DflE 
 
PRESENTED UY .... 
 
 No. 
 
n ^ *s ' / 
 -^t-^^Z^^ 
 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE 
 
BOOKS BY ARABELLA B. BUCKLEY. 
 
 The Fairy-Land of Science. 
 
 With 74 Illustrations. 12mo. Cloth, gilt, 
 $1.50. 
 
 Through Magic Glasses, 
 
 and other Lectures. A Sequel to " The Fairy- 
 Land of Science." Illustrated. 12rno. Cloth, 
 gilt, $1.50. 
 
 Life and Her Children: 
 
 Glimpses of Animal Life from the Amoeba to 
 the Insect's. With over 100 Illustrations. 
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 Winners in Life's Race; 
 
 or, The Great Backboned Familj/. With 
 
 numerous Illustrations. 
 $1.50 
 
 12mo. Cloth, gilt, 
 
 A Short History of Natural Science, 
 
 and of the l*rogress of Discovery from the Time 
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 trations. 12mo. Cloth, $2.00. 
 
 Moral Teachings of Science. 
 
 12mo. Cloth, 75 cents. 
 
 D. APPtETON & CO., Publishers, New York. 
 
FIG. 31. 
 
 GLACIER CARRYING DOWN STONES. 
 
 See page 124. 
 
THE 
 
 FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 ARABELLA B. BUCKLEY 
 
 AUTHOR OF A SHORT HISTORY OF NATURAL SCIENCE, 
 BOTANICAL TABLES FOR YOUNG STUDENTS, ETC. 
 
 1 For they remember yet the tales we told them 
 Around the hearth, of fairies, long ago, 
 
 When they loved still in fancy to behold them 
 Quick dancing earthward in the feathery snow. 
 
 1 But now the young and fresh imagination 
 
 Finds traces of their presence everywhere, 
 And peoples with a new and bright creation 
 The clear blue chambers of the sunny air." 
 
 FOLK LORE. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 1900 
 
Authorized Edition. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1899, 
 BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 
 
PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 
 
 THE publishers of the Fairy-land of Science, with 
 the assistance of the talented authoress, have consider- 
 ably extended the original volume, adding to it more 
 or less extended notices of the latest scientific discov- 
 eries in the departments treated, and amplifying with 
 fuller detail such portions as have grown in impor- 
 tance and interest since the first publication of the 
 work more than twenty years ago. A careful revision 
 has, as far as practicable, eliminated all errors and also 
 all words which, on account of their almost exclusive 
 use in England, are not likely to be easily understood 
 by children in the United States. American instead 
 of English examples are given to illustrate statements 
 of general scientific truths, and, in fact, the whole 
 letter-press has been carefully and thoroughly edited 
 in the endeavour to adapt it to the use and enjoy- 
 ment of our children at home. 
 
 The work has also been largely re-illustrated. It is 
 now offered in the belief that the clear and readable 
 
Vl PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 
 
 style, the untechnical language, and ingenious fancy 
 of its authoress that first made the Fairy-land of Sci- 
 ence acceptable to its readers, will be no less worthy 
 of appreciation when extended to embrace recent de- 
 velopments of knowledge and adjusted to meet the 
 special requirements of the American public. 
 
 February, i8gq. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THE Ten Lectures of which this volume is com- 
 posed were delivered in the spring of 1878, in St. 
 John's Wood, to a large audience of children and 
 their friends, and at their conclusion I was asked by 
 many of those present to publish them for a child's 
 reading book. 
 
 At first I hesitated, feeling that written words can 
 never produce the same effect as viva-voce delivery. 
 But the majority of my juvenile hearers were evidently 
 so deeply interested that I am encouraged to think 
 that the present work may - be a source of pleasure 
 to a wider circle of young people, and at the same 
 time awaken in them a love of nature and of the study 
 of science. 
 
 The Lectures were entirely rewritten from the 
 short notes used when they were delivered. With 
 the exception of the first of the series, none of them 
 have any pretensions to originality, their object being 
 
 merely to explain well-known natural facts in simple 
 
 vii 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 and pleasant language. Throughout the whole book 
 I availed myself freely of the leading popular works 
 on science, but found it impossible to give special 
 references, as nearly all the matter I have dealt with 
 has long ago been the common property of scientific 
 teachers. 
 
 In the present edition Mr. Carter Beard has made 
 some alterations so as to give examples more familiar 
 to American children, and he has helped me to bring 
 some of the subjects more up to date. There are also 
 several new illustrations. 
 
 ARABELLA B. BUCKLEY. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE : HOW TO ENTER IT ; HOW TO 
 USE IT; AND HOW TO ENJOY IT . . . . I 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 SUNBEAMS, AND THE WORK THEY DO . . . . .26 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE .... 53 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 A DROP OF WATER ON ITS TRAVELS 76 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 THE Two GREAT SCULPTORS WATER AND ICE . . . 103 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 THE VOICES OF NATURE, AND HOW WE HEAR THEM' . . 129 
 
 ix 
 
x TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE 154 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 THE HISTORY OF A PIECE OF COAL 174 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 BEES IN THE HIVE . 200 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 BEES AND FLOWERS 219 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 HOW TO ENTER IT; HOW TO USE IT; AND HOW 
 TO ENJOY IT. 
 
 HAVE promised to 
 introduce you to- 
 day to the fairy- 
 land of science 
 a somewhat bold promise, 
 seeing that most of you 
 probably look upon science as a bundle of dry facts, 
 while fairy-land is all that is beautiful, and full . of 
 
2 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 poetry and imagination. But I thoroughly believe 
 myself, and hope to prove to you, that science is full 
 of beautiful pictures, of real poetry, and of wonder- 
 working fairies; and what is more, I promise you 
 they shall be true fairies, whom you will love just 
 as much when you are old and greyheaded as when 
 you are young; for you will be able to call them 
 up wherever you wander by land or by sea, through 
 meadow or through wood, through water or through 
 air; and though they themselves will always remain 
 invisible, yet you will see their wonderful power at 
 work everywhere around you. 
 
 Let us first see for a moment what kind of tales 
 science has to tell, and how far they are equal to the 
 old fairy tales we all know so well. Who does not 
 remember the tale of the Sleeping Beauty in the 
 Wood, and how under the spell of the angry fairy 
 the maiden pricked herself with the spindle and slept 
 a hundred years? How the horses in the stall, the 
 dogs in the court-yard, the doves on the roof, the cook 
 who was boxing the scullery boy's ears in the kitchen, 
 and the king and queen with all their courtiers in the 
 hall remained spell-bound, while a thick hedge grew 
 up all round the castle and all within was still as 
 death. But when the hundred years had passed the 
 valiant prince came, the thorny hedge opened before 
 him bearing beautiful flowers ; and he, entering the 
 castle, reached the room where the princess lay, and 
 with one sweet kiss raised her and all around her to 
 life again. 
 
 Can science bring any tale to match this? 
 
 Tell me, is there anything in this world more busy 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 3 
 
 and active than water, as it rushes along in the swift 
 brook, or dashes over the stones, or spouts up in the 
 fountain, or trickles down from the roof, or shakes 
 itself into ripples on the surface of the pond as the 
 wind blows over it? But have you never seen this 
 water spell-bound and motionless? Look out of the 
 window some cold frosty morning in winter, at the 
 little brook which yesterday was flowing gently past 
 the house, and see how still it lies, with the stones 
 over which it was dashing now held tightly in its icy 
 .grasp. Notice the wind-ripples on the pond; they 
 have become fixed and motionless. Look up at the 
 roof of the house. There, instead of living doves 
 merely charmed to sleep, we have running water 
 caught in the very act of falling and turned into 
 transparent icicles, decorating the eaves with a beau- 
 tiful crystal fringe. On every tree and bush you will 
 catch the water-drops napping, in the form of tiny 
 crystals; while the fountain looks like a tree of glass 
 with long down-hanging pointed leaves. Even the 
 damp of your own breath lies rigid and still on the 
 window-pane frozen into delicate patterns like fern- 
 leaves of ice. 
 
 All this water was yesterday flowing busily, or 
 falling drop by drop, or floating invisibly in the air; 
 now it is all caught and spell-bound by whom? 
 By the enchantments of the frost-giant who holds it 
 -fast in his grip and will not let it go. 
 
 But wait awhile, the deliverer is coming. In a 
 few weeks or days, or it may be in a few hours, the 
 brave sun will shine down ; the dull-grey, leaden sky 
 will melt before him, as the hedge gave way before 
 
4 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 the prince in the fairy tale, and when the sunbeam 
 gently kisses the frozen water it will be set free. 
 Then the brook will flow rippling on again ; the frost- 
 drops will be shaken down from the trees, the icicles 
 fall from the roof, the moisture trickle down the win- 
 dow-pane, and in the bright, warm sunshine all will 
 be alive again. 
 
 Is not this a fairy tale of nature ? and such as these 
 it is which science tells. 
 
 Again, who has not heard of Catskin, who came 
 out of a hollow tree, bringing a walnut containing 
 three beautiful dresses the first glowing as the sun, 
 the second pale and beautiful as the moon, the third 
 spangled like the star-lit sky, and each so fine and 
 delicate that all three could be packed in a nut ? But 
 science can tell of shells so tiny that a whole group 
 of them will lie on the point of a pin, and many 
 thousands be packed into a walnut-shell; and each 
 one of these tiny structures is not the mere dress but 
 the home of a living animal. It is a tiny, tiny shell- 
 palace made of the most delicate lacework, each pat- 
 tern being more beautiful than the last; and what is 
 more, the minute creature that lives in it has built it 
 out of the foam of the sea, though he himself is noth- 
 ing more than a drop of jelly. 
 
 Lastly, any one who has read the Wonderful Trav- 
 elers must recollect the man whose sight was so 
 keen that he could hit the eye of a fly sitting on 
 a tree two miles away. But tell me, can you see gas 
 before it is lighted, even when it is coming out of the 
 gas-jet close to your eyes? Yet, if you learn to use 
 that wonderful instrument the spectroscope, it will 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 5 
 
 enable you to tell one kind of gas from another, even 
 when they are both ninety-one millions of miles away 
 on the face of the sun; nay more, it will read for you 
 the nature of the different gases in the far distant 
 stars, billions of miles away, and actually tell you 
 whether you could find there any of the same metals 
 which we have on the earth. 
 
 We might find hundreds of such fairy tales in the 
 domain of science, but these three will serve as ex- 
 amples, and we must pass on to make the acquaint- 
 ance of the science-fairies themselves, and see if they 
 are as real as our old friends. 
 
 Tell me, why do you love fairy-land? what is its 
 charm? Is it not that things happen so suddenly, 
 so mysteriously, and without man having anything to 
 do with it ? In fairy-land, flowers blow, houses spring 
 up like Aladdin's palace in a single night, and people 
 are carried hundreds of miles in an instant by the 
 touch of a fairy wand. 
 
 And then this land is not some distant country 
 to which we can never hope to travel. It is here 
 in the midst of us, only our eyes must be opened or 
 we cannot see it. Ariel and Puck did not live in 
 some unknown region. On the contrary, Ariel's 
 song is 
 
 "Where the bee sucks, there suck I ; 
 
 In a cowslip's bell I lie ; 
 
 There I couch when owls do cry. 
 
 On the bat's back I do fly, 
 
 After summer, merrily." 
 
 The peasant falls asleep some evening in a wood, 
 and his eyes are opened by a fairy wand, so that he 
 
6 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 sees the little goblins and imps dancing round him on 
 the green sward, sitting on mushrooms, or in the 
 heads of the flowers, drinking out of acorn-cups,, 
 fighting with blades of grass, and riding on grass- 
 hoppers. 
 
 So, too, the gallant knight, riding to save some poor 
 oppressed maiden, dashes across the foaming torrent ; 
 and just in the middle, as he is being swept away, 
 his eyes are opened, and he sees fairy water-nymphs 
 soothing his terrified horse and guiding him gently to 
 the opposite shore. They are close at hand, these 
 sprites, to the simple peasant or the gallant knight, or 
 to anyone who has the gift of the fairies and can see 
 them. But the man who scoffs at them, and does not 
 believe in them or care for them, he never sees them. 
 Only now and then they play him an ugly trick, lead- 
 ing him into some treacherous bog and leaving him 
 to get out as he may. 
 
 Now, exactly all this which is true of the fairies of 
 our childhood is true too of the fairies of science. 
 There are -forces around us, and among us, which I 
 shall ask you to allow me to call fairies, and these are 
 ten thousand times more wonderful, more magical, 
 and more beautiful in their work, than those of the old 
 fairy tales. They, too, are invisible, and many people 
 live and die without ever seeing them or caring to see 
 them. These people go about with their eyes shut, 
 either because they do not open them, or because no 
 one has taught them how to see. They fret and worry 
 over their own little work and their own petty troubles, 
 and do not know how to rest and refresh themselves, 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. ' 7 
 
 by letting the fairies open their eyes and show them 
 the calm sweet pictures of nature. They are like 
 Peter Bell of whom Wordsworth wrote : 
 
 "A primrose by a river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more." 
 
 But we will not be like these, we will open our 
 eyes, and ask, " What are these forces or fairies, and 
 how can we see them ? " f 
 
 Just go out into the country, and sit down quietly 
 and watch nature at work. Listen to the wind as 
 it blows, look at the clouds rolling overhead, and the 
 waves rippling on the pond at your feet. Hearken 
 to the brook as it flows by, watch the flower-buds 
 opening one by one, and then ask yourself, " How 
 is all this done?" Go out in the evening and see 
 the dew gather drop by drop upon the grass, or 
 trace the delicate hoar-frost crystals which bespangle 
 every blade on a winter's morning. Look at the 
 vivid flashes of lightning in a storm, and listen to the 
 pealing thunder : and then tell me, by what machinery 
 is all this wonderful work done? Man does none of 
 it, neither could he stop it if he were to try ; for it 
 is all the work of those invisible forces or fairies whose 
 acquaintance I wish you to make. Day and night, 
 summer and winter, storm or calm, these fairies are at 
 work, and we may hear them and know them, and 
 make friends of them if we will. 
 
 There is only one gift we must have before we can 
 learn to know them we must have imagination. I 
 do not mean mere fancy, which creates unreal images 
 
8 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 and impossible monsters, but imagination, the power 
 of making pictures or images in our mind, of that 
 which is, though it is invisible to us. Most children 
 have this glorious gift, and love to picture to them- 
 selves all that is told them, and to hear the same tale 
 over and over again till they see every bit of it as if it 
 were real. This is why they are sure to love science 
 if its tales are told them aright; and I, for one, hope 
 the day may never come when we may lose that child- 
 ish clearness of .vision, which enables us through the 
 temporal things which are seen, to realize those eternal 
 truths which are unseen. 
 
 If you have this gift of imagination come with me, 
 and in these lectures we will look for the invisible 
 fairies of nature. 
 
 Watch a shower of rain. Where do the drops come 
 from? and why are they round, or rather slightly 
 oval? In our fourth lecture we shall see that the 
 little particles of water of which the rain-drops are 
 made, were held apart and invisible in the air by heat, 
 one of the most wonderful of our forces * or fairies, 
 till the cold wind passed by and chilled the air. Then, 
 when there was no longer so much heat, another 
 invisible force, cohesion, which is always ready and 
 waiting, seized on the tiny particles at once, and 
 locked them together in a drop, the closest form in 
 which they could lie. Then as the drops became 
 
 * I am quite aware of the danger incurred by using this word 
 " force," especially in the plural ; and how even the most mod- 
 est little book may suffer at the hands of scientific purists by 
 employing it rashly. As, however, the better term "energy" 
 would not serve here, I hope I may be forgiven for retaining 
 the much-abused term, especially as I sin in very good company. 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 9 
 
 larger and larger they fell into the grasp of another 
 invisible force, gravitation, which dragged them down 
 to the earth, drop by drop, till they made a shower of 
 rain. Pause for a moment and think. You have 
 surely heard of gravitation, by which the sun holds 
 the earth and the planets, and keeps them moving 
 round him in regular order? Well, it is this same 
 gravitation which is at work also whenever a shower 
 of rain falls to the earth. Who can say that he is not 
 a great invisible giant, always silently and invisibly 
 toiling in great things and small whether we wake or 
 sleep ? 
 
 Now the shower is over, the sun comes out, and the 
 ground is soon as dry as though no rain had fallen. 
 Tell me, what has become of the rain-drops ? Part no 
 doubt have sunk into the ground, and as for the rest, 
 why you will say the sun has dried them up. Yes, 
 but how? The sun is more than ninety-two millions 
 of miles away ; how has he touched the rain-drops ? 
 Have you ever heard that invisible waves are travelling 
 every second over the space between the sun and us ? 
 We shall see in the next lecture how these waves are 
 the sun's messengers to the earth, and how they tear 
 asunder the rain-drops on the ground, scattering them 
 in tiny particles too small for us to see, and bearing 
 them away to the clouds. Here are more invisible 
 fairies working every moment around you, and you 
 cannot even look out of the window without seeing 
 the work they are doing. 
 
 If, however, the day is cold and frosty, the water 
 does not fall in a shower of rain ; it comes down in the 
 shape of noiseless snow. Go out after such a snow- 
 
IO THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 shower, on a calm day, and look at some of the flakes 
 which have fallen ; you will see, if you choose good 
 specimens, that they are not mere masses of frozen 
 water, but that each one is a beautiful six-pointed 
 crystal star. How have these crystals been built up? 
 What power has been at work arranging their delicate 
 forms? In the fourth lecture we shall see that up in 
 the clouds another of our invisible fairies, which, for 
 want of a better name, we call the " force of crystal- 
 lization," has caught hold of the tiny particles of 
 water before " cohesion " had made them into round 
 drops, and there silently but rapidly, has moulded 
 them into those delicate crystal stars known as " snow- 
 flakes." 
 
 And now, suppose that this snow-shower has fallen 
 early in February; turn aside for a moment from 
 examining the flakes, and clear the newly-fallen snow 
 from off the flower-bed on the lawn. What is this 
 little green tip peeping up out of the ground under 
 the snowy covering? It is a young snowdrop- plant. 
 Can you tell me why it grows? where it finds its food? 
 what makes it spread out its leaves and add to its stalk 
 day by day? What fairies are at work here? 
 
 First there is the hidden fairy " life," and of her 
 even our wisest men know but little. But they know 
 something of her way of working, and in Lecture VII 
 we shall learn how the invisible fairy sunbeams have 
 been busy here also; how last year's snowdrop plant 
 caught them and stored them up in its bulb, and how 
 now in the spring, as soon as warmth and moisture 
 creep down into the earth, these little imprisoned sun- 
 waves begin to be active, stirring up the matter in 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. \\ 
 
 the bulb, and making it swell and burst upward till it 
 sends out a little shoot through the surface of the 
 soil. Then the sun-waves above-ground take up the 
 work, and form green granules in the tiny leaves, 
 helping them to take food out of the air, while the 
 little rootlets below are drinking water out of the 
 ground. The invisible life and invisible sunbeams are 
 busy here, setting actively to work another fairy, the 
 force of " chemical attraction," and so the little snow- 
 drop plant grows and blossoms, without any help from 
 you or me. 
 
 One picture more, and then I hope you will believe 
 in my fairies. From the cold garden, you run into the 
 house, and find the fire laid indeed in the grate, but 
 the wood dead and the coal black, waiting to be 
 lighted. You strike a match, and soon there is a 
 blazing fire. Where does the heat come from ? Why 
 does the coal burn and give out a glowing light ? Have 
 you not read of gnomes buried down deep in the earth, 
 in mines, and held fast there till some fairy wand 
 has released them, and allowed them to come to earth 
 again? Well, thousands and millions of years ago, 
 this coal was plants, and. like the snowdrop in the 
 garden of to-day, caught the sunbeams and worked 
 them into leaves. Then the plants died and were 
 buried deep in the earth and the sunbeams with them ; 
 and like the gnomes they lay imprisoned till the coal 
 was dug out by the miners, and brought to your grate ; 
 and just now you yourself took hold of the fairy 
 wand which was to release them. You struck a 
 match, and its atoms clashing with atoms of oxygen 
 in the 'air, set the invisible fairies' " heat " and " chemi- 
 
12 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 cal attraction " to work, and they were soon busy 
 within the wood and the coal causing their atoms 
 too to clash ; and the sunbeams, so long imprisoned, 
 leapt into flame. Then you spread out your hands 
 and cried, " Qh, how nice and warm ! " and little 
 thought that you were warming yourself with the sun- 
 beams of ages and ages ago. 
 
 This is no fancy tale; it is literally true, as we 
 shall see in Lecture VIII, that the warmth of a coal 
 fire could not exist if the plants of long ago had not 
 used the sunbeams to make their leaves, holding them 
 ready to give up their warmth again whenever those 
 crushed leaves are consumed. 
 
 Now, do you believe in, and care for, my fairy-land ? 
 Can you see in your imagination fairy Cohesion ever 
 ready to lock atoms together when they draw very 
 near to each other : or fairy Gravitation dragging 
 rain-drops down to the earth : or the fairy of Crystalli- 
 zation building up the snow-flakes in the clouds ? Can 
 you picture tiny sunbeam-waves of light and heat 
 travelling from the sun to the earth ? Do you care to 
 know how another strange fairy, " Electricity" flings 
 the lightning across the sky and causes the rumbling 
 thunder ? Would you like to learn how the sun makes 
 pictures of the world on which he shines, so that we 
 can carry about with us photographs or sun-pictures 
 of all the beautiful scenery of the earth? And have 
 you any curiosity about " Chemical action" which 
 works such wonders in air, and land, and sea ? If you 
 have any wish to know and make friends of these in- 
 visible forces, the next question is 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 13 
 
 How are you to enter the fairy-land of science ? 
 
 There is but one way. Like the knight or peasant 
 in the fairy tales, you must open your eyes. There is 
 no lack of objects, everything around you will tell 
 some history if touched with the fairy wand of imag- 
 ination. I have often thought, when seeing some 
 sickly child drawn along the street, lying on its back 
 while other children romp and play, how much hap- 
 piness might be given to sick children at home or in 
 hospitals, if only they were told the stories which lie 
 hidden in the things around them. They need not 
 even move from their beds, for sunbeams can fall on 
 them there, and in a sunbeam there are stories enough 
 to occupy a month. The fire in the grate, the lamp 
 by the bedside, the water in the tumbler, the fly on 
 the ceiling above, the flower in the vase on the table, 
 anything, everything, has its history, and can reveal 
 to us nature's invisible fairies. 
 
 Only you must wish to see them. If you go 
 through the world looking upon everything only as 
 so much to eat, to drink, and to use, you will never 
 see the fairies of science. But if you ask yourself why 
 things happen, and how the great God above us has 
 made and governs this world of ours ; if you listen to 
 the wind, and care to learn why it blows ; if you ask 
 the little flower why it opens in the sunshine and 
 closes in the storm; and if when you find questions 
 you cannot answer, you will take the trouble to hunt 
 out in books, or make experiments, to solve your own 
 questions, then you will learn to know and love those 
 fairies. 
 
 Mind, I do not advise you to be constantly asking 
 
I 4 . THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 questions of other people ; for often a question quickly 
 answered is quickly forgotten, but a difficulty really 
 hunted down is a triumph for ever. For example, 
 if you ask why the rain dries up from the ground, 
 most likely you will be answered that " the sun dries 
 it," and you will rest satisfied with the sound of the 
 words. But if you hold a wet handkerchief before 
 the fire and see the damp rising out of it, then you 
 have some real idea how moisture may be drawn up 
 by heat from the earth. 
 
 A little foreign niece of mine, only four years old, 
 who could not speak English plainly, was standing 
 one morning near the bedroom window and she no- 
 ticed the damp trickling down the 'window-pane. 
 " Auntie," she said, " what for it rain inside ? " It was 
 quite useless to explain to her in words, how our breath 
 had condensed into drops of water upon the cold glass ; 
 but I wiped the pane clear, and breathed on it several 
 times. When new drops were formed, I said, " Cissy 
 and auntie have done like this all night in the room." 
 She nodded her little head and amused herself for a 
 long time breathing on the window-pane and watching 
 the tiny drops; and about a month later, when we 
 were travelling back to Italy, I saw her following the 
 drops on the carriage window with her little finger, and 
 heard her say quietly to herself, " Cissy and auntie 
 made you." Had not even this little child some real 
 picture in her mind of invisible water coming from her 
 mouth, and making drops upon the window-pane? 
 
 Then again, you must learn something of the lan- 
 guage of science. If you travel in a country with 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. jjj 
 
 no knowledge of its language, you can learn very little 
 about it: and in the -same way if you are to go to 
 books to find answers to your questions, you must 
 know something of the language they speak. You 
 need not learn hard scientific names, for the best 
 books have the fewest of these, but you must really 
 understand what is meant by ordinary words. 
 
 For example, how few people can really explain 
 the difference between a solid, such. as the wood of the 
 table ; a liquid, as water ; and a gas, such as I can let 
 off from this gas-jet by turning the tap. And yet 
 any child can make a picture of this in his mind if 
 only it has been properly put before him. 
 
 All matter in the .world is made up of minute 
 parts or particles ; in a solid these particles are locked 
 together so tightly that you must tear them forcibly 
 apart if you wish to alter the shape of the solid 
 piece. If I break or bend this wood I have to force 
 the particles to move round each other, and I have 
 great difficulty in doing it. But in a liquid, though 
 the particles are still held together, they do not cling 
 so tightly, but are able to roll or glide round each 
 other, so that when you pour water out of a cup on 
 to a table, it loses its cuplike shape and spreads itself 
 out fiat. Lastly, in a gas the particles are no longer 
 held together at all, but they try to fly away from 
 each other; and unless you shut a gas in tightly 
 and safely, it will soon have spread all over the 
 room. 
 
 A solid, therefore, will' retain the same bulk and 
 shape unless you forcibly alter it; a liquid will retain 
 the same bulk, but not the same shape if it be left 
 
1 6 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 free; a gas will not retain either the same bulk or 
 the same shape, but will spread over as large a space 
 as it can find wherever it can penetrate. Such simple 
 things as these you must learn from books and by ex- 
 periment. 
 
 Then you must understand what is meant by 
 chemical attraction; and though I can explain this 
 roughly here, you will have to make many interesting 
 experiments before you will really learn to know this 
 wonderful fairy power. If I dissolve sugar in water, 
 though it disappears it still remains sugar, and does 
 not join itself to the water. I have only to let the 
 cup stand till the water dries, and the sugar will re- 
 main at the bottom. There has been no chemical at- 
 traction here. 
 
 But now I will put something else in water which 
 will call up the fairy power. Here is a little piece of 
 
 the metal potassium, one 
 of the simple substances 
 of the earth; that is to 
 say, we can not split it 
 up into other substances, 
 wherever we find it, it is 
 
 _ always the same. Now if 
 
 FIG. i. Piece of potassium in 
 
 a basin of water. * P ut this P iece of P otas - 
 
 sium on the water it does 
 
 not disappear quietly like the sugar. See how it rolls 
 round and round, fizzing violently, with a blue flame 
 burning round it, and at last goes off with a pop. 
 
