Other things being equal, which of graded streams will have the steeper gradient, a trunk stream or its tributaries? a stream supplied with gravel or one with silt? Other factors remaining the same, what changes would occur if the Platte should increase in volume? What changes would occur if the load should be increased in amount or in coarseness? THE OLD AGE OF RIVERS. As rivers pass their prime, as denudation lowers the relief of the region, less waste and finer is washed over the gentler slopes of the lowering hills. With smaller loads to carry, the rivers now deepen their valleys and find grade with fainter declivities nearer the level of the sea. This limit of the level of the sea beneath which they cannot erode is known as baselevel. [Footnote: The term "baselevel" is also used to designate the close approximation to sea level to which streams are able to subdue the land.] As streams grow old they approach more and more closely to baselevel, although they are never able to attain it. Some slight slope is needed that water may flow and waste be transported over the land. Meanwhile the relief of the land has ever lessened. The master streams and their main tributaries now wander with sluggish currents over the broad valley floors which they have planed away; while under the erosion of their innumerable branches and the wear of the weather the divides everywhere are lowered and subdued to more and more gentle slopes. Mountains and high plateaus are thus reduced to rolling hills, and at last to plains, surmounted only by such hills as may still be unreduced to the common level, because of the harder rocks of which they are composed or because of their distance from the main erosion channels. Such regions of faint relief, worn down to near base level by subaerial agencies, are known as PENEPLAINS (almost plains). Any residual masses which rise above them are called MONADNOCKS, from the name of a conical peak of New Hampshire which overlooks the now uplifted peneplain of southern New England. In its old age a region becomes mantled with thick sheets of fine and weathered waste, slowly moving over the faint slopes toward the water ways and unbroken by ledges of bare rock. In other words, the waste mantle also is now graded, and as waterfalls have been effaced in the river beds, so now any ledges in the wide streams of waste are worn away and covered beneath smooth slopes of fine soil. Ground water stands high and may exude in areas of swamp. In youth the land mass was roughhewn and cut deep by stream erosion. In old age the faint reliefs of the land dissolve away, chiefly under the action of the weather, beneath their cloak of waste.