Wealth of the Worlds Waste Places and Oceania | Page 2

103
A group of Arabs with their dromedaries 111
A caravan crossing the desert on the road to Jaffa 125
Peary's ship, the Roosevelt 137
Commander Robert E. Peary and three of his Eskimo dogs on the Roosevelt 141
Musk ox 144
An antarctic summer scene 149
The penguin defies the cold 153
Street in Reykjavik, Iceland 163
North Cape, Iceland 167
Stone igloos on the bleak coast of Greenland 171
A large iceberg 173
A group of Eskimos in south Greenland 174
The Straits of Magellan. Cape Pilar is the extreme western end 177
Fuegians 179
The Everglades of Florida 184
Group of Seminole Indians in the Everglades of Florida 187
The Devil's Slide, Weber Canyon, Utah 191
Witch Rocks, near Echo Canyon, Utah 193
This strong and impregnable place is the Rock of Gibraltar, and the city nestling at its base, Gibraltar 201
Landing-place for commerce on the Caspian Sea 209
Open workings of the diamond mine, Kimberley 219
Sorting gravel for diamonds in the Kimberley mine 223
A Malay girl 229
A Malay boy 231
A giant fig-tree, 140 feet in circumference 235
A mother kangaroo with a young kangaroo in her pocket 237
An Australian emeu 239
Homestead and station in Young district, Australia 243
The Great Barrier Reef of Australia, the most remarkable animal structure in the world 247
Melbourne is the largest city of Australia and contains nearly half a million people 257
Maori pa, or village 263
The Petrifying Geyser, New Zealand 265
Native canoe, Fiji Islands 275
General view of Volcano House, Kilauea, Hawaii 279
A lake of white-hot molten lava. The volcano of Mauna-Lo��, Hawaii 281
Native ploughing in rice-field, Guam. One may find rice-farms as skilfully cultivated as those of Japan or China 287
The carabao, harnessed to a dray or wagon, shuffles along 291
The harbor of the city. Scene on the Pasig River, Manila 295
Extracting indigo in Ilocos Province, Philippine Islands 297
Manila hemp as it is brought in from the country 299
A breadfruit tree in Java 303
Coffee-drying in Java 309
Natives in the jungle, Sumatra 313
A jungle, scene in Sumatra 316

WEALTH OF THE WORLD'S WASTE PLACES AND OCEANIA
[Illustration: Islands of the Pacific.]
PART I
WEALTH OF THE WORLD'S WASTE PLACES

INTRODUCTION
There is a great wealth of literature about what we call the world's productive lands--that is, the densely peopled lands that yield grain, meat, sugar, fruit, and all the various foodstuffs. In any well-equipped library we may find great numbers of useful books that will tell us all about the places where cotton, wool, and silk are grown, or where coal and iron are mined. All these lands are the dwelling places of many people. Networks of railways connect the various cities and villages, and probably a majority of the people living in them have travelled in and about much of the area of these lands.
A large part of the earth's surface is commonly called "unproductive." As a rule this is only another way of saying that such parts of the world produce little foodstuffs. We must not take the word "unproductive" either too literally or too seriously, however, for Dame Nature has a way of secreting some of her choice treasures in places so forbidding and so desolate that only the most resolute and daring men even search for them. For instance, the mineral once much used by the makers of carbonated or "soda" water comes from a part of Greenland that is so bleak, cold, and inhospitable that no human beings can long exist there unless food and fuel are brought them from afar off. The famous "nitrates" of Chile are obtained in the fiercest part of the Andean desert. Not only the food but the water consumed must be carried to the miners, who are but little better than slaves. Most of the gold and silver is obtained in regions that are unfit for human habitation. The largest diamond fields in the world are in a region that will not produce even grass without irrigation--a region that would not be inhabited were there no diamonds. From the most inhospitable highlands of Asia comes a very considerable part of the precious mineral, jade. Death Valley, in the southern part of the United States, on account of its terrific heat, is perhaps the most unhabitable region in the world, but the borax which it produces is used in every civilized country. And so we might name regions by the score that are practically unhabitable, which nevertheless produce things necessary to civilized man.
We call them "waste places," but this is far from true. For the greater part they are quite as necessary as the places we call fertile. Of foodstuffs, for instance, the greater part of the Rocky Mountain highland produces not much more than the State of New York. Yet the presence of this great mountain wall diverts the moist warm air from the Gulf of Mexico northward, making the Mississippi basin one of the foremost granaries of the world. The absence of rain in the west slope of