 What has been happening here? 
 
 You must first know that water is made of two 
 substances, hydrogen and oxygen, and these are not 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 17 
 
 merely held together, but are joined so completely 
 that they have lost themselves and have become 
 water; and each atom of water is made of two atoms 
 of hydrogen and one of oxygen. 
 
 Now the metal potassium is devotedly fond of 
 oxygen, and the moment I threw it on the water it 
 called the fairy " chemical attraction " to help it, and 
 dragged the atoms of oxygen out of the water and 
 joined them to itself. In doing this it also caught part 
 of the hydrogen, but only half, and so the rest was 
 left out in the cold. No, not in the cold! for the 
 potassium and oxygen made such a great heat in 
 clashing together that the rest of the hydrogen 
 became very hot indeed, and sprang into the air to 
 find some other companion to make up for what it 
 had lost. Here it found some free oxygen floating 
 about, and it seized upon it so violently, that they 
 made a burning flame, while the potassium with its 
 newly found oxygen and hydrogen sank down quietly 
 into the water as potash. And so you see we have 
 got quite a new substance potash in the basin; made 
 with a great deal of fuss by chemical attraction drawing 
 different atonis together. 
 
 When you can really picture this power to yourself 
 it will help you very much to understand what you 
 read and observe about nature. 
 
 Next, as plants grow around you on every side, 
 and are of so much importance in the world, you must 
 also learn something of the names of the different 
 parts of a flower, so that you may understand those 
 books which explain how a plant grows and lives and 
 forms its seeds. You must also know the common 
 
1 8 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 names of the parts of an animal, and of your own 
 body, so that you may be interested in understand- 
 ing the use of the different organs ; how you breathe, 
 and how your blood flows; how one animal walks, 
 another flies, and another swims. Then you must 
 learn something of the various parts of the world, so 
 that you may know what is meant by a river, a plain, 
 a valley, or a delta. All these things are not difficult, 
 you can learn them pleasantly from simple books on 
 physics, chemistry, botany, physiology, and physical 
 geography; and when you understand a few plain 
 scientific terms, then all by yourself, if you will open 
 your eyes and ears, you may wander happily in the 
 fairy-land of science. Then wherever you go you 
 will find 
 
 "Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything." . 
 
 And now we come to the last part of our subject. 
 When you have reached and entered the gates of 
 science, how are you to use and enjoy this new and 
 beautiful land ? 
 
 This is a very important question, for you may 
 make a twofold use of it. If you are only ambitious 
 to shine in the world, you may use it chiefly to get 
 prizes, to be at the head of your class, or to pass in 
 examinations; but if you also enjoy discovering its 
 secrets, and desire to learn more and more of nature, 
 and to revel in dreams of its beauty, then you will study 
 science for its own sake as well. Now it is a good 
 thing to win prizes and be at the head of your class, 
 for it shows that you are industrious; it is a good 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 19 
 
 thing to pass well in examinations, for it shows that 
 you are accurate ; but if you study science for this 
 reason only, do not complain if you find it dull, and 
 dry, and hard to master. You may learn a great deal 
 that is useful, and nature will answer you truthfully 
 if you ask your questions accurately, but she will give 
 you dry facts, just such as you ask for. If you do 
 not love her for herself she will never take you to her 
 heart. 
 
 This is the reason why so many people complain 
 that science is dry and uninteresting. They forget that 
 though it is necessary to learn accurately, for so only 
 we can arrive at truth, it is equally necessary to love 
 knowledge and make it lovely to those who learn, and 
 to do this we must get at the spirit which lies under 
 the facts. What child which loves its mother's face 
 is content to know only that she has brown eyes, a 
 straight nose, a small mouth, and hair arranged in 
 such and such a manner? No, it knows that its 
 mother has the sweetest smile of any woman living; 
 that her eyes are loving, her kiss is sweet, and that 
 when she looks grave, then something is wrong which 
 must be put right. And it is in this way that those 
 who wish to enjoy the fairy-land of science must love 
 nature. 
 
 It is well to know that when a piece of potassium 
 is thrown on water the change which takes place is 
 expressed by the formula K + H 2 O=:KHO + H. 
 But it is better still to have a mental picture of the 
 tiny atoms clasping each other, and mingling so as to 
 make a new substance, and to feel how wonderful are 
 the many changing forms of nature. It is useful to 
 
2O 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 be able to classify a flower and to know that the 
 buttercup belongs to the Family Ranunculaceae, with 
 petals free and definite, stamens hypogynous and in- 
 definite, pistil apocarpous. But it is far sweeter to 
 learn about the life of the little plant, to understand 
 why its peculiar flower is useful to it, and how it 
 feeds itself, and makes its seed. No one can love dry 
 
 facts ; we must clothe 
 them with real mean- 
 ing and love the 
 truths they tell, if we 
 wish to enjoy science. 
 Let us take an ex- 
 ample to show this. 
 I have here a branch 
 of white coral, a beau- 
 tiful, delicate piece of 
 nature's work. We 
 will begin by copy- 
 ing a description of 
 it from one of those 
 class - books which 
 suppose children to 
 learn words like par- 
 rots, and to repeat 
 them with just as little 
 understanding. 
 
 " Goral is formed 
 
 by an animal belong- 
 FIG. 2 .-Piece of white coral. ; ng tQ the k ; ngdom of 
 
 Radiates, sub-kingdom Polypes. The soft body of 
 the animal is attached to a support, the mouth open- 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 21 
 
 ing upward in a row of tentacles. The coral is se- 
 creted in the body of the polyp out of the carbonate 
 of lime in the sea. Thus the coral animalcule rears 
 its polypidom or rocky structure in warm latitudes, 
 and constructs reefs or barriers around islands. It 
 is limited in range of depth from 25 to 30 fathoms. 
 Chemically considered, coral is carbonate of lime; 
 physiologically, it is the skeleton of an animal ; geo- 
 graphically, it is characteristic of warm latitudes, es- 
 pecially of the Pacific Ocean." This description is 
 correct, and even very fairly complete, if you know 
 enough of the subject to understand it. But tell me, 
 does it lead you to love my piece of coral ? Have you 
 any picture in your mind of the coral animal, its home, 
 or its manner of working? 
 
 But now, instead of trying to master this dry, hard 
 passage, take Mr. Huxley's penny lecture on Coral 
 and Coral Reefs,* and with the piece of coral in your 
 hand, try really to learn its history. You will then be 
 able to picture to yourself the coral animal as a kind 
 of sea-anemone, something like those which you have 
 often seen, resembling red, blue, or green flowers, put- 
 ting out their feelers in sea-water on our coasts, and 
 drawing in the tiny sea-animals to digest them in that 
 bag of fluid which serves the sea-anemone as a stom- 
 ach. You will learn how this curious jelly animal can 
 split itself in two, and so form two polyps, or send a 
 bud out of its side and so grow up into a kind of " tree 
 or bush of "polyps," or how it can hatch little eggs in- 
 side it and throw out young ones from its mouth, 
 
 * Manchester Science Lectures, No. i, Second Series. John 
 Heywood, 141, Deansgate, Manchester. 
 3 
 
22 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 provided with little hairs, by means of which they 
 swim to new resting-places. You will learn the dif- 
 ference between the animal which builds up the red 
 coral as its skeleton, and the group of animals which 
 build up the white; and you will look with new in- 
 terest on our piece of white coral, as you read that 
 each of those little cups on its stem with delicate divi- 
 sions like the spokes of a wheel has been the home of 
 a separate polyp, and that from the sea-water each little 
 jelly animal has drunk in carbonate of lime as you 
 drink in sugar dissolved in water, and then has used 
 it grain by grain to build that delicate cup and add to 
 the coral tree. 
 
 We cannot stop to examine all about coral now, we 
 are only learning how to learn, but surely our speci- 
 men is already beginning to grow interesting; and 
 when you have followed it out into the great Pacific 
 Ocean, where the wild waves dash restlessly against 
 the coral trees, and have seen these tiny drops of jelly 
 conquering the sea and building huge walls of stone 
 against the rough breakers, you will hardly rest till 
 you know all their history. Look at that curious 
 circular island in the picture (Fig. 3), covered with 
 palm trees ; it has a large smooth lake in the mid- 
 dle, and the bottom of this lake is covered with 
 blue, red, and green jelly animals, spreading out their 
 feelers in the water and looking like beautiful flow- 
 ers, and all round the outside of the island similar 
 animals are to be seen washed by the sea waves. 
 Such islands as this have been built entirely of the 
 skeletons of the coral animals, and the history of the 
 way in which the tiny creatures added to them inch 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 23 
 
 by inch, is as fascinating as the story of the building 
 of any fairy palace in the days of old. Read all this, 
 
 Lagoon of still-water inside the encircling 
 
 coral reef. Coral polyp. 
 
 FIG. 3. Coral island of the Pacific. 
 
 and then if you have no coral of your own to examine, 
 go to some museum and see the beautiful specimens 
 in the glass cases there, and think that they have been 
 built up under the rolling surf by the tiny jelly ani- 
 mals ; and then coral will become a real living thing 
 to you, and you will love the thoughts it awakens. 
 
 But people often ask, what is the use of learning 
 all this ? If you do not feel by this time how delight- 
 ful it is to fill your mind with beautiful pictures of 
 nature, perhaps it would be useless to say more. But 
 in this age of ours, when restlessness and love of ex- 
 citement pervade so many lives, is it nothing to be 
 
24 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 taken out of ourselves and made to look at the won- 
 ders of nature going on around us? Do you never feel 
 tired and " out of sorts," and want to creep away from 
 your companions, because they are merry and you 
 are not? Then it is the time to read about the stars, 
 and how quietly they keep their course from age to 
 age ; or to visit some little flower, and ask what story 
 it has to tell; or to watch the clouds, and try to im- 
 agine how the winds drive them across the sky. No 
 person is so independent as he who can find interest 
 in a bare rock, a drop of water, the foam of the sea, 
 the spider on the wall, the flower underfoot or the 
 stars overhead. And these interests are open to every- 
 one who enters the fairy-land of science. 
 
 Moreover, we learn from this study to see that there 
 is a law and purpose in everything in the Universe, 
 and it makes us patient when we recognize the quiet 
 noiseless working of nature all around us. Study 
 light, and learn how all colour, beauty, and life depend 
 on the sun's rays ; note the winds and currents of the 
 air, regular even in their apparent irregularity, as they 
 carry heat and moisture all over the world. Watch 
 the water flowing in deep quiet streams, or forming 
 the vast ocean ; and then reflect that every drop is 
 guided by invisible forces working according to fixed 
 laws. See plants springing up under the sunlight, 
 learn the secrets of plant life, and how their scents 
 and colours attract the insects. Read how insects 
 cannot live without plants, nor plants without the flit- 
 ting butterfly or the busy bee. Realize that all this 
 is worked by fixed laws, and that out of it (even if 
 sometimes in suffering and pain) springs the wonder- 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 2$ 
 
 ful universe around us. And then say, can you fear 
 for your own little life, even though it may have its 
 troubles? Can you help feeling a part of this guided 
 and governed nature? or doubt that the power which 
 fixed the laws of the stars and of the tiniest drop of 
 water that made the plant draw power from the sun, 
 the tiny coral animal its food from the dashing waves ; 
 that adapted the flower to the insect and the insect 
 to the flower is also moulding your life as part of 
 the great machinery of the universe, so that you have 
 only to work, and to wait, and to love ? 
 
 We are all groping dimly for the Unseen Power, 
 but no one who loves nature and studies it can ever 
 feel alone or unloved in the world. Facts, as mere 
 facts, are dry and barren, but nature is full of life and 
 love, and her calm unswerving rule is tending to some 
 great though hidden purpose. You may call this Un- 
 seen Power what you will may lean on it in loving, 
 trusting faith, or bend in reverent and silent awe ; but 
 even the little child who lives with nature and gazes 
 on her with open eye, must rise in some sense or other 
 through nature to nature's God. 
 
26 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 SUNBEAMS AND THE WORK THEY DO. 
 
 WHO does not love the sunbeams, and feel 
 brighter and merrier as he watches them 
 playing on the wall, sparkling like diamonds on the 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 27 
 
 ripples of the sea, or making bows of coloured light 
 on the waterfall? Is not the sunbeam so dear to us 
 that it has become a household word for all that is 
 merry and gay? and when we want to describe the 
 dearest, busiest little sprite among us, who wakes a 
 smile on all faces wherever she goes, do we not call 
 her the " sunbeam of the house " ? 
 
 And yet how little even the wisest among us know 
 about the nature and work of these bright messengers 
 of the sun as they dart across space ! 
 
 Did you ever wake quite early in the morning, 
 when it was pitch-dark and you could see nothing, 
 not even your own hand; and then lie watching as 
 time went on till the light came gradually creeping in 
 at the window? If you have done this you will have 
 noticed that you can at first only just distinguish the 
 dim outline of the furniture ; then you can tell the dif- 
 ference between the white cloth on the table and the 
 dark wardrobe beside it ; then by degrees all the small- 
 er details, the handles of the drawer, the pattern on 
 the wall, and the different colours of all the objects in 
 the room become clearer and clearer till at last you see 
 all distinctly in broad daylight. 
 
 What has been happening here ? and why have the 
 things in the room become visible by such slow de- 
 grees? We say that the sun is rising, but we know 
 very well that it is not the sun which moves, but that 
 our earth has been turning slowly round, and bringing 
 the little spot on which we live face to face with the 
 great fiery ball, so that his beams can fall upon us. 
 
 Take a small globe, and stick a piece of black 
 plaster over the United States, then let a lighted lamp 
 
2 g THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 represent the sun, and turn the globe slowly, so that 
 the spot creeps round from the dark side away from 
 the lamp, until it catches, first the rays which pass 
 along the side of the globe, then the more direct rays, 
 and at last stands fully in the blaze of the light. Just 
 this was happening to our spot of the world as you lay 
 in bed and saw the light appear ; and we have to learn 
 to-day what those* beams are which fall upon us and 
 what they do for us. 
 
 First we must learn something about the sun itself, 
 since it is the starting-place of all the sunbeams. If 
 the sun were a dark mass instead of a fiery one we 
 should have none of these bright cheering messengers, 
 and though we were turned face to face with him every 
 day we should remain in one cold eternal night. Now 
 you will remember we mentioned in the last lecture 
 that it is heat which shakes apart the little atoms of 
 water and makes them float up in the air to fall again 
 as rain ; and that if the day is cold they fall as snow, 
 and all the water is turned into ice. But if the sun 
 were altogether dark, think how bitterly cold it would 
 be; far colder than the most wintry weather ever 
 known, because in the bitterest night some warmth 
 comes out of the earth, where it has been stored from 
 the sunlight which fell during the day. But if we 
 never received any warmth at all, no water would 
 ever rise up into the sky, no rain ever fall, no rivers 
 flow, and consequently no plants could grow and no 
 animals live. All water would be in the form of snow 
 and ice, and the earth would be one great frozen mass 
 with nothing moving upon it. 
 
 So you see it becomes very interesting for us to 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 29 
 
 learn what the sun is, and how he sends us his beams. 
 How far away from us do you think he is ? On a fine 
 summer's day when we can see him clearly, it looks as 
 if we had only to get into a balloon and reach him as 
 he sits in the sky, and yet we know that he is more 
 than ninety-two millions of miles distant from our 
 earth. 
 
 These figures are so enormous that you cannot 
 really grasp them. But imagine yourself in an express 
 train, travelling at the tremendous rate of sixty miles 
 an hour and never stopping. At that rate, if you 
 wished to arrive at the sun to-day you would have 
 been obliged to start more than one hundred and 
 seventy-five years ago. That is, you must have set 
 off in the early part of the reign of Queen Anne, long 
 before the revolution by which America ceased to be 
 an English colony and became a free nation ; all 
 through the days of Washington and the long line of 
 presidents; through the war of 1812; that with Mex- 
 ico, and the late war with Spain, up to the present 
 day whirling on day and night at express speed, and 
 at last, to-day, you would have reached the sun! 
 
 And when you arrived there, how large do you 
 think you would find him to be? Anaxagoras, a 
 learned Greek, was laughed at by his fellow Greeks 
 because he said that the sun was as large as the Pelo- 
 ponnesus that is, about the size of a county of the 
 state in which you live. How astonished they would 
 have been if they could have known that not only is 
 he bigger than the whole of Greece, but more than a 
 million times bigger than the whole world ! 
 
 Our world itself is a large place, so large that your 
 
3O THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 own state looks only like a tiny speck upon it, and an 
 express train would take nearly a month to travel 
 round it. Yet even our whole globe is nothing in size 
 compared to the sun, for it only measures 8000 miles 
 across, while the sun measures more than 852,000. 
 
 FIG. 4. 109 earths laid across the face of the sun. Each one of 
 these dots represents roughly the size of the earth as com- 
 pared to the size of the sun represented by the large circle. 
 
 Imagine for a moment that you could cut the sun 
 and the earth each in half as you would cut an apple ; 
 then if you were to lay the flat side of the half-earth on 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 31 
 
 the flat side of the half-sun it would take 109 such 
 earths to stretch across the face of the sun. One of 
 these 109 round spots on the diagram represents the 
 size which our earth would look if placed on the sun ; 
 and they are so tiny compared to him that they look 
 only like a string of minute beads stretched across his 
 face. Only think, then, how many of these minute 
 dots would be required to fill the whole of the inside of 
 Fig. 4, if it were a globe ! 
 
 One of the best ways to form an idea of the whole 
 size of the sun is to imagine it to be hollow, like a 
 hollow air ball, and then see how many earths it 
 would take to fill it. You would hardly believe that 
 it would take one million three hundred and thirty-one 
 thousand globes the size of our world squeezed to- 
 gether. Just think, if a huge giant could travel all 
 over the universe and gather worlds, all as big as ours, 
 and were to make first a heap of merely ten such 
 worlds, how huge it would be ! Then he must have a 
 hundred such heaps of ten to make a thousand worlds ; 
 and then he must collect again a thousand times that 
 thousand to make a million, and when he had stuffed 
 them all into the sun-ball he would still have only 
 filled three-quarters of it ! 
 
 After hearing this you will not be astonished that 
 such a monster should give out an enormous quantity 
 of light and heat ; so enormous that it is almost im- 
 possible to form any idea of it. Sir John Herschel 
 has, indeed, tried to picture it for us. He found that 
 a ball of lime with a flame of oxygen and hydrogen 
 playing round it (such as we use in magic lanterns 
 and call oxy-hydrogen light) becomes so violently 
 
32 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 hot that it gives, with the exception of that produced 
 by electricity, the most brilliant artificial light we can 
 get such that you cannot put your eye near it with- 
 out injury. Yet if you wanted to have a light as 
 strong as that of our sun, it would not be enough to 
 make such a lime-ball as big as the sun is. No, you 
 must make it as big as 146 suns, or more than 
 146,000,000 times as big as our earth, in order to get 
 the right amount of light. Then you would have a 
 tolerably good artificial sun; for we know that the 
 body of the sun gives out an intense white light, just 
 as the lime-ball does, and that, like it, it has an atmos- 
 phere of glowing gases round it. 
 
 But perhaps we get the best idea of the mighty 
 heat and light of the sun by remembering how few of 
 the rays which dart out on all sides from this fiery 
 ball can reach our tiny globe, and yet how powerful 
 they are. Look at the globe of a lamp in the middle of 
 the room, and see how its light pours out on all sides 
 and into every corner; then take a grain of mustard- 
 seed, which will very well represent the comparative 
 size of our earth, and hold it up at a distance from the 
 lamp. How very few of all those rays which are 
 filling the room fall on the little mustard-seed, and 
 just so few does our earth catch of the rays which 
 dart out from the sun. And yet this small quantity 
 ( lo ! inr rnillionth part of the whole) does nearly all the 
 work of our world.* 
 
 * These and the preceding numerical statements will be found 
 worked out in Sir J. Herschel's Familiar Lectures on Scien- 
 tific Subjects, 1868, from which many of the facts in the first 
 part of the lecture are taken. 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 33 
 
 In order to see how powerful the sun's rays are, 
 you have only to take a magnifying glass and gather 
 them to a point on a piece of brown paper, for they 
 will set the paper alight. Sir John Herschel tells us 
 that at the Cape of Good Hope the heat was even 
 so great that he cooked a beefsteak and roasted some 
 eggs by merely putting them in the sun, in a box 
 with a glass lid ! Indeed, just as we should all be 
 frozen to death if the sun were cold, so we should 
 all be burnt up with intolerable heat if his fierce rays 
 fell with all their might upon us. But we have an 
 invisible veil protecting us, made of what do you 
 think? Of those tiny particles of water which the 
 sunbeams draw up and scatter in the air, and which, 
 as we shall see in Lecture IV, cut off part of the in- 
 tense heat and make the air cool and pleasant for us. 
 
 We have now learnt something of the distance, the 
 size, the light, and the heat of the sun the great 
 source of the sunbeams. But we are as yet no nearer 
 the answer to the question, What is a sunbeam? how 
 does the sun touch our earth? 
 
 Now suppose I wish to touch you from this plat- 
 form where I stand, I can do it in two ways. Firstly, 
 I can throw something at you and hit you in this 
 case a thing will have passed across the space from 
 me to you. Or, secondly, if I could make a violent 
 movement so as to shake the floor of the room, you 
 would feel a quivering motion ; and so I should touch 
 you across the whole distance of the room. But in 
 this case no thing would have passed from me to you 
 but a movement or wave, which passed along the 
 
34 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 boards of the floor. Again, if I speak to you, how 
 does the sound reach your ear? Not by anything 
 being thrown from my mouth to your ear, but by 
 the motion of the air. When I speak I agitate the 
 air near my mouth, and that makes a wave in the air 
 beyond, and that one, another, and another (as we 
 shall see more fully in Lecture VI), till the last wave 
 hits the drum of your ear. 
 
 Thus we see there are two ways of touching any- 
 thing at a distance: ist, by throwing some thing at it 
 and hitting it ; 2nd, by sending a movement or wave 
 across to it, as in the case of the quivering boards and 
 the air. 
 
 Now the great natural philosopher Newton thought 
 that the sun touched us in the first of these ways, and 
 that sunbeams were made of very minute atoms of 
 matter thrown out by the sun, and making a perpetual 
 cannonade on our eyes. It is easy to understand 
 that this would make us see light and feel heat, just as 
 a blow in the eye makes us see stars, or on the body 
 makes us feel hot : and for a long time this explanation 
 was supposed to be the true one. But we know now 
 that there are many facts which cannot be explained 
 on this theory, though we cannot go into them here. 
 What we will do, is to try and understand what 
 now seems to be the true explanation of a sun- 
 beam. 
 
 About the same time that Newton wrote, a Dutch- 
 man, named Huyghens, suggested that light comes 
 from the sun in tiny waves, travelling across space 
 much in the same way as ripples travel across a pond. 
 The only difficulty was to explain in what substance 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 35 
 
 these waves could be travelling: not through water, 
 for we know that there is no water in space nor 
 through air, for the air ceases at a comparatively short 
 distance from our earth. There must then be some- 
 thing filling all space between us and the sun, finer 
 than either water or air. 
 
 And now I must ask you to use all your imagina- 
 tion, for I want you to picture to yourselves something 
 quite as invisible as the Emperor's new clothes in 
 Andersen's fairy-tale, only with this difference, that 
 our invisible something is very active ; and though we 
 can neither see it nor touch it we know it by its 
 effects. You must imagine a fine substance filling all 
 space between us and the sun and the stars; a sub- 
 stance so very delicate and subtle, that not only is 
 it invisible, but it can pass through solid bodies such 
 as glass, ice, or even wood or brick walls. This sub- 
 stance we call " ether." I cannot give you here the 
 reasons why we must assume that it is throughout 
 all space ; you must take this on the word of such men 
 as Sir John Herschel or Professor Clerk-Maxwell, 
 until you can study the question for yourselves. 
 
 Now if you can imagine this ether filling every 
 corner of space, so that it is everywhere and passes 
 through everything, ask yourselves, what must happen 
 when a great commotion is going on in one of the 
 large bodies which float in it? When the atoms of 
 the gases round the sun are clashing violently together 
 to make all its light and heat, do you not think they 
 must shake this ether all around them? And then, 
 since the ether stretches on all sides from the sun to 
 our earth and all other planets, must not this quiver- 
 
36 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 ing travel to us, just as the quivering of the boards 
 would from me to you ? Take a basin of water to rep- 
 resent the ether, and take a piece of potassium like 
 that which we used in our last lecture, and hold it 
 with a pair of nippers in the middle of the water. You 
 will see that as the potassium hisses and the flame 
 burns round it, they will make waves which will 
 travel all over the water to the edge of the basin, and 
 you can imagine how in the same way waves travel 
 over the ether from the sun to us. 
 
 Straight away from the sun on all sides, never 
 stopping, never resting, but chasing after each other 
 with marvellous quickness, these tiny waves travel 
 out into space by night and by day. When the spot 
 of the earth where America lies is turned away from 
 them and they cannot touch you, then it is night for 
 you, but directly America is turned so as to face the 
 sun, then they strike on the land, and the water, and 
 warm it; or upon your eyes, making the nerves quiver 
 so that you see light. Look up at the sun and picture 
 to yourself that instead of one great blow from a fist 
 causing you to see stars for a moment, millions of tiny 
 blows from these sun-waves are striking every instant 
 on your eye; then you will easily understand that this 
 would cause you to see a constant blaze of light. 
 
 But when the sun is away, if the night is clear we 
 have light from the stars. Do these then too make 
 waves all across the enormous distance between them 
 and us ? Certainly they do, for they too are suns like 
 our own, only they are so far off that the waves they 
 send are more feeble, and so we only notice them 
 when the sun's stronger waves are away. 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 
 
 37 
 
 But perhaps you will ask, if no one has ever seen 
 these waves or the ether in which they are made, 
 what right have we to say they are there ? Strange as 
 it may seem, though we cannot see them we have 
 measured them and know how large they are, and how 
 many can go into an inch of space. For as these tiny 
 waves are running on straight forward through the 
 room, if we put something in their way, they will have 
 to run round it ; and if you let in a very narrow ray of 
 light through a shutter and put an upright wire in the 
 sunbeam, you actually make the waves run round the 
 wire just as water runs round a post- in a river; and 
 
 FIG. 5. A, hole in the shutter ; B, wire placed in the beam of 
 light ; S S, screen on which the dark and light bands are 
 caught. 
 
 they meet behind the wire just as the water meets in a 
 V shape behind the post. Now when they meet, they 
 run up against each other, and here it is we catch 
 them. For if they meet comfortably, both rising up 
 in a good wave, they run on together and make a 
 bright line of light ; but if they meet higgledy-pig- 
 
38 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 gledy, one up and the other down, all in confusion, 
 they stop each other, and then there is no light, but 
 a line of darkness. And so behind your piece of 
 wire you can catch the waves on a piece of paper, 
 and you will find. they make dark and light lines one 
 side by side with the other, and by means of these 
 bands it is possible to find out how large the waves 
 must be. This question is too difficult for us to work 
 it out here, but you can see that large waves will make 
 broader light and dark bands than small ones will, 
 and that in this way the size of the waves may be 
 measured. 
 
