Earth and Sky Every Child Should Know Part 10

"Hard" water and "soft" water are very different. The rain that falls and fills our cisterns is not softer or more delightful to use than the well water in some favoured regions. In it, soap makes beautiful, creamy suds, and it is a real pleasure to put one's hands into it. But in hard water soap seems to curdle, and some softening agent like borax has to be added or the water will chap the hands. There is little satisfaction in using water of this kind for any purpose.

Hard water was as soft as any when it fell from the sky; but the rain water trickled into the ground and pa.s.sed through rocks containing lime.

Some of this mineral was absorbed, for lime is readily soluble in water.

Clear though it may be, water that has lime in it has quite a different feeling from rain water. Blow the breath into a basin of hard water, and a milky appearance will be noted. The carbonic acid gas exhaled from the lungs unites with the invisible lime, causing it to become visible particles of carbonate of lime, which fall to the bottom of the basin.

Nearly all well water is hard. So is the water of lakes and rivers and the ocean, for limestone is one of the most widely distributed rocks in the surface of the earth. Rain water makes its way into the earth's crust, absorbs mineral substances, and collects in springs which feed brooks and rivers and lakes. Wells are holes in the ground which bore into water-soaked strata of sand.

We gain something from the lime dissolved in hard water, for it is an essential part of our food. We must drink a certain amount of water each day to keep the body in perfect health. The lime in this water goes chiefly to the building of our bones. Plant roots take up lime in the water that mounts as sap through the plant bodies. We get some of the lime we need in vegetable foods we eat.

All of the kingdom of vertebrate animals, from the lowest forms to the highest, all of the sh.e.l.l-bearing animals of sea and land, require lime.

Many of the lower creatures especially these in the sea, such as corals and their near relatives, encase themselves in body walls of lime. They absorb the lime from the sea water, and deposit it as unconsciously as we build the bony framework of our bodies.

All the bone and sh.e.l.l-bearing creatures that die on the earth and in the sea restore to the land and to the water the lime taken by the creatures while they lived. Carbonic acid gas in the water greatly hastens the dissolving of dead sh.e.l.ls. Carbonic acid gas, whether free in the air, or absorbed by percolating water, hastens the dissolving of skeletons of creatures that die upon land. Then the raw materials are built again into lime rocks underground.

The lime rocks are the most important group in the list of rocks that form the crust of the earth. They are made of the elements calcium, carbon, and oxygen, yet the different members of this calcite group differ widely in composition and appearance. So do oyster sh.e.l.ls and beef bones, though both contain quant.i.ties of carbonate of lime.

Calcite is a soft mineral, light in weight, sometimes white, but oftener of some other colour. It may be found crystallized or not. Whenever a drop of acid touches it, a frothy effervescence occurs. The drop of acid boils up and gives off the pungent odour of carbonic acid gas.

The reason that calcite is hard to find in rocks is that percolating water, charged with acids, is constantly stealing it, and carrying it away into the ocean. The rocks that contain it crumble because the limy portions have been dissolved out.

Some limestones resist the destructive action of water. When they are impregnated with silica they become transformed into marble, which takes a high polish like granite. Acids must be strong to make any impression on marble.

The thick beds of pure limestone that underlie the surface soil in Kentucky and in parts of Virginia sometimes measure several hundred feet in thickness, a single stratum often being twenty feet thick. They are all horizontal, for they were formed on sea bottom, and have not been crumpled in later time. The dead bodies of sea creatures contributed their sh.e.l.ls and skeletons to the lime deposit on the sea bottom. Who can estimate the time it took to form those thick, solid layers of lime rock? The animals were corals, crinoids, and molluscs. Little sand and clay show in the lime rock of this period, before the marshes of the Carboniferous Age took the place of the ancient inland sea of the Subcarboniferous Period, the sedimentary acc.u.mulations of which we are now talking about.

The living corals one sees in the shallow water of the Florida coast to-day are building land by building up their limy skeletons. The reefs are the dead skeletons of past generations of these tiny living things.

They take in lime from the water, and use it as we use lime in building our bones. In each case it is an unconscious process of animal growth--not a "building process" like a mason's building of a wall. Many people think that the coral polyp builds in this way. They give it credit for patience in a great undertaking. All the polyp does is to feed on whatever the water supplies that its digestive organs can use.

It is like a sea anemone in appearance and in habits of life. It is not at all like an insect. Yet it is common to hear people speak of the "coral insect"! Do not let any one ever hear you repeat such a mistake.

Southern Florida is made out of coral rock, but thinly covered with soil. It was made by the growth of reef after reef, and it is still growing.

The Cretaceous Period of the earth's eventful history is named for the lime rock which we know as chalk. Beds of this recent kind of limestone are found in England and in France, pure white, made of the skeletons of the smallest of lime-consuming creatures, Foraminifera. They swarmed in deep water, and so did minute sponge animalcules and plant forms called Diatoms that took silica from the water, and formed their hard parts of this gla.s.sy substance. The result is seen in the nodules of flint found in the soft, snow-white chalk. Did you ever use a piece of chalk that scratched the black-board? The flint did it. Have you ever seen the chalk cliffs of Dover? When you do see them, notice how they gleam white in the sun. See how the rains have sculptured those cliffs. The prominences left standing out are strengthened by the flint they contain. Chalk beds occur in Texas and under our great plains; but the princ.i.p.al rocks of the age in America were sandstones and clays.

THE AGE OF FISHES

The first animal with a backbone recorded its existence among the fossils found in rocks of the upper Silurian strata. It is a fish; but the earliest fossils are very incomplete specimens. We know that these old-fashioned fishes were somewhat like the sturgeons of our rivers.

