Outlines of the Earth's History Part 8

The most interesting field of these Swiss mountain falls is a high mountain valley of amphitheatrical form, known as the Diablerets, or the devil's own district. This great circus, which lies at the height of about four thousand feet above the sea, is walled around on its northern side by a precipice, above which rest, or rather once rested, a number of mountain peaks of great bulk. The region has long been valued for the excellent pasturage which the head of the valley affords. Two costly roads, indeed, have been built into it to afford footpaths for the flocks and herds and their keepers in the summer season. Through this human experience with the valley, we have a record of what has gone on in this part of the mountain wilderness.

Within the period of history and tradition, three very great mountain falls have occurred in this field, each having made its memory good by widespread disaster which it brought to the people of the _chalets_.

The last of these was brought about by the fall of a great peak which spread itself out in a vast field of ruins in the valley below. The belt of destruction was about half a mile wide and three miles long.

When the present writer last saw it, a quarter of a century ago, it was still a wilderness of great rocks, but here and there the process of their decay was giving a foothold for herbage, and in a few centuries the field will doubtless be so verdure-clad that its story will not be told on its face. It is likely, however, to be preserved in the memory of the people, and this through a singular and pathetic tradition which has grown up about the place, one which, if not true, comes at least among the legends which we should like to believe.

As told the present writer by a native of the district, it happened when, in the nighttime the mountain came down, the herdsmen and their cows gathered in the _chalets_--stout buildings which are prepared to resist avalanches of snow. In one of these, which was protected from crus.h.i.+ng by the position of the stones which covered it, a solitary herdsman found himself alive in his unharmed dwelling. With him in the darkness were the cows, a store of food and water, and his provisions for the long summer season. With nothing but hope to animate him, he set to work burrowing upward among the rocks, storing the _debris_ in the room of the _chalet_. He toiled for some months, but finally emerged to the light of day, blanched by his long imprisonment in the darkness, but with the strength to bear him to his home. In place of the expected warm welcome, the unhappy man found himself received as a ghost. He was exorcised by the priest and driven away to the distance.

It was only when long afterward his path of escape was discovered that his history became known.

Returning to the account of the _debris_ which descends at varied speed into the torrents, we find that when the detritus encounters the action of these vigorous streams it is rapidly ground to pieces while it is pushed down the steep channels to the lower country. Where the stones are of such size that the stream can urge them on, they move rapidly; at least in times when the torrent is raging. They beat over each other and against the firm-set rocks; the more they wear, the smaller they become, and the more readily they are urged forward.

Where the ma.s.ses are too large to be stirred by the violent current, they lie unmoved until the pounding of the rolling stones reduces them to the proportions where they may join the great procession.

Ordinarily those who visit mountains behold their torrents only in their shrunken state, when the waters stir no stones, and fail even to bear a charge of mud, all detachable materials having been swept away when the streams course with more vigour. In storm seasons the conditions are quite otherwise; then the swollen torrents, their waters filled with clay and sand, bear with them great quant.i.ties of boulders, the collisions of which are audible above the m.u.f.fled roar of the waters, attesting the very great energy of the action.

When the waste on a mountain slope lies at a steep angle, particularly where the acc.u.mulation is due to the action of ancient glaciers, it not infrequently happens that when the ground is softened with frost great ma.s.ses of the material rush down the slope in the manner of landslides. The observer readily notes that in many mountain regions, as, for instance, in the White Mountains of New Hamps.h.i.+re, the steep slopes are often seamed by the paths of these great landslides. Their movement, indeed, is often begun by sliding snow, which gives an impulse to the rocks and earth which it encounters in its descent. At a place known as the Wylie Notch, in the White Mountains, in the early part of this century, a family of that name was buried beneath a ma.s.s of glacial waste which had hung on the mountain slope from the ancient days until a heavy rain, following on a period of thaw, impelled the ma.s.s down the slope. Although there have been few such catastrophes noted in this country, it is because our mountains have not been much dwelt in. As they become thickly inhabited as the Alps are, men are sure to suffer from these accidents.

