." </div> </div> <h3>THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE DUST</h3> But whether they store it in their little barns, like the chipmunk, or on their bones, like Brer Bear, these farmers deserve more friendly understanding than they usually get from that two-legged farmer, Mr. Man. Just think of the ages upon ages that they have been at work, these humble brothers of ours, and their ancestors—making the soil that gives us food—and yet after all[Pg 226] this Mr. Man comes along and says: "Get out of my fields!" <h4>I. The Lord of Creation</h4> "Oh, but—please Mr. Man—we were here first!" Was that the dormouse speaking? Anyhow, whoever it was, I think he was more than half right, don't you? Mr. Man, when he complains of these people, is apt not only to forget what he owes to them but in claiming that what they eat is wasted, to forget what a waster he is himself—wasting the soil and wasting the trees and everything. <h5>BRER BEAR GIVES MR. MAN A PIECE OF HIS MIND</h5> "Now just don't you overdo this Lord-of-Creation business, Mr. Man," says a deep, growly voice. (It must be Brer Bear!) "Other people have rights as well as you! And if you'd tend to your work half as well as they've attended to theirs, for ages before you were born, this would be a better world to live in; a good deal better, and there'd be a lot more of the good things of life to go around. "And now that you've waked me up I'm going to tell you something else. You human beings are not only a hard lot, but a stupid lot. You think you're mighty smart, don't you, with your bear-traps and your shooting machines that you shoot each other with, as well as shooting the rest of us! But do you know what I think? I think if some of us—the bears or the beavers or the ants, for example—had had half your chance they'd have been twice as smart; and then we bears might have gone around[Pg 227] shooting at you, the way Mr. Beard showed once in one of those funny pictures of his." <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i239.jpg" alt="" /> HUNTING THAT DOESN'T HURT Hunting with a gun is great sport. But now you know from my story what good the animals do in the world you may not like so well to kill them. And there is a new kind of hunting that is just as much fun—with a camera. This picture shows a boy in ambush, ready to shoot, by pressing a bulb; for the bird in the tree is exactly in front of the shutter of the camera. </div> </div> You see, Brer Bear has a good tongue in his head as well as a wise old head on his shoulders, and I must say he's entirely right when he makes the statement that human beings aren't anywhere near as bright, according to the chance they've had, as the bears and the beavers and the ants and the bees, and many others that could be named. Why, do you know that in the whole history of the human race there have been only a few really bright people, like Mr. Shakespere and Mr. Kipling, Mr. Archimedes and Mr. Edison. It was such men as these—not over two thousand or three thousand out of the millions upon millions of human beings who have lived on the earth—that raised the rest up from the Stone Age to where they are to-day. <blockquote>"Into the coarse dough of humanity an infrequent genius has put some enchanted yeast." </blockquote> That's the way a recent English writer puts it. And[Pg 228] then he goes on to say that if snakes and beasts of prey had been as clever as the bees and ants and beavers, men would have been exterminated. They could have saved themselves only by getting on with their education, climbing up the grades, a good deal faster than they have done. He says it—this Englishman—almost in the very words of Brer Bear. And we can imagine Brer Bear going on, taking up where the Englishman leaves off. "In other words," says Brer Bear, "it was because the bees and ants and beavers went on minding their own business, neither hurting you nor giving any pointers to the wolves and the lions and the snakes, that you're still here, Mr. Lord Man! That's part of the story of how you got to be lord of creation. Now listen to the rest of it:[27] <blockquote>"'The cave-dwellings of men were stolen from cave-lions and cave-bears; their pit-dwellings were copied from the holes and tunnels burrowed by many animals; and in their lake-dwellings they collected hints from five sources: natural bridges, the platforms built by apes, the habits of waterfowl, the beaver's dam and lodge, and the nests of birds. In the round hut, which was made with branches and wattle-and-daub, stick nests were united to the plaster work of rock martins. Yes, a good workman in the construction of mud walls does no more than rock martins have done in all the ages of their nest-building. "'Suppose primitive man cut down a tree with his flint axe, choosing one that grew aslant over a chasm or across a river; or suppose he piled stepping-stones together in the middle of a waterway, and then used this pier as a support for two tree trunks, whose far ends rested on the bank sides. Neither of these ideas has more[Pg 229] mother wit than that which has enabled ants to bore tunnels under running water, and to make bridges by clinging to each other in a suspension chain of their wee, brave bodies.'" </blockquote> <h5>HOW MAN HELPED HIMSELF TO OTHER PEOPLE'S IDEAS</h5> So you see that isn't just Mr. Bear's way of putting it; there are human beings who think a good deal as he does. Myself, I agree with Brer Bear and Brer Brangyn.