Madam How and Lady Why; or, First lessons in earth lore for children . have come down inside the glacier itself,and piled up in the field in great mounds, which arecalled moraines, such as you may see and walk on inScotland many a time, though you might never guesswhat they are. The river which runs out at the glacier foot is, youmust remember, all foul and milky with the finestmud; and that mud is the grinding of the rocks overwhich the glacier has been crawling down, and scrapingthem as it scraped my bit of stone with pebbles andwith sand. And this is the alphabet, which, if youlearn by hear
Madam How and Lady Why; or, First lessons in earth lore for children . have come down inside the glacier itself,and piled up in the field in great mounds, which arecalled moraines, such as you may see and walk on inScotland many a time, though you might never guesswhat they are. The river which runs out at the glacier foot is, youmust remember, all foul and milky with the finestmud; and that mud is the grinding of the rocks overwhich the glacier has been crawling down, and scrapingthem as it scraped my bit of stone with pebbles andwith sand. And this is the alphabet, which, if youlearn by heart, you will learn to understand howMadam How uses her great ice-plough to plough down THE ICE-PLOUGH 89 her old mountains, and spread the stuff of them aboutthe valleys to make rich straths of fertile soil. Nay,so immensely strong, because immensely heavy, is theshare of this her great ice-plough, that some will tellyou (and it is not for me to say that they are wrong)that with it she has ploughed out all the mountainlakes in Europe and in North America; that such r. lakes, for instance, as UUswater or Windermere havebeen scooped clean out of the solid rock by ice whichcame down these glaciers in old times. And be sureof this, that next to Madam Hows steam-pixmp andher rain-spade, her great ice-plough has had, and hasstill, the most to do with making the ground on whichwe live. Do I mean that there were ever glaciers here ? 90 MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY uhap. No, I do not. There have been glaciers in Scotland inplenty. And if any Scotch boy shall read this book,it will tell him presently how to find the marks ofthem far and wide over his native land. But as you,my child, care most about this country in which youlive, I will show you in any gravel-pit, or hollow laneupon the moor, the marks, not of a glacier, which is anice-river, but of a whole sea of ice. Let us come up to the pit upon the top of the hill,and look carefully at what we see there. The lowerpart of the pit of course
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