Various

“ The afternoon was devoted to the great natural wonders of Baku, petroleum and the everlasting fires. At Surakhani the whole country is saturated with petroleum; on making a hole in the ground the gas escapes, on lighting which it burns for a very long while, one of the few spots on earth where this phenomenon can be seen. When there is no wind the flame is dull and small, but in a gale it roars and leaps up eight or ten feet. ”

“ But how few people have had the privilege of watching that sweet life; of knowing how precious and sacred it is; how the little beings guard their nests with almost human wisdom and cherish their young with faithful, careful, self-sacrificing love! If women only knew these things there is not one in the length and breadth of the land, I am happy to believe, who would be cruel enough to encourage this massacre of the innocents by wearing any precious rifled plume of theirs upon her person. ”

“ From infancy I have lived among them, have watched them with the most profound reverence and love, respected their rights, adored their beauty and their song, and I could no more injure a bird than I could hurt a child. No woman would if she knew it. The family life of most birds is a lesson to men and women. ”

“ There is a solemnity about them, a quiet grandeur, which is very impressive, and the rustling of their branches and leaves has that mysterious sound which caused the ancients to people them with spirits. We still recognize the feeling of awe that comes in the presence of forests, although we have long since ceased to explain it by peopling them with spirits.
Once forests covered all parts of the earth where plants could grow well, and no country had greater forests than North America. When America was discovered, there was a huge, unbroken forest from the Atlantic west to the prairies. ”

“ In the deepest parts of the earth which we can get at for study, we find that it is made up of rocks of the granite class; not always granite proper, but rocks like it. What is below this in the great heart of the earth we do not know, except that it is very dense and heavy. Rocks of the granite class are formed under great heat and pressure, or by the cooling of molten rock material. They may be called the basement rock or great floor, on which all the other rocks near the surface are laid. They underlie all the surface, but at different depths. ”

“ The river is running to the south; the mountains have an easterly and westerly trend directly athwart its course, yet it glides on in a quiet way as if it thought a mountain range no formidable obstruction to its course. ”

“ Insects are enfeebled at all changes in their life, and at each successive moult, when the pupa case is broken, too weak to keep guard, they flutter and rest on the water an instant before flitting away. At this instant many are seized by the wary fish. Insects leave the water mornings and evenings, particularly the latter, rarely at midday, never during rain storms or heavy winds. It is at these times, when they are leaving the water, their imitations are used to most advantage. It is that insect floating off into a new element that the fish are watching and waiting to feed on. ”

“ For heavy sport, fishing for sharks, which are good for nothing, or the gusa, which weighs from 400 to 600 pounds and is excellent eating, offers abundant exercise. It is a daily occurrence to see schools of fish numbering from hundreds to many thousands, each fish weighing from one to four pounds, swimming around the bays and harbors waiting for a bait. Any American who enjoys good fishing can find his fondest dreams more than satisfied in Cuba. ”

“ When the sap reaches the leaves, the water is no longer needed as a carrier of soil-material. Some of it is needed in the manufacture of food, but by far the greater part of it escapes from the leaves into the air by a process which may be called "plant evaporation." The amount of water thus brought from the soil and poured out into the air by active plants is very great; and when we consider a forest at work, we can hardly compute the vast amount of moisture which it is constantly contributing to the air during the growing season. ”

“ From the base of the mighty palisade which forms the walls of the outer cañon stretches a plateau 5, 8, 10, or 12 miles wide, to the equally lofty palisade which forms the opposite wall of the outer cañon, and somewhere near the middle of this plateau is sunk the inner cañon, another 2,000 to 3,000 feet deep, with a width at the top varying from one-half to three-fourths of a mile, and in its somber depths rolls the ever turbid Colorado, ceaselessly at its endless labor of cutting down the mountains and sweeping their ruins to the sea. ”

“ In America there are over 25,000 petroleum wells; Baku possesses 400, but a single one of these 400 wells has thrown up as much oil in a day as nearly the whole of the 25,000 in America put together. This is very wonderful, but a more striking fact is that the copiousness of the well should have ruined its owners and broken the heart of the engineer who bored it after having yielded enough oil in four months to have realized in America at least one million sterling. In Pennsylvania that fountain would have made its owner's fortune. ”

“ In some places they have been crowded up by the pressure that came from the shrinking of the earth, of which we spoke before, and so have come to be actually at the surface, except that soil, clay, sand, or gravel may cover them. Under about one-fifth of the land these rocks lie just below the clays, gravels, sands, and soils that occupy the immediate surface. Sometimes they come out to the actual surface, and may be seen in ledges or bluffs. But usually the soils, sands, gravels, and clays cover them up more or less deeply, but even then they are often struck in sinking wells. ”

