Thomas Chandler Haliburton - "The Attache; or, Sam Slick in England (V2)"

Ernst Haeckel - "The Evolution of Man, V.1."

Eliza Lee Follen - "Two Festivals"

Cuthbert Bede - "The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green"

Time and Change

J >> John Burroughs >> Time and Change




Through the courtesy of Mr. Lowell, the superintendent, we had that
day the pleasure of going through a large sugar-making plant at
Paia--one that turns out nearly fifty thousand tons of sugar a year.
We saw the cane come in from the fields in one end of the plant, and
the dry, warm product being put up in bags at the other. All the
latest devices and machinery for sugar-making we saw here in full
operation, affording a contrast to the crude and wasteful methods I
had seen in the island of Jamaica a few years before.

In the afternoon we availed ourselves of the five or six miles of
narrow-gauge railway, the only one on the island, to go from Paia to
Wailuku, where we were met by another automobile, which hurried us
to Lahaina, where we were to meet the steamer that was to convey us
to Hilo, on Hawaii. I say "hurried," but before the journey of
twenty-odd miles was half over, we realized the truth of the old
adage, "The more haste, the less speed." The automobile began to
sulk and finally could be persuaded to go only on the low gear, and
to rattle along at about the speed of a man with a horse and buggy.
We reached Lahaina just as the boat was entering the harbor.

The next morning we found ourselves steaming along past the high,
verdant shores of Hawaii. For fifty miles or more the land presented
one unbroken expanse of sugar-cane, suggesting fields of some
gigantic yellow-green grass. At Hilo the sun was shining between
brief showers, and the air was warm and muggy. It is said to rain
there every day in the year, and the lush vegetation made the
statement seem credible. Judge Andrews met us at the steamer, and
took us to his home for rest and dinner, and was extremely kind to
us.

In the mid-afternoon we took the train for Glenwood, thirty miles on
our way to the volcano of Kilauea. A large part of the way the road
leads through sugar plantations, newly carved out of the koa and
tree-fern wilderness that originally covered the volcanic soil.
Clusters of the little houses of the Japanese laborers, perched high
above the ground on slender posts, were passed here and there.
Everywhere we saw wooden aqueducts, or flumes, winding around the
contours of the hills and across the little valleys, often on high
trestle-work, and partly filled with clear, swift-running water, in
which the sugar-cane was transported to the mills.

At Glenwood stages meet the tourists and convey them over a fairly
good road that winds through the tree-fern forests to the Volcano
House, ten miles away. The beauty of that fern-lined forest, the
long, stately plumes of the gigantic ferns meeting the eye
everywhere, I shall not soon forget. I saw what appeared to be a
large, showy red raspberry growing by the roadside, but I did not
find it at all tempting to the taste.

It was dark when we reached the Volcano House, and we saw off to the
left a red glow upon the fog-clouds, like the reflected light from
a burning barn or house in the country, and inferred at once that it
came from the volcano, which it did. From my window that night, as I
lay in bed, I could see this same angry glow upon the clouds. The
smell of sulphur was in the air about the hotel, and very hot steam
was issuing from cracks in the rocks. A party of tourists on
horseback, in the spirit of true American hurry, visited the volcano
that night, but we chose to wait until the morrow.

The next morning the great crater of Kilauea was filled with fog,
but it lifted, and the sun shone before noon. We passed a pleasant
forenoon strolling along the tree-fringed brink, looking down eight
or nine hundred feet upon its black lava floor, and plucking ohelo
berries, which grew there abundantly, a kind of large, red
huckleberry that one could eat out of hand, but that one could not
get excited over. They were better in a pie than in the hand. Their
name seemed to go well with the suggestion of the scenes amid which
they grew. Kilauea is a round extinct crater about three miles
across and seven or eight hundred feet deep. It has been the scene
of terrific explosions in past ages, but it has now dwindled to the
small active crater of Halemaumau, which is sunk near the middle of
it like a huge pot, two hundred or more feet deep and a thousand
feet across.

In the mid-afternoon a party of eight or ten of us on horseback set
out to visit the volcano. The trail led down the broken and shelving
side of the crater, amid trees and bushes, till it struck the floor
of lava at the bottom. In going down I was aware all the time of a
beautiful bird-song off on my left, a song almost as sweet as that
of our hermit thrush, but of an entirely different order. I think it
was the song of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with black
wings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager.