[28] For man certainly, take him by and large, doesn't always set a good example to his fellow animals, either in making the best of his opportunities or in giving his humble brothers a square deal. <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i241.jpg" alt="" /> From "Bugs, Butterflies and Beetles," by Dan Beard. By permission of J. B. Lippincott IF BEETLES WERE AS BIG AS BOYS Our six-footed brothers are wonderfully strong in proportion to their size, and it would go hard with us if beetles, for example, were as big as boys. </div> </div> Do you know what I felt like saying, back there in Chapter IX, when we were speaking of kingfishers, and[Pg 230] how certain parties had given it out that kingfishers eat big fish that otherwise might be caught with a hook or a seine? This is what I felt like saying: "What if they do? Who's got a better right?" Then they'd say—these men—I suppose: "Why, we have; we're sportsmen!" "Oh, yes," I'd say, "you're the kind of sportsman that's so afraid somebody else will see and kill something before you do; particularly if that somebody is itself a wild creature that has to earn its living that way and only takes what it needs for its family!" And they're so good-natured about it, most of these country cousins of ours, that we walked right in on and ordered out, Cousin Woodchuck, for instance. <blockquote>"The woodchuck can no more see the propriety of fencing off—though he admits that stone walls are fine refuges, in case he has to run for it—a space of the very best fodder than the British peasant can see the right of shutting him out of a grove where there are wild rabbits, or forbidding him to fish in certain streams. So he climbs over, or digs under, or creeps through, the fence, and makes a path or a playground for himself amid the timothy and the clover, and laughs, as he listens from a hole in the wall or under a stump, to hear the farmer using language which is good Saxon but bad morals, and the dog barking himself into a fit."[29] </blockquote> <h4>II. The School of the Woods and Fields</h4> I don't mean to say, mind you, that the farmer hasn't any rights in his own fields, and that he should turn everything over to the woodchuck and the rest, but I do mean to say that our wild kinsmen have rights and that there[Pg 231] is a lot more to be got out of them than their flesh or their hides or the pleasure of killing them. For one thing, the ant and the angleworm, the birds and the woodchucks, the little lichens and the big trees, the winds and the rains, are all teachers in the Great School of Out-of-Doors, and in this school you can learn almost everything there is to be learned. It's really a university. Nature study, as you call it in the grades, besides all the facts it teaches you, trains the eye to see, and the ear to listen, and the brain to reason, and the heart to feel. <h5>STORY OF THE LONDON BANKER AND HIS ANTS</h5> <div class="figright"> <ANTIMG src="images/i243.jpg" alt="" /> SIR JOHN LUBBOCK The great London banker who carried ants in his pocket. </div> Once there was a London banker who used to go around with—what do you think—in his pockets? Money? Yes, I suppose so; but what else? You'll never guess—ants! He was a lot more interested in ants than he was in money; and so, while the business world knew him as a big banker, all the scientific world knew him as a great naturalist. He wrote not only nature books but other books, including one on "The Pleasures of Life," and among life's greatest pleasures he placed the "friendship," as he puts it, of things in Nature. He said he never went into the woods but he[Pg 232] found himself welcomed by a glad company of friends, every one with something interesting to tell. And, in speaking of the wide-spread growth of interest in Nature in recent years, he said: <blockquote>"The study of natural history indeed, seems destined to replace the loss of what is, not very happily, I think, termed 'sport.'" </blockquote> And isn't it curious, when one comes to think of it, why a man should take pleasure in seeing a beautiful deer fall dead with a bullet in its heart? You'd think there