As the volume of a mountain torrent increases through the junction of many tributaries, the energy of its moving waters becomes sufficient to sweep away the fragments which come to its bed. Before this stage is attained the stream rarely touches the solid under rock of the mountain, the base of the current resting upon the larger loose stones which it was unable to stir. In this pebble-paved section, because the stream could not attack the foundation rock, we find no gorges--in fact, the whole of this upper section of the torrent system is peculiarly conditioned by the fact that the streams are dealing not with bed-rock, but with boulders or smaller loose fragments. If they cut a little channel, the materials from either side slip the faster, and soon repave the bed. But when the streams have by a junction gained strength, and can keep their beds clear, they soon carve down a gorge through which they descend from the upper mountain realm to the larger valleys, where their conjoined waters take on a riverlike aspect. It should be noted here that the cutting power of the water moving in the torrent or in the wave, the capacity it has for abrading rock, resides altogether in the bits of stone or cutting tools with which it is armed. Pure water, because of its fluidity, may move over or against firm-set stones for ages without wearing them; but in proportion as it moves rocky particles of any size, the larger they are, the more effective the work, it wears the rock over which it flows. A capital instance of this may be found where a stream from a hose is used in was.h.i.+ng windows. If the water be pure, there is no effect upon the gla.s.s; but if it be turbid, containing bits of sand, in a little while the surface will appear cloudy from the mult.i.tude of line scratches which the hard bits impelled by the water have inflicted upon it. A somewhat similar case occurs where the wind bears sand against window panes or a bottle which has long lain on the sh.o.r.e. The gla.s.s will soon be deeply carved by the action, a.s.suming the appearance which we term "ground." This principle is made use of in the arts. Gla.s.s vessels or sheets are prepared for carving by pasting paper cut into figures on their surfaces. The material is then exposed to a jet of air or steam-impelling sand grains; in a short time all the surface which has not been protected by paper has its polish destroyed and is no longer translucent.

The pa.s.sage from the torrent to the river, though not in a geographical way distinct, is indicated to the observant eye by a simple feature--namely, the appearance of alluvial terraces, those more or less level heaps of water-borne _debris_ which acc.u.mulate along the banks of rivers, which, indeed, const.i.tute the difference between those streams and torrents. Where the mountain waters move swiftly, they manage to bear onward the waste which they receive. Even where the blocks of stone cling in the bed, it is only a short time before they are again set in motion or ground to pieces. If by chance the detritus acc.u.mulates rapidly, the slope is steepened and the work of the torrent made more efficient. As the torrent comes toward the base of the mountains, where it neither finds nor can create steep slopes over which to flow, its speed necessarily diminishes. With each reduction in this feature its carrying power very rapidly diminishes.

Thus water flowing at the rate of ten miles an hour can urge stones four times the ma.s.s that it can move when its speed is reduced to half that rate. The result is that on the lowlands, with their relatively gentle slopes, the combined torrents, despite the increase in the volume of the stream arising from their confluence, have to lay down a large part of their load of detritus.

If we watch where a torrent enters a mountain river, we observe that the main stream in a way sorts over the waste contributed to it, bearing on only those portions which its rate of flow will permit it to carry, leaving the remainder to be built into the bank in the form of a rude terrace. This acc.u.mulation may not extend far below the point where the torrent which imported the _debris_ joins the main stream; a little farther down, however, we are sure to find another such junction and a second acc.u.mulation of terrace material. As these contributions increase, the terrace acc.u.mulations soon become continuous, lying on one side or the other of the river, sometimes bordering both banks of the stream. In general, it can be said that so long as the rate of fall of the torrent exceeds one hundred feet to the mile it does not usually exhibit these shelves of detritus. Below that rate of descent they are apt to be formed. Much, however, depends upon the amount of detritus which the stream bears and the coa.r.s.eness of it; moreover, where the water goes through a gorge in the manner of a flume with steep rocky sides, it can urge a larger amount before it than when it traverses a wide valley, through which it pa.s.ses, it may be, in a winding way.

At first sight it may seem rather a fine distinction to separate torrents from rivers by the presence or absence of terraces. As we follow down the stream, however, and study its action in relation to these terraces, and the peculiar history of the detritus of which they are composed, we perceive that these latter acc.u.mulations are very important features. Beginning at first with small and imperfect alluvial plains, the river, as it descends toward the sea, gaining in store of water and in the amount of _debris_ which comes with that water from the hills, while the rate of fall and consequent speed of the current are diminished, soon comes to a stage where it is engaged in an endless struggle with the terrace materials. In times of flood, the walls of the terraces compel the tide to flow over the tops of these acc.u.mulations. Owing to the relative thinness of the water beyond the bed, and to the growth of vegetation there, the current moves more slowly, and therefore lays down a considerable deposit of the silt and sand which it contains. This may result during a single flood in lifting the level of the terrace by some inches in height, still further serving to restrict the channel. Along the banks of the Mississippi and other large rivers the most of this detritus falls near the stream; a little of it penetrates to the farther side of the plains, which often have a width of ten miles or more. The result is that a broad elevation is constructed, a sort of natural mole or levee, in a measure damming the flood waters, which can now only enter the "back swamps" through the channels of the tributary streams. Each of these back swamps normally discharges into the main stream through a little river of its own, along the banks of which the natural levees do not develop.

