tons in weight, sweeping them down their steeply inclined channels and into the lake basins with astounding energy. Many of these side affluents also have the advantage of access to the main lateral moraines of the vanished glacier that occupied the cañon; 5 and upon these they draw for lake-filling material, while the main trunk stream flows mostly over clean glacier pavements, where but little moraine matter. is ever left for them to carry. Thus a small rapid stream with abundance of loose transportable ma- 10 terial within its reach may fill up an extensive basin in a few centuries, while a large perennial trunk stream, flowing over clean, enduring pavements, though ordinarily a hundred times larger, may not fill a smaller basin in thousands of years.

15

XII. The comparative influence of great and small streams as lake-fillers is strikingly illustrated in Yosemite Valley, through which the Merced flows. The bottom of the valley is now composed of level meadow-lands and dry, sloping soil-beds planted with 20 oak and pine; but it was once a lake stretching from wall to wall and nearly from one end of the valley to the other, forming one of the most beautiful cliffbound sheets of water that ever existed in the Sierra. And though never perhaps seen by human eye, it 25 was but yesterday, geologically speaking, since it disappeared; and the traces of its existence are still so fresh that it may easily be restored to the eye of imagination, and viewed in all its grandeur, about as truly and vividly as if actually before us. Now 30 we find that the detritus which fills this magnificent basin was not brought down from the distant mountains by the main streams that converge here

to form the river, however powerful and available for the purpose at first sight they appear; but almost wholly by the small local tributaries, such as those of Indian Cañon, the Sentinel, and the Three Brothers, and by a few small residual glaciers which lingered 5 in the shadows of the walls long after the main trunk glacier had receded beyond the head of the valley.

XIII. Had the glaciers that once covered the range been melted at once, leaving the entire surface. bare from top to bottom simultaneously, then of 10 course all the lakes would have come into existence at the same time; and the highest, other circumstances being equal, would, as we have seen, be the first to vanish. But because they melted gradually from the foot of the range upward, the lower lakes 15 were the first to see the light and the first to be obliterated. Therefore, instead of finding the lakes of the present day at the foot of the range, we find them at the top. Most of the lower lakes vanished thousands of years before those alpine landscapes were born. to the deliberation of the glaciers, the lowest of the existing lakes are also the oldest, a gradual transition being apparent throughout the apparent belt, from the older, forested, 25 meadow-rimmed and contracted forms all the way up to those that are new born, lying bare and meadowless among the highest peaks.

now brightening the 20 And in general, owing upward retreat of the

XIV. A few small lakes unfortunately situated are extinguished suddenly by a single swoop of an ava-30 lanche carrying down immense numbers of trees, together with the soil they were growing upon. Others are obliterated by land-slips, earthquake taluses, etc.;

but these lake-deaths, compared with those resulting from the deliberate and incessant deposition of sediments, may be termed accidental. Their fate is like that of trees struck by lightning.

XV. The lake-line is of course still rising, its 5 present elevation being about 8000 feet above sealevel; somewhat higher than this toward the southern extremity of the range, lower toward the northern, on account of the difference in time of the withdrawal of the glaciers, due to difference in cli- 10 mate. Specimens occur here and there considerably below this limit, in basins specially protected from inwashing detritus, or exceptional in size. These, however, are not sufficiently numerous to make any marked irregularity in the line. The highest I have 15 yet found lies at an elevation of about 12,000 feet, in a glacier womb, at the foot of one of the highest of the summit peaks, a few miles to the north of Mount Ritter. The basins of perhaps twenty-five or thirty are still in process of formation beneath the few 20 lingering glaciers; but, by the time they are born, an equal or greater number will probably have died. Since the beginning of the close of the ice-period. the whole number in the range has perhaps never been greater than at present.

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SELECTION II

THE GENIUS OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION 1

LAFCADIO HEARN

[The reprint below, though substantially complete, omits a few foot-notes and five paragraphs, whose places are marked by summaries. The idiosyncrasies of punctuation are retained.]

I

I. Without losing a single ship or a single battle, Japan has broken down the power of China, made a new Korea, enlarged her own territory, and changed the whole political face of the East. Astonishing as this has seemed politically, it is much more astonish-5 ing psychologically; for it represents the result of a vast play of capacities with which the race had never been credited abroad, capacities of a very high order. The psychologist knows that the so-called "adoption of Western civilization" within a time of 10 thirty years cannot mean the addition to the Japanese brain of any organs or powers previously absent from it. He knows that it cannot mean any sudden change in the mental or moral character of the race. Such changes are not made in a generation. Trans- 15 mitted civilization works much more slowly, requiring even hundreds of years to produce certain permanent psychological results.

1 Reprinted, by kind permission, from Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, copyright, 1896, by Houghton, Mifflin & Company; all rights reserved.

II. It is in this light that Japan appears the most extraordinary country in the world; and the most wonderful thing in the whole episode of her "Occidentalization" is that the race brain could bear so heavy a shock. Nevertheless, though the fact be 5 unique in human history, what does it really mean? Nothing more than the rearrangement of a part of the pre-existing machinery of thought. Even that, for thousands of brave young minds, was death. The adoption of Western civilization was not nearly 10 such an easy matter as unthinking persons imagined. And it is quite evident that the mental readjustments, effected at a cost which remains to be told, have given good results only along directions in which the race had always shown capacities of special kinds. 15 Thus, the appliances of Western industrial invention. have worked admirably in Japanese hands, - have produced excellent results in those crafts at which the nation had been skillful, in other and quainter ways, for ages. There has been no transformation, 20 -nothing more than the turning of old abilities into new and larger channels. The scientific professions tell the same story. For certain forms of science, such as medicine, surgery (there are no better surgeons in the world than the Japanese), chemistry, 25 microscopy, the Japanese genius is naturally adapted; and in all these it has done work already heard of round the world. In war and statecraft it has shown wonderful power; but throughout their history the Japanese have been characterized by great military 30 and political capacity. Nothing remarkable has been done, however, in directions foreign to the national genius. In the study, for example, of Western music,