Our course took us out over the cracked and contorted lava-beds,
where no green thing was growing. The forms of the lava-flow
suggested mailed and writhing dragons, with horrid, gaping mouths
and vicious claws. The lava crunched beneath the horses' feet like
shelly and brittle ice. At one point we passed over a wide, jagged
crack on a bridge. As we neared the crater, the rocks grew warm, and
sulphur and other fumes streaked the air.

When a half-mile from the crater we dismounted, and, leaving our
horses in charge of the guide, proceeded on foot over the cracked
and heated lava rocks toward the brink of this veritable devil's
caldron. The sulphur fumes are so suffocating that it can be
approached only on the windward side. The first glance into that
fearful pit is all that your imagination can picture it. You look
upon the traditional lake of brimstone and fire, and if devils were
to appear skipping about over the surface with pitchforks, turning
their victims as the cook turns her frying crullers in the
sputtering fat, it would not much astonish you. This liquid is
rather thick and viscid, but it is boiling furiously. Great masses
of it are thrown up forty or fifty feet, and fall with a crash like
that of the surf upon the shore. Livid jets are thrown up many feet
high against the sides and drip back, cooling quickly as the lava
descends. We sat or stood upon the brink, at times almost letting
our feet hang over the sides, and shielding our faces from the
intense heat with paper masks and veils. It is probably the only
place in the world where you can come face to face with the heart of
an active volcano. There are no veils of vapor to hide it from you.
It appears easy enough to cast a stone into the midst of it, but
none of us could quite do it.

The mass of boiling lava is said to be about one and one half acres
in extent. Its surface is covered with large masses of floating
crust, black and smooth, like leather or roofing-paper, and between
these masses, or islands, the molten lava shows in broad, vivid
lines. It is never quiet. When not actually boiling, there is a slow
circulatory movement, and the great flakes of black crust,
suggesting scum, drift across from one end to the other and are
drawn under the rocks. At one moment only this movement is apparent,
then suddenly the mass begins to boil furiously all over the
surface, and you hear dimly the sound of the bursting bubbles and
the crash of the falling lava. When this takes place, the black
floating masses are broken up and scattered as they are in boiling
maple-syrup, but they quickly reunite, and are carried on by the
current as before.

Looking upon this scene with the thought of the traditional lake of
fire and brimstone of our forefathers in mind, you would say that
these black, filthy-looking masses floating about on the surface
were the accumulation of all the bad stuff that had been fried out
of the poor sinners since hell was invented. How much wickedness and
uncharity and evil thought it would represent! If the poor victims
were clarified and made purer by the process, then it would seem
worth while.

At the Volcano House they keep a book in which tourists write down
their impressions of the volcano. A distinguished statesman had been
there a few days before us, and had written a long account of his
impressions, closing with this oratorical sentence: "No pen, however
gifted, can describe, no brush, however brilliant, can portray, the
wonders we have been permitted to behold." I could not refrain from
writing under it, "I have seen the orthodox hell, and it's the real
thing."

That huge kettle of molten metal, mantling and bubbling, how it is
impressed upon my memory! It is a vestige of the ancient cosmic fire
that once wrapped the whole globe in its embrace. It had a kind of
brutal fascination. One could not take one's eyes from it. That
network of broad, jagged, fiery lines defining those black, smooth
masses, or islands, of floating matter told of a side of nature we
had never before seen. We lingered there on the brink of the fearful
spectacle till night came on, and the sides of the mighty caldron,
and the fog-clouds above it, glowed in the infernal light. Not so
white as the metal pouring from a blast furnace, not so hot, a more
sullen red, but welling up from the central primordial fires of the
earth. This great pot has boiled over many times in the recent past,
as the lava-beds we traveled over testify, and it will probably boil
over again. It has been unusually active these last few years.

About nine o'clock we rode back, facing a cold, driving mist, the
back of each rider, protected by the shining yellow "slickers,"
glowing to the one behind him, in the volcano's light, till we were
a mile or more away.

The next morning came clear, and the sight of the mighty slope of
Mauna Loa, lit up by the rising sun, was a grand spectacle. It
looked gentle and easy of ascent, wooded here and there, and here
and there showing broad, black streaks from the lava overflows at
the summit in recent years; but remembering that it was nearly four
thousand feet higher than Haleakala, I had no desire to climb it.
This mountain and its companion, Mauna Kea, are the highest island
mountains in the world.

