Wonders of the World We Live On
I. Land
When you went around the world you found that this earth we live upon is made of just land and water. But what a number of things were made with them. No two countries looked just the same, but they were all beautiful and interesting. Do you want to know how they came to be so different?
You need not go around the world again to find out, but it will help you to understand everything better if you will remember what you saw—the grassy plains, the high, rocky mountains, the green river valleys, the sandy desert. No matter where you live on the earth, there is land and water. In any wood or field or city park you can find out a great many of old mother earth's secrets.
This is a perfectly flat meadow, isn't it? It is covered with grass and flowers. Here is a pond, with water-flags and cat-tails and pussy willows growing about it. The water is as still as if it lay in a wash basin. No, there is a ripple on the other side. A little stream, almost buried in grass, is flowing in there. The water runs very slowly. The land on that side slopes a little toward the pond, or the tiny stream could not flow into it. Water never runs any way except down hill. Here is another little feeder to the pond, and another! Here the water runs out of the pond, through a larger brook. The meadow isn't flat at all. It is made up of little slopes. The pond is a small lake. Some lakes are hundreds of miles long, but they were formed just like this pond. The water from them flows out through a big river, instead of through a little brook. They are fed by many small rivers, and by springs underneath, too.
Wherever a pond or a lake is made on land, there must be a low place shaped like a bowl, with the land sloping down on all the sides but one. But sometimes, for hundreds of miles, the land slopes from only two sides, making a trough between. There you would find, not a lake, but a river. When the river is very long and deep, like the Mississippi, its valley is hundreds of miles wide. The slopes rise slowly, but they rise high, to the very tops of mountain ranges. Many big streams run down these long slopes to feed the main river,
