hese lands are the dwelling places of many
people. Networks of railways connect the various cities and villages,
and probably a majority of the people living in them have travelled in
and about much of the area of these lands.

A large part of the earth's surface is commonly called "unproductive."
As a rule this is only another way of saying that such parts of the
world produce little foodstuffs. We must not take the word
"unproductive" either too literally or too seriously, however, for Dame
Nature has a way of secreting some of her choice treasures in places so
forbidding and so desolate that only the most resolute and daring men
even search for them. For instance, the mineral once much used by the
makers of carbonated or "soda" water comes from a part of Greenland that
is so bleak, cold, and inhospitable that no human beings can long exist
there unless food and fuel are brought them from afar off. The famous
"nitrates" of Chile are obtained in the fiercest part of the Andean
desert. Not only the food but the water consumed must be carried to the
miners, who are but little better than slaves. Most of the gold and
silver is obtained in regions that are unfit for human habitation. The
largest diamond fields in the world are in a region that will not
produce even grass without irrigation--a region that would not be
inhabited were there no diamonds. From the most inhospitable highlands
of Asia comes a very considerable part of the precious mineral, jade.
Death Valley, in the southern part of the United States, on account of
its terrific heat, is perhaps the most unhabitable region in the world,
but the borax which it produces is used in every civilized country. And
so we might name regions by the score that are practically unhabitable,
which nevertheless produce things necessary to civilized man.

We call them "waste places," but this is far from true. For the greater
part they are quite as necessary as the places we call fertile. Of
foodstuffs, for instance, the greater part of the Rocky Mountain
highland produces not much more than the State of New York. Yet the
presence of this great mountain wall diverts the moist warm air from the
Gulf of Mexico northward, making the Mississippi basin one of the
foremost granaries of the world. The absence of rain in the west slope
of the Peruvian Andes makes much of the western part of Chile and Peru a
desert. But that same absence of rain makes the nitrate beds possible;
for had t