would be so much more pleasure in seeing him run—the very poetry of motion. Or, why should a boy want to kill a little bird? You'd think it would have been so much greater pleasure to study its flight or to listen to the happy notes pour out from that "little breast that will throb with song no more." <h5>WHY MAN KILLS AND CALLS IT "SPORT"</h5> Among other animals that this banker naturalist studied was man himself; man when he was even more of an animal than he is to-day, and he came to the conclusion that this curious killing instinct is a survival of the long ages when man had to earn his living by the chase. <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave When the night fell o'er the plain And the moon hung red o'er the river bed, He mumbled the bones of the slain. </div> <div class="stanza"> Loud he howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered his kith and kin; From west and east to the crimson feast[Pg 233] The clan came trooping in. O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof, They fought and clawed and tore."[30] </div> </div> Not a very pretty picture, is it? Yet it's true. But, fortunately, so is this one of the happiest hours of the caveman's grandchild. <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Oh, for boyhood's painless play, Sleep that wakes in laughing day, Health that mocks the doctor's rules, Knowledge never learned of schools: Of the wild bee's morning chase, Of the wild flower's time and place; Flight of fowl, and habitude Of the tenants of the wood; How the tortoise bears his shell, How the woodchuck digs his cell And the ground-mole sinks his well. </div> <div class="stanza"> Of the black wasp's cunning way, Mason of his walls of clay And the architectural plans Of gray hornet artisans. For, eschewing books and tasks, Nature answers all he asks."[31] </div> </div> Some boy wrote to John Burroughs once, and asked how to become a naturalist. In his reply, Burroughs said: <blockquote>"I have spent seventy-seven years in the world, and they have all been contented and happy years. I am certain that my greatest source of happiness has been my love of nature; my love of the[Pg 234] farm, of the birds, the animals, the flowers, and all open-air things. "You can begin to be a naturalist right where you are, in any place, in any season."[32] </blockquote> <div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/i246.jpg" alt="" /> WHOSE AUTOGRAPH IS THIS? If you're a boy scout you will probably recognize this autograph in the snow. If not look it up in the Boy Scout Handbook. </div> It is the wholesomest, most inspiring reading in all the world, this Book of Nature. And there is simply no end to it. Just see what all we've been led into merely in following out the story of a grain of dust; and even then, I've only dipped into it here and there, as you can see by the hints of things to be looked up in the library. If we had gone into all the highways and byways of the subject—for it's all one continued story, from the making of the planets, circling in the fields of space, to the making of the little dust grains that are whirled along in the winds of March—if we followed the story all through we would have to have learned professors to teach us Astronomy, Geology, Chemistry, Zoology, with its subdivisions of Paleontology, Ornithology, Entomology, and so on; a whole college faculty sitting on a grain of dust! <h4>III. The World Brotherhood</h4> An obvious thing in Nature is what is called "the struggle for existence"; animals and plants fighting among themselves and against enemies of their species in the universal struggle for food. What is not so obvious, is how the whole world of things works together toward the common[Pg 235] good. <h5>HOW THE LICHENS AND THE VOLCANOES WORK TOGETHER</h5> For example, working with those quiet little people, the lichens, is one of the biggest and noisiest things in the world—the volcano. The volcanoes not only pour into the air vast quantities of carbon-gas, which is the breath of life to plants, but help the lichens and the rest of the soil-makers with their work in other ways. And as the volcanoes help the lichens get their breath, the lichens forward the world service of the volcanoes by turning their[Pg 236] lava into soil; in course of time, hiding the most desolate of these black iron wastes under a rich garment of green. It is thus the dead lava comes to life, and it is the very smallest of the lichen family that starts the process. <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i247.jpg" alt="" /> Courtesy of the Northern Pacific Railway HOW THE DEAD LAVA COMES TO LIFE Lava, after it has been converted into soil, by the agents of decay, makes the richest land in the world. This picture shows a vineyard on the fertile plains