 And now how large do you think they turn out 
 to be? So very, very tiny that about fifty thousand 
 waves are contained in a single inch of space ! I 
 have drawn on the board the length of an inch,* and 
 now I will measure the same space in the air between 
 my finger and thumb. Within this space at this mo- 
 ment there are fifty thousand tiny waves moving up 
 and down ! I promised you we would find in science 
 things as wonderful as in fairy tales. Are not these 
 tiny invisible messengers coming incessantly from the 
 sun as wonderful as any fairies? and still more so 
 when, as we shall see presently, they are doing nearly 
 all the work of our world. 
 
 We must next try to realize how fast these waves 
 travel. You will remember that an express train 
 would take more than one hundred and seve.nty- 
 five years to reach us from the sun ; and even a 
 cannon-ball would take from ten to thirteen years 
 to come that distance. Well, these tiny waves 
 * The width of an inch may be seen in Fig. 13, p. 64. 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 39 
 
 take only seven minutes and a half to come the whole 
 92 millions of miles. The waves which are hitting 
 your eye at this moment are caused by a movemenl 
 which began at the sun only 7^ minutes ago. And re- 
 member, this movement is going on incessantly, and 
 these waves are always following one after the other so 
 rapidly that they keep up a perpetual cannonade 
 upon the pupil of your eye. So fast do they come 
 that about 608 billion waves enter your eye in one 
 single second.* I do not ask you to remember these 
 figures ; I only ask you to try and picture to your- 
 selves these infinitely tiny and active invisible mes- 
 sengers from the sun, and to acknowledge that light is 
 a fairy thing. 
 
 But we do not yet know all about our sunbeam. 
 See, I have here a piece of glass with three sides, called 
 a prism. If I put it in the 
 
 sunlight which is streaming /V /\ 
 
 through the window, what ^ ^ 
 
 happens? Look! on the FlG - 6 - 
 
 table there is a line of beautiful colours. I can make 
 it long or short, as I turn the prism, but the colours 
 always remain arranged in the same way. Here at 
 my left hand is the red, beyond it orange, then yellow, 
 green, blue, indigo or deep blue, and violet, shading 
 one into the other all along the line. We have all 
 seen these colours dancing on the wall when the sun 
 
 * Light travels at the rate of 192,000 miles, or 12,165,120,000 
 inches, in a second. Taking the average number of wave- 
 lengths in an inch at 50,000, then 12,165,120,000 X 50,000 = 608,- 
 256,000,000,000. 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 has been shining brightly on the cut-glass pendants 
 of the chandelier, and you may see them still more 
 distinctly if you let a ray of light into a darkened 
 
 room, and pass 
 it through the 
 prism as in the 
 diagram (Fig. 7). 
 What are these 
 colours? Do they 
 come from the 
 glass ? No ; for 
 FIG. 7. Coloured spectrum thrown by a you will remem- 
 prism on the wall. D E, window-shut- fogr to have seen 
 ter ; F, round hole in it ; A B C, glass- them in the rain _ 
 
 prism ; M N, wall. , . 
 
 bow, and in the 
 
 soap-bubble, and even in a drop of dew or the scum 
 on the top of a pond. This beautiful coloured line is 
 only our sunbeam again, which has been split up into 
 many colours by passing through the glass, as it is in 
 the rain-drops of the rainbow and the bubbles of the 
 scum of the pond. 
 
 Till now we have talked of the sunbeam as if it were 
 made of only one set of waves, but in truth it is made 
 of many sets of waves of different sizes, all travelling 
 along together from the sun. These various waves 
 have been measured, and we know that the waves 
 which make up red light are larger and more lazy than 
 those which make violet light, so that there are only 
 thirty-nine thousand red waves in an. inch, while there 
 are fifty-seven thousand violet waves in the same space. 
 
 How is it then, that if all these different waves, 
 making different colours, hit on our eye, they do not 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 
 
 always make us see coloured light? Because, unless 
 they are interfered with, they all travel along together, 
 and you know that all colours mixed together in 
 proper proportion, make white. 
 
 I have here a round piece of cardboard, painted 
 with the seven colours in succession several times over. 
 When it is still you can distinguish them all apart, but 
 when I whirl it quickly round see ! the cardboard 
 looks quite white, because we see them all so instan- 
 taneously that they are mingled together. In the same 
 way light looks white to you, because all the differ- 
 ent coloured waves strike on your eye at once. You 
 can easily make one of these cards for yourselves, 
 only the white will always look dirty, because you 
 cannot get the col- 
 ours pure. 
 
 Now, when the 
 light passes through 
 the three-sided glass 
 or prism, the waves 
 are spread out, and 
 the slow, heavy, red 
 waves lag behind and 
 remain at the lower 
 end R of the coloured 
 line on the wall (Fig. 
 7), while the rapid 
 little violet waves are 
 bent more out of their road and run to V at the farther 
 end of the line ; and the orange, yellow, green, blue, 
 and indigo arrange themselves between, according to 
 the size of their waves. 
 
 FIG. 8. A, cardboard painted with 
 the seven colours in succession ; 
 B, same cardboard spun quickly 
 round. 
 
42 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 And now you are very likely eager to ask why the 
 quick waves should make us see one colour, and the 
 slow waves another. This is a very difficult question, 
 for we have a great deal still to learn about the effect 
 of- light on the eye. But you can easily imagine that 
 colour is to our eye much the same as music is to our 
 ear. You know we can distinguish different notes 
 when the air-waves play slowly or quickly upon the 
 drum of the ear (as we shall see in Lecture VI.), and 
 somewhat in the same way the tiny waves of the ether 
 play on the retina or curtain at the back of our eye, 
 and make the nerves carry different messages to the 
 brain : and the colour we see depends upon the num- 
 ber of waves which play upon the retina in a second. 
 
 Do you think we have now rightly answered the 
 question What is a sunbeam? We have seen that it 
 is really a succession of tiny rapid waves, travelling 
 from the sun to us across the invisible substance we 
 call " ether," and keeping up a constant cannonade 
 upon everything which comes in their way. We have 
 also seen that, tiny as these waves are, they can still 
 vary in size, so that one single sunbeam is made up 
 of myriads of different-sized waves, which travel all 
 together and make us see white light ; unless for some 
 reason they are scattered apart, so that we see them 
 separately as red, green, blue, or yellow. How they 
 are scattered, and many other secrets of the sun-waves, 
 we cannot stop to consider now, but must pass on to 
 ask 
 
 What work do the sunbeams do for us f 
 
 They do two things they give us light and heat. 
 It is by means of them alone that we see anything. 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 43 
 
 When the room was dark you could not distinguish 
 the table, the chairs, or even the walls of the room. 
 Why? Because they had no light-waves to send to 
 your eye. But as the sunbeams began to pour in at 
 the window, the waves played upon the things in the 
 room, and when they hit them they bounded off them 
 back to your eye, as a wave of the sea bounds back 
 from a rock and strikes against a passing boat. Then, 
 when they fell upon your eye, they entered it and ex- 
 cited the retina and the nerves, and the image of the 
 chair or the table was carried to your brain. Look 
 around at all the things in this room. Is it not strange 
 to think that each one of them is sending these invisible 
 messengers straight to your eye as you look at it ; and 
 that you see me, and distinguish me from the table, 
 entirely by the kind of waves we each send to you ? 
 
 Some substances send back hardly any waves of 
 light, but let them all pass through them, and thus we 
 cannot see them. A pane of clear glass, for instance, 
 lets nearly all the light-waves pass through it, and 
 therefore you often cannot see that the glass is there, 
 because no light-messengers come back to you from 
 it. Thus people have sometimes walked up against a 
 glass door and broken it, not seeing it was there. 
 Those substances are transparent which, for some 
 reason unknown to us, allow the ether waves to pass 
 through them without shaking the atoms of which the 
 substance is made. In clear glass, for example, all 
 the light-waves pass through without affecting the 
 substance of the glass ; while in a white wall the larger 
 part of the rays are reflected back to your eye, and 
 
44 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 those which pass into the wall, by giving motion to its 
 atoms, lose their own vibrations. 
 
 Into polished shining metal the waves hardly enter 
 at all, but are thrown back from the surface ; and so a 
 steel knife or a silver spoon are very bright, and are 
 clearly seen. Quicksilver is put at the back of look- 
 ing-glasses because it reflects so many waves. It not 
 only sends back those which come from the sun, but 
 those, too, which come from your face. So, when you 
 see yourself in a looking-glass, the sun-waves have first 
 played on your face and bounded off from it to the 
 looking-glass; then, when they strike the looking- 
 glass, they are thrown back again on to the retina of 
 your eye, and you see your own face by means of the 
 very waves you threw off from it an instant before. 
 
 But the reflected light-waves do more for us than 
 this. They not only make us see things, but they 
 make us see them in different colours. What, you 
 will ask, is this too the work of the sunbeams? Cer- 
 tainly ; for if the colour we see depends on the size of 
 the waves which come back to us, then we must see 
 things coloured differently according to the waves they 
 send back. For instance, imagine a sunbeam playing 
 on a leaf : part of its waves bound straight back from 
 it to our eye and make us see the surface of the leaf, 
 but the rest go right into the leaf itself, and there 
 some of them are used up and kept prisoners. The 
 red, orange, yellow, blue, and violet waves are all 
 useful to the leaf, and it does not let them go again. 
 But it cannot absorb the green waves, and so it throws 
 them back, and they travel to your eye and make you 
 see a green colour. So when you say a leaf is green, 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 45 
 
 you mean that the leaf does not want the green waves 
 of the sunbeam, but sends them back to you. In the 
 same way the scarlet geranium rejects the red waves ; 
 this table sends back brown waves ; a white tablecloth 
 sends back nearly the whole of the waves, and a black 
 coat scarcely any. This is why, when there is very 
 little light in the room, you can see a white tablecloth 
 while you would not be able to distinguish a black 
 object, because the few faint rays that are there, are 
 all sent back to you from a white surface. 
 
 Is it not curious to think that there is really no 
 such thing as colour in the leaf, the table, the coat, 
 or the geranium flower, but we see them of different 
 colours because, for some reason, they send back only 
 certain coloured waves to our eye? 
 
 Wherever you look, then, and whatever you see, all 
 the beautiful tints, colours, lights, and shades around 
 you are the work of the tiny sun-waves. 
 
 Again, light does a great deal of work when it falls 
 upon plants. Those rays of light which are caught 
 by the leaf are by no means idle ; we shall see in Lec- 
 ture VII that the leaf uses them to digest its food and 
 make the sap on which the plant feeds. 
 
 We all know that a plant becomes pale and sickly 
 if it has not sunlight, and the reason is, that without 
 these light-waves it cannot get food out of the air, nor 
 make the sap and juices which it needs. When you 
 look at plants and trees growing in the beautiful 
 meadows ; at the fields of corn, and at the lovely land- 
 scape, you are looking on the work of the tiny waves 
 of light, which never rest all through the day in help- 
 ing to give life to every green thing that grows. 
 
46 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 So far we have spoken only of light ; but hold your 
 hand in the sun and feel the heat of the sunbeams, and 
 then consider if the waves of heat do not do work 
 also. There are many waves in a sunbeam which 
 move too slowly to make us see light when they hit 
 our eye, but we can feel them as heat, though we 
 cannot see them as light. The simplest way of feeling 
 heat-waves is to hold a warm iron near your face. 
 You know that no light conies from it, yet you can feel 
 the heat-waves beating violently against your face and 
 scorching it. Now there are many of these dark heat- 
 rays in a sunbeam, and it is they which do most of 
 the work in the world. 
 
 In the first place, as they come quivering to the 
 earth, it is they which shake the water 7 drops apart, so 
 that these are carried up in the air, as we shall see in 
 the next lecture. And then remember, it is these 
 drops, falling again as rain, which make the rivers and 
 all the moving water on the earth. So also it is the 
 heat-waves which make the air hot and light, and so 
 cause it to rise and make winds and air-currents, and 
 these again give rise to ocean-currents. It is these 
 dark rays, again, which strike upon the land and give 
 it the warmth which enables plants to grow. It is 
 they also which keep up the warmth in our own bodies, 
 both by coming to us directly from the sun, and also 
 in a very roundabout way through plants. You will 
 remember that plants use up rays of light and heat 
 in growing ; then either we eat the plants, or animals 
 eat the plants and we eat the animals ; and when we 
 digest the food, that heat comes back in our bodies, 
 which the plants first took from the sunbeam. 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 47 
 
 Breathe upon your hand, and feel how hot your breath 
 is; well, that heat which you feel, was once in a sun- 
 beam, and has travelled from it through the food you 
 have eaten, and has now been at work keeping up the 
 heat of your body. 
 
 But there is still another way in which these plants 
 may give out the heat-waves they have imprisoned. 
 You will remember how we learnt in the first lecture 
 that coal is made of plants, and that the heat they 
 give out is the heat these plants once took in. Think 
 how much work is done by burning coal. Not only 
 are our houses warmed by coal fires and lighted by 
 coal gas, but our steam-engines and machinery work 
 entirely by water which has been turned into steam by 
 the heat of coal and coke fires ; and our steamboats 
 travel all over the world by means of the same power. 
 In the same way the oil of our lamps comes -from coal 
 and the remains of plants and animals in the earth. 
 Even our tallow candles are made of mutton fat, and 
 sheep eat grass; and so, turn which way we will, we 
 find that the light and heat on our earth, whether it 
 comes from fires, or candles, or lamps, or gas, and 
 whether it moves machinery, or drives a train, or pro- 
 pels a ship, is equally the work of the invisible waves of 
 ether coming from the sun, which make what we call 
 a sunbeam. 
 
 Lastly, there are still some hidden waves which we 
 have not yet mentioned, which are not useful to us 
 either as light or heat, and yet they are not idle. 
 
 Before I began this lecture, I put a piece of paper, 
 which had been dipped in nitrate of silver, under a 
 piece of glass ; and between it and the glass I put a 
 
48 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 piece of lace. Look what the sun has been doing 
 while I have been speaking. It has been breaking up 
 the nitrate of silver on the paper and turning it into 
 a deep brown substance ; only where the threads of 
 the lace were, and the sun could not touch the nitrate 
 of silver, there the paper has remained light-coloured, 
 and by this means I have a beautiful impression of the 
 lace on the paper. I will now dip the impression into 
 water in which some hyposulphite of soda is dissolved, 
 and this will " fix " the picture, that is, prevent the 
 sun acting upon it any more; then the picture will 
 remain distinct, and I can pass it round to you all. 
 Here, again, invisible waves have been at work, and 
 
 FIG. 9. Piece of lace photographed during the lecture. 
 
 this time neither as light nor as heat, but as chemical 
 agents, and it is these waves which give us all our 
 beautiful photographs. In any toyshop you can buy 
 this prepared paper, and set the chemical waves at 
 work to make pictures. Only you must remember 
 to fix it in the solution afterward, otherwise the chemi- 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 49 
 
 cal rays will go on working after you have taken the 
 lace away, and all the paper will become brown and 
 your picture will disappear. 
 
 The action of the photographic rays was well 
 known long before I delivered these lectures, twenty 
 years ago. 
 
 But since some still more marvellous and wonder- 
 working rays have been discovered. These rays were 
 studied and their curious action first shown by Profes- 
 sor Rontgen, of Wiirzburg ; therefore they are some- 
 times called the Rontgen rays, and sometimes the 
 X-rays, because X stands in algebra for an unknown 
 quantity; and although we know how these rays act, 
 we do not yet know what they are, except that they 
 are not ordinary forms of heat, light, or electricity. 
 
 They are produced by inserting platinum wires, 
 one at each end, into a glass tube from which the air 
 has been withdrawn so as to make almost a perfect 
 vacuum. These wires are then connected with an 
 electric battery, and a current of electricity at very 
 high pressure is passed through the tube, producing 
 a bluish-green light. But just before the current 
 passes out at the other end of the tube, there is a dark 
 space seen in which there is no bluish-green light. 
 It is in this space that the X-rays lie. They are quite 
 invisible in themselves, but if a screen is placed in 
 their road, painted over with a fluorescent substance 
 (such as the luminous paint put on matchbox cases), 
 they set up vibrations in the paint which cause it to 
 glow brilliantly. 
 
 Now comes the wonderful part. If you make this 
 screen of cardboard or wood, and turn the painted side 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 away from the vacuum tube, it will still glow brightly. 
 And if you then put your hand between the tube and 
 the screen you will see the bones of your hand on the 
 glowing paint, exactly as shown in Fig. 10. The X-rays 
 will have passed almost entirely through the flesh of 
 your hand and through the wood or cardboard, throw- 
 ing only a very faint shadow upon the screen, while 
 the bones will have stopped 
 them altogether, and so cast a 
 deep black shadow. You will 
 see that the ring on the finger 
 also casts a deep shadow, 
 showing that the X-rays could 
 not pass through the gold. 
 
 I have done this myself 
 and seen the bones of my own 
 hand, and I have made an 
 equally strange experiment. 
 I held a stout leather bag be- 
 tween the tube and the screen, 
 and lo! the leather of the bag 
 became only a very faint shad- 
 ow, like the flesh of my hand 
 had done, and I saw upon the screen the metal frame- 
 work of the bag, and within it a bunch of keys, an 
 opera glass, and several coins which were shut up in- 
 side the bag. 
 
 The reason of all these marvels is that the X-rays 
 will pass through flesh, wood, leather, paper, card- 
 board, even through a pack of cards, and through sev- 
 eral other substances which entirely stop the ordinary 
 rays of light and heat. But they will not pass through 
 
 FIG. 10. Shadow of the 
 human hand as thrown 
 on the fluorescent 
 screen by the X-rays. 
 Also as shown when 
 photographed by the 
 same rays. 
 
SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 51 
 
 bone nor through heavy metals. Therefore the frame- 
 work of the bag, the brass tubes of the opera glass, 
 the coins, and the bunch of keys stopped them alto- 
 gether and threw deep shadows. It is not necessary 
 to make these rays visible in order to enable them to 
 do work. If you take the fluorescent screen away and 
 put in its place a properly prepared photographic 
 plate, wrapped in black paper to keep out the light- 
 rays, or in a wooden box, and place your hand again 
 in front of the tube, the X-rays will pass through your 
 flesh and through the black paper, or the wood, and 
 cast the shadow of your bones and ring upon the plate, 
 altering the chemicals everywhere except where this 
 shadow lies. Then when the plate is taken out, prop- 
 erly developed, and printed on paper you will have the 
 image shown in Fig. 10 just as we had the impres- 
 sion of the lace just now. 
 
 Is not this like a magician's story ! And it has the 
 advantage of being useful to mankind, for surgeons 
 now use these X-rays to see the exact spot where bul- 
 lets or other solid objects are buried in the flesh of 
 people's bodies, so that they can cut them out. These 
 rays have several other curious properties, and we do 
 not yet know half the wonders they may reveal to us, 
 but they teach us how much more we have still to learn 
 about sunbeams and their work. 
 
 And now, tell me, may we not honestly say, that 
 the invisible waves which make our sunbeams, are 
 wonderful fairy messengers as they travel eternally 
 and unceasingly across space, never resting, never 
 tiring in doing the work of our world? Little as we 
 have been able to learn about them in one short hour, 
 
52 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 do they not seem to you worth studying and worth 
 thinking about, as we look at the beautiful results of 
 their work ? The ancient Greeks worshipped the sun, 
 and condemned to death one of their greatest phi- 
 losophers, named Anaxagoras, because he denied that 
 it was a god. We can scarcely wonder at this when 
 we see what the sun does for our world ; but we know 
 that it is a huge globe made of gases and fiery matter, 
 and not a god. We are grateful for the sun instead 
 of to him, and surely we shall look at him with new- 
 interest, now that we can picture his tiny messengers, 
 the sunbeams, flitting over all space, falling upon our 
 earth, giving us light to see with, and beautiful colours 
 to enjoy, warming the air and the earth, making the 
 refreshing rain, and, in a word, filling the world with 
 life and gladness. 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 
 
 'ID you ever .^v^^ "?*"" <* 
 
 sit on the bank of a river in some quiet spot where 
 the water was deep and clear, and watch the fishes 
 swimming lazily along ? When I was a child this was 
 one of my favourite occupations in the summertime 
 
54 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 on the banks of the Thames, and there was one ques- 
 tion which often puzzled me greatly, as I watched the 
 minnows and gudgeon gliding along through the 
 water. Why should fishes live in something and be 
 often buffeted about by waves and currents, while I 
 and others lived on the top of the earth and not in 
 anything? I do not remember ever asking any one 
 about this ; and if I had, in those days people did not 
 pay much attention to children's questions, and prob- 
 ably nobody would have told me, what I now tell 
 you, that we do live in something quite as real and 
 often quite as rough and stormy as the water in which 
 the fishes swim. The something in which we live is 
 air, and the reason that we do not perceive it is, 
 that we are in it, and that it is a gas, and invisible to 
 us ; while we are above the water in which the fishes 
 live, and it is a liquid which our eyes can perceive. 
 
 But let us suppose for a moment that a being, 
 whose eyes were so made that he could see gases as we 
 see liquids, were looking down from a distance upon 
 our earth. He would see an ocean of air, or aerial 
 ocean, all round the globe, with birds floating about in 
 it, and people walking along the bottom, just as we see 
 fish gliding along the bottom of a river. It is true, he 
 would never see even the birds come near to the sur- 
 face, for the highest-flying bird, the condor, never 
 soars more than five miles from the ground, and our 
 atmosphere, as we shall see, is at least 100 miles high. 
 So he would call us all deep-air creatures, just as we 
 talk of the deep-sea animals; and if we can imagine 
 that he fished in this air-ocean, and could pull one of 
 us out of it into space, he would find that we should 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 55 
 
 gasp and die just as fishes do when pulled out of the 
 water. 
 
 He would also observe very curious things going 
 on in our air-ocean; he would see large streams and 
 currents of air, which we call winds, and which would 
 appear to him as ocean-currents do to us, while near 
 down to the earth he would see thick mists forming 
 and then disappearing again, and these would be our 
 clouds. From them he would see rain, hail and snow 
 falling to the earth, and from time to time bright 
 flashes would shoot across the air-ocean, which would 
 be our lightning. Nay even the brilliant rainbow, 
 the northern aurora borealis, and the falling stars, 
 which seem to us so high up in space, would be seen 
 by him near to our earth, and all within the aerial 
 ocean. 
 
 But as we know of no such being living in space, 
 who can tell us what takes place in our invisible air, 
 and as we cannot see it ourselves, we must try by ex- 
 periments to see it with our imagination, though we 
 cannot with our eyes. 
 
 First, then, can we discover what air is? At one 
 time it was thought that it was a simple gas and could 
 not be separated into more than one kind. But we are 
 now going to make an experiment by which it has 
 been shown that air is made of two gases mingled 
 together, and that one of these gases, called oxygen, is 
 used up when anything burns, while the other nitrogen 
 is not used, and only serves to dilute the minute atoms 
 of oxygen. I have here a glass bell-jar, with a cork 
 fixed tightly in the neck, and I place the jar over a 
 pan of water, while on the water floats a plate with 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 FIG. n. Phosphorus burning under a 
 bell- jar (Roscoe). 
 
 a small piece of phosphorus upon it. You will see that 
 by putting the bell-jar over the water, I have shut 
 in a certain quantity of air, and my object now is to 
 
 use up the oxygen 
 out of this air and 
 leave only nitro- 
 gen behind. To 
 do this I must 
 light the piece of 
 phosphorus, for 
 you will remem- 
 ber it is in burn- 
 ing that oxygen 
 is used up. I will 
 take the cork out, light the phosphorus, and cork up 
 the jar again. See ! as the phosphorus burns white 
 fumes fill the jar. These fumes are phosphoric acid, 
 which is a substance made of phosphorus -and oxygen. 
 Our fairy force " chemical attraction " has been at 
 work here, joining the phosphorus and the oxygen of 
 the air together. 
 
 Now, phosphoric acid melts in water just as sugar 
 does, and in a few minutes these fumes' will disappear. 
 They are beginning to melt already, and the water 
 from the pan is rising up in the bell-jar. Why is this ? 
 Consider for a moment what we have done. First, the 
 jar was full of air, that is, of mixed oxygen and nitro- 
 gen ; then the phosphorus used up the oxygen, making 
 white fumes; afterward, the water sucked up these 
 fumes; and so, in the jar now nitrogen is the only 
 gas left, and the water has risen up to fill all the rest 
 of the space that was once taken up with the oxygen. 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 57 
 
 We can easily prove that there is no oxygen now 
 in the jar. I take out the cork and let a lighted taper 
 down into the gas. If there were any oxygen the 
 taper would burn, but you see it goes out directly, 
 proving that all the oxygen has been used up by the 
 phosphorus. When this experiment is made very 
 accurately, we find that for every pint of oxygen in air 
 there are four pints of nitrogen, so that the active 
 oxygen-atoms are scattered about, floating in the 
 sleepy, inactive nitrogen. 
 
 It is these oxygen-atoms which we use up when we 
 breathe. If I had put a mouse under the bell-jar, 
 instead of the phosphorus, the water would have risen 
 just the same, because the mouse would have breathed 
 in the oxygen and used it up in its body, joining it to 
 carbon and making a bad gas, carbonic acid, which 
 would also melt in the water, and when all the oxygen 
 was used the mouse would have died. 
 
 Do you see now how foolish it is to live in rooms 
 that are closely shut up, or to hide your head under 
 the bedclothes when you sleep? You use up all the 
 oxygen-atoms, and then there are none left for you to 
 breathe ; and besides this, you send out of your mouth 
 bad fumes, though you can not see them, and these 
 when you breathe them in again, poison you and make 
 you ill. 
 
 Perhaps you will say, If oxygen is so useful, why is 
 not the air made entirely of it? But think for a 
 moment. If there was such an immense quantity of 
 oxygen, how fearfully fast everything would burn ! 
 Our bodies would soon rise above fever heat from the 
 quantity of oxygen we should take in, and all fires and 
 
58 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 lights would burn furiously. In fact, a flame once 
 lighted would spread so rapidly that no power on earth 
 could stop it, and everything would be destroyed. So 
 the lazy nitrogen is very useful in keeping the oxygen- 
 atoms apart; and we have time, even when a fire is 
 very large and powerful, to put it out before it has 
 drawn in more and more oxygen from the surround- 
 ing air. Often, if you can shut a fire into a closed 
 space, as in a closely-shut room or the hold of a ship, 
 it will go out, because it has used up all the oxygen in 
 the air. 
 