We have now to note a curious swinging movement of rivers which was first well observed by the skilful engineers of British India. This movement can best be ill.u.s.trated by its effects. If on any river which winds through alluvial plains a jetty is so constructed as to deflect the stream at any point, the course which it follows will be altered during its subsequent flow, it may be, for the distance of hundreds of miles. It will be perceived that in its movements a river normally strikes first against one sh.o.r.e and then against the other. Its water in a general way moves as does a billiard ball when it flies from one cus.h.i.+on to another. It is true that in a torrent we have the same conditions of motion; but there the banks are either of hard rock or, if of detritus, they are continually moving into the stream in the manner before described. In the case of the river, however, its points of collision are often on soft banks, which are readily undermined by the was.h.i.+ng action of the stream. In the ordinary course of events, the river beginning, we may imagine, with a straight channel, had its current deflected by some obstacle, it may be even by the slight pressure of a tributary stream, is driven against one bank; thence it rebounds and strikes the other. At each point of impinge it cuts the alluvium away. It can bear on only a small portion of that which it thus obtains; the greater part of the material is deposited on the opposite side of the stream, but a little lower down, where it makes a shallow. On these shallows water-loving plants and even certain trees, such as the willows and poplars, find a foothold. When the stream rises, the sediment settles in this tangle, and soon extends the alluvial plain from the neighbouring bank, or in rarer cases the river comes to flow on either side of an island of its own construction. The natural result of this billiard-ball movement of the waters is that the path of the stream is sinuous. The less its rate of fall and the greater the amount of silt it obtains from its tributaries, the more winding its course becomes. This gain in those parts of the river's curvings where deposition tends to take place may be accelerated by tree-planting. Thus a skilful owner of a tract of land on the south bank of the Ohio River, by a.s.siduously planting willow trees on the front of his property, gained in the course of thirty years more than an acre in the width of his arable land. When told by the present writer that he was robbing his neighbours on the other side of the stream, he claimed that their ignorance of the laws of river motion was sufficient evidence that they did not deserve to own land.

In the primitive state of a country the water-loving plants, particularly the trees which flourish in excessively humid conditions, generally make a certain defence against these incursions of the streams. But when a river has gained an opening in the bank it can, during a flood, extend its width often to the distance of hundreds of feet. During the inundations of the Mississippi the river may at times be seen to eat away acres of land in a single day along one of the outcurves of its banks. The undermined forests falling into the flood join the great procession of drift timber, composed of trees which have been similarly uprooted, which occupies the middle part of the stream. This driftwood belt often has a width of three or four hundred feet, the entangled stems and branches making it difficult for a boat to pa.s.s from one side of the river to the other.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 11.--Oxbows and cut-off. Showing the changes in the course of a river in its alluvial plain.]

When the curves of a river have been developed to a certain point (see Fig. 11), when they have attained what is called the "oxbow" form, it often happens that the stream breaks through the isthmus which connects one of the peninsulas with the mainland. Where, as is not infrequently the case, the bend has a length of ten miles or more, the water just above and below the new-made opening is apt to differ in height by some feet. Plunging down the declivity, the stream, flowing with great velocity, soon enlarges the channel so that its whole tide may take the easier way. When this result is accomplished, the old curve is deserted, sand bars are formed across their mouths, which may gradually grow to broad alluvial plains, so that the long-surviving, crescent-shaped lake, the remnant of the river bed, may be seen far from the present course of the ever-changing stream. Gradually the acc.u.mulations of vegetable matter and the silt brought in by floods efface this moat or oxbow cut-off, as it is so commonly termed.

As soon as the river breaks through the neck of a peninsula in the manner above described, the current of the stream becomes much swifter for many miles below and above the opening. Slowly, however, the slopes are rearranged throughout its whole course, yet for a time the stream near the seat of the change becomes straighter than before, and this for the reason that its swifter current is better able to dispose of the _debris_ which is supplied to it. The effect of a change in the current produced by such new channels as we have described as forming across the isthmuses of bends is to perturb the course of the stream in all its subsequent downward length. Thus an oxbow cut-off formed near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi may tend more or less to alter the swings of the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Although the swayings of the streams to and fro in their alluvial plains will give the reader some idea as to the struggle which the greater rivers have with the _debris_ which is committed to them, the full measure of the work and its consequences can only be appreciated by those who have studied the phenomena on the ground. A river such as the Mississippi is endlessly endeavouring to bear its burden to the sea. If its slope were a uniform inclined plane, the task might readily be accomplished; but in this, as in almost all other large water ways, the slope of the bed is ever diminis.h.i.+ng with its onward course. The same water which in the mountain torrent of the Appalachians or Cordilleras rolled along stones several feet in diameter down slopes of a hundred feet or more to the mile can in the lower reaches of the stream move no pebbles which are more than one fourth of an inch in diameter over slopes which descend on the average about half a foot in a mile. Thus at every stage from the torrent to the sea the detritus has from time to time to rest within the alluvial banks, there awaiting the decay which slowly comes, and which may bring it to the state where it may be dissolved in the water, or divided into fragments so small that the stream may bear them on. A computation which the present writer has made shows that, on the average, it requires about forty thousand years for a particle of stone to make its way down the Mississippi to the sea after it has been detached from its original bed. Of course, some bits may make the journey straightforwardly; others may require a far greater time to accomplish the course which the water itself makes at most in a few weeks. This long delay in the journey of the detritus--a delay caused by its frequent rests in the alluvial plain--brings about important consequences which we will now consider.