“ Men must use the forest, and still they must save it, and they are now trying to find out how they may do both.
Forests are sometimes almost entirely made up of one kind of tree, and then they are called "pure forests." Pine and beech forests are examples of this kind. More common with us, however, are the "mixed forests," made up of many kinds of trees, and nowhere in the world are there such mixed forests as in our Middle States, where beech, oak, hickory, maple, elm, poplar, gum, walnut, sycamore, and many others all grow together. ”

“ As they grow older they separate, and each one chooses his own particular hiding-place, the larger trout taking the deepest holes and largest projections and leaving the smaller relations to shift for themselves. The older they grow the wiser and more wary they become, hence the necessity of considerable skill to land a wary old trout. Angle-worms are considered the best bait for trout, but in the spring, after the usual freshets, which wash vast numbers of worms and insects into the water, they bite better at the more tempting bait of a fly. ”

“ We see clearly about twenty-five miles each way along the cañon, and somewhat indistinctly probably another twenty-five or thirty miles each way, and everywhere is the same indescribable splendor of color and of beauty of form. ”

“ It is thought by some that the earth may have grown up entirely by gathering them in, the idea being that it was itself once only a little meteorite that succeeded in gathering the others in. It is commonly supposed, however, by those who hold to this view, that the earth was formed from some special cluster of these meteorites that gathered together. It has been thought that perhaps the gas of the rings mentioned before may have cooled down into little solid particles before they were collected together and that they built up the earth. ”

“ It is evident, therefore, that the root is supplying to the tree two kinds of raw material for food manufacture obtained from the soil, namely, water and soil-material dissolved in it.
But the tree does not obtain all its raw material from the soil. A very important material is taken from the air, the material commonly called "carbonic acid gas," the same material that we breathe out so abundantly from our lungs as one of our body wastes. This important material is taken out of the air into the plant chiefly by means of the leaves. ”

“ All nocturnal insects have a strange infatuation for glistening light. What the attraction is for some is beyond the [Pg 139] ken of mortals. A Tipulidæ bibri marci, or in piscatorial language, the hawthorn fly, an insect whose life is beneath the surface of the earth eleven months of the year, comes crawling, creeping out of the ground on warm June mornings appareled in new livery. After resting awhile on low herbage, all, as if guided by one impulse, fly to the nearest stream. We have kept those insects for weeks in confinement, and they would neither eat nor drink. ”

“ No narrow crack in the earth's crust is this cañon, but a vast chasm 217 miles long, from five to twelve miles wide and from 5,000 to 6,000 feet deep, with a great river rolling tumultuously along its bottom, miles away from us as the crow flies, and nearly a mile below us vertically. ”

“ It is only a cyclone that seems to be able to overthrow a sound tree, and then it more commonly breaks its trunk than uproots it.
The very important work of absorbing is given over to the very young roots; in fact, chiefly to those of this year, for new rootlets must be put out each year. These roots can only absorb water, so that if they are to get anything from the soil it must be something that water will dissolve. In this way the water is used as the carrier of soil-material into the root. ”

“ It is a wonderful process, which we do not at all understand, but it consists in taking this dead raw material from soil and air and manufacturing out of it living material. Not only does the food of the plant, and hence its life, depend upon this process, but all the life of the world, as we understand it, depends upon it. We know at least two prominent conditions of this process, [Pg 101] for it seems evident that it cannot take place without light and the peculiar green substance which gives the characteristic color to leaves. ”

“ Hairy caterpillars feeding on the trees are blown off by the winds, or their silken thread is broken, as they hang under the leaves in shelter from the rain. Imitations of those known to the American by the familiar term of hackles are to be used after winds or during rain storms; also that compromise between larvae and image known as the hackle fly. No bait has ever been used that has given as general satisfaction as this anomaly. It is a common remark that fish will not bite before rain. ”

“ Practice alone will enable one to catch this wary beauty. One must know not only how to catch it but where to find it, and some knowledge of entomology is essential at the very beginning. It is desirable to have some acquaintance with the insects that live in the water, under the water, and over the water, and whose habits in great part influence the movements of the fish. ”

“ The character of the wood is affected by the soil and locality in which the trees grow, lumbermen making distinctions not recognized by botanists. The white oak is long-lived, and specimens supposed to have been in existence before the settlement of the country are still standing. It is of slow growth, but does not cease to grow as it gets larger. The oak is much esteemed as an ornamental tree. The names of some of the varieties are: Post oak, burr oak, swamp oak, live oak, black oak, willow oak, scrub oak, scarlet oak, and California evergreen oak. ”

“ With the help of light and this green coloring substance, known as "chlorophyll," the living substance in the leaves is able to do this marvelous work.
The food thus manufactured is distributed throughout the tree, either to be used wherever growth is going on, or to be stored up. While we may say that there is an "ascending current" of sap through the sap wood, it is an error to say that there is a "descending current." The movement of prepared food has no definite channel, but it is drawn in every direction wherever needed. ”