The stage rolled us back through the fern forest to the railway
station and thence on to Hilo again, where in good time, in the
afternoon, we went aboard the steamer; and the next morning we were
again in the harbor of Honolulu, glad we had made the inter-island
trip, and above all glad that we had seen Haleakala.






VI

THE OLD ICE-FLOOD

I





He was a bold man who first conceived the idea of the great
continental ice-sheet which in Pleistocene times covered most of the
northern part of the continent, and played such a part in shaping
the land as we know it. That bold man was Agassiz, who, however, was
not bold enough to accept the theory of evolution as propounded by
Darwin. The idea of the great glacier did not conflict with
Agassiz's religious predilections, and the theory of evolution did.
It was a bold generalization, this of the continental ice-sheet, one
of the master-strokes of the scientific imagination. It was about
the year 1840 that Agassiz, fresh from the glaciers of the Alps,
went to Scotland looking for the tracks of the old glaciers, and he
found them at once when he landed near Glasgow. We can all find them
now on almost every walk we take to the fields and hills; but until
our eyes are opened, how blind we are to them! We are like people
who camp on the trail of an army and never suspect an army has
passed, though the ruts made by their wagons and artillery and the
ruins of their intrenchments are everywhere visible.

When I was a boy on the farm we never asked ourselves questions
about the stones and rocks that encumbered the land--whence they
came, or what the agency was that brought them. The farmers believed
the land was created just as we saw it--stones, boulders, soil,
gravel-pits, hills, mountains, and all--and doubtless wished in
their hearts that the Creator had not been so particular about the
rocks and stones, or had made an exception in favor of their own
fields. Rocks and stones were good for fences and foundations, and
for various other uses, but they were a great hindrance to the
cultivation of the soil. I once heard a farmer boast that he had
very strong land--it had to be strong to hold up such a crop of
rocks and stones. When the Eastern farmer moved west into the
prairie states, or south into the cotton-growing states, he probably
never asked himself why the Creator had not cumbered the ground with
rocks and stones in those sections, as he had in New York and New
England. South of the line that runs irregularly through middle New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and so on to
the Rockies, he will find few loose stones scattered over the soil,
no detached boulders sitting upon the surface, no hills or mounds of
gravel and sand, no clay banks packed full of rounded stones, little
and big, no rocky floors under the soil which look as if they had
been dressed down by a huge but dulled and nicked jack-plane. The
reason is that the line I have indicated marks the limit of the old
ice-sheet which more than a hundred thousand years ago covered all
the northern part of the continent to a depth of from two to four
thousand feet, and was the chief instrument in rounding off
mountain-tops, scattering rock-fragments, little and big, over our
landscapes, grinding down and breaking off the protruding rock
strata, building up our banks of mingled clay and stone, changing
the courses of streams and rivers, deepening and widening our
valleys, transplanting boulders of one formation for hundreds of
miles, and dropping them upon the surface of another formation. When
it began to melt and retreat, it was the chief agent in building up
our river terraces, and our long, low, rounded hills of sand and
gravel and clay, called kames and drumlins. In many of our valleys
its flowing waters left long, low ridges, gentle in outline, made up
entirely of sand and gravel, or of clay. In other places it left
moraines made up of earth, gravel, and rock-fragments that make a
very rough streak through the farmer's land. All those high, level
terraces along the Hudson, such as that upon which West Point
stands, were the work of the old ice-sheet that once filled the
river valley. The melting ice was also the chief agent in building
up the enormous clay-banks that are found along the shores of the
Hudson. The clay formed in very still waters, the sand and gravel in
more active waters.

This great ice-sheet not only covered our northern farms with rocks
and stones, and packed the soil with rounded boulders, but it also
carried away much of the rock decay that goes to the making of the
soil, so that the soil is of greater depth in the non-glaciated than
in the glaciated areas of the country. The New-Englander or
New-Yorker in traveling in the Southern States may note the enormous
depth of soil as revealed by the water-courses or railroad cuts. The
ice-sheet was a huge mill that ground up the rocks in the North
probably as fast or faster than the rains and the rank vegetation
reduced them in the South, but the floods of water which it finally
let loose carried a great deal of the rock-waste into the sea.