As an alluvial plain is constructed, we generally find at the base pebbly material which fell to the bottom in the current of the main stream as the sh.o.r.es grew outward. Above this level we find the deposits laid down by the flood waters containing no pebbles, and this for the reason that those weightier bits remained in the stream bed when the tide flowed over the plain. As the alluvial deposit is laid down, a good deal of vegetable matter was built into it. Generally this has decayed and disappeared. On the surface of the plain there has always been growing abundant vegetation, the remains of which decayed on the surface in the manner which we may observe at the present day. This decomposing vegetable matter within and upon the porous alluvial material produces large quant.i.ties of carbonic acid, a gas which readily enters the rain water, and gives it a peculiar power of breaking up rock matter. Acting on the _debris_, this gas-charged water rapidly brings about a decay of the fragments. Much of the material pa.s.ses at once into solution in this water, and drains away through the mult.i.tudinous springs which border the river. As this matter is completely dissolved, as is sugar in water, it goes straight away to the sea without ever again entering the alluvium. In many, if not most, cases this dissolving work which is going on in alluvial terraces is sufficient to render a large part of the materials which they contain into the state where it disappears in an unseen manner; thus while the annual floods are constantly laying down acc.u.mulations on the surface of these plains, the springs are bearing it away from below.

In this way, through the decomposition which takes place in them, all those river terraces where much vegetable matter is mingled with the mineral substances, become laboratories in which substances are brought into solution and committed to the seas. We find in the water of the ocean a great array of dissolved mineral substances; it, indeed, seems probable that the sea water contains some share, though usually small, of all the materials which rivers encounter in their journey over and under the lands. As the waters of the sea obtain but little of this dissolved matter along the coast, it seems likely that the greater share of it is brought into the state of solution in the natural laboratories of the alluvial plains.

Here and there along the sides of the valleys in which the rivers flow we commonly find the remains of ancient plains lying at more or less considerable heights above the level of the streams. Generally these deposits, which from their form are called terraces, represent the stages of down-wearing by which the stream has carved out its way through the rocks. The greater part of these ancient alluvial plains has been removed through the ceaseless swinging of the stream to and fro in the valley which it has excavated.

In all the states of alluvial plains, whether they be the fertile deposits near the level of the streams which built them, or the poorer and ruder surfaced higher terraces, they have a great value to mankind. Men early learned that these lands were of singularly uniform goodness for agricultural use. They are so light that they were easily delved with the ancient pointed sticks or stone hoes, or turned by the olden, wooden plough. They not only give a rich return when first subjugated, but, owing to the depth of the soil and the frequency with which they are visited by fertilizing inundations, they yield rich harvests without fertilizing for thousands of years. It is therefore not surprising that we find the peoples who depended upon tillage for subsistence first developed on the great river plains. There, indeed, were laid the foundations of our higher civilization; there alone could the state which demands of its citizens fixed abodes and continuous labour take rise. In the conditions which these fields of abundance afforded, dense populations were possible, and all the arts which lead toward culture were greatly favoured. Thus it is that the civilization of China, India, Persia, and Egypt, the beginnings of man's higher development, began near the mouths of the great river valleys. These fields were, moreover, most favourably placed for the inst.i.tution of commerce, in that the arts of navigation, originating in the sheltered reaches of the streams, readily found its way through the estuaries to the open sea.

