The Adventures of a Grain of Dust Part 2

At first, in the reign of the spruces, some of the old residents begin to come back. A spruce forest, not being so dense in the beginning as a pine forest, lets in a good deal of sunlight, and you'll find scattered through its aisles and byways gentians, bluebells, daisies, goldenrod.

In course of time, however, the leaves and branches of the spruces become so thick that hardly a sunbeam can get through and you have a forest where noontime looks like twilight; a forest of deep shade and silence with its thick carpet of brown needles, and where all the shrubs and gra.s.ses and flowers have disappeared, except in the open s.p.a.ces. It was in such a forest and in one of these sunny glades, no doubt, that the knight the little girl tells of in Tennyson:

"... while he past the dim lit woods Himself beheld three spirits mad with joy Come das.h.i.+ng down on a tall wayside flower That shook beneath them as the thistle shakes When three gray linnets wrangle for the seed."

HOW NATURE RESTORES ABANDONED FARMS

So it is that new lands pa.s.s from barren rock to forest, and deep rich soil, and so it is that worn-out soils, the result of reckless farming are finally restored. Hardly any soil is too poor for some kind of a weed. These weeds springing up, die and make soil that better kinds of weeds can use. Later come a few woody plants. In the course of fifteen or twenty years the soil is deep enough to support trees; and in fifty years there is a young forest. At the end of a century fine timber can be cut, the land cleared, and the old place may be as good as new.

But it's a long time to wait! It's a much better plan to take care of the land in the first place.

HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY

One of the strangest things about Mr. Lichen, as you will see by looking up the subject in any botany or encyclopaedia, is that he is really _two_ people--two different plants that have grown into partners.h.i.+p; and that one of the partners supplies water for the firm while the other furnishes the food.

The part of "him" that supplies the food is green, or blue-green, and that is why it is able to do this. This idea that Mr. Lichen is really two people was one of those that was "received with a storm of opposition," but certain lichenologists actually took two different kinds of plants, put them together and _made_ a lichen themselves, as you will see when you look the matter up.

As to just who among these two kinds of plants shall go into partners.h.i.+p--that usually depends on chance and the winds; although in the case of some lichens, the parents determine upon these partners.h.i.+ps, just as they often do in human relations.

If you want to continue this interesting study and become Learned Lichenologists, you will be interested to know that there are a lot of things to be learned, including not only no end of delightful names, such as _Endocarpon_, _Collema_, _Pertusaria_, not to speak of _Xanthoria parietina_, and loads of others, but there are still things unknown that _you_ may be able some day to find out. For instance, while they know that the two kinds of vegetation that together make a lichen, feed and water each other, it's not known exactly _how_ they do it; although the "Britannica" article has a picture showing the two partners in the very act of going into partners.h.i.+p. The article in the "Americana" shows some striking forms of lichens, and how nature from these very dawnings of life begins to dream of beauty. You will be surprised at the forms shown in the "Americana," they are either so graceful, symmetrical, or picturesque. One of them looks like a very elaborate helmet decoration, or plume of a knight.

This article also tells what an incredible number of species of lichens there are--enough to make quite a good-sized town, if they were all real people.

It also tells why the orange and yellow lichens take to the shady side of the rock; and something about how the lichens get those remarkable decorations and sculpturings, and what the weather has to do with it.

There you will also get a probable explanation of the fact that the manna which the Israelites found on the ground in the morning appeared so suddenly.

In the article in the "International" you will find another picture of how the two partners--the fungus and the alga--make the lichen, and you will learn that Mr. Lichen's name, like Mr. Lichen himself, is centuries old; being the very name given him by the Greeks, and afterward by the Romans.

In the "Country Life Reader" there is an article on the soil that has a very close relations.h.i.+p to the subject of the lichens and their work. It tells, among other things, about the value of humus--decayed leaves, gra.s.s, etc.--to the soil. It was the lichens, you know, who _started_ the humus-making business.

The article in the reader on "Planting Time," by L. H. Bailey, expresses the wonder we must all feel when we stop to think about it, at the magic work of the soil in changing a little speck of a seed into a plant.

CHAPTER II

(FEBRUARY)

Behold a strange monster our wonder engages!

If dolphin or lizard your wit may defy.

Some thirty feet long, on the sh.o.r.e of Lyme-Regis With a saw for a jaw and a big staring eye.

A fish or a lizard? An Ichthyosaurus, With a big goggle-eye and a very small brain, And paddles like mill-wheels in chattering chorus Smiting tremendous the dread-sounding main.

