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Show 180. i mile's thickness of granite, then he would also have to show where all the rock went. At the same time, in "Formation af Soils," Chapter Six of the Studies, he seized a chance to influence an audience which might be more interested in agriculture than in beautiful sculpture. He used the language of agriculture. Glaciers, when they formed soils, were like plows, producing "soil belts or furrows." The glacier was the perfect contour plow, a model for men: . . . instead of disappearing suddenly, like a sun-stricken cloud, it withdrew from the base of the great soil-belt upward, in that magnificiently deliberate way so characteristic of nature - adding belt to belt in beautiful order over lofty plateaus and rolling hills and valleys, wherever soil could be made to lie. One cannot help but notice that this is a sort of natural recycling. A good craftsman not only cleans up after himself, but uses everything at hand. The winds and the rains had their roles in this secondary glacial phenomenon. Acting over the centuries, they "smooth rough glacial soils like harrows and rollers. But this culture is carried on at an infinitely slow rate, as we measure time." Culture, the refining process, is an afterthought. Of course Muir's notion of Nature as the Original Gardener was hardly novel, but it became the basis for some interesting lessons for farmers in his later writing. In the Studies, he kept his attention, not on the refinement, but on the production of soil, for "Notwithstanding the many august implements employed |