Pa.s.sing down the reaches of a great river as it approaches the sea, we find that the alluvial plains usually widen and become lower. At length we attain a point where the flood waters cover the surface for so large a part of the year that the ground is swampy and untillable unless it is artificially and at great expense of labour won to agriculture in the manner in which this task has been effected in the lower portion of the Rhine Valley. Still farther toward the sea, the plain gradually dips downward until it pa.s.ses below the level of the waters. Through this mud-flat section the stream continues to cut channels, but with the ever-progressive slowing of its motion the burden of fine mud which it carries drops to the bottom, and constantly closes the paths through which the water escapes. Every few years they tend to break a new way on one side or the other of their former path. Some of the greatest engineering work done in modern times has been accomplished by the engineers engaged in controlling the exits of large rivers to the sea. The outbreak of the Yellow River in 1887, in which the stream, hindered by its own acc.u.mulations, forced a new path across its alluvial plains, destroyed a vast deal of life and property, and made the new exit seventy miles from the path which it abandoned.

Below the surface of the open water the alluvial deposits spread out into a broad fan, which slopes gradually to a point where, in the manner of the continental shelf, the bottom descends steeply into deep water.

It is the custom of naturalists to divide the lower section of river deposits--that part of the acc.u.mulation which is near the sea--from the other alluvial plains, terming the lower portion the delta. The word originally came into use to describe that part of the alluvium acc.u.mulated by the Nile near its mouth, which forms a fertile territory shaped somewhat like the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. Although the definition is good in the Egyptian instance, and has a certain use elsewhere, we best regard all the detritus in a river valley which is in the state of repose along the stream to its utmost branches as forming one great whole. It is, indeed, one of the most united of the large features which the earth exhibits. The student should consider it as a continuous inclined plane of diminis.h.i.+ng slope, extending from the base of the torrents to the sea, and of course ramifying into the several branches of the river system. He should further bear in mind the fact that it is a vast laboratory where rock material is brought into the soluble state for delivery to the seas.

The diversity in the form of river valleys is exceedingly great.

Almost all the variety of the landscape is due to this impress of water action which has operated on the surface in past ages. When first elevated above the sea, the surface of the land is but little varied; at this stage in the development the rivers have but shallow valleys, which generally cut rather straight away over the plain toward the sea. It is when the surface has been uplifted to a considerable height, and especially when, as is usually the case, this uplifting action has been a.s.sociated with mountain-building, that valleys take on their accented and picturesque form. The reason for this is easily perceived: it lies in the fact that the rocks over which the stream flows are guided in the cutting which they effect by the diversities of hardness in the strata that they encounter. The work which it does is performed by the hard substances that are impelled by the current, princ.i.p.ally by the sand and pebbles. These materials, driven along by the stream, become eroding tools of very considerable energy. As will be seen when we shortly come to describe waterfalls, the potholes formed at those points afford excellent evidence as to the capacity of stream-impelled bits of stone to cut away the firmest bed rocks. Naturally the ease with which this carving work is done is proportionate to the energy of the currents, and also to the relative hardness of the moving bits and the rocks over which they are driven.

So long as the rocks lie horizontally in their natural construction att.i.tude the course of the stream is not much influenced by the variations in hardness which the bed exhibits. Where the strata are very firm there is likely to be a narrow gorge, the steeps of which rise on either side with but slight alluvial plains; where the beds are soft the valley widens, perhaps again to contract where in the course of its descent it encounters another hard layer. Where, however, the beds have been subjected to mountain-building, and have been thrown into very varied att.i.tudes by folding and faulting, the stream now here and now there encounters beds which either restrain its flow or give it freedom. The stream is then forced to cut its way according to the positions of the various underlying strata. This effect upon its course is not only due to the peculiarities of uplifted rocks, but to manifold accidents of other nature: veins and dikes, which often interlace the beds with harder or softer part.i.tions than the country rock; local hardenings in the materials, due to crystallization and other chemical processes, often create indescribable variations which are more or less completely expressed in the path of the stream.

When a land has been newly elevated above the sea there is often--we may say, indeed, generally--a very great difference between the height of its head waters and the ocean level. In this condition of a country the rivers have what we may call a new aspect; their valleys are commonly narrow and rather steep, waterfalls are apt to abound, and the alluvial terraces are relatively small in extent. Stage by stage the torrents cut deeper; the waste which they make embarra.s.ses the course of the lower waters, where no great amount of down-cutting is possible for the reason that the bed of the stream is near sea level.

At the same time the alluvial materials, building out to sea, thus diminish the slope of the stream. In the extreme old age of the river system the mountains are eaten down so that the torrent section disappears, and the stream becomes of something like a uniform slope; the higher alluvial plains gradually waste away, until in the end the valley has no salient features. At this stage in the process, or even before it is attained, the valley is likely to be submerged beneath the sea, where it is buried beneath the deposits formed on the floor; or a further uplift of the land may occur with the result that the stream is rejuvenated; or once more endowed with the power to create torrents, build alluvial plains, and do the other interesting work of a normal river.

