forms, water and ice, and speak of them as sculp

tors.

. To understand why they deserve this name we must first consider what the work of a sculptor is. If you go into a statuary yard you will find there large blocks of granite, marble, and other kinds of stone, hewn roughly into different shapes; but if you pass into the studio, where the sculptor himself is at work, you will find beautiful statues, more or less finished; and you will see that out of rough blocks of stone he has been able to cut images which look like living forms. You can even see by their faces whether they are intended to be sad, or thoughtful, or gay, and by their attitude whether they are writhing in pain, or dancing with joy, or resting peacefully. How has all this history been worked out from the shapeless stone? It has been done by the sculptor's chisel. A piece chipped off here, a wrinkle cut there, a smooth surface rounded off in another place, so as to give a gentle curve; all these touches gradually shape the figure and mould it out of the rough stone, first into a rude shape and afterward, by delicate strokes, into the form of a living being.

Now, just in the same way as the wrinkles and curves of a statue are cut by the sculptor's chisel, so the hills and valleys, the steep slopes and gentle curves on the face of our earth, giving it all its beauty, and the varied landscapes we love so well, have been cut out by water and ice passing over them. It is true that some of the greater wrinkles of the earth, the lofty mountains, and the high masses of land which rise above the sea, have been caused by earthquakes

and shrinking of the earth. We shall not speak of these to-day, but put them aside as belonging to the rough work of the statuary yard. But when once these large masses are put ready for water to work upon, then all the rest of the rugged wrinkles and gentle slopes which make the country so beautiful are due to water and ice; and for this reason I have called them "sculptors."

Go for a walk in the country, or notice the landscape as you travel on a railway journey. You pass by hills and through valleys, through narrow steep gorges cut in hard rock, or through wild ravines up the sides of which you can hardly scramble. Then you come to grassy slopes and to smooth plains across which you can look for miles without seeing a hill; or, when you arrive at the seashore, you clamber into caves and grottos, and along dark narrow passages leading from one bay to another. All these-hills, valleys, gorges, ravines, slopes, plains, caves, grottos, and rocky shores-have been cut out by water. Day by day and year by year, while everything seems to us to remain the same, this industrious sculptor is chipping away, a few grains here, a corner there, a large mass in another place, till he gives to the country its own peculiar scenery, just as the human sculptor gives expression to his statue.

Our work to-day will consist in trying to form some idea of the way in which water thus carves out the surface of the earth, and we will begin by seeing how much can be done by our old friends the rain-drops before they become running streams.

Everyone must have noticed that whenever rain

falls on soft ground it makes small round holes in which it collects, and then sinks into the ground, forcing its way between the grains of earth. But

you would hardly think that the beautiful pillars in Fig. 26 have been made entirely in this way by rain beating upon and soaking into the ground. Rather would you

suppose they were built by people who lived in very

early times in the

country in which they are found,

or the strange edifices

made in a similar manner of rough stones by the Peruvian Indians in South America before the white man came into this part of the world.

You may see these pillars if you visit Botzen, in the Austrian Tyrol, amid the Rosengarten Mountains. In order to reach this place you must go by rail from Innsbruck, through the Brenner Pass, over a road

that runs through no less than twenty-seven tunnels, over a great many bridges, and a series of

grades one above the other, so that you can look from a window in your car down upon the roofs of trains of cars ahead several hundred feet below.

The largest of the pillars here shown is no less than forty feet high, and the other one not much less. The next picture shows a group of these pillars that look like a church with a number of spires or pinnacles. Where they now stand there was once a solid mass of clay and stones, into which the rain-drops crept, loosening the earthy particles; and then when the