Their bodies were encased in bony armour of hard scales, coated with enamel. The bones of the spine were connected by ball and socket joints, and the heads were movable. In these two particulars the fishes resembled reptiles. The modern gar-pike has a number of the same characteristics.

Another backboned creature of the ancient seas was the ancestral type of the shark family. In some points this old-fashioned shark reminds us of birds and turtles. These early fishes foreshadowed all later vertebrates, not yet on the earth. After them came the amphibians, then the reptiles, then the birds, and latest the mammals.

The race of fishes began, no doubt, with forms so soft-boned that no fossil traces are preserved in the rocks. When those with harder bones appeared, the fossil record began, and it tells the story of the pa.s.sing of the early, unfish-like forms, and the coming of new kinds, great in size and in numbers, that swarmed in the seas, and were tyrants over all other living things. They conquered the giant straight-horns and trilobites, former rulers of the seas.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _By permission of the American Museum of Natural History_

A sixteen-foot fossil fish from Cretaceous of Kansas, with a modern tarpon]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _By permission of the American Museum of Natural History_

Canon Diablo meteorite from Arizona]

One of these giant fishes fifteen to twenty feet long, three feet wide, had jaws two feet long, set with blade-like teeth. Devonian rocks in Ohio have yielded fine fossils of gigantic fishes and sharks.

Devonian fishes were unlike modern kinds in these particulars, the spinal column extended to the end of the tail, whether the fins were arranged equally or unequally on the sides; the paired side fins look like limbs fringed with fins. Every Devonian fish of the gar type seems to have had a lung to help out its gill-breathing.

In these traits the first fishes were much like the amphibians. They were the parent stock from which branched later the true fishes and the amphibians, as a single trunk parts into two main boughs. The trunk is the connecting link.

The sea bottom was still thronged with crinoids, and lamp sh.e.l.ls, and cup corals. Sh.e.l.ls of both clam and snail shapes are plentiful. The chambered straight-horns are fewer and smaller, and coiled forms of this type of sh.e.l.l are found. Trilobite forms are smaller, and their numbers decrease.

The first land plants appeared during this age. Ferns and giant club mosses and cycads grew in swampy ground. This was the beginning of the wonderful fern forests that marked the next age, when coal was formed.

The rocks that bear the record of these living things in their fossils, form strata of great thickness that overlie the Silurian deposits. There is no break between them. So we understand that the sea changed its sh.o.r.e-line only when the Silurian deposits rose to the water-level.

The Devonian sea was smaller than the Silurian. A great tract of Devonian deposits occupies the lower half of the state of New York, Canada between Lakes Erie and Huron, and the northern portions of Indiana and Illinois. These older layers of the stratified rock are covered with the deposits of later periods. Rivers that cut deep channels reveal the earlier rocks as outcrops along their canyon walk.

The record of the age of fishes is, for the most part, still an unopened book. The pages are sealed, waiting for the geologist with his hammer to disclose the mysteries.

KING COAL

In this country, and in this age, who can doubt that coal is king? It is one of the few necessities of life. In various sections of the country, layers of coal have been discovered--some near the surface, others deep underground. These are the storehouses of fuel which the coal miners dig out and bring to the surface, and the railroads distribute. From Pennsylvania and Ohio to Alabama stretches the richest coal-basin.

Illinois and Indiana contain another. From Iowa southward to Texas another broad basin lies. Central Michigan and Nova Scotia each has isolated coal-basins. All these have been discovered and mined, for they lie in the oldest part of the country.

In the West, coal-beds have been discovered in several states, but many regions have not yet been explored. Vast coal-fields, still untouched, have been located in Alaska. The Government is trying to save this fuel supply for coming generations. Many of the richest coal-beds from Nova Scotia southward dip under the ocean. They have been robbed by the erosive action of waves and running water. Glaciers have ground away their substance, and given it to the sea. Much that remains intact must be left by miners on account of the difficulties of getting out coal from tilted and contorted strata.

As a rule, the first-formed coal is the best. The Western coal-fields belong to the period following the Carboniferous Age. Although conditions were favourable to abundant coal formation, Western coal is not equal to the older, Eastern coal. It is often called _lignite_, a word that designates its immaturity compared with anthracite.

Coal formed in the Tria.s.sic Period is found in a basin near Richmond, Virginia. There is an abundance of this coal, but it has been subjected to mountain-making pressure and heat, and is extremely inflammable. The miners are in constant danger on account of coal gas, which becomes explosive when the air of the shaft reaches and mingles with it. This the miner calls "fire damp." North Carolina has coal of the same formation, that is also dangerous to mine, and very awkward to reach, on account of the crumpling of the strata.

There are beds of coal so pure that very little ash remains after the burning. Five per cent, of ash may be reasonably expected in pure coal, unmixed with sedimentary deposits. Such coal was formed in that part of the swamp which was not stirred by the inflow of a river. Wherever muddy water flowed in among the fallen stems of plants, or sand drifted over the acc.u.mulated peat, these deposits remained, to appear later and bother those who attempt to burn the coal.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Eocene fish]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _By permission of the American Museum of Natural History_

Trilobite from the Niagara limestone, Upper Silurian, of Western New York]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sigillaria, Stigmaria and Lepidodendron]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _By permission of the American Museum of Natural History_

Coal fern]

You know pure coal, that burns with great heat and leaves but little ashes. You know also the other kind, that ignites with difficulty, burns with little flame, gives out little heat, and dying leaves the furnace full of ashes. You are trying to burn ancient mud that has but a small proportion of coal mixed with it. The miners know good coal from poor, and so do the coal dealers. It is not profitable to mine the impure part of the vein. It costs as much to mine and ship as the best quality, and it brings a much lower price.