 So, you see, we shall be right in picturing this in- 
 visible air all around us as a mixture of two gases. 
 But when we examine ordinary air very carefully, we 
 find small quantities of other gases in it, besides oxy- 
 gen and nitrogen. First, there is carbonic-acid gas. 
 This is the bad gas which we give out of our mouths 
 after we have burnt up the oxygen with the carbon 
 of our bodies inside our lungs ; and this carbonic acid 
 is also given out from everything that burns. If only 
 animals lived in the world, this gas would soon poison 
 the air ; but plants get hold of it, and in the sunshine 
 they break it up again, as we shall see in Lecture VII, 
 and use up the carbon, throwing the oxygen back 
 into the air for us to use. Secondly, there are very 
 small quantities in the air of ammonia, or the gas which 
 almost chokes you in smelling-salts, and which, when 
 liquid, is commonly called " spirits of hartshorn." 
 This ammonia is useful to plants, as we shall see by 
 and by. Again, there is a great deal of water in the 
 air, floating about as invisible vapour or water-dust, 
 and this we shall speak of in the next lecture. Lastly, 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN 2tt WHICH WE LIVE. 59 
 
 the air we breathe is now found by no means the simple 
 mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, with a little car- 
 bonic acid and still less ammonia, which were all that 
 science had discovered in it till within the last few 
 years. We must add to the invisible mixture, not 
 only argon, whose presence in the atmosphere was 
 detected about three years ago, and crypton, a more 
 recent discovery, but two more constituents which 
 are believed to be simple or elementary substances, 
 neon and metargon. Still, all these gases and va- 
 pours in the atmosphere are in very small quantities, 
 and the bulk of the air is composed of oxygen and 
 nitrogen. 
 
 Having now learned what air is, the next question 
 which presents itself is, Why does it stay round our 
 earth ? You will remember we saw in the first lecture, 
 that all the little atoms of gas are trying to fly away 
 from each other, so that if I turn on this gas-jet the 
 atoms soon leave it, and reach you at the farther end 
 of the room, and you can smell the gas. Why, then, 
 do not all the atoms of oxygen and nitrogen fly away 
 from our earth into space, and leave us without any 
 air? 
 
 Ah ! here you must look for another of our invisible 
 forces. Have you forgotten our giant force, " gravita- 
 tion," which draws things together from a distance? 
 This force draws together the earth and the atoms of 
 oxygen and nitrogen ; and as the earth is very big and 
 heavy, and the atoms of air are light and easily moved, 
 they are drawn down to the earth and held there by 
 gravitation. But for all that, the atmosphere does not 
 
6o 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 leave off trying to fly away ; it is always pressing up* 
 ward and outward with all its might, while the earth 
 is doing its best to hold it down. 
 
 The effect of this is, that near the earth, where the 
 pull downward is very strong, the air-atoms are drawn 
 very closely together, because gravitation gets the best 
 in the struggle. But as we get farther and farther 
 from the earth, the pull downward becomes weaker, 
 and then the air-atoms spring farther apart, and the 
 air becomes thinner. Suppose that the lines in this 
 
 FIG. 12. 
 
 diagram represent layers of air. Near the earth we 
 have to represent them as lying closely together, but 
 as they recede from the earth they are also farther 
 apart. 
 
 But the chief reason why the air is thicker or 
 denser nearer the earth, is because the upper layers 
 press it down. If you have a heap of papers lying 
 one on the top of the other, you know that those at 
 the bottom of the heap will be more closely pressed 
 together than those above, and just the same is the 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 6 1 
 
 case with the atoms of the air. Only there is this 
 difference, if the papers have lain for some time, 
 when you take the top ones off, the under ones remain 
 close together. But it is not so with the air, because 
 air is elastic, and the atoms are always trying to fly 
 apart, so that directly you take away the pressure they 
 spring up again as far as they can. 
 
 In this the ocean of air differs from an ocean of 
 water, for water is neither elastic nor can it be com- 
 pressed except to a very small extent. If it were 
 otherwise the sea at great depths would be almost or 
 quite solid under the pressure of the enormous weight 
 of water above ; and even at a few fathoms below the 
 surface would present great resistance to bodies pass- 
 ing through it. Fish or marine animals could only 
 exist at or near the surface. At any considerable 
 depth the compressed water would hold sunken objects 
 embedded in it as does ice ; nothing could reach the 
 bottom below a certain depth. 
 
 I have here an ordinary pop-gun. If I push the 
 cork in very tight, and then force the piston slowly 
 inward, I can compress the air a good deal. Now I 
 am forcing the atoms nearer and nearer together, but 
 at last they rebel so strongly against being more crowd- 
 ed that the cork can not resist their pressure. Out it 
 flies, and the atoms spread themselves out comfortably 
 again in the air all around them. Now, just as I 
 pressed the air together in the pop-gun, so the at- 
 mosphere high up above the earth presses on 
 the air below and keeps the atoms closely packed 
 together. And in this case the atoms cannot force 
 back the air above them as they did the cork in the 
 
62 THE FAIRY-LAND OP SCIENCE. 
 
 pop-gun; they are obliged to submit to be pressed 
 together. 
 
 Even a short distance from the earth, however, at 
 the top of a high mountain, the air becomes lighter, 
 because it has less weight of atmosphere above it, and 
 people who go up in balloons often have great diffi- 
 culty in breathing, because the air is so thin and light. 
 In 1804 a Frenchman, named Gay-Lussac, went up 
 four miles and a half in a balloon, and brought down 
 some air; and he found that it was much less heavy 
 than the same quantity of air taken close down to the 
 earth, showing that it was much thinner, or rarer, as it 
 is called; * and when, in 1862, Mr. Glaisher and Mr. 
 Coxwell went up five miles and a half, Mr. Glaisher's 
 veins began to swell, his head grew dizzy, and he 
 fainted. The air was too thin for him to breathe 
 enough in at a time, and it did not press heavily 
 enough on the drums of his ears and the veins of his 
 body. He would have died if Mr. Coxwell had not 
 quickly let off some of the gas in the balloon, so that 
 it sank down into denser air. 
 
 And now comes another very interesting question. 
 If the air gets less and less dense as it is farther from 
 the earth, where does it stop altogether? We cannot 
 go up to find out, because we should die long before 
 we reached the limit; and for a long time we had to 
 guess about how high the atmosphere probably was, 
 and it was generally supposed not to be more than fifty 
 miles. But lately, some curious bodies, which we 
 
 * 100 cubic inches near the earth weighed 31 grains, while the 
 same quantity taken at four and a half miles up in the air 
 weighed only 12 grains, or two-fifths of the weight. 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 63 
 
 should have never suspected would be useful to us in 
 this way, have let us into the secret of the height of 
 the atmosphere. These bodies are the meteors, or 
 falling stars. 
 
 Most people, at one time or another, have seen what 
 looks like a star shoot right across the sky, and dis- 
 appear. On a clear starlight night you may often see 
 one or more of these bright lights flash through the 
 air; for one falls on an average in every twenty min- 
 utes, and on the nights of August 9th and -November 
 1 3th there are numbers in one part of the sky. These 
 bodies are not really stars ; they are simply stones or 
 lumps of metal flying through the air, and taking fire 
 by clashing against the atoms of oxygen in it. There 
 are great numbers of these masses moving round and 
 round the sun, and when our earth comes across their 
 path, as it does especially in August and November, 
 they dash with such tremendous force through the 
 atmosphere that they grow white-hot, and give out 
 light, and then disappear, melted into vapour. Every 
 now and then one falls to the earth before it is all 
 melted away, and thus we learn that these stones 
 contain tin, iron, sulphur, phosphorus, and other sub- 
 stances. 
 
 It is while these bodies are burning that they look 
 to us like falling stars, and when we see them we know 
 that they must be dashing against our atmosphere. 
 Now if two people stand a certain known distance, 
 say fifty miles, apart on the earth, and observe these 
 meteors and the direction in which, they each see them 
 fall, they can calculate (by means of the angle between 
 the two directions) how high they are above them 
 
6 4 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 when they first see them, and at that moment they 
 must have struck against the atmosphere, and even 
 travelled some way through it, to become white-hot. 
 In this way we have learnt that meteors burst into 
 light at least 100 miles above the surface of the earth, 
 and so the atmosphere must be more than 100 miles 
 high. 
 
 Our next question is as to the weight of our aerial 
 ocean. You will easily understand that all this air 
 weighing down upon the earth 
 must be very heavy, even though 
 it grows lighter as it ascends. The 
 atmosphere does, in fact, weigh 
 down upon land at the level of the 
 sea as much as if a 1 5-pound weight 
 were put upon every square inch of 
 land. This little piece of linen 
 paper, which I am holding up, 
 measures exactly a square inch, 
 and as it lies on the table, it is 
 bearing a weight of 15 Ibs. on its 
 surface. But how, then, comes it 
 that I can lift it so easily? Why 
 am I not conscious of the weight? 
 
 To understand this you must give all your atten- 
 tion, for it is important and at first not very easy to 
 grasp. You must remember, in the first place, that 
 the air is heavy because it is attracted to the earth, and 
 in the second place, that since air is elastic all the atoms 
 of it are pushing upward against this gravitation. And 
 so, at any point in air, as for instance the place where 
 
 FIG. 13. A square 
 inch of paper, as 
 shown in the lec- 
 ture. 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 65 
 
 the paper now is as I hold it up, I feel no pressure, 
 because exactly as much as gravitation is pulling 'the 
 air down, so much elasticity is resisting and pushing it 
 up. So the pressure is equal upward, downward, and 
 on all sides, and I can move the paper with equal ease 
 any way. 
 
 Even if I lay the paper on the table this is still true, 
 because there is always some air under it. If, how- 
 ever, I could get the air quite away from one side of 
 the paper, then the pressure on the other side would 
 show itself. I can do this by simply wetting the paper 
 and letting it fall on the table, and the water will 
 prevent any air from getting under it. Now see! if 
 I try to lift it by the thread in the middle, I have 
 great difficulty, because the whole 15 pounds' weight 
 of the atmosphere is pressing it down. A still better 
 way of making the experiment is with a piece of 
 leather, such as the boys often amuse themselves with 
 in the streets. This piece of leather has been well 
 soaked. I drop it on the floor, and see ! it requires all 
 my strength to pull it up.* I now drop it on this stone 
 weight, and so heavily is it pressed down upon it 
 by the atmosphere that I can lift the weight without its 
 breaking away from it. 
 
 Have you ever tried to pick limpets off a rock ? If 
 so, you know how tight they cling. The limpet clings 
 to the rock just in the same way as this leather does 
 to the stone; the little animal exhausts the air inside 
 
 * In fastening the string to the leather the hole must be very 
 small and the knot as flat as possible, and it is even well to put 
 a small piece of kid under the knot. When I first made this ex- 
 periment, not having taken these precautions, it did not succeed 
 well, owing to air getting in through the hole. 
 
66 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 its shell, and then it is pressed against the rock by the 
 whole weight of the air above. 
 
 Perhaps you will* wonder how it is that if we have 
 a weight of 15 Ibs. pressing on every square inch of 
 
 our bodies, it does not 
 crush us. And, in- 
 deed, it amounts on the 
 whole to a weight of 
 about 15 tons upon the 
 body of a grown man. 
 It would crush us if it 
 were not that there are 
 gases and fluids inside 
 our bodies which press 
 outward and balance 
 the weight so that we 
 do not feel it at all. 
 This is why Mr. Glaisher's veins swelled and he 
 grew giddy in thin air. The gases and fluids inside his 
 body were pressing outward as much as when he was 
 below, but the air outside did not press so heavily, and 
 so all the natural condition of his body was dis- 
 turbed. 
 
 I hope we realize how heavily the air presses down 
 upon our earth, but it is equally necessary to under- 
 stand how, being elastic, it also presses upward; and 
 we can prove this by a simple experiment. I fill 
 this tumbler with water, and keeping a piece of card 
 firmly pressed against it, I turn the whole upside- 
 down. When I now take my hand away you would 
 naturally expect the card to fall, and the water to be 
 spilt. But no! the card remains as if glued to the 
 
 FIG. 14. Soaked leather lifting a 
 stone paper-weight. 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 67 
 
 tumbler, kept there entirely by the air pressing upward 
 against it. 
 
 And now we are almost prepared to understand 
 how we can weigh the invisible air. One more experi- 
 ment first. I have here (Fig. 16, p. 68) what is called 
 a U tube, because it is shaped like a large U. I pour 
 some water in it till it is about half full, and you will 
 notice that the water stands at the same height 
 in both arms of the tube (A, Fig. 16), because the 
 air presses on both surfaces alike. Putting my thumb 
 on one end I tilt the tube carefully, so as to make 
 the water run up to the end of one arm, and then turn 
 it back again (B, Fig. 16). But the water does not 
 now return to its even position, it remains up in 
 the arm on which my thumb 
 rests. Why is this ? Because 
 my thumb keeps back the 
 air from pressing at that end, 
 and the whole weight of the 
 atmosphere rests on the water 
 at c. And so we learn that 
 not only has the atmosphere 
 real weight, but we can see the 
 effects of this weight by mak- 
 ing it balance a column of 
 water or any other liquid. In 
 
 the case of the wetted leather we felt the weight of the 
 air, here we see its effects. 
 
 Now when we wish to see the weight of the air 
 we consult a barometer, which works really just in 
 the same way as the water in this tube. An ordi- 
 nary upright barometer is simply a straight tube of 
 
68 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 FIG. 16. A, water in a U tube under 
 natural pressure of air ; B, water 
 kept in one arm of the tube by 
 pressure of the air being at the 
 open end only at c. 
 
 glass filled with mercury or quicksilver, and turned 
 upside-down in a small cup of mercury (see B, Fig. 
 
 17). The tube is 
 a little more than 
 30 inches long, 
 and though it is 
 quite full of mer- 
 cury before it is 
 turned up (A), yet 
 directly it stands 
 in the cup the 
 mercury falls, till 
 there is a height 
 
 of about 30 inches between the surface of the mercury 
 in the cup C, and that of the mercury in the tube B. 
 As it falls it leaves an empty space above the mercury 
 at B which is called a vacuum, because it has no air in 
 it. Now, the mercury is under the same conditions as 
 the water was in the U tube, there is no pressure upon 
 it at B, while there is a pressure of 15 Ibs. upon it in the 
 bowl, and therefore it remains held up in the tube. 
 
 But why will it not remain more than 30 inches 
 high in the tube? You must remember it is only 
 kept up in the tube at all by the air which presses on 
 the mercury in the cup. And that column of mercury 
 C B now balances the pressure of the air outside, and 
 presses down on the mercury in the cup at its mouth 
 just as much as the air does on the rest. So this cup 
 and tube act exactly like a pair of scales. The air out- 
 side is a thing to be weighed at one end as it presses 
 on the mercury, the column C B answers to the leaden 
 weight at the other end which tells you how heavy 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 69 
 
 the air is. Now if the bore of this tube is made an 
 inch square, then the 30 inches of mercury in it weigh 
 exactly 15 Ibs., and so we know that the weight of 
 the air is 15 Ibs. upon every square inch,, but if the bore 
 of the tube is only half a 
 square inch, and there- 
 fore the 30 inches of 
 mercury only weigh 7^ 
 Ibs. instead of 15 Ibs., the 
 pressure of the atmos- 
 phere will also be halved, 
 because it will only act 
 upon half a square inch 
 of surface, and for this 
 reason it will make no 
 difference to the height 
 of the mercury whether 
 the tube be broad or nar- 
 row. Fig. 1 8 is a pic- 
 ture of the ordinary up- 
 right barometer ; the cup 
 of mercury in which the 
 tube stands is hidden in- 
 side the round piece of 
 wood A, and just at the 
 bottom of this round is a small hole B, through which 
 the air gets to the cup. 
 
 But now suppose the atmosphere grows lighter, as 
 it does when it has much damp in it. The barometer 
 will show this at once, because there will be less 
 weight on the mercury in the cup, therefore it will 
 not keep the mercury pushed so high up in the 
 6 
 
 FIG. 17. Tube of mercury in- 
 verted in a basin of mercury. 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 tube. In other words, the mercury in the tube will 
 fall. 
 
 Let us suppose that one day the air 
 is so much lighter that it presses down 
 only with a weight of 14^ Ibs. to the 
 square inch instead of 15 Ibs. Then 
 the mercury would fall to 29 inches, 
 because each inch is equal to the 
 weight of half a pound. Now, when 
 the air is damp and very full of water- 
 vapour it is much lighter, and so when 
 the barometer falls we expect rain. 
 Sometimes, however, other causes make 
 the air light, and then, although the 
 barometer is low, no rain comes. 
 
 Again, if the air becomes heavier 
 the mercury is pushed up above 30 to 
 31 inches, and in this way we are able 
 to weigh the invisible air-ocean all over 
 the world, and tell when it grows lighter 
 or heavier. This, then, is the secret of 
 the barometer. We cannot speak of the 
 thermometer to-day, but I should like 
 to warn you in passing that it has noth- 
 ing to do with the weight of the air, 
 
 FIG. 18. Ordi- but only with heat, and acts in quite a 
 nary upright ,.~. 
 barometer different way. 
 
 And now we have been so long 
 
 A, wood cov- 
 ering cup of 
 mercury ; B, 
 
 hole through hunting out, testing and weighing our 
 
 which air acts. aer j a j ocean, that scarcely any time is 
 
 left us to speak of its movements or the pleasant 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. >j\ 
 
 breezes which it makes for us in our country walks. 
 Did you ever try to run races on a very windy day? 
 Ah ! then you feel the air strongly enough ; how it 
 beats against your face and chest, and blows down 
 your throat so as to take your breath away ; and what 
 hard work it is to struggle against it! Stop for a 
 moment and rest, and ask yourself, what is the wind ? 
 Why does it blow sometimes one way and sometimes 
 another, and sometimes not at all? 
 
 Wind is nothing more than air moving 'across the 
 surface of the earth, which as it passes along bends 
 the tops of the trees, beats against the houses, pushes 
 the ships along by their sails, turns the windmill, car- 
 ries off the smoke from cities, whistles through the 
 keyhole, and moans as it rushes down the valley. 
 What makes the air restless? why should it not lie 
 still all round the earth ? 
 
 It is restless because, as you will remember, its 
 atoms are kept pressed together near the earth by the 
 weight of the air above, and they take every oppor- 
 tunity, when they can find more room, to spread out 
 violently and rush into the vacant space, and this rush 
 we call a wind. 
 
 Imagine a great number of active schoolboys all 
 crowded into a room till they can scarcely move their 
 arms and legs for the crush, and then suppose all at 
 once a large door is opened. Will they not all come 
 tumbling out pell-mell, one over the other, into the hall 
 beyond, so that if you stood in their way you would 
 most likely be knocked down? Well, just this hap- 
 pens to the air-atoms ; when they find a space before 
 them into which they can rush, they come on belter- 
 
72 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 skelter, with such force that you have great difficulty in 
 standing against them, and catch hold of something to 
 support you for fear you should be blown down. 
 
 But how come they to find any empty space to 
 receive them. To answer this we must go back 
 again to our little active invisible fairies the sunbeams. 
 When the sun-waves come pouring down upon the 
 earth they pass through the air almost without heating 
 it. But not so with the ground ; there they pass down 
 only a short distance and then are thrown back again. 
 And when these sun-waves come quivering back they 
 force the atoms of the air near the earth apart and 
 make it lighter ; so that the air close to the surface of 
 the heated ground becomes less heavy than the air 
 above it, and rises just as a cork rises in water. You 
 know that hot air rises in the chimney ; for if you put 
 a piece' of lighted paper on the fire it is carried up by 
 the draught of air, often even before it can ignite. 
 Now just as the hot air rises from the fire, so it rises 
 from the heated ground up into higher parts of the 
 atmosphere. And as it rises it leaves only thin air be- 
 hind it, and this cannot resist the strong cold air whose 
 atoms are struggling and trying to get free, and they 
 rush in and fill the space. 
 
 One of the simplest examples of wind is to be 
 found at the seaside. There in the daytime the land 
 gets hot under the sunshine, and heats the air, making 
 it grow light and rise. Meanwhile the sunshine on 
 the water goes down deeper, and so does not send 
 back so many heat-waves into the air; consequently 
 the air on the top of the water is cooler and heavier, 
 and it rushes in from over the sea to fill up the space 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 73 
 
 on the shore left by the warm air as it rises. This is 
 why the seaside is so pleasant in hot weather. During 
 the daytime a light sea-breeze nearly always sets in 
 from the sea to the land. 
 
 When night comes, however, then the land loses its 
 heat very quickly, because it has not stored it up 
 and the land-air grows cold; but the sea, which has 
 been hoarding the sun-waves down in its depths, now 
 gives them up to the atmosphere above it, and the 
 sea-air becomes warm and rises. For this reason it 
 is now the turn of the cold air from the land to spread 
 over the sea, and you have a land-breeze blowing off 
 the shore. 
 
 Again, the reason why there are such steady winds, 
 called the trade winds, blowing toward the equator, 
 is that the sun is very hot at the equator, and hot air 
 is always rising there and making room for colder air 
 to rush in. We have not time to travel farther with 
 the moving air, though its journeys are extremely 
 interesting ; but if, when you read about the trade and 
 other winds, you will always picture to yourselves 
 warm air made light by heat rising up into space and 
 cold air expanding and rushing in to fill its place, I 
 can promise you that you will not find the study of 
 aerial currents so dry as many people imagine it 
 to be. 
 
 We are now able to form some picture of our aerial 
 ocean. We can imagine the active atoms of oxygen 
 floating in the sluggish nitrogen, and being used lip in 
 every candle-flame, gas-jet and fire, and in the breath 
 of all living beings ; and coming out again tied fast to 
 
74 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 atoms of carbon and making carbonic acid. Then we 
 can turn to trees and plants, and see them tearing these 
 two apart again, holding the carbon fast and sending 
 the invisible atoms of oxygen bounding back again 
 into the air, ready to recommence work. We can 
 picture all these air-atoms, whether of oxygen or nitro- 
 gen, packed close together on the surface of the earth, 
 and lying gradually farther and farther apart, as they 
 have less weight above them, till they become so scat- 
 tered that we can only detect them as they rub against 
 the flying meteors which flash into light. We can feel 
 this great weight of air pressing the limpet on to the 
 rock ; and we can see it pressing up the mercury in 
 the barometer and so enabling us to measure its 
 weight. Lastly, every breath of wind that blows past 
 us tells us how this aerial ocean is always moving to 
 and fro on the face of the earth; and if we think for a 
 moment how much bad air and bad matter it must 
 carry away, as it goes from the crowded cities to be 
 purified in the country, we can see how, in even this 
 one way alone, it is a great blessing to us. 
 
 Yet even now we have not mentioned many of the 
 beauties of our atmosphere. It is the tiny particles 
 floating in the air which scatter the light of the sun 
 so that it spreads over the whole country and into 
 shady places. The sun's rays always travel straight 
 forward; .and in the moon, where there is no atmos- 
 phere, there is no light anywhere except just where 
 the rays fall. But on our earth the sun-waves hit 
 against the myriads of particles in the air and glide 
 off them into the corners of the room or the recesses 
 of a shady lane, and so we have light spread before 
 
THE AERIAL OCEAN IN WHICH WE LIVE. 75 
 
 us wherever we walk in the daytime, instead of those 
 deep black shadows which we can see through a tele- 
 scope on the face of the moon. 
 
 Again, it is electricity playing in the air-atoms in 
 the upper parts of the atmosphere, where the air is 
 very thin and rare, which gives us the beautiful light- 
 ning and the grand aurora borealis, and even the 
 twinkling of the stars is produced entirely by minute 
 changes in the air. If it were not for our aerial ocean 
 the stars would stare at us sternly, instead of smiling 
 with the pleasant twinkle-twinkle which we have all 
 learned to love as little children. 
 
 All these questions, however, we must, leave for 
 the present ; only I hope you will be eager to read 
 about them wherever you can, and open your eyes to 
 learn their secrets. For the present we must be con- 
 tent if we can even picture this wonderful ocean of 
 gas spread round our earth, and some of the work it 
 does for us. 
 
 We said in the last lecture that without the sun- 
 beams the earth would be cold, dark, and frost-ridden. 
 With sunbeams, but without air, it would indeed have 
 burning heat, side by side with darkness and ice, but 
 it could have no soft light. Our planet might look 
 beautiful to others, as the moon does to ils, but it 
 r could have comparatively few beauties of its own. 
 With the sunbeams and the air, we see it has much 
 to make it beautiful. But a third worker is wanted 
 before our planet can revel in activity and life. This 
 worker is water; and in the next lecture we shall 
 learn something of the beauty and the usefulness of 
 the " drops of water " on their travels. 
 
7 6 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 A DROP OF WATER ON ITS TRAVELS. 
 
 'E are going to 
 spend an hour 
 to-day in fol- 
 lowing a drop 
 of water on its travels. If I dip my finger in this 
 basin of water and lift it up again, I bring with it 
 
A DROP OF WATER. 77 
 
 a small glistening drop out of the body of water be- 
 low, and hold it before you. Tell me, have you any 
 idea where this drop has been? what changes it has 
 undergone, and what work it has been doing during 
 all the long ages that water has lain on the face of 
 the earth? It is a drop now, but it was not so before 
 I lifted it out of the basin; then it was part of a sheet 
 of water, and will be so again if I let it fall. Again, 
 if I were to put this basin on the stove till all the 
 water had boiled away, where would my drop be then? 
 Where would it go? What forms will it take before 
 it reappears in the rain-cloud, the river, or the spark- 
 ling dew? 
 
 These are questions we are going to try to answer 
 to-day; and first, before we can in the least under- 
 stand how water travels, we must call to mind what 
 we have learned about the sunbeams and the air. We 
 must have clearly pictured in our imagination those 
 countless sun-waves which are for ever crossing space, 
 and especially those larger and slower undulations, the 
 dark heat-waves; for it is these, you will remember, 
 which force the air-atoms apart and make the air 
 light, and it is also these which are most busy in 
 sending water on its travels. But not these alone. 
 The sun-waves might shake the water-drops as much 
 as they liked, and turn them into visible vapour, but 
 they could not carry them over the earth if it were not 
 for the winds and currents of that aerial ocean which 
 bears the vapour on its bosom, and wafts it to different 
 regions of the world. 
 
 Let us try to understand how these two invisible 
 workers, the sun-waves and the air, deal with the drops 
 
78 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 of water. I have here a kettle (Fig. 19, p. 79) boiling 
 over a spirit-lamp, and I want you to follow minutely 
 what is going on in it. First, in the flame of the lamp, 
 atoms of the spirit drawn up from below are clashing 
 with the oxygen-atoms in the air. This, as you know, 
 causes heat-waves and light-waves to move rapidly 
 all round the lamp. The light waves cannot pass 
 through the kettle, but the heat-waves can, and as 
 they enter the water inside they agitate it violently. 
 Quickly, and still more quickly, the particles of water 
 near the bottom of the kettle move to and fro and are 
 shaken apart; and as they become light they rise 
 through the colder water, letting another layer come 
 down to be heated in its turn. The motion grows 
 more and more violent, making the water hotter and 
 hotter, till at last the particles of which it is com- 
 posed fly asunder, and escape as invisible vapour. If 
 this kettle were transparent you would not see any 
 steam above the water, because it is in the form of an 
 invisible gas. But as the steam comes out of the 
 mouth of the kettle you see a cloud. Why is this? 
 Because the vapour is chilled by coming out into the 
 cold air, and condenses round the minute particles of 
 dust floating in the air, forming into tiny, tiny drops 
 of water, to which Dr. Tyndall has given the sugges- 
 tive name of water-dust. If you hold a plate over the 
 steam you can catch these tiny drops, though they will 
 run into one another almost as you are catching them. 
 The clouds you see floating in the sky are made of 
 exactly the same kind of water-dust as the cloud from 
 the kettle, and I wish to show you that this is also 
 really the same as the invisible steam within the kettle. 
 
