Not only in the text is special emphasis laid on the interpretation of landscape, but the character, treatment, and arrangement of the illustrations is intended to train the eye to read the story of the earth drama as recorded in the forms of valley, mountain, field, and shore. And--since the earth is not, after all, a mere geological specimen--these illustrations include reproductions of paintings, scenery as interpreted by the poet and the artist. To create an appropriate atmosphere and so add to the vividness of conception, the twelve chapters each deal with a seasonable subject. Relation to the Text-Book The relation of this book to the formal study of physiography or geology in the schools will be apparent. The classified and exhaustive treatment of the text-book, while so admirably adapted to organize knowledge already acquired, or reward an appetite already aroused, is not at all adapted for creating this appetite in the first place; a thing so essential to true progress in education. For example, in a text-book, the many aspects of glaciers and their work, which are here distributed in a number of sections (as the discovery of these aspects was distributed in time), are usually dealt with in a single chapter or series of chapters, whose nature the reader at once gathers from the title, "The Work of the Glaciers." The young reader or school pupil is thus deprived of the element of surprise, of the pleasure of following an unfolding mystery, which was at once the inspiration and reward of men of science to whom we owe these discoveries. If left to the text-book alone, the student acquires his facts too rapidly and too easily. The result is a loss of both pleasure and profit. The movements of the glaciers and the nature of the movement, which gave Agassiz seven years of keen delight to ascertain, the pupil acquires through his text-book in something like seven minutes, and without either the pleasure or the profit of Agassiz' gradual and inductive acquirement of this knowledge. In other words, to begin the study of a given science by means of a text-book, without previously arousing interest in the subject, is to assume a greater zeal on the part of school pupils and college students than, it is reasonable to assume, was possessed by the scientists themselves. It was the attraction of the unknown rather than the rapid acquirement of the known that drew them on to their grand discoveries, their illuminating generalizations. In recording the pebble's story the endeavor has been to cause the reader to come upon the data on which these generalizations were based, piece by piece, here a little and there a little--as did the scientists themselves.