The glacier milk which colors the streams that flow from beneath it
finally settles and makes clay. Off the great Malaspina Glacier in
Alaska the ocean is tinged by the glacier milk for nearly fifty
miles from the shores. Very few country people, even among the
educated, are ready to believe that this enormous ice-sheet ever
existed. To make them believe that it is just as much a fact in the
physical history of this continent as the war of the Revolution is a
fact in our political history is no easy matter. It certainly is a
crushing proposition. It so vastly transcends all our experience
with ice and snow, or the experience of the race since the dawn of
history, that only the scientific imagination and faith are equal to
it. The belief in it rests on indubitable evidence, its record is
written all over our landscape, but it requires, I say, the
scientific imagination to put the facts together and make a
continuous history.

Three or four hundred feet above my cabin, five or six hundred feet
above tidewater, there is a bold rocky point upon which the old
ice-sheet bore heavily. It has rubbed it down and flattened it as a
hand passing over a knob of soft putty might do. The great hand in
this case moved from the northeast and must have fairly made this
rocky prominence groan with its weight. The surface, scratched and
grooved and planed by the ice, has weathered away, leaving the rock
quite rough; its general outlines alone tell the tale of the battle
with the ice. But on the east side a huge mass of rock, that had
been planed and gouged by the glacier, was detached and toppled
over, turning topsy-turvy before it had weathered, and it lies in
such a position, upheld by two rock fragments, that its glaciated
surface, though protected from the weather, is clearly visible. You
step down two or three feet between the two upholding rocks and are
at the entrance of a little cave, and there before you, standing at
an angle of thirty or forty degrees, is this rocky page written over
with the history of the passing of the great ice plane. The surface
exposed is ten or twelve feet long, and four or five feet wide, and
it is as straight and smooth, and the scratches and grooves are as
sharp and distinct as if made yesterday. I often take the college
girls there who come to visit me, to show them, as I tell them,
where the old ice gods left their signatures. The girls take turns
in stooping down and looking along the under surface of the rock,
and feeling it with their hands, and marveling. They have read or
heard about these things, but the reading or hearing made little
impression upon their minds. When they see a concrete example, and
feel it with their hands, they are impressed. Then when I tell them
that there is not a shadow of a doubt but that the ice was at one
time two or three thousand feet thick above the place where they now
stand, and that it bore down upon Julian's Rock with a weight of
thousands of tons to the square foot, that it filled all the Hudson
River Valley, and covered the landscape for thousands of miles
around them, riding over the tops of the Catskills and of the
Adirondacks, and wearing them down and carrying fragments of rock
torn from them hundreds of miles to the south and southwest,--when
I have told them all of this, I have usually given them a mouthful
too big for them to masticate or swallow. As a sort of abstract
proposition contained in books, or heard in the classroom, they do
not mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light of common day
on the hill above Slabsides, with the waters of the Hudson
glistening below, and the trees rustling in the wind all about us,
that is quite another matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable.
Many of the processes that have made our globe what we see it have
been so slow and on such a scale that they are quite beyond our
horizon--beyond the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind has
to approach them slowly and tentatively, and become familiar with
the idea of them, before it can give any sort of rational assent to
them. It has taken the geologist a long time to work out and clear
up and confirm this conception of the great continental glacier
which in Pleistocene times covered so large a part of the northern
hemisphere. It is now as well established as any event in the remote
past well can be. In Alaska, and in the Swiss Alps, one may see the
ice doing exactly what the Pleistocene ice-sheet did over this
country.




II



The other day in passing a farmer's house I saw where he had placed
a huge, roundish boulder, nearly as high as a man's head, by the
roadside and had cut upon it his own name and date, and that of his
father before him, and that of the first settler upon the farm, in
the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was an interesting
monument. I learned that the rock had been found in the bed of a
small creek near by, and that the farmer had given a hundred dollars
to have it moved to its place in front of his house. Had I seen the
old farmer I am sure I could have added to his interest and pride in
his monument by telling him that it was Adiron-dack gneiss, and had
been brought from that region on the back, or in the maw, of a
glacier, many tens of thousands of years ago. But it is highly
probable that, were he an uneducated man, he would have treated my
statement with contempt or incredulity. Education does at least this
for a man: it opens his mind and makes him less skeptical about
things not dreamed of in his philosophy.