A DROP OF WATER. 79 
 
 I will do so by an experiment suggested by Dr. Tyn- 
 dall. Here is another spirit-lamp, which I will hold 
 under the cloud of steam see! the cloud disappears! 
 As soon as the water-dust is heated the heat-waves 
 
 FIG. 19. 
 
 scatter it again into invisible particles, which float 
 away into the room. Even without the spirit-lamp, 
 you can convince yourself that water-vapour may be 
 invisible; for close to the mouth of the kettle you will 
 see a short blank space before the cloud begins. In 
 this space there must be steam, but it is still so hot 
 that you cannot see it; and this proves that heat- 
 waves can so shake water apart as to carry it away in- 
 visibly right before your eyes. 
 
 Now, although we never see any water travelling 
 from our earth up into the skies, we know that it goes 
 there, for it comes down again in rain, and so it must 
 go up invisibly. But where does the heat come from 
 which makes this water invisible? Not from below, 
 as in the case of the kettle, but from above, pouring 
 down from the sun. Wherever the sun-waves touch 
 the rivers, ponds, lakes, seas, or fields of ice and snow 
 
8o THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 upon our earth, they carry off invisible water-vapour. 
 They dart down through the top layers of the water, 
 and shake the water-particles forcibly apart; and in 
 this case the drops fly asunder more easily and before 
 they are so hot, because they are not kept down 
 by a great weight of water above, as in the kettle, 
 but find plenty of room to spread themselves out 
 in the gaps between the air-atoms of the atmos- 
 phere. 
 
 Can you imagine these water-particles, just above 
 any pond or lake, rising up and getting entangled 
 among the air- atoms? They are very light, much 
 lighter than the atmosphere; and so, when a great 
 many of them are spread about in the air which lies 
 just over the pond, they make it much lighter than 
 the layer of air above, and so help it to rise, while 
 the heavier layer of air comes down ready to take up 
 more vapour. 
 
 In this way the sun-waves and the air carry off 
 water every day, and all day long, from the top of 
 lakes, rivers, pools, springs, and seas, and even from 
 the surface of ice and snow. Without any fuss or 
 noise or sign of any kind, the water of our earth is 
 being drawn up invisibly into the sky. 
 
 It has been calculated that in the Indian Ocean 
 three-quarters of an inch of water is carried off from 
 the surface of the sea in one day and night; so that 
 as much as 22 feet, or a depth of water about twice 
 the height of an ordinary room, is silently and in- 
 visibly lifted up from the whole surface of the ocean 
 in one year. It is true this is one of the hottest parts 
 of the earth, where the sun-waves are most active; 
 
A DROP OF WATER. 8 1 
 
 but even in our own country many feet of water are 
 drawn up in the summer-time. 
 
 What, then, becomes of all this water ? Let us fol- 
 low it as it struggles upward to the sky. We see it in 
 our imagination first carrying layer after layer of air 
 up with it from the sea till it rises far above our heads 
 and above the highest mountains. But now, call to 
 mind what happens to the air as it recedes from the 
 earth. Do you not remember that the air-atoms are 
 always trying to fly apart, and are only kept pressed 
 together by the weight of air above them? Well, as 
 this water-laden air rises up, its particles, no longer so 
 much pressed together, begin to separate, and as all 
 work requires an expenditure of heat, the air becomes 
 colder, and then you know at once what must happen 
 to the invisible vapour it will form into tiny water- 
 drops, like the steam from the kettle. And so, as the 
 air rises and becomes colder, the vapour gathers into 
 visible masses, and we can see it hanging in the sky, 
 and call it clouds. When these clouds are highest they 
 are about ten miles from the earth, but when they are 
 made of heavy drops and hang low down, they some- 
 times come within a mile of the ground, or even lower. 
 When they rest upon its surface we call them fog and 
 mist. 
 
 Look up at the clouds as you go home, and think 
 that the water of which they are made has all been 
 drawn up invisibly through the air. Not, however, 
 necessarily here where we live, for we have already 
 seen that air travels as wind all over the world, rushing 
 in to fill spaces made by rising air wherever they occur, 
 and so these clouds may be made of vapour collected 
 
82 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 in the Mediterranean, or in the Gulf of Mexico off 
 the coast of America, or even, if the wind is from the 
 north, of chilly particles gathered from the surface 
 of Greenland ice and snow, and brought here by the 
 moving currents of air. Only, of one thing we 
 may be sure, that they come from the water of our 
 earth. 
 
 Sometimes, if the air is warm, these water-particles 
 may travel a long way without ever forming into 
 clouds; and on a hot, cloudless day the air is often 
 very full of invisible vapour. Then, if a cold wind 
 comes sweeping along, high up in the sky, and chills 
 
 FIG. 20. Clouds formed by ascending vapour as it enters cold 
 spaces in the atmosphere. 
 
 this vapour, it forms into great bodies of water-dust 
 clouds, and the sky is overcast. At other times clouds 
 hang lazily in a bright sky, and these show us that 
 just where they are (as in Fig. 20) the air is cold and 
 turns the invisible vapour rising from the ground into 
 visible water-dust, so that exactly in those spaces we 
 see it as clouds. Such clouds form often on a warm, 
 still summer's day, and they are shaped like masses 
 of wool, ending in a straight line below. They are 
 not merely hanging in the sky, they are really resting 
 
A DROP OF WATER. 83 
 
 upon a tall column of invisible vapour which stretches 
 right up from the earth; and that straight line under 
 the clouds marks the place where the air becomes cold 
 enough to turn this invisible vapour into visible drops 
 of water. 
 
 And now, suppose that while these or any other 
 kind of clouds are overhead, there comes along either 
 a very cold wind, or a wind full of vapour. As it 
 passes through the clouds, it makes them very full of 
 water, for, if it chills them, it makes the water-dust 
 draw more closely together ; or, if it brings a new load 
 of water-dust, the air is fuller than it can hold. In 
 either case a number of water-particles are set free, 
 and our fairy force " cohesion " seizes upon them at 
 once and forms them into large water-drops. Then 
 they are much heavier than the air, and so they can 
 float no longer, but down they come to the earth in a 
 shower of rain. 
 
 There are other ways in which the air may be 
 chilled, and rain made to fall, as, for example, when 
 a wind laden with moisture strikes against the cold 
 tops of mountains. Thus the Khasia Hills in India, 
 which face the Bay of Bengal, chill the air which 
 crosses them on its way from the Indian Ocean. The 
 wet winds are driven up the sides of the hills, the air 
 expands, and the vapour is chilled, and forming into 
 drops, falls in torrents of rain. Sir J. Hooker tells us 
 that as much as 500 inches of rain fell in these hills 
 in nine months. That is to say, if you could measure 
 off all the ground over which the rain fell, and spread 
 the whole nine months' rain over it, it would make a 
 lake 500 inches, or more than 40 feet deep! You will 
 
84 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 not be surprised that the country on the other side of 
 these hills gets hardly any rain, for all the water has 
 been taken out of the air before it comes there. Again 
 for example in England, the wind comes to Cumber- 
 land and Westmoreland over the Atlantic, full of va- 
 pour, and as it strikes against the Pennine Hills it 
 shakes off its watery load ; so that the lake district is 
 the most rainy in England, with the exception perhaps 
 of Wales, where the high mountains have the same 
 effect. 
 
 In this way, from different causes, the water of 
 which the sun has robbed our rivers and seas, comes 
 back to us, after it has travelled to various parts of 
 the world, floating on the bosom of the air. But it 
 does not always fall straight back into the rivers and 
 seas again ; a large part of it falls on the land, and has 
 to trickle down slopes and into the earth, in order to 
 get back to its natural home, and it is often caught on 
 its way before it can reach the great waters. 
 
 Go to any piece of ground which is left wild and 
 untouched, you will find it covered with grass, weeds, 
 and other plants; if you dig up a small plot you will 
 find innumerable tiny roots creeping through the 
 ground in every direction. Each of these roots has 
 a sponge-like mouth by which the plant takes up 
 water. Now, imagine rain-drops falling on this plot 
 of ground and sinking into the earth. On every side 
 they will find rootlets thirsting to drink them in, and 
 they will be sucked up as if by tiny sponges, and 
 drawn into the plants, and up the stems to the leaves. 
 Here, as we shall see in Lecture VII, they are worked 
 
A DROP OF WATER. 85 
 
 up into food for the plant, and only if the leaf has 
 more water than it needs, some drops may escape at 
 the tiny openings under the leaf, and be drawn up 
 again by the sun-waves as invisible vapour into the air. 
 
 Again, much of the rain falls on hard rock and 
 stone, where it cannot sink in, and then it lies in pools 
 till it is shaken apart again into vapour and carried off 
 in the air. Nor is it idle here, even before it is car- 
 ried up to make clouds. We have to thank this in- 
 visible vapour in the air for protecting us from the 
 burning heat of the sun by day and intolerable frost 
 by night. 
 
 Let us for a moment imagine that we can see all 
 that we know exists between us and the sun. First, 
 we have the fine ether across which the sunbeams 
 travel, beating down upon our earth with immense 
 force, so that in the sandy desert they are like a burn- 
 ing fire. Then we have the coarser atmosphere of oxy- 
 gen and nitrogen atoms hanging in this ether, and 
 bending the minute sun-waves out of their direct path. 
 But they do very little to hinder them on their way, 
 and this is why in very dry countries the sun's heat is 
 so intense. The rays beat down mercilessly, and noth- 
 ing opposes them. Lastly, in damp countries we have 
 the larger but still invisible particles of vapour hang- 
 ing about among the air-atoms. Now, these watery 
 particles, although they are very few (only about one 
 twenty-fifth part of the whole atmosphere), do hinder 
 the sun-waves. For they are very greedy of heat, and 
 though the light-waves pass easily through them, they 
 catch the heat-waves and use them to help themselves 
 to expand. And so, when there is invisible vapour in 
 7 
 
86 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 the air, the sunbeams come to us deprived of some of 
 their heat-waves, and we can remain in the sunshine 
 without suffering from the heat. 
 
 This is how the water-vapour shields us by day, 
 but by night it is still more useful. During the day 
 our earth and the air near it have been storing up the 
 heat which has been poured down on them, and at 
 night, when the sun goes down, all this heat begins to 
 escape again. Now, if there were no vapour in the air, 
 this heat would rush back into space so rapidly that 
 the ground would become cold and frozen even on a 
 summer's night, and all but the most hardy plants 
 would die. But the vapour which formed a veil against 
 the sun in the day, now forms a still more powerful 
 veil against the escape of the heat by night. It shuts 
 in the heat-waves, and only allows them to make their 
 way slowly upward from the earth thus producing 
 for us the soft, balmy nights of summer and prevent- 
 ing all life being destroyed in the winter. 
 
 Perhaps you would scarcely imagine at first that it 
 is this screen of vapour which determines whether or 
 not we shall have dew upon the ground. Have you 
 ever thought why dew forms, or what power has been 
 at work scattering the sparkling drops upon the grass ? 
 Picture to yourself that it has been a very hot sum- 
 mer's day, and the ground and the grass have been 
 well warmed, and that the sun goes down in a clear 
 sky without any clouds. At once the heat-waves 
 which have been stored up in the ground, bound back 
 into the air, and here some are greedily absorbed by 
 the vapour, while others make their way slowly up- 
 ward. The grass, especially, gives out these heat-waves 
 
A DROP OF WATER. 87 
 
 very quickly, because the blades, being very thin, are 
 almost all surface. In consequence of this they part 
 with their heat more quickly than they can draw it 
 up from the ground, and become cold. Now, the air 
 lying just above the grass is full of invisible vapour, 
 and the cold of the blades, as it touches them, chills 
 the water-particles, and they are no longer able to hold 
 apart, but are drawn together into drops on the sur- 
 face of the leaves. 
 
 We can easily make artificial dew for ourselves. I 
 have here a bottle of ice which has been kept outside 
 the window. When I bring it into the warm room a 
 mist forms rapidly outside the bottle. This mist is 
 composed of water-drops, drawn out of the air of the 
 room, because the cold glass chilled the air all round 
 it, so that it gave up its invisible water to form dew- 
 drops. Just in this same way the cold blades of grass 
 chill the air lying above them, and steal its vapour. 
 
 But try the experiment, some night when a heavy 
 dew is expected, of spreading a thin piece of muslin 
 over some part of the grass, supporting it at the four 
 corners with pieces of stick so that it forms an awn- 
 ing. Though there may be plenty of dew on the 
 grass all round, yet under this awning you will find 
 scarcely any. The reason of this is that the muslin 
 checks the heat-waves as they rise from the grass, 
 and so the grass-blades are not chilled enough to draw 
 together the water-drops on their surface. If you 
 walk out early in the summer mornings and look at 
 the fine cobwebs flung across the hedges, you will see 
 plenty of drops on the cobwebs themselves sparkling 
 like diamonds ; but underneath on the leaves there will 
 
88 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 be none, for even the delicate cobweb has been strong 
 enough to shut in the heat-waves and keep the leaves 
 warm. 
 
 Again, if you walk off the grass on to the gravel 
 path, you find no dew there. Why is this? Because 
 the stones of the gravel can draw up heat from the 
 earth below as fast as they give it out, and so they 
 are never cold enough to chill the air which touches 
 them. On a cloudy night also you will often find 
 little or no dew even on the grass. The reason of this 
 is that the clouds give back heat to the earth, and 
 so the grass does not become chilled enough to draw 
 the water-drops together on its surface. But after 
 a hot, dry day, when the plants are thirsty and there 
 is little hope of rain to refresh them, then they are 
 able in the evening to draw the little drops from the 
 air and drink them in before the rising sun comes 
 again to carry them away. 
 
 But our rain-drop undergoes other changes stran- 
 ger than these. Till now we have been imagining it to 
 travel only where the temperature is moderate enough 
 for it to remain in a liquid state as water. But sup- 
 pose that when it is drawn up into the air it meets with 
 such a cold blast as to bring it to the freezing point. 
 If it falls into this blast when it is already a drop, then 
 it will freeze into a hailstone, and often on a hot sum- 
 mer's day we may have a severe hailstorm, because 
 the rain-drops have crossed a bitterly cold wind as 
 they were falling, and have been frozen into round 
 drops of ice. 
 
 But if the water-vapour reaches the freezing air 
 
A DROP OF WATER. 
 
 8 9 
 
 while it is still an invisible gas, and before it has been 
 drawn into a drop, then its history is very different. 
 The ordinary force of cohesion has then no power over 
 the particles to make them into watery globes, but its 
 place is taken by the fairy process of " crystallization," 
 and they are formed into beautiful white flakes, to fall 
 in a snow-shower. I 
 want you to picture 
 this process to your- 
 selves, for if once you 
 can take an interest in 
 the wonderful power of 
 nature to build up crys- 
 tals, you will be as- 
 tonished how often you 
 will meet with in- 
 stances of it, and what 
 pleasure it will add to 
 your life. 
 
 The particles of 
 nearly all substances, 
 when left free and not 
 hurried, can build 
 themselves into crys- 
 tal forms. If you melt 
 salt in water and then FlG ' "- A pi K e " of 
 
 photographed, of the natural 
 
 let all the water evapo- size 
 
 rate slowly, you will 
 
 get salt-crystals beautiful cubes of transparent salt 
 
 all built on the same pattern. The same is true of 
 
 sugar ; and if you will look at the spikes of an ordinary 
 
 stick of rock-candy, such as I have here, you will see 
 
90 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 the kind of crystals which sugar forms. You may 
 even pick out such shapes as these from the common 
 crystallized brown sugar in the sugar basin, or see 
 them with a magnifying glass on a lump of white 
 sugar. 
 
 But it is not only easily melted substances such as 
 sugar and salt which form crystals. The beautiful 
 stalactite grottos are all made of crystals of lime. 
 Natural diamonds are crystals of carbon, made inside 
 the earth.* Rock-crystals, which you know probably 
 under the name of Cape May or California diamonds, 
 are crystallized quartz; and so, with slightly different 
 colourings, are agates, opals, jasper, cairngorms, and 
 many other precious stones. Iron, copper, gold, and 
 sulphur, when melted and cooled slowly build them- 
 selves into crystals, each of their own peculiar form, 
 and we see that there is here a wonderful order, such 
 as we should never have dreamed of, if we had not 
 proved it. If you possess a microscope you may 
 watch the growth of crystals yourself by melting some 
 common powdered nitre in a little water till you find 
 that no more will melt in it. Then put a few drops 
 of this water on a warm glass slide and place it under 
 the microscope. As the drops dry you will see the 
 long transparent needles of nitre forming on the glass, 
 and notice how regularly these crystals grow, not by 
 taking food inside like living beings, but by adding 
 particle to particle on the outside evenly and regu- 
 larly. 
 
 Can we form any idea why the crystals build them- 
 
 * It is possible to make diamonds artificially, but they are 
 very small. 
 
A DROP OF WATER. gi 
 
 selves up so systematically? Dr. Tyndall says we can, 
 and I hope by the help of these small bar magnets 
 to show you how he explains it. These little pieces of 
 steel, which I hope you can see lying on this white 
 cardboard, have been rubbed along a magnet until 
 they have become magnets themselves, and I can at- 
 tract and lift up a needle with any one of them. But 
 if I try to lift one bar with another, I can only do 
 it by bringing certain ends together. I have tied a 
 piece of red cotton (c, Fig. 22) round one end of each 
 
 c 
 
 FIG. 22. Bar magnets attracting and repelling each other. 
 c, Cotton tied round positive end of the magnet. 
 
 of the magnets, and if I bring two red ends together 
 they will not cling together but roll apart. If, on the 
 contrary, I put a red end against an end where there 
 is no cotton, then the two bars cling together. This 
 is because every magnet has two poles or points which 
 are exactly opposite in character, and to distinguish 
 them one is called the positive pole and the other 
 the negative pole. Now when I bring two red ends, 
 that is, two positive poles, together they drive each 
 
92 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 other away. See! the magnet I am not holding runs 
 away from the other. But if I bring a red end and 
 a black end, that is, a positive and a negative end, to- 
 gether, then they are attracted and cling. I will make 
 a triangle (A, Pig. 22) in which a black end and a 
 red end always come together, and you see the triangle 
 holds together. But now if I take off the lower bar 
 and turn it (B, Fig. 22) so that two red ends and two 
 black ends come together, then this bar actually rolls 
 back from the others down the cardboard. If I were to 
 break these bars into a thousand pieces, each piece 
 would still have two poles, and if they were scattered 
 about near each other in such a way that they were 
 quite free to move, they would arrange themselves 
 always so that two different poles came together. 
 
 You may not perhaps be able to easily obtain bar 
 magnets, but you may easily repeat these experiments 
 at home, and others even more interesting, with the 
 help of a toy horseshoe magnet, which almost any child 
 can get, a glass or bowl of water, and several sewing 
 needles. Rub the needles along the magnet and they 
 themselves will become magnets. Hold a needle par- 
 allel to the surface of the water and very near it. Drop 
 the needle, and it will float like a straw. This seems 
 strange, for the metal of which the needle is made is 
 much heavier than water, but a thin coat of air clings 
 to the polished steel, and the needle is too light to break 
 through it to the water. If the needle is not perfectly 
 dry the air will not cling to it, and it will sink. Float- 
 ing upon the surface of the water it will place itself 
 with one end pointing north and the other south. In 
 other words, it will be a compass. 
 
A DROP OF WATER. 
 
 93 
 
 Picture to yourselves that all the particles of those 
 substances which form crystals have poles like our 
 magnets, or your needles, then you can imagine that 
 when the heat which held them apart is withdrawn and 
 the particles come very near together, they will ar- 
 range themselves according to the attraction of their 
 poles and so build up regular and beautiful patterns. 
 
 So, if we could travel up to the clouds where this 
 fairy power of crystallization is at work, we should 
 
 FIG. 23. Snow-crystals. 
 
 find the particles of water-vapour in a freezing atmos- 
 phere being built up into minute solid crystals of 
 snow. If you go out after a snow-shower and search 
 carefully, you will see that the snow-flakes are not 
 mere lumps of frozen water, but beautiful six-pointed 
 crystal stars, so white and pure that when we want to 
 speak of anything being spotlessly white, you say 
 
94 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 that it is " white as snow." Some of these crystals 
 are simply flat slabs with six sides, others are stars 
 with six rods or spikes springing from the centre, 
 others with six spikes each formed like a delicate fern. 
 No less than a thousand different forms of delicate 
 crystals have been found among snow-flakes, but 
 though there is such a great variety, yet they are all 
 built on the six-sided and six-pointed plan, and are 
 all rendered dazzlingly white by the reflection of the 
 light from the faces of the crystals and the tiny air- 
 bubbles built up within them. This, you see, is why, 
 when the snow melts, you have only a little dirty water 
 in your hand; the crystals are gone and there are no 
 more air-bubbles held prisoners to act as looking- 
 glasses to the light. Hoar-frost is also made up of 
 tiny water-crystals, and is nothing more than frozen 
 dew hanging on the blades of grass and from the trees. 
 
 But how about ice? Here, you will say, is frozen 
 water, and yet we see no crystals, only a clear trans- 
 parent mass. Here, again, Dr. Tyndall helps us. He 
 says (and as I have proved it true, so may you for 
 yourselves, if you will) that if you take a magnifying 
 glass, and look down on the surface of ice on a sunny 
 day, you will see a number of dark, six-sided stars, 
 looking like flattened flowers, and in the centre of each 
 a bright spot. These flowers, which are seen when 
 the ice is melting, are our old friends the crystal stars 
 turning into water, and the bright spot in the middle 
 is a bubble of empty space, left because the watery 
 flower does not fill up as much room as the ice of the 
 crystal star did. 
 
 And this leads us to notice that ice always takes 
 
A DROP OF WATER. 
 
 95 
 
 up more room than water, and that this is the reason 
 why our water-pipes burst in severe frosts; for as the 
 water freezes it expands with great force, and the pipe 
 is cracked, and then when the thaw conies on, and 
 the water melts again, it -pours through the crack it 
 has made. 
 
 It is not difficult to understand why ice should take 
 more room; for we know that if we were to try to 
 arrange bricks end to end in star-like shapes, we must 
 
 FIG. 24. Water flowers in melting ice. TYNDALL. 
 
 leave some spaces between, and could not pack them 
 so closely as if they lay side by side. And so, when 
 this giant force of crystallization constrains the atoms 
 of frozen water to grow into star-like forms, the solid 
 mass must fill more room than the liquid water, and 
 when the star melts, this space reveals itself to us 
 in the bright spot of the centre. 
 
 We have now seen our drop of water under all its 
 various forms of invisible gas, visible steam, cloud, 
 
g6 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 dew, hoarfrost, snow, and ice, and we have only time 
 shortly to see it on its travels, not merely up and down, 
 as hitherto, but round the world. 
 
 We must first go to the sea as the distillery, or the 
 place from which water is drawn up invisibly, in its 
 purest state, into the air; and we must go chiefly to 
 the seas of the tropics, because here the sun shines 
 most directly all the year round, sending heat-waves to 
 shake the water-particles asunder. It has been found 
 by experiment that, in order to turn I Ib. of water into 
 vapour, as much heat must be used as is required to 
 melt 5 Ibs. of iron; and if you consider for a moment 
 how difficult iron is to melt, and how we can keep an 
 iron poker in a hot fire and yet it remains solid, this 
 will help you to realize how much heat the sun must 
 pour down in order to carry off such a constant supply 
 of vapour from the tropical seas. 
 
 Now, when all this vapour is drawn up into the air, 
 we know that some of it will form into clouds as it 
 gets chilled high up in the sky, and then it will pour 
 down again in those tremendous floods of rain which 
 occur in the tropics. 
 
 But the sun and air will not let it all fall down at 
 once, and the winds which are blowing from the equa- 
 tor to the poles carry large masses of it away with 
 them. Then, as you know, it will depend on many 
 things how far this vapour is carried. Some of it, 
 chilled by cold blasts, or by striking on cold moun- 
 tain tops, as it travels northward, will fall in rain in 
 Europe and Asia, while that which travels southward 
 may fall in South America, Australia, or New Zealand, 
 or be carried over the sea to the South Pole. Wher- 
 
A DROP OF WATER. 
 
 97 
 
 ever it falls on the land as rain, and is not used by 
 plants, it will do one of two things; either it will run 
 down in streams and form brooks and rivers, and so 
 at last find its way back to the sea, or it will sink 
 deep in the earth till it comes upon some hard rock 
 through which it cannot get, and then, being hard 
 pressed by the water coming on behind, it will rise up 
 again through cracks, and come to the surface as a 
 spring. These springs, again, feed rivers, sometimes 
 above-ground, sometimes for long distances under- 
 ground; but one way or another at last the whole 
 drains back into the sea. 
 
 But if the vapour travels on till it reaches high 
 mountains in cooler lands, such as the mountains in 
 Alaska ; or is carried to the poles and to such countries 
 as Greenland or the Antarctic Continent, then it will 
 come down as snow, forming immense snow-fields. 
 And here a curious change takes place in it. If you 
 make an ordinary snowball and work it firmly to- 
 gether, it becomes very hard, and if you then press it 
 forcibly into a mould you can turn it into transparent 
 ice. And in the same way the snow which falls in 
 Greenland and on the high mountains of Alaska be- 
 comes very firmly pressed together, as it slides down 
 into the valleys. It is like a crowd of people passing 
 from a broad thoroughfare into a narrow street. As 
 the valley grows narrower and narrower the great 
 mass of snow in front cannot move down quickly, 
 while more and more is piled up by the snowfall be- 
 hind, and the crowd and crush grow denser and denser. 
 In this way the snow is pressed together till the air 
 that was hidden in its crystals, and which gave it its 
 
9 8 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 beautiful whiteness, is all pressed out, and the snow- 
 crystals themselves are squeezed into one solid mass 
 of pure, transparent ice. 
 
 Then we have what is called a " glacier," or river of 
 ice, and this solid river comes creeping down till, in 
 Greenland, it reaches the edge of the sea. There it 
 is pushed over the brink of the land, and large pieces 
 snap off, and we have " icebergs." These icebergs 
 made, remember, of the same water which was first 
 drawn up from the tropics float on the wide sea, and 
 melting in its warm currents, topple over and over * 
 till they disappear and mix with the water, to be car- 
 ried back again to the warm ocean from which 
 they first started. In Switzerland the glaciers cannot 
 reach the sea, but they move down into the valleys 
 till they come to a warmer region, and there the end 
 of the glacier melts, and flows away in a stream. The 
 Rhone and many other rivers are fed by the glaciers 
 of the Alps ; and as these rivers flow into the sea, our 
 drop of water again finds its way back to its home. 
 
