FullReads

One question more. Whence comes the mud? The answer is, Mainly from the detritus of the mountains. There it has two origins. Part of it is glacial, part of it is leaf-mould. In order to feel we have really got to the very bottom of the mud problem–and we are nothing if not thorough–we must examine in brief these two separate origins.

The glacier mud is of a very simple nature. It is disintegrated rock, worn small by the enormous millstone of ice that rolls slowly over the bed, and deposited in part as ‘terminal moraine’ near the summer melting-point. It is the quantity of mud thus produced, and borne down by mountain torrents, that makes the alluvial plains collect so quickly at their base. The mud flats of the world are in large part the wear and tear of the eternal hills under the planing action of the eternal glaciers.

But let us be just to our friends. A large part is also due to the industrious earth-worm, whose place in nature Darwin first taught us to estimate at its proper worth. For there is much detritus and much first-rate soil even on hills not covered by glaciers. Some of this takes its origin, it is true, from disintegration by wind or rain, but much more is caused by the earth-worm in person. That friend of humanity, so little recognized in his true light, has a habit of drawing down leaves into his subterranean nest, and there eating them up, so as to convert their remains into vegetable mould in the form of worm-casts. This mould, the most precious of soils, gets dissolved again by the rain, and carried off in solution by the streams to the sea or the lowlands, where it helps to form the future cultivable area. At the same time the earthworms secrete an acid, which acts upon the bare surface of rock beneath, and helps to disintegrate it in preparation for plant life in unfavourable places. It is probable that we owe almost more on the whole to these unknown but conscientious and industrious annelids than even to those ‘mills of God’ the glaciers, of which the American poet justly observes that though they grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small.

In the last resort, then, it is mainly on mud that the life of humanity in all countries bases itself. Every great plain is the alluvial deposit of a great river, ultimately derived from a great mountain chain. The substance consists as a rule of the debris of torrents, which is often infertile, owing to its stoniness and its purely mineral character; but wherever it has lain long enough to be covered by earth-worms with a deep black layer of vegetable mould, there the resulting soil shows the surprising fruitfulness one gets (for example) in Lombardy, where twelve crops a year are sometimes taken from the meadows. Everywhere and always the amount and depth of the mud is the measure of possible fertility; and even where, as in the Great American Desert, want of water converts alluvial plains into arid stretches of sand-waste, the wilderness can be made to blossom like the rose in a very few years by artificial irrigation. The diversion of the Arkansas River has spread plenty over a vast sage scrub; the finest crops in the world are now raised over a tract of country which was once the terror of the traveller across the wild west of America.