The Project Gutenberg eBook, Wealth of the World's Waste Places and
Oceania, by Jewett Castello Gilson

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Title: Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania

Author: Jewett Castello Gilson

Release Date: November 19, 2007 [eBook #23546]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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Redway's Geographical Readers

WEALTH OF THE WORLD'S WASTE PLACES AND OCEANIA

by

JEWETT C. GILSON
Former Superintendent of Schools, Oakland, California

Illustrated

[Illustration: From the National Geographic Magazine, copyright 1911:
The great Rainbow natural bridge of southern Utah]

Charles Scribner's Sons
New York 1913

Copyright, 1913,
by Jewett C. Gilson

PREFACE

Although the term "Waste Places" carries an implied meaning of
"worthless," yet, interpreted in the light of Nature's methods, each
region described, useless as it may apparently seem, possesses a
definite relation to the rest of the world, and therefore to the
well-being of man. The Sahara is the track of the winds whose moisture
fertilizes the flood-plains of the Nile. The Himalaya Mountains condense
the rain that gives life to India. From the inhospitable polar regions
come the winds and currents that temper the heat of the tropics.

Nature has secreted many of her most useful treasures in most forbidding
places. The nitrates which fertilize so much of Europe are drawn from
the fiercest of South American deserts, and the gold which measures
American commerce is mined in the arctic wilds of Alaska or in the
almost inaccessible scarps of the western highlands. The description of
these regions and the portrayal of their relation t