 But when it joins itself in this way to its com- 
 panions, from whom it was parted for a time, does 
 it come back clear and transparent as it left them? 
 From the iceberg it does indeed return pure and clear; 
 for the fairy Crystallization will have no impurities, 
 not even salt, in her ice-crystals, and so as they melt 
 they give back nothing but pure water to the sea. Yet 
 even icebergs bring down earth and stones frozen into 
 
 * A floating iceberg must have about eight times as much ice 
 under the water as it has above, and therefore, when the lower 
 part melts in a warm current, the iceberg loses its balance and 
 tilts over, so as to rearrange itself round the centre of gravity. 
 
A DROP OF WATER. gg 
 
 the bottom of the ice, and so they feed the sea with 
 mud. 
 
 Yet the drops of water in rivers are by no means 
 as pure as when they rose up into the sky. We shall 
 see in the next lecture that rivers not only carry down 
 sand and mud all along their course, but also contain 
 solid matter such as salt, lime, iron, and flint, dis- 
 solved in the clear water, just as sugar is dissolved, 
 without our being able to see it. The water, too, 
 which has sunk down into the earth, takes up much 
 matter as it travels along. You all know that the 
 water you drink from a spring is very different from 
 rain-water, and you will often find a hard crust at 
 the bottom of kettles and in boilers, which is formed 
 of the carbonate of lime which is driven out of the 
 clear water when it is boiled. The water has become 
 " hard " in consequence of having picked up and dis- 
 solved the carbonate of lime on its way through the 
 earth, just in the same way as water would become 
 sweet if you poured it through a sugar-cask. You 
 will also have heard of iron-springs, sulphur-springs, 
 and salt-springs, which come out of the earth, even 
 if you have never tasted any of them, and the water 
 of all these springs finds its way back at last to the 
 sea. 
 
 And now, can you understand why sea-water 
 should taste salt and bitter? Every drop of water 
 which flows from the earth to the sea carries some- 
 thing with it. Generally, there is so little of any sub- 
 stance in the water that we cannot taste it, and we 
 call it pure water; but the purest of spring or river- 
 water has always some solid matter dissolved in it, 
 
100 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 and all this goes to the sea. Now, when the sun- 
 waves come to take the water out of the sea again, 
 they will have nothing but the pure water itself; and 
 so all these salts and carbonates and other solid sub- 
 stances are left behind, and we taste them in sea- 
 water. 
 
 Some day, when you are at the seaside, take some 
 sea-water and set it over a fire till a great deal has sim- 
 mered gently away, and the liquid is very thick. Then 
 take a drop of this liquid, and examine it under a 
 microscope. As it dries up gradually, you will see a 
 number of crystals forming, some square and these 
 will be crystals of ordinary salt; some oblong these 
 will be crystals of gypsum or alabaster; and others 
 of various shapes. Then, when you see how much 
 matter from the land is contained in sea-water, you 
 will no longer wonder that the sea is salt; on the 
 contrary, you will ask, Why does it not grow salter 
 every year? 
 
 The answer to this scarcely belongs to our history 
 of a drop of water, but I must just suggest it to you. 
 In the sea are numbers of soft-bodied animals, like 
 the jelly animals which form the coral, which require 
 hard material for their shells or the solid branches on 
 which they live, and they are greedily watching for 
 these atoms of lime, of flint, of magnesia, and of other 
 substances brought down into the sea. It is with 
 lime and magnesia that the tiny chalk-builders form 
 their beautiful shells, and the coral animals their skele- 
 tons, while another class of builders use the flint; and 
 when these creatures die, their remains go to form 
 fresh land at the bottom of the sea; and so, though 
 
A DROP OF WATER. IOI 
 
 the earth is being washed away by the rivers and 
 springs it is being built up again, out of the same 
 materials, in the depths of the great ocean. 
 
 And now we have reached the end of the travels of 
 our drop of water. We have seen it drawn up by the 
 fairy "heat," invisible into the sky; there fairy " co- 
 hesion " seized it, and formed it into water-drops, and 
 the giant, " gravitation," pulled it down again to the 
 earth. Or, if it rose to freezing regions, the fairy of 
 " crystallization " built it up into snow r -crystals, again 
 to fall to the earth, and either to be melted back into 
 water by heat, or to slide down the valleys by force 
 of gravitation, till it became squeezed into ice. We 
 have detected it, when invisible, forming a veil round 
 our earth, and keeping off the intense heat of the sun's 
 rays by day, or shutting it in by night. We have seen 
 it chilled by the blades of grass, forming sparkling 
 dew-drops or crystals of hoarfrost, glistening in the 
 early morning sun; and we have seen it in the dark 
 underground, being drunk up greedily by the roots 
 of plants. We have started with it from the tropics, 
 and travelled over land and sea, watching it forming 
 rivers, or flowing underground in springs, or moving 
 onward to the high mountains or the poles, and com- 
 ing back again in glaciers and icebergs. Through all 
 this, while it is being carried hither and thither by 
 invisible power, we find no trace of its becoming worn 
 out, or likely to rest from its labours. Ever onward it 
 goes, up and down, and round and round the world, 
 taking many forms, and performing many wonderful 
 feats. We have seen some of the work that it does, 
 in refreshing the air, feeding the plants, giving us 
 
102 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 clear, sparkling water to drink, and carrying matter 
 to the sea; but besides this, it does a wonderful work 
 in altering all the face of our earth. This work we 
 shall consider in the next lecture, on " The two great 
 Sculptors Water and Ice." 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. 103 
 
 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS WATER AND ICE. 
 
 >N our last lecture we saw that 
 water can exist in three 
 
 /fo 
 
 forms: ist, as an invisible 
 
 vapour; 2nd, as liquid water; 3rd, as solid snow 
 and ice. 
 
 To-day we are going to take the two last of these 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 forms, water and ice, and speak of them as sculp- 
 tors. 
 
 To understand why they deserve this name we 
 must first consider what the work of a sculptor is. If 
 you go into a statuary yard you will find there large 
 blocks of granite, marble, and other kinds of stone, 
 hewn roughly into different shapes ; but if you pass 
 into the studio, where the sculptor himself is at work, 
 you will find beautiful statues, more or less finished; 
 and you will see that out of rough blocks of stone he 
 has been able to cut images which look like living 
 forms. You can even see by their faces whether they 
 are intended to be sad, or thoughtful, or gay, and by 
 their attitude whether they are writhing in pain, or 
 dancing with joy, or resting peacefully. How has all 
 this history been worked out from the shapeless stone? 
 It has been done by the sculptor's chisel. A piece 
 chipped off here, a wrinkle cut there, a smooth sur- 
 face rounded off in another place, so as to give a gentle 
 curve; all these touches gradually shape the figure 
 and mould it out of the rough stone, first into a rude 
 shape and afterward, by delicate strokes, into the form 
 of a living being. 
 
 Now, just in the same way as the wrinkles and 
 curves of a statue are cut by the sculptor's chisel, so 
 the hills and valleys, the steep slopes and gentle curves 
 on the face of our earth, giving it all its beauty, and 
 the varied landscapes we love so well, have been cut 
 out by water and ice passing over them. It is true 
 that some of the greater wrinkles of the earth, the 
 lofty mountains, and the high masses of land which 
 rise above the sea, have been caused by earthquakes 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. 105 
 
 and shrinking of the earth. We shall not speak of 
 these to-day, but put them aside as belonging to the 
 rough work of the statuary yard. But when once 
 these large masses are put ready for water to work 
 upon, then all the rest of the rugged wrinkles and 
 gentle slopes which make the country so beautiful are 
 due to water and ice ; and for this reason I have called 
 them " sculptors." 
 
 Go for a walk in the country, or notice the land- 
 scape as you travel on a railway journey. You pass 
 by hills and through valleys, through narrow steep 
 gorges cut in hard rock, or through wild ravines up 
 the sides of which you can hardly scramble. Then 
 you come to grassy slopes and to smooth plains across 
 which you can look for miles without seeing a hill ; 
 or, when you arrive at the seashore, you clamber into 
 caves and grottos, and along dark narrow passages 
 leading from one bay to another. All these hills, 
 valleys, gorges, ravines, slopes, plains, caves, grottos, 
 and rocky shores have been cut out by water. Day 
 by day and year by year, while everything seems to 
 us to remain the same, this industrious sculptor is 
 chipping away, a few grains here, a corner there, a 
 large mass in another place, till he gives to the coun- 
 try its own peculiar scenery, just as the human sculp- 
 tor gives expression to his statue. 
 
 Our work to-day will consist in trying to form some 
 idea of the way in which water thus carves out the 
 surface of the earth, and we will begin by seeing how 
 much can be done by our old friends the rain-drops 
 before they become running streams. 
 
 Everyone must have noticed that whenever rain 
 
io6 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 falls on soft ground it makes small round holes in 
 which it collects, and then sinks into the ground, 
 forcing its way between the grains of earth. But 
 
 you would hardly 
 think that the 
 beautiful pillars 
 in Fig. 26 have 
 been made entire- 
 ly in this way 
 by rain beating 
 upon and soaking 
 into the ground. 
 Rather would you 
 suppose theywere 
 built by people 
 who lived in very 
 early times in the 
 country in which 
 they are found, 
 as were the 
 rude structures at 
 Stonehenge, in 
 England, erected 
 by the old Druids 
 before the ancient 
 Britons were any- 
 thing better than 
 savages, or the 
 strange edifices 
 
 made in a similar manner of rough stones by the 
 Peruvian Indians in South America before the white 
 man came into this part of the world. 
 
 FIG. 25. Earth pillar near Botzen, in 
 the Tyrol, forty feet high. 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. \QJ 
 
 You may see 'these pillars if you visit Botzen, in 
 the Austrian Tyrol, amid the Rosengarten Mountains. 
 In order to reach this place you must go by rail from 
 Innsbruck, through the Brenner Pass, over a road 
 
 FIG. 26. Earth pil- 
 lars, near Botzen, 
 that resemble a 
 church. 
 
 that runs through no less than 
 
 twenty-seven tunnels, over a great 
 
 many bridges, and a series of 
 
 grades one above the other, so that you can look from 
 
 a window in your car down upon the roofs of trains 
 
 of cars ahead several hundred feet below. 
 
 The largest of the pillars here shown is no less than 
 forty feet high, and the other one not much less. The 
 next picture shows a group of these pillars that look 
 like a church with a number of spires or pinnacles. 
 Where they now stand there was once a solid mass 
 of clay and stones, into which the rain-drops crept, 
 loosening the earthy particles; and then when the 
 
IO8 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE, 
 
 FIG. 27. American earth pillars. 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. 109 
 
 sun dried the earth again cracks were formed, so 
 that the next shower loosened it still more, and carried 
 some of the mud down into the valley below. But 
 here and there large stones were buried in the clay, 
 and where this happened the rain could not penetrate, 
 and the stones became the tops of tall pillars of clay, 
 washed into shape by the rain beating on its sides, but 
 escaping the general destruction of the rest of the 
 mud. In this way the whole valley has been carved 
 out into fine pillars, some still having capping-stones, 
 while others have lost them, and these last will soon 
 be washed away. You may sometimes see tiny pillars 
 under bridges or the hollows worn by the continual 
 dripping of the rain from the eaves of a house, where 
 the water has washed away the earth between the peb- 
 bles, and such small examples which you can observe 
 for yourselves are quite as instructive as more impor- 
 tant ones. 
 
 We have much finer and larger earth pillars in 
 our own country. A celebrated geologist, Mr. Prest- 
 wich, says in speaking of some that he saw in Wyo- 
 ming : " For about three miles along the side of South 
 River and for half a mile in width the wooded slopes 
 are studded by hundreds of these monuments, some 
 of which rise to the height of four hundred feet, the 
 average being from sixty to eighty feet. High spruce 
 trees of great size seem like dwarfs by the side of 
 these mighty columns, each one of which is capped by 
 a boulder." The soil beneath these great earth pillars 
 is of a soft and crumbling character. 
 
 Another way in which rain changes the surface of 
 the earth is by sinking down through loose soil from 
 
HO THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 the top of a cliff to a depth of many feet till it comes to 
 solid rock, and then lying spread over a wide space. 
 Here it forms a kind of watery mud, which is a very 
 unsafe foundation for the hill of earth above it, and so 
 after a time the whole mass slips down and makes a 
 fresh piece of land at the foot of the cliff. If you have 
 ever been at the Isle of Wight you will have seen an 
 undulating strip of ground, called the Undercliff, at 
 Ventnor and other places, stretching all along the sea 
 below the high cliffs. This land was once at the top 
 of the cliff, and came down by a succession of land- 
 slips such as we have been describing. 
 
 You will easily see how in forming earth-pillars 
 and causing landslips rain changes the face of the 
 country^ but these are only rare effects of water. It is 
 when the rain collects in brooks and forms rivers that 
 it is most busy in sculpturing the land. Look out 
 some day into the road or the garden where the ground 
 slopes a little, and watch what happens during a 
 shower of rain. First the rain-drops run together in 
 every little hollow of the ground, then the water be- 
 gins to flow along any ruts or channels it can find, 
 lying here and there in pools, but always making its 
 way gradually down the slope. Meanwhile from other 
 parts of the ground little rills are coming, and these 
 all meet in some larger ruts where the ground is low- 
 est, making one great stream, which at last empties 
 itself into the gutter or an area, or finds its way down 
 some gratings into the sewer. 
 
 Now just this, which we can watch whenever a 
 heavy shower of rain comes down on the road, hap- 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTOXS. m 
 
 pens also all over the world. Up in the mountains, 
 where there is always a great deal of rain, little rills 
 gather and fall over the mountain sides, meeting in 
 some stream below. Then, as this stream flows on, it 
 is fed by many runnels of water, which come from all 
 parts of the country, trickling along ruts, and flowing 
 in small brooks and rivulets down the gentle slope of 
 the land till they reach the big stream, which at last 
 is important enough to be called a river. Sometimes 
 this river comes to a large hollow in the land and there 
 the water gathers and forms a lake; but still at the 
 lower end of this lake out it comes again, forming a 
 new river, and growing and growing by receiving fresh 
 streams until at last it reaches the sea. 
 
 The River Thames, which you all know, and whose 
 course you will find clearly described in Mr. Huxley's 
 " Physiography," drains in this way no less than one- 
 seventh of the whole of England. All the rain which 
 falls in Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Middlesex, Hertford- 
 shire, Surrey, the north of Wiltshire and northwest of 
 Kent, 'the south of Buckinghamshire and of Glouces- 
 tershire, finds its way into the Thames ; making an 
 area of 6160 square miles over which the water of every 
 little rivulet and brook finds its way down to the one 
 great river, which bears them to the ocean. And so 
 with every other area of land in the world there is some 
 one channel toward which trie ground on all sides 
 slopes gently down, and into this channel all the water 
 will run, on its way to the sea. 
 
 But what has this to do with sculpture or cutting 
 out of valleys? If you will only take a glass of water 
 out of any river, and let it stand for some hours, you 
 
112 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 will soon answer this question for yourself. For you 
 will find that even from river water which looks quite 
 clear, a thin layer of mud will fall to the bottom of 
 the glass, and if you take the water when the river is 
 swollen and muddy you will get quite a thick deposit. 
 This shows that the brooks, the streams, and the rivers 
 wash away the land as they flow over it and carry it 
 from the mountains down to the valleys, and from the 
 valleys away out into the sea. 
 
 But besides earthy matter, which we can see, there 
 is much matter dissolved in the water of rivers (as we 
 mentioned in the last lecture), and this we can not see. 
 
 If you use water which comes out of a chalk coun- 
 try you will find that after a time the kettle in which 
 you have been in the habit of boiling this water has 
 a hard crust on its bottom and sides, and this crust 
 is made of chalk or carbonate of lime, which the water 
 took out of the rocks when it was passing through 
 them. Professor Bischoff has calculated that the river 
 Rhine carries past Bonn every year enough carbonate 
 of lime dissolved in its water to make 332,000 million 
 oyster-shells, and that if all these shells were built into 
 a cube it would measure 560 feet. 
 
 Imagine to yourself a building, perhaps larger than 
 any you have ever seen as large, for example, as the 
 State, War, and Navy Department buildings at Wash- 
 ington an edifice that extends over a space measur- 
 ing five hundred and sixty-seven feet in one direction 
 and four hundred and seventy-one in the other, com- 
 pletely filled up, covered over, and deeply buried in 
 a great square mound of oyster shells extending many 
 times the height of the building above it; then you 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. 113 
 
 will have some idea of the amount of chalk carried 
 invisibly past Bonn in the water of the Rhine every 
 year. 
 
 Since all this matter, whether brought down as 
 mud or dissolved, comes from one part of the land 
 to be carried elsewhere or out to sea, it is clear that 
 some -gaps and hollows must be left in the places from 
 which it is taken. Let us see how these gaps are 
 made. Have you ever clambered up the mountain- 
 side, or even up one of those small ravines in the hill- 
 side, which have generally a little stream trickling 
 through them? If so, you must have noticed the 
 number of pebbles, large and small, lying in patches 
 here and there in the stream, and many pieces of 
 broken rock, which are often scattered along the sides 
 of the ravine ; 'and how, as you climb, the path grows 
 steeper, and the rocks become rugged and stick out 
 in strange shapes. 
 
 The history of this ravine will tell us a great deal 
 about the carving of water. Once it was nothing 
 more than a little furrow in the hill-side down which 
 the rain found its way in a thin thread-like stream. 
 But by and by, as the stream carried down some of 
 the earth, and the furrow grew deeper and wider, the 
 sides began to crumble when the sun dried up the 
 rain which had soaked in. Then in winter, when the 
 sides of the hill were moist with the autumn rains, 
 frost came and turned the water to ice, and so made 
 the cracks still larger, and the swollen stream rushing 
 down, caught the loose pieces of rock and washed 
 them down into its bed. Here they were rolled over 
 and over, and grated against each other, and were 
 
114 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 ground away till they became rounded pebbles, such 
 as lie in the foreground of the picture (Fig. 28) ; while 
 the grit which was rubbed off them was carried far- 
 ther down by the stream. And so in time this be- 
 
 FIG. 28. Ravine worn by water in the side of a hill. 
 
 came a little valley, and as the stream cut it deeper 
 and deeper, there was room to clamber along the 
 sides of it, and ferns and mosses began to cover the 
 naked stone, and small trees rooted themselves along 
 the banks, and this beautiful little nook sprang up on 
 the hill-side entirely by the sculpturing of water. 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. 115 
 
 Shall you not feel a fresh interest in all the little 
 valleys, ravines, and gorges you meet with in the 
 country, if you can picture them being formed in this 
 way year by year? There are many curious differ- 
 ences in them which you can study for yourselves. 
 Some will be smooth, broad valleys, and here the rocks 
 have been soft and easily worn, and water trickling 
 down the sides of the first valley has cut other chan- 
 nels so as to make smaller valleys running across it. 
 In other places there will be narrow ravines, and here 
 the rocks have been hard, so that they did not wear 
 away gradually, but broke off and fell in blocks, leav- 
 ing high cliffs on each side. In some places you will 
 come to a beautiful waterfall, where the water has tum- 
 bled over a steep cliff, and then eaten its way back, 
 just like a saw cutting through a piece of wood. 
 
 There are two things in particular to notice in a 
 waterfall like this. First, how the water and spray 
 dash against the bottom of the cliff down which it 
 falls, and grind the small pebbles against the rock. 
 In this way the bottom of the cliff is undermined, and 
 so great pieces tumble down from time to time, and 
 keep the fall upright instead of its being sloped away 
 at the top, and becoming a mere stream. Secondly, 
 you may often see curious cup-shaped holes, called 
 " pot-holes," in the rocks on the sides of a waterfall, 
 and these also are concerned in its formation. In 
 these holes you will generally find two or three small 
 pebbles, and you have here a beautiful example of 
 how water uses stones to grind away the face of the 
 earth. These holes are made entirely by the falling 
 water eddying round and round in a small hollow of 
 
H6 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 the rock, and grinding the pebbles which it has 
 brought down, against the bottom and sides of this 
 hollow, just as you grind round a pestle in a mortar. 
 By degrees the hole grows deeper and deeper, and 
 though the first pebbles are probably ground down 
 to powder, others fall in, and so in time there is a 
 great hole perforated right through, helping to make 
 the rock break and fall away. 
 
 In this and other ways the water works its way 
 back in a surprising manner. The Isle of Wight gives 
 us some good instances of this; Alum Bay Chine and 
 the celebrated Blackgang Chine have been entirely 
 cut out by waterfalls. 
 
 But any ravines cut by water in England are as 
 nothing compared with the canons of Colorado. Ca- 
 non, is a Spanish word for a rocky gorge, and these 
 gorges are indeed so grand, that if we had not seen in 
 other places what water can do, we should never have 
 been able to believe that it could have cut out these gi- 
 gantic chasms. For more than three hundred miles the 
 River Colorado, coming down from the Rocky Moun- 
 tains, has eaten its way through a country made of 
 granite and hard beds of limestone and sandstone, and 
 it has cut down straight through these rocks, leaving 
 walls from half-a-mile to a mile high, standing straight 
 up from it. The cliffs of the Great Canon, as it is 
 called, stretch up for more than a mile above the river 
 which flows in the gorge below! Fancy yourselves 
 for a moment in a boat on this river, as shown in 
 Fig. 29, and looking up at these gigantic walls of 
 rock towering above you. Even halfway up them, 
 a man, if he could get there, would be so small you 
 
FIG. 29. GREAT CANON, COLORADO RIVER. 
 
 (From Lieutenant Ives' Report.) 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. 
 
 could not see him without a telescope ; while the open- 
 ing at the top between the two walls would seem so 
 narrow at such an immense distance that the sky 
 above would have the appearance of nothing more 
 than a narrow streak of blue. Yet these huge chasms 
 have not been made by any violent breaking apart 
 of the rocks or convulsion of an earthquake. No, 
 they have been gradually, silently, and steadily cut 
 through by the river which now glides quietly in the 
 wider chasms, or rushes rapidly through the narrow 
 gorges at their feet. 
 
 " No description," says Lieutenant Ives, one of the 
 first explorers of this river, " can convey the idea of 
 the varied and majestic grandeur of this peerless water- 
 way. Wherever the river turns, the entire panorama 
 changes. Stately facades, august cathedrals, amphi- 
 theatres, rotundas, castellated walls, and rows of time- 
 stained ruins, surmounted by every form of tower, 
 minaret, dome and spire, have been moulded from the 
 cyclopean masses of rock that form the mighty de- 
 file." Who will say, after this, that water is not the 
 grandest of all sculptors, as it cuts through hundreds 
 of miles of rock, forming such magnificent granite 
 groups, not only unsurpassed but unequalled by any 
 of the works of man? 
 
 But we must not look upon water only as a cutting 
 instrument, for it does more than merely carve out 
 land in one place, it also carries it away and lays it 
 down elsewhere ; and in this it is most like a modeller 
 in clay, who smooths off the material from one part of 
 his figure to put it upon another. 
 
U8 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 Running water is not only always carrying away 
 mud, but at the same time laying it down here and 
 there wherever it flows. When a torrent brings down 
 stones and gravel from the mountains, it will depend 
 on the size and weight of the pieces how long they 
 will be in falling through the water. If you take a 
 handful of gravel and throw it into a glass full of 
 water, you will notice that the stones in it will fall to 
 the bottom at once, the grit and coarse sand will take 
 longer in sinking, and lastly, the fine sand will be 
 an hour or two in settling down, so that the water 
 becomes clear. Now, suppose that this gravel were 
 sinking in the water of a river. The stones would be 
 buoyed up as long as the river was very full and 
 flowed very quickly, but they would drop through 
 sooner than the coarse sand. The coarse sand in its 
 turn would begin to sink as the river flowed more 
 slowly, and would reach the bottom while the fine 
 sand was still borne on. Lastly, the fine sand would 
 sink through very, very slowly, and only settle in corh- 
 paratively still water. 
 
 From this it will happen that stones will generally 
 lie near to the bottom of torrents at the foot of the 
 banks from which they fall, while the gravel will be 
 carried on by the stream after it leaves the mountains. 
 This too, however, will be laid down when the river 
 comes into a more level country and runs more slowly. 
 Or it may be left together with the finer mud in a lake, 
 as in the lake of Geneva, into which the Rhone flows 
 laden with mud and comes out at the other end clear 
 and pure. But if no lake lies in the way the finer 
 earth will still travel on, and the river will take up 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. \ ig 
 
 more and more as it flows, till at last it will leave this 
 too on the plains across which it moves sluggishly 
 along, or will deposit it at its mouth when it joins 
 the sea. 
 
 You all know the history of the Nile; how, when 
 the rains fall very heavily in March and April in the 
 mountains of Abyssinia, the river comes rushing down, 
 and brings with it a load of mud which it spreads out 
 over the Nile valley in Egypt. This annual layer of 
 mud is so thin that it takes a thousand years for it 
 to become 2 or 3 feet thick; but besides that which 
 falls in the valley a great deal is taken to the mouth 
 of the river and there forms new land, making what is 
 called the " Delta " of the Nile. Alexandria, Rosetta, 
 and Damietta, are towns which are all built on land 
 made of Nile mud which was carried down ages and 
 ages ago, and which has now become firm and hard 
 like the rest of the country. You will easily remember 
 other deltas mentioned in books, and all these are 
 made of the mud carried down from the land to the 
 sea. The delta of the Ganges and Brahmapootra in 
 India, is actually as large as the whole of England and 
 Wales,* and the River Mississippi in America drains 
 such a large tract of country .that its delta grows, Sir 
 A. Geikie tells us, at the rate of 86 yards in a year. 
 
 All this new land laid down in Egypt,' in India, in 
 America, and in other places, is the -work of water. 
 Even on the Thames you may see mud-banks, as at 
 Gravesend, which are made of earth brought from 
 the interior of England. But at the mouth of the 
 Thames 'the sea washes Up very strongly every tide, 
 
 * 58,311 square miles'. 
 
120 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 and so it carries most of the mud away and prevents 
 a delta growing up there. If you will look about when 
 you are at the seaside, and notice wherever a stream 
 flows down into the sea, you may even see little min- 
 iature deltas being formed there, though the sea gen- 
 erally washes them away again in a few hours, unless 
 the place is well sheltered. 
 
 This, then, is what becomes of the earth carried 
 down by rivers. Either on plains, or in lakes, or in 
 the sea, it falls down to form new land. But what 
 becomes of the dissolved chalk and other substances? 
 We have seen that a great deal of it is used by river 
 and sea animals to build their shells and skeletons, 
 and some of it is left on the surface of the ground by 
 springs when the water evaporates. It is this car- 
 bonate of lime which forms a hard crust over any- 
 thing upon which it may happen to be deposited, and 
 then these things are called " petrified." 
 