It rarely, if ever, happens that a river valley attains old age before it has sunk beneath the sea or been refreshed by further upliftings.

In the unstable conditions of the continents, one or the other of these processes, sometimes in different places both together, is apt to be going on. Thus if we take the case of the Mississippi and its princ.i.p.al tributaries, the Ohio and Missouri, we find that for many geological ages the mountains about their sources have frequently, if not constantly, grown upward, so that their torrent sections, though they have worn down tens of thousands of feet, are still high above the sea level, perhaps on the average as high as they have ever been.

At the same time the slight up-and-down swayings of the sh.o.r.e lands, amounting in general to less than five hundred feet, have greatly affected the channels of the main river and its tributaries in their lower parts. Not long ago the Mississippi between Cairo and the Gulf flowed in a rather steep-sided valley probably some hundreds of feet in depth, which had a width of many miles. Then at the close of the last Glacial period the region sank down so that the sea flooded the valley to a point above the present junction of the Ohio River with the main stream. Since then alluvial plains have filled this estuary to even beyond the original mouth. In many other of our Southern rivers, as along the sh.o.r.e from the Mississippi to the Hudson, the streams have not brought in enough detritus to fill their drowned valleys, which have now the name of bays, of which the Delaware and Chesapeake on the Atlantic coast, and Mobile Bay on the Gulf of Mexico, are good examples. The failure of Chesapeake and Delaware Bays to fill with _debris_ in the measure exhibited by the more southern valleys is due to the fact that the streams which flow into them to a great extent drain from a region thickly covered with glacial waste, a ma.s.s which holds the flood waters, yielding the supply but slowly to the torrents, which there have but a slight cutting power.

In our sketch of river valleys no attention has been given to the phenomena of waterfalls, those accidents of the flow which, as we have noted, are particularly apt to characterize rivers which have not yet cut down to near the sea level. Where the normal uniform descent which is characteristic of a river's bed is interrupted by a sudden steep, the fact always indicates the occurrence of one of a number of geological actions. The commonest cause of waterfalls is due to a sudden change in the character of horizontal or at least nearly level beds over which the stream may flow. Where after coursing for a distance over a hard layer the stream comes to its edge and drops on a soft or easily eroded stratum, it will cut this latter bed away, and create a more or less characteristic waterfall. Tumbling down the face of the hard layer, the stream acquires velocity; the _debris_ which it conveys is hurled against the bottom, and therefore cuts powerfully, while before, being only rubbed over the stone as it moved along, it cut but slightly. Ma.s.ses of ice have the same effect as stones. Bits dropping from the ledge are often swept round and round by the eddies, so that they excavate an opening which prevents their chance escape.

In these confined s.p.a.ces they work like augers, boring a deep, well-like cavity. As the bits of stone wear out they are replaced by others, which fall in from above. Working in this way, the fragments often develop regular well-like depressions, the cavities of which work back under the cliffs, and by the undermining process deprive the face of the wall of its support, so that it tumbles in ruin to the base, there to supply more material for the potholing action.

Waterfalls of the type above described are by far the commonest of those which occur out of the torrent districts of a great river system. That of Niagara is an excellent specimen of the type, which, though rarely manifested in anything like the dignity of the great fall, is plentifully shown throughout the Mississippi Valley and the basin of the Great Lakes. Within a hundred miles of Niagara there are at least a hundred small waterfalls of the same type. Probably three quarters of all the larger accidents of this nature are due to the conditions of a hard bed overlying softer strata.

Falls are also produced in very many instances by dikes which cross the stream. So, too, though rarely, only one striking instance being known, an ancient coral reef which has become buried in strata may afford rock of such hardness that when the river comes to cross it it forms a cascade, as at the Falls of the Ohio, at Louisville, Ky. It is a characteristic of all other falls, except those first mentioned, that they rarely plunge with a clean downward leap over the face of a precipice which recedes at its base, but move downward over an irregular sloping surface.

In the torrent district of rivers waterfalls are commonly very numerous, and are generally due to the varying hardness in the rocks which the streams encounter. Here, where the cutting action is going on with great rapidity, slight differences in the resistance which the rocks make to the work will lead to great variations in the form of the bed over which they flow, while on the more gently sloping bottoms of the rivers, where the _debris_ moves slowly, such variations would be unimportant in their effect. When the torrents escape into the main river valleys, in regions where the great streams have cut deep gorges, they often descend from a great vertical height, forming wonderful waterfalls, such as those which occur in the famous Lauterbrunnen Valley of Switzerland or in that of the Yosemite in California. This group of cascades is peculiar in that the steep of the fall is made not by the stream itself, but by the action of a greater river or of a glacier which may have some time taken its place.