overlooked by Mt. Ranier, which is an extinct volcano. In the days when Mt. Rainer was being built these plains were covered with molten lava. </div> </div> Among the two principal gases of the air there is a working brotherhood; just as there is between the plants and the animals in their great breath exchange. The oxygen in the air makes a specialty of crumbling up rock containing iron. It rusts this iron into dust; while the CO2, as the High School Boy calls what I have called carbon, for short, goes after the rocks that contain lime, potash, and soda. Working with both these gases is the frost that, with its prying fingers, enlarges the cracks in stones, and so allows the gases of the water and the air to reach in farther than they could otherwise do. Every Winter, with its frost and its storing up of moisture in the great snow-fields of the mountains, is a benefit to the lands and their people, but the Ice Age, "The Winter that Lasted All Summer,"[33] not only worked wonders in other ways, but was of far greater benefit to the soil because it was so much more of a Winter. Mr. Shakespere, in his day, didn't know anything about an Ice Age, but Brer Bear might have quoted certain lines of his, just the same: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man's ingratitude. </div> <div class="stanza"> Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, Thou dost not bite so nigh As benefits forgot."[34] </div> </div> [Pg 237] <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i249.jpg" alt="" /> Courtesy of the Northern Pacific Railway ASTER GROWING IN VOLCANIC ASH ON MT. RANIER </div> </div> <h5>THE GREAT PLOUGHS OF THE ICE AGES</h5> With all the work the other agencies do in changing the rock into soil, and fertilizing and refreshing it with additions from the subsoil, there still remains an important thing to be done, and that is to mix the soil from different kinds of rock. This is still done constantly by the winds and flowing waters, but every so often, apparently, there needs to be a deeper, wider stirring and mixing. This the great ice ploughs and glacial rivers of the Ice Ages did. And they do it every so often, probably; for there was more than one Ice Age in the past, and, as Nature's processes do not change, it is more than likely there will be more ice ages and more deep ploughing and redistribution of the soil in the future. As you will see, if you take the trouble[Pg 238] to look it up in "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble," it is thought we may now be in the springtime of one of those vaster changes which bring Springs lasting for ages, followed by long Summers and Autumns, and by the age-long Winters and the big glaciers and all. The glaciers, moving over thousands of miles and often meeting and dumping their loads together on vast fields, did the very same thing for everybody that England does for herself to-day in bringing different kinds of fertilizers from all over the world to enrich her farms. I'm very glad to speak of this because the author of the story of the pebble may have left a bad impression of the glaciers—"The Old Men of the Mountain"—as farmers, by what he said[Pg 239] about their carrying off the original farm lands of New England, and leaving a lot of pebbles and boulders instead. While these pebbles have not produced what you would call a brilliant performer among soils, they have made a good, steady soil that in New England has helped greatly in growing farm boys into famous men, while the pebbles of Wisconsin have been of immense service to her famous cows. In the counties in Wisconsin where there are plenty of pebbles scattered through the soil, the production of cheese and butter is something like 50 per cent greater than it is in regions where there are comparatively few pebbles.[35] <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i251.jpg" alt="" /> From Tarr and Martin's "College Physiography." By permission of the Macmillan Company GOOD CROPS FROM NEW ENGLAND'S STONY FIELDS While the stones, big and little, with which the fields of New England are so richly supplied have not produced what you would call a brilliant performer among soils, they have made a good steady soil that can turn its hand to almost anything, and that has helped greatly in growing farm boys into famous men. In building those stone fences, for example, the boys learned that it always pays to do your work well. A hundred years is merely the tick of a watch in the life of a fence like that! </div> </div> The soils of New England are like the New Englander[Pg 240] himself, they can turn their hands to almost anything; raise any kind of crop suited to the climate, while richer soils are often not so versatile. The reason is that these pebbles were originally gathered by the glaciers