 But it is in the caves and hollows of the earth 
 that this dissolved matter is built up into the most 
 beautiful forms. If you have ever been to Buxton in 
 Derbyshire, you will probably have visited a cavern 
 called Poole's Cavern, not far from there, which when 
 you enter it looks as if it were built up entirely of 
 rods of beautiful transparent white glass, hanging from 
 the ceiling, from the walls, or rising up from the floor. 
 In this cavern, and many others like it,* water comes 
 dripping through the roof, and as it falls slowly drop 
 by drop it leaves behind a little of the carbonate of 
 lime it has brought out of the rocks. This carbonate 
 of lime forms itself into a thin, white film on the roof, 
 * See the picture at the head of the lecture. 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. 121 
 
 often making a complete circle, and then, as the water 
 drips from it day by day, it goes on growing and grow- 
 ing till it forms a long needle-shaped or tube-shaped 
 rod, hanging like an icicle. These rods are called 
 stalactites, and they are so beautiful, as their minute 
 crystals glisten when a light is taken into the cavern, 
 that one of them near Tenby is called the " Fairy 
 Chamber." Meanwhile, the water which drips on to 
 the floor also leaves some carbonate of lime where it 
 falls, and this forms a pillar, growing up toward the 
 roof, and often the hanging stalactites and the rising 
 pillars (called stalagmites) meet in the middle and form 
 one column. And thus we see that underground, as 
 well as aboveground, water moulds beautiful forms in 
 the crust of the earth. At Adelsberg, near Trieste, 
 there is a magnificent stalactite grotto made of a num- 
 ber of chambers one following another, with a river 
 flowing through them ; and the famous Mammoth 
 Cave of Kentucky, more than ten miles long, is an- 
 other example of these wonderful limestone caverns. 
 
 But we have not yet spoken of the sea, and this 
 surely is not idle in altering the shape of the land. 
 Even the waves themselves in a storm wash against 
 the cliffs and bring down stones and pieces of rock on 
 to the shore below. And they help to make cracks 
 and holes in the cliffs, for as they dash with force 
 against them they compress the air which lies in the 
 joints of the stone and cause it to force the rock apart, 
 and so larger cracks are made and the cliff is ready 
 to crumble. 
 
 It is, however, the stones and sand and pieces of 
 
122 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 rock lying at the foot of the cliff which are most active 
 in wearing it away. Have you never watched the 
 waves breaking upon a beach in a heavy storm? How 
 they catch up the stones and hurl them down again, 
 grinding them against each other! At high tide in 
 such a storm these stones are thrown against the foot 
 of the cliff, and each blow does something toward 
 knocking away part of the rock, till at last, after many 
 storms, the cliff is undermined and large pieces fall 
 down. These pieces are in their turn ground down 
 to pebbles which serve to batter against the remain- 
 ing rock. 
 
 Professor Geikie tells us that the waves beat in 
 a storm against the Bell Rock Lighthouse with as 
 much force as if you dashed a weight of 3 tons against 
 every square inch of the rock, and Stevenson found 
 stones of 2 tons' weight which had been thrown dur- 
 ing storms right over the ledge of the lighthouse. 
 Think what force there must be in waves which 
 can lift up such a rock and throw it, and such force 
 as this beats upon our sea-coasts and eats away the 
 land. 
 
 Fig. 30 is a sketch on the shores of Arbroath which 
 I made some years ago. You will not find it diffi- 
 cult to picture to yourselves how the sea has eaten 
 away these cliffs till some of the strongest pieces which 
 have resisted the waves stand out by themselves in 
 the sea. That cave in the left-hand corner ends in a 
 narrow dark passage from which you come out on 
 the other side of the rocks into another bay. Such 
 caves as these are made chiefly by the force of the 
 waves and the air, bringing down pieces of rock from 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. 
 
 I2 3 
 
 under the cliff and so making a cavity, and then as 
 the waves roll these pieces over and over and grind 
 them against the sides, the hole is made larger. There 
 are many places on the English coast where large 
 pieces of the road are destroyed by the crumbling 
 
 
 FIG. 30. Cliffs off Arbroath, showing the waste of the shore. 
 
 down of cliffs when they have been undermined by 
 caverns such as these. 
 
 Thus, you see, the whole of the beautiful scenery of 
 the sea the shores, the steep cliffs, the quiet bays, the 
 creeks and caverns are all the work of the " sculptor " 
 water ; and he works best where the rocks are hardest, 
 for there they offer him a good stout wall to batter, 
 whereas in places where the ground is soft it washes 
 down into a gradual gentle slope, and so the waves 
 
124 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 come flowing smoothly in and have no power to eat 
 away the shore. 
 
 And now, what has Ice got to do with the sculp- 
 turing of the land? First, we must remember how 
 much the frost does in breaking up the ground. The 
 farmers know this, and always plough after a frost, be- 
 cause the moisture, freezing in the ground, has broken 
 up the clods, and done half their work for them. 
 
 But this is not the chief work of ice. You will 
 remember how we learned in our last lecture that 
 snow, when it falls on the mountains, gradually slides 
 down into the valleys, and is pressed together by the 
 gathering snow behind until it becomes moulded into 
 a solid river of ice (see Fig. 31, Frontispiece). In 
 Greenland and in Norway there are enormous ice- 
 rivers or glaciers, and even in Switzerland some of 
 them are very large. The Aletsch glacier, in the Alps, 
 is fifteen miles long, and some are even longer than 
 this. They move very slowly on an average about 
 20 to 27 inches in the centre, and 13 to 19 inches at 
 the sides every twenty- four hours, in summer and au- 
 tumn. How they move, we cannot stop to discuss 
 now; but if you will take a slab of thin ice and rest 
 it upon its two ends only, you can prove to yourself 
 that ice does bend, for in a few hours you will find 
 that its own weight has drawn it down in the centre 
 so as to form a curve. This will help you to picture 
 to yourself how glaciers can adapt themselves to the 
 windings of the valley, creeping slowly onward until 
 they come down to a point where the air is warm 
 enough to melt them, and then the ice flows away in 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. 
 
 125 
 
 a stream of water. It is very curious to see the num- 
 ber of little rills running down the great masses of 
 ice at the glacier's mouth, bringing down with them 
 gravel, and every now and then a large stone, which 
 falls splashing into the stream below. If you look at 
 the glacier in the Frontispiece, you will see that these 
 stones come from those long lines of stones and boul- 
 ders stretching along the sides and centre of the gla- 
 cier. It is easy to understand where the stones at the 
 side come from; for we have seen that damp and 
 frost cause pieces to break off the surface of the rocks, 
 and it is natural that these pieces should roll down 
 the steep sides of the mountains on to the glacier. 
 But the middle row requires some explanation. Look 
 to the back of the picture, and you will see that this 
 line of stones is made of two side rows, which come 
 from the valleys above. Two glaciers, you see, have 
 there joined into one, and so made a heap of stones all 
 along their line of junction. 
 
 These stones are being continually, though slowly, 
 conveyed by the glacier, from all the mountains, along 
 its sides, down to the place where it melts. Here it 
 lets them fall, and they are gradually piled up till they 
 form great walls of stone, which are called moraines. 
 Some of the moraines left by the larger glaciers of 
 olden time, in the country near Turin, form high hills, 
 rising up even to 1 500 feet. 
 
 Therefore, if ice did no more than carry these 
 stone blocks, it would alter the face of the country; 
 but it does much more than this. As the glacier moves 
 along, it often cracks for a considerable way across 
 its surface, and this crack widens and widens, until at 
 
126 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 last it becomes a great gaping chasm, or crevasse as 
 it is called, so that you can look down it right to the 
 bottom of the glacier. Into these crevasses large 
 blocks of rock fall, and when the chasm is closed 
 again as the ice presses on, these masses are frozen 
 firmly into the bottom of the glacier, much in the 
 same way as a steel cutter is fixed in the bottom of a 
 plane. And they do just the same kind of work; for 
 as the glacier slides down the valley, they scratch and 
 grind the rocks underneath them, rubbing themselves 
 away, it is true, but also scraping away the ground 
 over which they move. In this way the glacier be- 
 comes a cutting instrument, and carves out the valleys 
 deeper and deeper as it passes through them. 
 
 You may always know where a glacier has been, 
 even if no trace of ice remains ; for you will see rocks 
 with scratches along them which have been cut by 
 these stones; and even where the rocks have not been 
 ground away, you will find them rounded like those in 
 the left-hand of the Frontispiece, showing that the 
 glacier-plane has been over them. These rounded 
 rocks are called " roches moutonnees," because at the 
 distance they look like sheep lying down. 
 
 You have only to look at the stream flowing from 
 the mouth of a glacier to see what a quantity of soil 
 it has ground off from the bottom of the valley ; for 
 the water is thick, and coloured a deep yellow by the 
 mud it carries. This mud soon reaches the rivers into 
 which the streams run; and such rivers as the Rhone 
 and the Rhine are thick with matter brought down 
 from the Alps. The Rhone leaves this mud in the 
 Lake of Geneva, flowing out at the other end quite 
 
THE TWO GREAT SCULPTORS. \ 2 J 
 
 clear and pure. A mile and a half of land has been 
 formed at the head of the lake since the time of the 
 Romans by the mud thus brought down from the 
 mountains. 
 
 Thus we see that ice, like water, is always busy 
 carving out the surface of the earth, and sending down 
 material to make new land elsewhere. We know that 
 in past ages the glaciers were much larger than they 
 are in our time ; for we find traces of them over large 
 parts of Switzerland where glaciers do not now exist, 
 and huge blocks which could only have been carried 
 by ice, and which are called " erratic blocks," some of 
 them as big as cottages, have been left scattered over 
 all the northern part of Europe. These blocks were 
 a great puzzle to scientific men till, in 1840, Professor 
 Agassiz showed that they must have been brought by 
 ice all the way from Norway and Russia. 
 
 In those ancient days, there were even glaciers in 
 England; for in Cumberland and in Wales you may 
 see their work, in scratched and rounded rocks, and 
 the moraines they have left. Llanberis Pass, so fa- 
 mous for its beauty, is covered with ice-scratches, and 
 blocks are scattered all over the sides of the valley. 
 There is one block high up on the right-hand slope 
 of the valley, as you enter from the Beddgelert side, 
 which is exactly poised upon another block, so that 
 it rocks to and fro. It must have been left thus bal- 
 anced when the ice melted round it. You may easily 
 see that these blocks were carried by ice, and not 
 by water, because their edges are sharp, whereas, if 
 they had been rolled in water, they would have been 
 snioothed down. 
 
128 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 We cannot here go into the history of that great 
 Glacial Period long ago, when large fields of ice cov- 
 ered all the north of England; but when you read 
 it for yourselves and understand the changes on the 
 earth's surface which we can see being made by ice 
 now, then such grand scenery as the rugged valleys 
 of Wales, with large angular stone blocks scattered 
 over them, will tell you a wonderful story of the ice 
 of bygone times. 
 
 And now we have touched lightly on the chief 
 ways in which water and ice carve out the surface 
 of the earth. We have seen that rain, rivers, springs, 
 the waves of the sea, frost, and glaciers all do their 
 part in chiselling out ravines and valleys, and in pro- 
 ducing rugged peaks or undulating plains here cut- 
 ting through rocks so as to form precipitous cliffs, 
 there laying down new land to add to the flat country 
 in one place grinding stones to powder, in others 
 piling them up in gigantic ridges. We cannot go a 
 step into the country without seeing the work of water 
 around us; every little gully and ravine tells us that 
 the sculpture is going on; every stream, with its bur- 
 den of visible or invisible matter, reminds us that 
 some earth is being taken away and carried to a new 
 spot. In our little lives we see indeed but very small 
 changes, but by these we learn how greater ones have 
 been brought about, and how we owe the outline of 
 all our beautiful scenery, with its hills and valleys, 
 its mountains and plains, its cliffs and caverns, its 
 quiet nooks and its grand rugged precipices, to the 
 work of the " Two great sculptors, Water and Ice." 
 
THE VOICES OF NA TURE. 
 
 I2 9 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 THE VOICES OF NATURE AND HOW WE . HEAR THEM. 
 
 E have reached 
 
 to-day the mid- 
 dle point of our course, and here we will make a new 
 start. All the wonderful histories which we have been 
 studying in the last five lectures have had little or 
 nothing to do with living creatures. The sunbeams 
 
130 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 would strike on our earth, the air would move rest- 
 lessly to and fro, the water drops would rise and fall, 
 the valleys and ravines would still be cut out by 
 rivers, if there were no such thing as life upon the 
 earth. But without living things there could be none 
 of the beauty which these changes bring about. 
 Without plants, the sunbeams, the air, and the water 
 would be quite unable to clothe the bare rocks, and 
 without animals and man they could not produce 
 light, or sound, or feeling of any kind. 
 
 In the next five lectures, however, we are going to 
 learn something of the use living creatures make of 
 the earth; and to-day we will begin by studying one 
 of the ways in which we are affected by the changes 
 of nature, and hear her voice. 
 
 We are all so accustomed to trust to our sight to 
 guide us in most of our actions, and to think of things 
 as we see them, that we often forget how very much 
 we owe to sound. And yet nature speaks to us so 
 much by her gentle, her touching, or her awful sounds, 
 that the life of the deaf person is even more hard to 
 bear than that of a blind one. 
 
 Have you ever amused yourself with trying how 
 many different sounds you can distinguish if you lis- 
 ten at an open window in a busy street? You will 
 probably be able to recognise easily the jolting of the 
 heavy wagon or dray, the humming of the trolley cars, 
 the smooth roll of the private carriage, and the rattle 
 of the light butcher's cart ; and even while you are lis- 
 tening for these, the crack of the carter's whip, the cry 
 of the passing vender, and the voices of the passers 
 by w r ill strike upon your ear. Then if you give still 
 
THE VOICES OF NATURE. \^\ 
 
 more close attention you will hear the doors open and 
 shut along the street, the footsteps of the passengers, 
 and the scraping of the shovel of the mud-carts. If 
 you think for a moment, does it not seem wonderful 
 that you should hear all these sounds so that you can 
 recognise each one distinctly while all the rest are 
 going on around you?' 
 
 But suppose you go into the quiet country. Sure- 
 ly there will be silence there. Try some day and prove 
 it for yourself, lie down on the grass in a sheltered 
 nook and listen attentively. If there be ever so little 
 wind stirring you will hear it rustling gently through 
 the trees ; or even if there is not this, it will be strange 
 if you do not hear some wandering gnat buzzing, or 
 some busy bee humming as it moves from flower to 
 flower. Then a grasshopper or katydid will set up 
 a chirp within a few yards of you, or, if all living crea- 
 tures are silent, a brook not far off may be flowing 
 along with a rippling musical sound. These and a 
 hundred other noises you will hear in the most quiet 
 country spot; the lowing of cattle, the song of the 
 birds, the squeak of the field-mouse, the croak of the 
 frog, mingling with the sound of the woodman's axe 
 in the distance, or the dash of some river torrent. 
 And besides these quiet sounds, there are still other 
 occasional voices of nature which speak to us from 
 time to time. The howling of the tempestuous wind, 
 the roar of the sea-waves in a storm, the crash of thun- 
 der, and the mighty noise of the falling avalanche; 
 such sounds as these tell us how great and terrible na- 
 ture can be. 
 
 Now, has it ever occurred to you to think what 
 10 
 
\ 
 
 132 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 sound is, and how it is that we hear all these things? 
 Strange as it may seem, if there were no creature that 
 could hear upon the earth, there would be no such 
 thing as sound, though all these movements in nature 
 were going on just as they are now. 
 
 Try and grasp this thoroughly, for it is difficult at 
 first to make people believe it. Suppose you were 
 stone-deaf, there would be no such thing as sound to 
 you. A heavy hammer falling on an anvil would in- 
 deed shake the air violently, but since this air when 
 it reached your ear would find a useless instrument, 
 it could not play upon it. And it is this play on the 
 drum of your ear and the nerves within it speaking to 
 your brain which makes sound. Therefore, if all crea- 
 tures on or around the earth were without ears or 
 nerves of hearing, there would be no instruments on 
 which to play, and consequently there would be no 
 such thing as sound. This proves that two things 
 are needed in order that we may hear. First, the 
 outside movement which plays on our hearing instru- 
 ment; and, secondly, the hearing instrument itself. 
 
 First, then, let us try to understand what happens 
 outside our ears. Take a poker and tie a piece of 
 string to it, and holding the ends of the string to your 
 ears, strike the poker against the fender. You will 
 hear a very loud sound, for the blow will set all the 
 particles of the poker quivering, and this movement 
 will pass right along the string to the drum of your 
 ear and play upon it. 
 
 Now take the string away from your ears, and hold 
 it with your teeth. Stop your ears tight, and strike 
 
THE VOICES OF NATURE. ^3 
 
 the poker once more against the fender. You will 
 hear the sound quite as loudly and clearly as you did 
 before, but this time the drum of your ear has not 
 been agitated. How, then, has the sound been pro- 
 duced? In this case, the quivering movement has 
 passed through your teeth into the bones of your head, 
 and from them into the nerves, and so produced sound 
 in your brain. And now, as a final experiment, fasten 
 the string to the mantelpiece, and hit it again against 
 the fender. How much feebler the sound is this time, 
 and how much sooner it stops! Yet still it reaches 
 you, for the movement has come this time across the 
 air to the drum of your ear. 
 
 Here we are back again in the land of invisible 
 workers! We have all been listening and hearing 
 ever since we were babies, but have we ever made any 
 picture to ourselves of how sound comes to us right 
 across a room or a field, when we stand at one end 
 and the person who calls is at the other? 
 
 Since we have studied the " aerial ocean," we know 
 that the air filling the space between us, though in- 
 visible, is something very real, and now all we have to 
 do is to understand exactly how the movement crosses 
 this air. 
 
 This we shall do most readily by means of an 
 experiment made by Dr. Tyndall in his lectures on 
 Sound. I have here a number of boxwood balls rest- 
 ing in a wooden tray which has a bell hung at the 
 end of it. I am going to take the end ball and roll 
 it sharply against the rest, and then I want you to 
 notice carefully what happens. See! the ball at the 
 other end has flown off and hit the bell, so that you 
 
134 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 hear it ring. Yet the other balls remain where they 
 were before. Why is this? It is because each of the 
 balls, as it was knocked forward, had one in front of 
 it to stop it and make it bound back again, but the 
 last one was free to move on. When I threw this ball 
 from my hand against the others, the one in front of 
 it moved, and hitting the third ball, bounded back 
 again; the third did the same to the fourth, the fourth 
 
 FIG. 32. 
 
 to the fifth, and so on to the end of the line. Each 
 ball thus came back to its place, but it passed the 
 shock on to the last ball, and the ball to the bell. If I 
 now put the balls close up to the bell, and repeat the 
 experiment, you still hear the sound, for the last ball 
 shakes the bell as if it were a ball in front of it. 
 
 Now imagine these balls to be atoms of air, and the 
 bell your ear. If I clap my hands and so hit the air 
 in front of them, each air-atom hits the next just as 
 the balls did, and though it comes back to its place, 
 it passes the shock on along the whole line to the 
 atom touching the drum of your ear, and so you re- 
 ceive a blow. But a curious thing happens in the 
 air which you cannot notice in the balls. You must 
 remember that air is elastic, just as if there were 
 springs between the atoms as in the diagram, Fig. 33, 
 and so when any shock knocks the atoms forward, 
 
THE VOICES OF NA TURE. 
 
 135 
 
 several of them can be crowded together before they 
 push on those in front. Then, as soon as they have 
 passed the shock on, they rebound and begin to sepa- 
 rate again, and so swing to and fro till they come 
 to rest. Meanwhile the second set will go through 
 just the same movements, and will spring apart as soon 
 as they have passed the shock on to a third set, and so 
 you will have one set of crowded atoms and one set 
 
 FIG. 33. 
 
 of separated atoms alternately all along the line, and 
 the same set will never be crowded two instants to- 
 gether. 
 
 You may see an excellent example of this in a 
 baggage train in a railway station, when the trucks are 
 left to bump each other till they stop. You will see 
 three or four trucks knock together, then they will 
 pass the shock on to the four in front, while they 
 themselves bound back and separate as far as their 
 chains will let them: the next four trucks will do the 
 same, and so a kind of wave of crowded trucks passes 
 on to the end of the train, and they bump to and fro 
 till the whole comes to a standstill. Try to imagine 
 a movement like this going on in the line of air-atoms, 
 Fig. 33, the drum of your ear being at the end B. 
 Those which are crowded together at that end will 
 hit on the drum of your ear and drive the membrane 
 which covers it inward; then instantly the wave will 
 
136 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 change, these atoms will bound back, and the mem- 
 brane will recover itself again, but only to receive a 
 second blow as the atoms are driven forward again, 
 and so the membrane will be driven in and out till the 
 air has settled down. 
 
 This you see is quite different to the waves of light 
 which moves in crests and hollows. Indeed, it is not 
 what we usually understand by a wave at all, but a 
 set of crowdings and partings of the atoms of air 
 which follow each other rapidly across the air. A 
 crowding of atoms is called a condensation, and a part- 
 ing is called a rarefaction, and when we speak of the 
 length of a wave of sound, we mean the distance be- 
 
 FIG. 34. 
 
 tween two condensations, a a, Fig. 34; or between 
 two rarefactions, b b. 
 
 . Although each atom of air moves a very little way 
 forward and then back, yet, as a long row of atoms 
 may be crowded together before they begin to part, a 
 wave is often very long. When a man talks in an 
 ordinary bass voice, he makes sound-waves from 8 to 
 12 feet long; a woman's voice makes shorter waves, 
 from 2 to 4 feet long, and consequently the tone is 
 higher, as we shall presently explain. 
 
 And now I hope that some one is anxious to ask 
 why, when I clap my hands, anyone behind me or at 
 the side, can hear it as well or nearly as well as you 
 
THE VOICES Of NATURE. 137 
 
 who are in front. This is because I give a shock to 
 the air all round my hands, and waves go out on all 
 sides, making as it were globes of crowdings and 
 partings, widening and widening away from the clap 
 as circles widen on a pond. Thus the waves travel 
 behind me, above me, and on all sides, until they hit 
 the walls, the ceiling, and the floor of the room, and 
 wherever you happen to be, they hit upon your ear. 
 
 If you can picture to yourself these waves spread- 
 ing out in all directions, you will easily see why sound 
 grows fainter at the distance. Just close round my 
 hands when I clap them, there is a small quantity of 
 air, and so the shock I give it is very violent, but 
 as the sound-waves spread on all sides they have 
 more and more air to move, and so the air-atoms are 
 shaken less violently and strike with less force on 
 your ear. 
 
 If we can prevent the sound-wave from spreading, 
 then the sound is not weakened. The Frenchman Biot 
 found that a low whisper could be heard distinctly for 
 a distance of half a mile through a tube, because the 
 waves could not spread beyond the small column of 
 air. But unless you speak into a small space of some 
 kind, you can not prevent the waves going out from 
 you in all directions. 
 
 Try and imagine that you see these waves spread- 
 ing all round me now and hitting on your ears as they 
 pass, then on the ears of those behind you, and on 
 and on in widening globes till they reach the wall. 
 What will happen when they get there? If the wall 
 were thin, as a wooden partition is, they would shake 
 it, and it again would shake the air on the other side, 
 
138 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 and so persons in the next room would have the sound 
 of my voice brought to their ear. 
 
 But something more will happen. In any case 
 the sound-waves hitting against the wall will bound 
 back from it just as a ball bounds back when thrown 
 against anything, and so another set of sound-waves 
 reflected from the wall will come back across the 
 room. If these waves come to your ear so quickly 
 that they mix with direct waves, they help to make the 
 sound louder. For instance, if I say " Ha," you hear 
 that sound louder in this room than you would in the 
 open air, for the " Ha " from my mouth and a second 
 " Ha " from the wall come to your ear so instantane- 
 ously that they make one sound. This is why you 
 can often hear better at the far end of a church when 
 you stand against a screen or a wall, that when you 
 are halfway up the building nearer to the speaker, 
 because near the wall the reflected waves strike strong- 
 ly on your ear and make the sound louder. 
 
 Sometimes, when the sound comes from a great 
 explosion, these reflected waves are so strong that they 
 are able to break glass. In the explosion of gun- 
 powder in St. John's Wood, many houses in the back 
 streets had their windows broken ; for the sound-waves 
 bounded off at angles from the walls and struck back 
 upon them. 
 
 Now, suppose the wall were so far behind you that 
 the reflected sound-waves only hit upon your ear after 
 those coming straight from me had died away; then 
 you would hear the sound twice, " Ha " from me and 
 " Ha " from the wall, and here you have an echo, 
 " Ha, ha." In order for this to happen in ordinary 
 
THE VOICES OF NATURE. 139 
 
 air, you must be standing at least 56 feet away from 
 the point from which the waves are reflected, for then 
 the second blow will come one-tenth of a second after 
 the first one, and that is long enough for you to feel 
 them separately.* Miss C. A. Martineau tells a story 
 of a dog which was terribly frightened by an echo. 
 Thinking another dog was barking, he ran forward to 
 meet him, and was very much astonished, when, as he 
 came nearer the wall, the echo ceased. I myself once 
 knew a case of this kind, and my dog, when he could 
 find no enemy, ran back barking, till he was a certain 
 distance off, and then the echo of course began again. 
 He grew so furious at last that we had great diffi- 
 culty in preventing him from flying at a strange man 
 who happened to be passing at the time. 
 
 Sometimes, in the mountains, walls of rock rise at 
 some distance one behind another, and then each one 
 will send back its echo a little later than the rock be- 
 fore it, so that the " Ha " which you give will come 
 back as a peal of laughter. There is an echo in Wood- 
 stock Park which repeats the word twenty times. 
 Again sometimes, as in the Alps, the sound-waves in 
 coming back rebound from mountain to mountain and 
 are driven backward and forward, becoming fainter 
 and fainter till they die away; these echoes are very 
 beautiful. 
 
 If you are now able to picture to yourselves one set 
 of waves going to the wall, and another set returning 
 * Sound travels 1120 feet in a second, in air of ordinary tem- 
 perature, and therefore 112 feet in the tenth of a second. There- 
 fore the journey of 56 feet beyond you to reach the wall and 56 
 feet to return, will occupy the sound-wave one-tenth of a second 
 and separate the two sounds. 
 
140 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 and crossing them, you will be ready to understand 
 something of that very difficult question, How is it 
 that we can hear many different sounds at one time 
 and tell them apart ? 
 
 Have you ever watched the sea when its surface is 
 much ruffled, and noticed how, besides the big waves 
 of the tide, there are numberless smaller ripples made 
 by the wind blowing the surface of the water, or the 
 oars of a boat dipping in it, or even rain-drops falling? 
 If you have done this you will have seen that all 
 these waves and ripples cross each other, and you can 
 follow any one ripple with your eye as it goes on its 
 way undisturbed by the rest. Or you may make beau- 
 tiful crossing and recrossing ripples on a pond by 
 throwing in two stones at a little distance from each 
 other, and here too you can follow any one wave on 
 to the edge of the pond. 
 