--_Professor Blackie._

SOME EARLY SETTLERS AND THEIR BONES

But a farm where nothing but plants grow isn't much of a farm. Every good farmer knows that nowadays, and so he stocks his place with horses and cows and chickens and things. Mother Nature understood this principle from the beginning, and the plants and animals on her farm have always got on well together.

For one thing the plant and the animal each help the other to get its breath. That is to say, plants, when they take in the air, keep most of the carbon there is in it and give back most of the oxygen, which is just what the animal world wants; while the animals, when they breathe, keep most of the oxygen and give back most of the carbon--just the thing that plants grow on.

But the service of the animals to the plants is very important after they have stopped breathing altogether; since their flesh and bones, like the dead bodies of the plants, go back to enrich their common dust.

The bones and bodies and sh.e.l.ls of members of the animal kingdom, however, are far richer food for soils than is dead vegetation. The sh.e.l.l creatures of the sea to which we owe our wonderfully fertile limestone soils are--many of them--so small that you can only make them out with a microscope; while certain other contributors to our food-supply were so big that one of them, walking down a country road, would almost fill the road from fence to fence.

I. MR. DINOSAUR AND HIS NEIGHBORS

A STRANGE FACE IN THE MEADOW

Now let's take a look at some of these big fellows. How would you like to have such a creature as the one at the right of this page come ambling up to meet you at the meadow gate of an evening when you went to milk the cows? Yet more than likely either this gentle animal, or some of his kin, browsed over the very field where now the cattle pasture, for he, too, was a gra.s.s-eater, and with an appet.i.te most hearty. If you kept him in a barn his stall would have to be eighty feet long, and it would be necessary to fill his rack with a ton of fodder every third day. But, a.s.suming there was a market for him in the shape of steaks and roasts, you would be well repaid; for, in prime condition, he weighed twenty tons.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN THE LAND OF HIS FATHERS]

These monsters who ate gra.s.s, and other monsters who ate them, and still other monsters who lived in the sea, appeared comparatively late in the life of the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NO WONDER HE NEVER WORRIED!

Quite aside from the fact that he had so little brain to worry with, it seems highly improbable that the Stegosaurus ever felt any apprehension about attacks from the rear, in the frequent military operations which distinguished the times in which he lived. In addition to the h.o.r.n.y plates down his back he had those h.o.r.n.y spines which were swung by a tail some ten feet long.]

TONS AND TONS OF ANCIENT BONES

It is only about 15,000,000 years ago, for example, that the biggest of them all, the Dinosaurs, lived, while the earth itself is now supposed to be some 100,000,000 years old. Their numbers were enormous, and it is probable there is not an acre of ground from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Alaska to the tip end of South America that has not been fertilized by their bones. In fact, of certain species I have found the bones scattered all the way from Oregon to Patagonia; so this must have been their pasture.

They were not only all over the land, but in the lakes and in the great sea that once extended right through North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. And they were along the sh.o.r.es of the sea and in the swamps. The bones of the ancestors of the whale were found in such quant.i.ties in some of the Southern States that they were used to build fences until it was found they were much more valuable to enrich the fields themselves.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HEAD OF HESPERORNIS

"Then there was a great toothed, diving creature with wings. They've named him the Hesperornis, which means 'western bird,' because the fossils of the best-known species were found in the chalk-beds of Kansas."]

In the great American inland sea of those days swam one kind of fierce fish-lizard that took such big bites he had to have a hinge in his jaw.

Because of this hinge he could open his mouth wider without putting anything out of place, don't you see? He was called the Mesosaur. But he never bit the Archelon, who was in his crowd, because he couldn't. The Archelon was the king of turtles, and, like all the turtle family, wore heavy armor. He was over twelve feet long. And sharks--no end of them! A shark at his best is bad enough, but the sharks of those days were almost too terrible to think about. Such jaws! And teeth like railroad spikes! Then there was a great toothed diving creature with wings.

They've named him the "Hesperornis," which means "western bird." He was given the name because the fossils of the best-known species were found in the chalk-beds of Kansas.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GREATEST OF ANCIENT FLYING MACHINES

Mr. Pterodactyl, on his way to dinner, looked like this. He was the largest of all flying-machines before the days of the Wright brothers.

He would have measured--if there had been anybody to measure him--twenty feet across the wings! Like the Hesperornis, he always dined on fish.]

Over the waters flew another bird-like, fish-like, bat-like thing called the Pterodactyl. Look at his picture and you will see how he got his nickname. It means "finger-toe." He was the largest of all flying-machines until the days of the Wright brothers. It was over twenty feet across his wings, from tip to tip; and, like the Hesperornis, he always had fish for dinner.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BIG "LITTLE FINGER" AND WHAT IT WAS FOR