Waterfalls have an economic as well as a picturesque interest in that they afford sources of power which may be a very great advantage to manufacturers. Thus along the Atlantic coast the streams which come from the Appalachian highlands, and which have hardly escaped from their torrent section before they attain the sea, afford numerous cataracts which have been developed so that they afford a vast amount of power. Between the James on the south and the Ste. Croix on the north more than a hundred of these Appalachian rivers have been turned to economic use. The industrial arts of this part of the country depend much upon them for the power which drives their machinery. The whole of the United States, because of the considerable size of its rivers and their relatively rapid fall, is richly endowed with this source of energy, which, originating in the sun's heat and conveyed through the rain, may be made to serve the needs of man. In view of the fact that recent inventions have made it possible to convert this energy of falling water into the form of electricity, which may be conveyed to great distances, it seems likely that our rivers will in the future be a great source of national wealth.

We must turn again to river valleys, there to trace certain actions less evident than those already noted, but of great importance in determining these features of the land. First, we have to note that in the valley or region drained by a river there is another degrading or down-wearing action than that which is accomplished by the direct work of the visible stream. All over such a valley the underground waters, soaking through the soil and penetrating through the underlying rock, are constantly removing a portion of the mineral matter which they take into solution and bear away to the sea. In this way, deprived of a part of their substance, the rocks are continually settling down by underwear throughout the whole basin, while they are locally being cut down by the action of the stream. Hence in part it comes about that in a river basin we find two contrasted features--the general and often slight slope of a country toward the main stream and its greater tributaries, and the sharp indentation of the gorge in which the streams flow, these latter caused by the immediate and recent action of the streams.

If now the reader will conceive himself standing at any point in a river basin, preferably beyond the realms of the torrents, he may with the guidance of the facts previously noted, with a little use of the imagination, behold the vast perceptive which the history of the river valley may unfold to him. He stands on the surface of the soil, that _debris_ of the rocks which is just entering on its way to the ocean.

In the same region ten thousand years ago he would have stood upon a surface from one to ten feet higher than the present soil covering. A million years ago his station would have been perhaps five hundred feet higher than the surface. Ten million years in the past, a period less than the lifetime of certain rivers, such as the French Broad River in North Carolina, the soil was probably five thousand feet or more above its present plane. There are, indeed, cases where river valleys appear to have worked down without interruption from the subsidence of the land beneath the sea to the depth of at least two miles. Looking upward through the s.p.a.ce which the rocks once occupied, we can conceive the action of the forces in their harmonious co-operation which have brought the surface slowly downward. We can imagine the ceaseless corrosion due to the ground water, bringing about a constant though slow descent of the whole surface. Again and again the streams, swinging to and fro under the guidance of the underlying rock, or from the obstacles which the _debris_ they carried imposed upon them, have crossed the surface. Now and then perhaps the wearing was intensified by glacial action, for an ice sheet often cuts with a speed many times as great as that which fluid water can accomplish. On the whole, this exercise of the constructive imagination in conceiving the history of a river valley is one of the most enlarging tasks which the geologist can undertake.

Where in a river valley there are many lateral streams, and especially where the process of solution carried on by the underground waters is most effective, as compared with erosive work done in the bed of the main river, we commonly find the valley sloping gently toward its centre, the rivers having but slight steeps near their banks. On the other hand, where, as occasionally happens, a considerable stream fed by the rain and snow fall in its torrent section courses for a great distance over high, arid plains, on which the ground water and the tributaries do but little work, the basin may slope with very slight declivity to the river margins, and there descend to great depths, forming very deep gorges, of which the Colorado Canon is the most perfect type. As instances of these contrasted conditions, we may take, on the one hand, the upper Mississippi, where the grades toward the main stream are gentle and the valley gorge but slightly exhibited; on the other, the above-mentioned Colorado, which bears a great tide of waters drawn from the high and relatively rainy region of the Rocky Mountains across the vast plateau lying in an almost rainless country. In this section nearly all the down-wearing has been brought about in the direct path of the stream, which has worn the elevated plain into a deep gorge during the slow uprising of the table-land to its present height. In this way a defile nearly a mile in depth has been created in a prevailingly rather flat country. This gorge has embranchments where the few great tributaries have done like work, but, on the whole, this river flows in an almost unbroken channel, the excavation of which has been due to its swift, pebble-bearing waters.