This boulder had been rolled and worn in its long, slow ride till it
was nearly round. I have a much smaller boulder, probably from the
same quarry, which I planted at the head of my garden for a seat
when the hoe gets tired. When it was dropped here on the land that
is now my field, the bed and valley of the Hudson were occupied by
the old glacier which, during its decline and recession, built up
the terraces opposite me (where now stands a multimillionaire's copy
of an Italian palace), and which added to and uncovered the river
slopes where now my own vineyards are planted.

The flowing or the creeping of this old ice-sheet, so that it could
transport large boulders hundreds of miles, is one of the most
remarkable things about it: as slow or slower than the hour-hand of
the clock, yet an actual progression, carrying it, in the course of
thousands of years, from its apex in Labrador well down into New
Jersey, where its terminal moraine is still clearly traceable.

A river of ice, under the right conditions, flows as literally as a
river of water, fastest in the middle, and slowest along its margins
where the friction is greatest. The old ice-sheet, or ice sea,
flowed around and over mountains as a river flows around and over
rocks. Where a mountain rose above the glacier, the ice divided and
flowed round it, and reunited again beyond it. One may see all this
in Alaska at the present time. Water, of course, flows because of
its own pressure; so does ice, only the pressure has to be vastly
greater. A drop of water on the table does not flow, but, pile it
high enough, and it will. The old ice sea flowed mainly south, not
because it was downhill in that direction, but because the
accumulation of ice and snow at the North was so great. If through
any climatic changes, the snowfall were ever again to be so great
that more snow should fall in winter than could melt in summer,
after the lapse of thousands of years, we should have another ice
age.






VII

THE FRIENDLY SOIL





I never tire of contemplating the soil itself, the mantle rock, as
the geologist calls it. It clothes the rocky framework of the earth
as the flesh clothes our bones. It is the seat of the vitality of
the globe, the youngest part, the growing, changing part. Out of it
we came, and to it we return. It is literally our mother, as the sun
is our father.

The soil!--the residuum of the rocks, the ashes of the mountains. We
know what a vast stretch of time has gone to the making of it; that
it has been baked and boiled and frozen and thawed, acted upon by
sun and star and wind and rain; mixed and remixed and kneaded and
added to, as the housewife kneads and moulds her bread; that it has
lain under the seas in the stratified rocks for incalculable ages;
that chemical and mechanical and vital forces have all had a hand in
its preparation; that the vast cycles of animal and vegetable life
of the foreworld have contributed to its fertility; that the life of
the sea, and the monsters of the earth, and the dragons of the air,
have left their ashes here, so that when I stir it with my hoe, or
turn it with my spade, I know I am stirring or turning the meal of a
veritable grist of the gods.

From its primal source in the Archaean rock, up through all the vast
series of sedimentary rocks to our own time, what vicissitudes and
transformations it has passed through; how many times it has died,
so to speak, and been reborn from the rocks; how many times the
winds and the rains have transported it, and infused invisible,
life-giving gases into it; how many of the elements have throbbed
with life, climbed and bloomed in trees, walked or flown or swam in
animals, or slumbered for thousands upon thousands of years beneath
the great ice-sheet of Pleistocene time! A handful of the soil by
your door is probably the most composite thing you can find in a
day's journey. It may be an epitome of a whole geological formation,
or of two or more of them. If it happens to be made up of decomposed
limestone, sandstone, slate, and basalt rock, think what a history
would be condensed in it!

Our lawns are made up of ashes from the funeral pyre of mountains,
of dust from the tombs of geologic ages. What masses of rock does
this sandbank represent! what an enormous grist in the great glacier
mill do these layers of clay stand for! Two feet of soil probably
represent a hundred feet or more of rock. Strictly speaking, the
soil is the insoluble parts of the ground-up and decomposed rocks,
after the rains and the winds have done their work and taken their
toll of the grist they have ground. Sometimes these mills take the
whole grist and leave the rocks bare; but usually they leave a
residuum in which life strikes its roots. We do not see all that the
waters take from the soil. They have invisible pockets in which they
carry away all the more soluble parts, such as lime, soda, potash,
silica, magnesia, and others, and leave for the land the more
insoluble parts. These, too, in times of flood they carry away in
suspension, in the shape of sand, silt, mud, gravel, and the like.
When the waters really digest the rocks, they hold the various
minerals in solution, and run limpid and dancing to the sea; when
they have an undigested burden, they run angry and turbid.

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