Some Winter Days in Iowa | Page 4

in the perspective.
In a small way you know how it would feel to hear the rumble of an
approaching seismic shock. Only there was no terror in this. It was the
laughter of the sunbeam fairies as they loosened the architecture of "the
elfin builders of the frost."
The recent rains have vivified the mosses clinging to the gray rocks
which jut out, halfway up the slope. Very tender and beautiful is their
vivid shade of green. Winter and summer, the mosses are always with
us. When the last late aster has faded, the last blue blossom of the
gentian changed to brown, the green mosses still remain. And the more
they are studied, the more fascinating they become. Take some home
and examine them with a hand lens, then with a microscope. You will
be charmed with the exquisite finish of their most minute parts. Nature
glories in the artistic excellence of infinitesimal workmanship. The
most beautiful part of her handiwork is that which is seen through a
microscope. There is beauty, beauty everywhere; the crystals of the
snow, the cell structure of the leaf, the scales of the butterfly's wing, the
pedicels, capsules and cilia of these mosses. No wonder that many
distinguished men have been led to give their whole lives to the study
of mosses and have felt well repaid.
* * * * *
Here are Nature's only two elementary forms of growth, the cell and the
crystal, wrestling for the mastery over each other in a life and death
struggle. The moss is built up of cell, the rock of crystal forms. Below
this Devonian limestone, its crystals sparkling in the sunshine, with its
coral fossils, its fragments of crinoids, and its broken shells of
brachiopods, down through the Devonian, the Silurian, the Ordovician,
and the Cambrian rocks, down to the original crust formed when first

the earth began to cool, if any there be remaining; all these miles of
rocks are inorganic, built up of crystals. But here on the surface, the
tender green mosses and the bright lichens have begun the struggle of
the cellular system for supremacy. These humble little rock-breakers
will not rest until they have pulverized the rocks into soil sufficient to
sustain higher forms of vegetable life.
Once before, many millions of years ago, the cell life had won a partial
victory over the crystal. In the great sub-tropical sea which once
covered this spot, corals lived and flourished as they do now in similar
seas. Myriads of brachiopods lived, moved, and had their being.
Gigantic fish sported in the waters. Meanwhile older rocks were being
denuded and disintegrated. Millions of tons of sediment were brought
by the rivers and streams to the shores of the Devonian sea. Upheaval,
change, transformation followed, and the tide of battle turned. Cell life
was powerless before the vanquishing crystals of the infiltrating calcite.
Only the inorganic part of that vast world of organic life here remains
in these fossils to tell the story--the walls of the corals, the shells of the
brachiopods, the teeth of the monster fishes. Then came succeeding
ages, and finally the great glaciers which brought down the drift,
rounded the sharp ridges, filled up the deep valleys and gorges, and
gave to Iowa her fertile and inexhaustible soil. The earth was prepared
to receive her king. The glaciers receded. Man came.
Now here, on this bit of limestone rock, the struggle is on again. The
mosses and the lichens have proceeded far enough in their work of
disintegration to provide substance for the slender red stem of dogwood,
which is growing out of the soil they have made. The fallen leaves of
the surrounding trees follow the pioneer work of the mosses. The rain
and the cracking frosts are other agencies. By and by the organic will
triumph over the inorganic, the cell over the crystal, the plant over the
rock, and where now the fossils lie beautiful flowers will bloom.
The short winter day draws rapidly to a close and there is time for only
a brief survey of the beauty of the upland trees. The fairy-like delicacy
of the hop hornbeam, with its hop clusters and pointing catkins; the
slender gracefulness of the chestnut oak; the Etruscan vase-like form of

the white elm; the flaky bark and pungent, aromatic twigs of the black
cherry; the massive, noble, silver-gray trunk of the white-oak; the lofty
stateliness, filagree bark, and berry-like fruit of the hackberry; the black
twigs of the black oaks, ashes, hickories and walnuts etched against the
sky,--all these arrest your attention and retard your steps until the sun is
near the horizon and you look over the tangled undergrowth of hazel,
sumac, and briers, far through the trunks of the trees to the western sky