the Infinite. Man interprets this thought through
the medium of natural law, and lo, a new product!

How much life would have been robbed of its charm and interest if all
these things had been worked out for us from the beginning! For there is
no interest so absorbing and no pleasure so keen as that of pursuit when
the pursuer is reaching out after the hidden things that are locked up
in Nature's great storehouse. From time to time she yields up her
secrets, little by little, to encourage those who love her and are
willing to work, not only for the pleasure of the getting, but for the
highest and best good of their fellows.

WATER.

CHAPTER XIX.

RIVERS AND FLOODS.

Water covers such a large proportion of the earth's surface and is such
an important factor in the economy of nature that it becomes a matter of
interest to study the process of its distribution. Water is to our globe
what blood is to our bodies. A constant circulation must be kept up or
all animal and vegetable life would suffer. Here, as in every other
operation of nature, the sun is the great heart and motive power that is
active in the distribution of moisture over the face of the globe.

The total annual rainfall on the whole surface of the earth amounts to
about 28,000 cubic miles of water. Only about one-fourth of this amount
ever reaches the ocean, but it is either absorbed for a time by animal
and vegetable life or lifted through the process of evaporation into the
air as invisible moisture, when it is carried over the region of
rainfall and there condensed into water and falls back upon the
earth--only to go through the same operation again. The whole surface of
the earth is divided into drainage areas that lead either directly
through rivulets and rivers to the ocean, or into some land-locked
basin, where it either finds an outlet under ground or is kept within
bounds through the process of evaporation, the same as is the case with
our great oceans. In North America the amount of drainage area that has
no outlet to the ocean amounts to about 3 per cent. of the whole
surface. In other countries the percentage of inland drainage is much
larger. The great Salt Lake in Utah is an instance where there is no
outlet for the water except through the medium of evaporation. Inasmuch
as all rivers and streams contain a certain proportion of
salt,--especially in such strongly alkaline land regions as the Great
Basin of the North American