The tendency of a newly formed river is to cut a more or less distinct canon. As the basin becomes ancient, this element of the gorge tends to disappear, the reason for this being that, while the river bed is high above the sea, the current is swift and the down-cutting rapid, while the slow subsidence of the country on either side--a process which goes on at a uniform rate--causes the surface of that region to be left behind in the race for the sea level. As the stream bed comes nearer the sea level its rate of descent is diminished, and so the outlying country gradually overtakes it.

In regions where the winters are very cold the effect of ice on the development of the stream beds both in the torrent and river sections of the valley is important. This work is accomplished in several diverse ways. In the first place, where the stream is clear and the current does not flow too swiftly, the stones on the bottom radiate their heat through the water, and thus form ice on their surfaces, which may attain considerable thickness. As ice is considerably lighter than water, the effect is often to lift up the stones of the bed if they be not too large; when thus detached from the bottom, they are easily floated down stream until the ice melts away. The ice which forms on the surface of the water likewise imprisons the pebbles along the banks, and during the subsequent thaw may carry them hundreds of miles toward the sea. It seems likely, from certain observations made by the writer, that considerable stones may thus be carried from the Alleghany River to the main Mississippi.

Perhaps the most important effect of ice on river channels is accomplished when in a time of flood the ice field which covered the stream, perhaps to the depth of some feet, is broken up into vast floes, which drift downward with the current. When, as on the Ohio, these fields sometimes have the area of several hundred acres, they often collide with the sh.o.r.es, especially where the stream makes a sharp bend. Urged by their momentum, these ice floes pack into the semblance of a dam, which may have a thickness of twenty, thirty, or even fifty feet. Beginning on the sh.o.r.e, where the collision takes place, the dam may swiftly develop clear across the stream, so that in a few minutes the way of the waters is completely blocked. The on-coming ice shoots up upon the acc.u.mulation, increases its height, and extends it up stream, so that in an hour the ma.s.s completely bars the current. The waters then heap up until they break their way over the obstacle, was.h.i.+ng its top away, until the whole is light enough to be forced down the stream, where, by the friction it encounters on the bottom and sides of the channel, it is broken to pieces. It is easy to see that such moving dams of ice may sweep the bed of a river as with a great broom.

Sometimes where the gorges do not form a stationary dam large cakes of ice become turned on edge and pack together so that they roll down the stream like great wheels, grinding the bed rock as they go.

In high northern countries, as in Siberia, the rivers, even the deepest, often become so far frozen that their channels are entirely obstructed. Where, as in the case of these Siberian rivers, the flow is from south to north, it often happens that the spring thaw sets in before the more northern beds of the main stream are released from their bondage of frost. In this case the inundations have to find new paths on either side of the obstructed way. The result is a type of valleys characterized by very irregular and changeable stream beds, the rivers having no chance to organize themselves into the shapely curves which they ordinarily follow.

The supply which finds its way to a river is composed, as has been already incidentally noted, in part of the water which courses underground for a greater or less distance before it emerges to the surface, and in part of that which moves directly over the ground.

These two shares of water have somewhat different histories. On the share of these two depends the stability of the flow. Where, as in New England and other glaciated countries, the surface of the earth is covered with a thick layer of sand and gravel, which, except when frozen, readily admits the water; the rainfall is to a very great extent absorbed by the earth, and only yielded slowly to the streams.

In these cases floods are rare and of no great destructive power.

Again, where also the river basin is covered by a dense mantle of forests, the ground beneath which is coated, as is the case in primeval woods, with a layer of decomposing vegetation a foot or more in depth, this spongy ma.s.s retains the water even more effectively than the open-textured glacial deposits above referred to. When the woods, however, are removed from such an area, the rain may descend to the streams almost as speedily as it finds its way to the gutters from the house roofs. It thus comes about that all regions, when reduced to tillage, and where the rainfall is enough to maintain a good agriculture, are, except when they have a coating of glacial waste, exceedingly liable to destructive inundations.

Unhappily, the risk of river floods is peculiarly great in all the regions of the United States lying much to the east of the Rocky Mountains, except in the basin of the Great Lakes and in the district of New England, where the prevalence of glacial sands and gravels affords the protection which we have noted. Throughout this region the rainfall is heavy, and the larger part of it is apt to come after the ground has become deeply snow-covered. The result is a succession of devastating floods which already are very damaging to the works of man, and promise to become more destructive as time goes on. More than in any other country, we need the protection which forests can give us against these disastrous outgoings of our streams.

LAKES.

In considering the journey of water from the hilltops to the sea, we should take some account of those pauses which it makes on its way when for a time it falls into the basin of a lake. These arrests in the downward motion of water, which we term lakes, are exceedingly numerous; their proper discussion would, indeed, require a considerable volume. We shall here note only the more important of their features, those which are of interest to the general student.