from widely separated river-beds, and so contain all varieties of rock with every kind of plant food in them. It takes a long, long time to make soil out of bed-rock, but in the case of soils in which there are a great many pebbles it is different; and you can see why. On a great mass of rock there is comparatively little surface for the air and other pioneer soil-makers to get at, and so decay is slow; while the same amount of rock broken up into pebbles presents a great deal of surface for decay. If you will examine with a glass—an ordinary hand-glass will do—one of these decaying pebbles lying embedded in the grass you can trace on it a number of wrinkly lines—sometimes even a network. These are the marks, the "finger-prints," of little roots. Little roots, as we have seen, are very wise. They always know what they are about, and the fact that they cling to the pebbles in this way means that they are getting food out of them. And that's right where the cows of Wisconsin come in. The rootlets of the grasses get a steady supply of food from the decaying surfaces of these pebbles scattered through the pastures, and then pass it on to the cows. <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i253.jpg" alt="" /> HOW PEBBLES HELP FEED THE COWS You'll think I'm joking at first, but it's the truth: Pebbles are good for cows. Otherwise how are you going to account for the fact that in the counties in Wisconsin where there are plenty of pebbles the production of cheese and butter is something like 50 per cent greater than it is in regions where there are comparatively few pebbles? Examine, with a hand-glass, the "finger prints" of the little roots on a decaying pebble, and see if you can't guess why. Then read the explanation in this chapter. </div> </div> <h5>TEAMWORK BETWEEN MOUNTAINS AND PEBBLES</h5> But now, going from little things to big things again, notice how the mountains and the pebbles are linked together in this chain of service. The mountains, too, continually feed the plains. Ruskin, in speaking of this great[Pg 241] service, says: <blockquote>"The elevations of the earth's surface provide for it a perpetual renovation. The higher mountains suffer their summits to be broken into fragments, and to be cast down in sheets of massy rock, full of every substance necessary for the nourishment of plants. These fallen fragments are again broken by frost and ground by torrents into various conditions of sand and clay—materials which are distributed perpetually by the streams farther and farther from the mountain's base. Every shower which swells the rivulets enables their waters to carry certain portions of earth into new positions, and exposes new banks of ground to be mined in their turn. The turbid foaming of the angry water—the tearing down of bank and rock along the flanks of its fury—these are no disturbances[Pg 242] of the kind course of nature; they are beneficent operations of laws necessary to the existence of man, and to the beauty of the earth; ... and each filtering thread of summer rain which trickles through the short turf of the uplands is bearing its own appointed burden of earth to be thrown down on some new natural garden in the dingles below." </blockquote> <div class="figborder2"> <div> <table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4" summary="illustrations"> <tr> <td> <ANTIMG src="images/i254.jpg" alt="" /> </td> <td> <ANTIMG src="images/i255.jpg" alt="" /> </td> </tr> </table></div> THE MILL OF THE EARTHWORM AND THE EARTH MILLS OF THE SEA "From the gizzard mills of the earthworm to the great earth mills of the sea, all are—most evidently—parts of one great system." (In the picture on the left an earthworm has been laid open to show its grinding apparatus.) </div> So we find a wonderful variety of things working together in making and feeding the soil that feeds the world: mountains and pebbles, volcanoes and lichens, the breath[Pg 243] of the living and the bones of the dead; the sun, the winds, the sea, the rains; the farmers with four feet, the farmers with six feet; the swallow building her nest under the eaves, the earthworms burrowing under our feet, each bent on its own affairs, to be sure, but at the same time each helping to carry on the great business of the universe. From the little gizzard mills of the earthworm to the great earth mills of the sea, that renew the soil for the ages yet to come, all are—most evidently—parts of one great system;[Pg 244] are together helping to work out great purposes in the advance of men and things; purposes which require that <blockquote>"While the earth remaineth, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, shall not cease." </blockquote> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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