 Now just in this way the waves of sound, in their 
 manner of moving, cross and recross each other. You 
 will remember too, that different sounds make waves 
 of different lengths, just as the tide makes a long wave 
 and the rain-drops tiny ones. Therefore each sound 
 falls with its own peculiar wave upon your ear, and 
 you can listen to that particular wave just as you look 
 at one particular ripple, and then the sound becomes 
 clear to you. 
 
 All this is what is going on outside your ear, but 
 what is happening in your ear itself? How do these 
 blows of the air speak to your brain? By means of 
 the following diagram, Fig. 35, we will try to under- 
 stand roughly our beautiful hearing instrument, the 
 ear. 
 
THE VOICES OF NA TURE. I4I 
 
 First, I want you to notice how beautifully the out- 
 side shell, or concha as it is called (a), is curved round 
 so that any movement of the air coming to it from 
 the front is caught in it and reflected into the hole of 
 
 FIG. 35. a, Concha, or shell of the ear. b c, Auditory canal. 
 c, Tympanic membrane stretched across the drum of the 
 ear. E, Eustachian tube, d, <?, /, Ear-bones : d, the ham- 
 mer, malleus ; e, the*anvil, incus ; f, the stirrup, stapes, L, 
 Labyrinth, g, Cochlea, or internal spiral shell, h, One of 
 the little windows ; the other is covered by the stirrup. 
 
 the ear. Put your finger round your ear and feel how 
 the gristly part is curved toward the front of your 
 head. This concha makes a curve much like the 
 curve a deaf man makes with his hand behind his ear 
 to catch the sound. Animals often have to raise their 
 ears to catch the sound well, but ours stand always 
 
142 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 ready. When the air-waves have passed in at the 
 hole of your ear, they move all the air in the passage, 
 b c, which is called the auditory, or hearing, canal. 
 This canal is lined with little hairs to keep out insects 
 and dust, and the wax which collects in it serves the 
 same purpose. But if too much wax collects, it pre- 
 vents the air from playing well upon the drum, and 
 therefore makes you deaf. Across the end of this 
 canal, at c, a membrane or skin called the tympanum 
 is stretched, like the parchment over the head of a 
 drum, and it is this membrane which moves to and 
 fro as the air-waves strike on it. A violent box on 
 the ear will sometimes break this delicate membrane, 
 or injure it, and therefore it is very wrong to hit a 
 person violently on the ear. 
 
 On the other side of this membrane, inside the ear, 
 there is air, which fills the w r hole of the inner chamber 
 and the tube E, which runs down into the throat be- 
 hind the nose, and is called the Eustachian tube after 
 the man who discovered it. This tube is closed at the 
 end by a valve which opens and shuts. If you breathe 
 out strongly, and then shut your mouth and swallow, 
 you will hear a little " click " in your ear. This is 
 because in swallowing you draw the air out of the 
 Eustachian tube and so draw in the membrane c, which 
 clicks as it goes back again. But unless you do this 
 the tube and the whole chamber cavity behind the 
 membrane remains full of air. 
 
 Now, as this membrane is driven to and fro by the 
 sound-waves, it naturally shakes the air in the cavity 
 behind it, and it also sets moving three most curious 
 little bones. The first of these bones d is fastened 
 
THE VOICES OF NATURE. 
 
 143 
 
 to the middle of the drumhead so that it moves to 
 and fro every time this membrane quivers. The head 
 of this bone fits into a hole in the next bone e, the 
 anvil, and is fastened to it by muscles, so as to drag it 
 along with it; but, the muscles being elastic, it can 
 draw back a little from the anvil, and so give it a blow 
 each time it comes back. This anvil e, is in its turn 
 very firmly fixed to the little bone /, shaped like a 
 stirrup, which you see at the end of the chain. 
 
 This stirrup rests upon a curious body L, which 
 looks in the diagram like a snail : shell with tubes 
 coming out of it. This body, which is called the 
 labyrinth, is made of bone, but it has two little win- 
 dows in it, one h covered only by a membrane, while 
 the other has the head of the stirrup / resting upon it. 
 
 Now, with a little attention you will understand 
 that when the air in the canal b c shakes the drum- 
 head c to and fro, this membrane must drag with it 
 the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup. Each time 
 the drum goes in, the hammer will hit the anvil, and 
 drive the stirrup against the little window; every time 
 it goes out it will draw the hammer, the anvil, and the 
 stirrup out again, ready for another blow. Thus the 
 stirrup is always playing upon this little window. 
 Meanwhile, inside the bony labyrinth L there is a 
 fluid like water, and along the little passages are very 
 fine hairs, which wave to and fro like reeds ; and when- 
 ever the stirrup hits at the little window, the fluid 
 moves these hairs to and fro, and they irritate the 
 ends of a nerve i, and this nerve carries the message 
 to your brain. There are also some curious little 
 stones called otoliths, lying in some parts of this fluid, 
 
144 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 and they, by their rolling to and fro, probably keep 
 up the motion and prolong the sound. 
 
 You must not imagine we have explained here the 
 many intricacies which occur in the ear; I can only 
 hope to give you a rough idea of it, so that you may 
 picture to yourselves the air-waves moving (as in Fig. 
 34) backward and forward in the canal of your ear, 
 then the tympanum vibrating to and fro, the hammer 
 hitting the anvil, the stirrup knocking at the little 
 window, the fluid waving the fine hairs and rolling 
 the tiny stones, the ends of the nerve quivering, and 
 then (how we know not) the brain hearing the message. 
 
 Is not this wonderful, going on as it does at every 
 sound you hear? And yet this is not all, for inside 
 that curled part of the labyrinth g, which looks like a 
 snail-shell and is called the cochlea, there is a most 
 wonderful apparatus of more than three thousand fine 
 stretched filaments or threads, and these act like the 
 strings of a harp, and make you hear different tones. 
 If you go near to a harp or a piano, and sing any 
 particular note very loudly, you will hear this note 
 sounding in the instrument, because you will set just 
 that particular string quivering, which gives the note 
 you sang. The air-waves set going by your' voice 
 touch that string, because it can quiver in time with 
 them, while none of the other strings can do so. Now, 
 just in the same way the tiny instrument of three 
 thousand strings in your ear, which is called Corti's 
 organ, vibrates to the air-waves, one thread to one set 
 of waves, and another to another, and according to 
 the fibre that quivers, will be the sound you hear. 
 Here then, at last, we see how nature speaks to us. 
 
THE VOICES OF NATURE. 145 
 
 All the movements going on outside, however violent 
 and varied they may be, cannot of themselves make 
 sound. But here, in the little space behind the drum 
 of our ear, the air-waves are sorted and sent on to our 
 brain, where they speak to us as sound. 
 
 But why then do we not hear all sounds as music? 
 Why are some mere noise, and others clear musical 
 notes? This depends entirely upon whether the 
 sound-waves come quickly and regularly, or by an 
 irregular succession of shocks. For example, when a 
 load of stones is being shot out of a cart, you hear 
 only a long, continuous noise, because the stones fall 
 irregularly, some quicker, some slower, here a number 
 together, and there two or three stragglers by them- 
 selves; each of these different shocks comes to your 
 ear and makes a confused, noisy sound. But if you 
 run a stick very quickly along a paling, you will hear 
 a sound very like a musical note. This is because the 
 rods of the paling are all at equal distances one from 
 the other, and so the shocks fall quickly one after an- 
 other at regular intervals upon your ear. Any quick 
 and regular succession of sounds makes a note, even 
 though it may be an ugly one. The squeak of a slate 
 pencil along a slate, and the shriek of a railway whistle 
 are not pleasant, but they are real notes which you 
 could copy on a violin. 
 
 I have here a simple apparatus which I have had 
 made to show you that rapid and regular shocks pro- 
 duce a natural musical note. This wheel (Fig. 36) is 
 milled at the edge like a quarter of a dollar, and when 
 I turn it rapidly so that it strikes against the edge of 
 
146 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 the card fixed behind it, the notches strike in rapid 
 succession and produce a musical sound. We can also 
 prove by this experiment that the quicker the blows 
 are, the higher the note will be. I pull the string 
 
 FIG. 36. 
 
 gently at first, and then quicker and quicker, and you 
 will notice that the note grows sharper and sharper, 
 till the movement begins to slacken, when the note 
 goes down again. This is because the more rapidly 
 the air is hit, the shorter are the waves it makes, and 
 short waves give a high note. 
 
 Let us examine this with two tuning-forks. I 
 strike one, and it sounds C, the third space in the 
 treble; I strike the other, and it sounds G, the first 
 leger line, five notes above the C. I have drawn on 
 this diagram (Fig. 37) an imaginary picture of these 
 two sets of waves. You see that the G fork makes 
 three waves, while the C iork makes only two. Why 
 is this? Because the prong of the G fork moves three 
 times backward and forward while the prong of the 
 
THE VOICES OF NATURE. 
 
 147 
 
 C fork only moves twice; therefore the G fork does 
 not crowd so many atoms together before it draws 
 back, and the waves are shorter. These two notes, C 
 and G, are a fifth of an octave apart; if we had two 
 
 FIG. 37. 
 
 forks, of which one went twice as fast as the other, 
 making four waves while the other made two, then 
 that note would be an octave higher. 
 
 So we see that all the sounds we hear the warning 
 noises which keep us from harm, the beautiful musical 
 notes with all the tunes and harmonies that delight 
 us, even the power of hearing the voices of those we 
 love, and learning from one another that which each 
 can tell all these depend upon the invisible waves of 
 air, even as the pleasures of light depend on the waves 
 of ether. It is by these sound-waves that nature 
 speaks to us, and in all her movements there is a 
 reason why her voice is sharp or tender, loud or gentle, 
 awful or loving. Take for instance the brook we 
 spoke of at the beginning of the lecture. Why does 
 it sing so sweetly, while the wide deep river makes 
 
I 4 8 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 no noise? Because the little brook eddies and purls 
 round the stones, hitting them as it passes ; sometimes 
 the water falls down a large stone, and strikes against 
 the water below ; or sometimes it grates the little peb- 
 bles together as they lie in its bed. Each of these blows 
 makes a small globe of sound-waves, which spread and 
 spread till they fall on your ear, and because they fall 
 quickly and regularly, they make a low, musical note. 
 We might almost fancy that the brook wished to show 
 how joyfully it flows along, recalling Shelley's beauti- 
 ful lines : 
 
 " Sometimes it fell 
 
 Among the moss with hollow harmony, 
 Dark and profound ; now on the polished stones 
 It danced ; like childhood laughing as it went." 
 
 The broad deep river, on the contrary, makes none 
 of these cascades and commotions. The only places 
 against which it rubs are the banks and the bottom; 
 and here you can sometimes hear it grating the par- 
 ticles of sand against each other if you listen very 
 carefully. But there is another reason why falling 
 water makes a sound, and often even a loud roaring 
 noise in the cataract and in the breaking waves of the 
 sea. You do not only hear the water dashing against 
 the rocky ledges or on the beach, you also hear the 
 bursting of innumerable little bladders of air which 
 are contained in the water. As each of these bladders 
 is dashed on the ground, it explodes and sends sound- 
 waves to your ear. Listen to the sea some day when 
 the waves are high and stormy, and you cannot fail 
 to be struck by the irregular bursts of sound. 
 
 The waves, however, do not only roar as they dash 
 
THE VOICES OF NA TURE. 
 
 149 
 
 on the ground; have you ever noticed how they seem 
 to scream as they draw back down the beach? Tenny- 
 son calls it, 
 
 " The scream of the madden'd beach dragged down by the wave ; " 
 
 and it is caused by the stones grating against each 
 other as the waves drag them down. Dr. Tyndall 
 tells us that it is possible to know the size of the stones 
 by the kind of noise they make. If they are large, it 
 is a confused noise; when smaller, a kind of scream; 
 while a gravelly beach will produce a mere hiss. 
 
 Who could be dull by the side of a brook, a water- 
 fall, or the sea, while he can listen for sounds like these, 
 and picture to himself how they are being made? You 
 may discover a number of other causes of sound made 
 by water, if you once pay attention to them. 
 
 Nor is it only water that sings to us. Listen to 
 the wind, how sweetly it sighs among the leaves. 
 There we hear it, because it rubs the leaves together, 
 and they produce the sound-waves. But walk against 
 the wind some day and you can hear it whistling in 
 your own ear, striking against the curved cup, and 
 then setting up a succession of waves in the hearing 
 canal of the ear itself. 
 
 Why should it sound in one particular tone when 
 all kinds of sound-waves must be surging about in the 
 disturbed air? 
 
 This glass jar will answer our question roughly. 
 If I strike my tuning-fork and hold it over the jar, 
 you can not hear it, because the sound is feeble, but if 
 I fill the jar gently with water, when the water rises 
 to a certain point you will hear a loud clear note, be- 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 cause the waves of air in the jar are exactly the right 
 length to answer to the note of the fork. If I now 
 blow across the mouth of the jar you hear the same 
 note, showing that a cavity of a particular length will 
 only sound to the waves which fit it. Do you see now 
 the reason why pan-pipes give different sounds, or 
 even the hole at the end of a common key when you 
 
 blow across it? Here 
 is a subject you will 
 find very interesting if 
 you will read about it, 
 for I can only just sug- 
 gest it here. But now 
 you will see that the 
 canal of your ear also 
 answers only to certain 
 waves, and so the wind 
 sings in your ear with 
 a real if not a musical 
 note. 
 
 Again, on a windy night have you not heard the 
 wind sounding a wild, sad note down a valley ? Why 
 do you think it sounds so much louder and more mu- 
 sical here than when it is blowing across the plain? 
 Because the air in the valley will only answer to a 
 certain set of waves, and, like the pan-pipe, gives a 
 particular note as the wind blows across it, and these 
 waves go up and down the valley in regular pulses, 
 making a wild howl. You may hear the same in the 
 chimney, or in the keyhole; all these are waves set up 
 in the hole across which the wind blows. Even the 
 music in the shell which you hold to your ear is made 
 
 FIG. 38. 
 
THE VOICES OF NATURE. \^\ 
 
 by the air in the shell pulsating to and fro. And how 
 do you think it is set going? By the throbbing of the 
 veins in your own ear, which causes the air in the shell 
 to vibrate. 
 
 Another grand voice of nature is the thunder. 
 People often have a vague idea that thunder is pro- 
 duced by the clouds knocking together, which is very 
 absurd, if you remember that clouds are but water- 
 dust. The most probable explanation of thunder is 
 much more beautiful than this. You will remember 
 from Lecture III that heat forces the air- atoms apart. 
 Now, when a flash of lightning crosses the sky it sud- 
 denly expands the air all round it as it passes, so that 
 globe after globe of sound-waves is formed at every 
 point across which the lightning travels. Now light, 
 you remember, travels with such wonderful rapidity 
 (192,000 miles in a second) that a flash of lightning is 
 seen by us and is over in a second, even when it is two 
 or three miles long. But sound comes slowly, taking 
 five seconds to travel half a mile, and so all the sound- 
 waves at each point of the two or three miles fall on 
 our ear one after the other, and make the rolling thun- 
 der. Sometimes the roll ts made even longer by the 
 echo, as the sound-waves are reflected to and fro by 
 the clouds on their road; and in the mountains we 
 know how the peals echo and re-echo till they die 
 away. 
 
 We might fill up far more than an hour in speak- 
 ing of those voices which come to us as nature is at 
 work. Think of the patter of the rain, how each drop 
 as it hits the pavement sends circles of sound-waves 
 out on all sides; or the loud report which falls on the 
 
152 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 ear of the Alpine traveller as the glacier cracks on its 
 way down the valley; or the mighty boom of the ava- 
 lanche as the snow slides in huge masses off the side 
 of the lofty mountain. Each and all of these create 
 their sound-waves, large or small, loud or feeble, which 
 make their way to our ear, and become converted 
 into sound. 
 
 We have, however, only time now just to glance at 
 life-sounds, of which there are so many around us. 
 Do you know why we hear a buzzing, as the gnat, the 
 bee, or the cockchafer fly past? Not by the beating 
 of their wings against the air, as many people imagine, 
 and as is really the case with humming birds, but by 
 the scraping of the under-part of their hard wings 
 against the edges of their hind-legs, which are toothed 
 like a saw. The more rapidly their wings move the 
 stronger the grating sound becomes, and you will now 
 see why in hot, thirsty weather the buzzing of the gnat 
 is so loud, for the more thirsty and the more eager he 
 becomes, the wilder his movements will be. 
 
 Some insects, like the drone-fly (Eristalis te-nax), 
 force the air through the tiny air-passages in their 
 sides, and as these passages are closed by little plates, 
 the plates vibrate to and fro and make sound-waves. 
 Again, what are those curious sounds you may hear 
 sometimes if you rest your head on a trunk in the 
 forest? They are made by the timber-boring beetles, 
 which saw the wood with their jaws and make a noise 
 in the world, even though they have no voice. 
 
 All these life-sounds are made by creatures which 
 do not sing or speak; but the sweetest sounds of all 
 in the woods are the voices of the birds. All voice- 
 
THE VOICES OF NATURE. 
 
 153 
 
 sounds are made by two elastic bands or cushions, 
 called vocal chords, stretched across the end of the 
 tube or windpipe through which we breathe, and as 
 we send the air through them we tighten or loosen 
 them as we will, and so make them vibrate quickly or 
 slowly and make sound-waves of different lengths. 
 But if you will try some day in the woods you will 
 find that a bird can beat you over and over again in 
 the length of his note; when you are out of breath 
 and forced to stop he will go on with his merry trill 
 as fresh and clear as if he had only just begun. This 
 is because birds can draw air into the whole of their 
 body, and they have a large stock laid up in the folds 
 of their windpipe, and besides this the air-chamber 
 behind their elastic bands or vocal chords has two 
 compartments where we have only one, and the second 
 compartment has special muscles by which they can 
 open and shut it, and so prolong the trill. 
 
 Only think what a rapid succession of waves must 
 quiver through the air as a tiny lark agitates his little 
 throat and pours forth a volume of song! The next 
 time you are in the country in the spring, spend half 
 an hour listening to him, and try and picture to your- 
 self how that little being is moving all the atmosphere 
 round him. Then dream for a little while about sound, 
 what it is, how marvellously it works outside in the 
 world, and inside in your ear and brain; and then, 
 when you go back to work again, you will hardly 
 deny that it is well worth while to listen sometimes to 
 the voices of nature and ponder how it is that we hear 
 them. 
 
154 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. 
 
 WHEN the dreary 
 days of winter and 
 the early damp 
 days of spring 
 are passing 
 away, and the 
 warm bright 
 sunshine has 
 begun to pour 
 down upon the 
 grassy paths of 
 the wood, who 
 does not love to 
 go out and bring home 
 bouquets of violets, and 
 
 bluebells, and primroses ? We wander from one plant 
 to another, picking a flower here and a bud there, as 
 they nestle among the green leaves, and we make our 
 rooms sweet and gay with the tender and lovely blos- 
 soms. But tell me, did you ever stop to think, as you 
 added flower after flower to your bouquet, how the 
 plants which bear them have been building up their 
 green leaves and their fragile buds during the last few 
 weeks ? If you had visited the same spot a month be- 
 fore, a few of last year's leaves, withered and dead, 
 
THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. 155 
 
 would have been all that you would have found. And 
 now the whole wood is carpeted with delicate green 
 leaves, with nodding bluebells, and pale-yellow prim- 
 roses, as if a fairy had touched the ground and covered 
 it with fresh young life. And our fairies have been at 
 work here; the fairy " Life," of whom we know so 
 little, though we love her so well and rejoice in the 
 beautiful forms she can produce; the fairy sunbeams 
 with their invisible influence kissing the tiny shoots 
 and warming them into vigour and activity ; the gentle 
 rain-drops, the balmy air, all these have been working, 
 while you or I passed heedlessly by; and now we come 
 and gather the flowers they have made, and too often 
 forget to wonder how these lovely forms have sprung 
 up around us. 
 
 Our work during the next hour will be to consider 
 this question. You were asked last week to bring 
 with you to-day a primrose-flower, or a whole plant if 
 possible, in order the better to follow out with me the 
 " Life of a Primrose." * This is a very different kind 
 of subject from those of our former lectures. There 
 we took world-wide histories ; we travelled up to the 
 sun, or round the earth, or into the air; now I only 
 ask you to fix your attention on one little plant, and 
 inquire into its history. 
 
 There is a beautiful little poem by Tennyson, which 
 says 
 
 " Flower in the crannied wall, 
 I pluck you out of the crannies ; 
 
 * To enjoy this lecture, the child ought to have, if possible, 
 a primrose-flower, an almond soaked for a few minutes in hot 
 water, and a piece of orange. 
 
1 56 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 Little flower ; but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is." 
 
 We cannot learn all about this little flower, but we 
 can learn enough to understand that it has a real sepa- 
 rate life of its own, well worth knowing. For a plant 
 is born, breathes, sleeps, feeds, and digests just as 
 truly as an animal does, though in a different way. 
 It works hard both for itself to get its food, and for 
 others in making the air pure and fit for animals to 
 breathe. It often lays by provision for the winter. 
 It sends young plants out, as parents send their chil- 
 dren, to fight for themselves in the world; and then, 
 after living sometimes to a good old age, it dies, and 
 leaves its place to others. 
 
 We will try to follow out something of this life to- 
 day; and first, we will begin with the seed. 
 
 I have here a package of primrose-seeds, but they 
 are so small that we cannot examine them ; so I have 
 also had given to each one of you an almond-kernel, 
 which is the seed of the almond-tree, and which has 
 been soaked, so that it splits in half easily. From 
 this we can learn about seeds in general, and then ap- 
 ply it to the primrose. 
 
 If you peel the two skins off your almond-seed (the 
 thick; brown, outside skin, and the thin, transparent 
 one under it), the two halves of the almond will slip 
 apart quite easily. One of these halves will have a 
 small dent at the pointed end, while in the other half 
 you will see a little lump, which fitted into the dent 
 when the two halves were joined. This little lump 
 
THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. 
 
 157 
 
 (a b, Fig. 39) is a young plant, and the two halves of 
 the almond are the seed-leaves which hold the plantlet, 
 and feed it till it can feed itself. The rounded end 
 of the plantlet (b) sticking out of the al- 
 mond, is the beginning of the root, while 
 the other end (a) will in time become the 
 stem. If you look carefully, you will see 
 two little points at this end, which are 
 the tips of future leaves. Only think how 
 minute this plantlet must be in a prim- 
 rose, where the whole seed is scarcely 
 larger than a grain of sand ! Yet in this FIG. 39. Half 
 tiny plantlet lies hid the life of the future an a ] mon <*> 
 plant. 
 
 When the seed falls into the ground, Rudiment of 
 so long as the earth is cold and dry, it stem. 6, Be- 
 lies like a person in a trance, as if it were g innin g of 
 dead ; but as soon as the warm, damp root> 
 spring comes, and the busy little sun-waves pierce 
 down into the earth, 'they wake up the plantlet, and 
 make it bestir itself. They agitate to and fro the par- 
 ticles of matter in this tiny body, and cause them to 
 seek out for other particles to seize and join to them- 
 selves. 
 
 But these new particles can not come in at the 
 roots, for the seed has none; nor through the leaves, 
 for they have not yet grown up; and so the plantlet 
 begins by helping itself to the store of food laid up in 
 the thick seed-leaves in which it is buried. Here it 
 finds starch, oils, sugar, and substances called albu- 
 minoids the sticky matter which you notice in wheat- 
 grains when you chew them is one of the albumi- 
 
I 5 8 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 FIG. 40. Juicy cells in a piece 
 of orange. 
 
 noids. This food is all ready for the plantlet to use, 
 
 and it sucks it in, and works itself into a young- plant 
 
 with tiny roots at one end, and a growing shoot, with 
 
 leaves, at the other. 
 
 But how does it grow? What makes it become 
 
 larger? To answer this, you must look at the second 
 
 thing I asked you to bring 
 a piece of orange. If 
 you take the skin off a 
 piece of orange, you will 
 see inside a number of 
 long-shaped transparent 
 
 bags, full of juice. These we call cells, and the flesh 
 
 of all plants and animals is made up of cells like these, 
 
 only of various shapes. 
 
 In the pith of elder 
 
 they are round, large, 
 
 and easily seen (a, 
 
 Fig. 41); in the stalks 
 
 of plants they 
 
 long, and lap 
 
 each other (b, 
 
 41), so as to 
 
 the stalk strength to 
 
 stand upright. Some- 
 times many cells 
 
 growing one on the 
 
 top of the other, FIG. 41. Plant-cells. 
 
 break into one tube * n pith of elder. 
 
 and make vessels. 
 
 But whether large or small, they are all bags grow- 
 ing one against the other. 
 
 Plant-cells. 
 
 a, Round cells 
 t>, Long cells 
 in fibres of a plant. 
 
THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. 
 
 159 
 
 In the orange-pulp these cells contain only sweet 
 juice, but in other parts of the orange-tree or any 
 other plant they contain a sticky substance with little 
 grains in it. This substance is called " protoplasm," 
 or the first form of life, for it is alive and active, and 
 under a microscope you may see in a living plant 
 streams of the little grains moving about in the cells. 
 
 Now we are prepared to explain how our plant 
 grows. Imagine the tiny primrose plantlet to be made 
 up of cells filled with active living protoplasm, which 
 drinks in starch and other food from the seed-leaves. 
 In this way each cell will grow too full for its skin, 
 and then the protoplasm divides into two parts and 
 builds up a wall between them, and so one cell be- 
 comes two. Each of these two cells again breaks up 
 into two more, and so the plant grows larger and 
 larger, till by the time it has used up all the food in 
 the seed-leaves, it has sent roots covered with fine 
 hairs downward into the earth, and a shoot with be- 
 ginnings of leaves up into the air. 
 
 Sometimes the seed-leaves themselves come above 
 ground, as in the mustard-plant, and sometimes they 
 are left empty behind, while the plantlet shoots through 
 them. 
 
 And now the plant can no longer afford to be idle 
 and live on prepared food. It must work for itself. 
 Until now it has been taking in the same kind of 
 food that you and I do; for we too find many seeds 
 very pleasant to eat and useful to nourish us. But 
 now this store is exhausted. Upon what then is the 
 plant to live? It is cleverer than we are in this, for 
 while we cannot live unless we have food which has 
 
l6o THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 once been alive, plants can feed upon gases and water 
 and mineral matter only. Think over the substances 
 you can eat or drink, and you will find they are nearly 
 all made of things which have been alive : meat, vege- 
 tables, bread, beer, wine, milk; all these are made 
 from living matter, and though you do take in such 
 things as water and salt, and even iron and phos- 
 phorus, these would be quite useless if you did not eat 
 and drink prepared food which your body can work 
 up into living matter. 
 
 But the plant, as soon as it has roots and leaves, 
 begins to make living matter out of matter that has 
 never been alive. Through all the little hairs of its 
 roots it sucks in water, and in this water are dissolved 
 more or less of the salts of ammonia, phosphorus, sul- 
 phur, iron, lime, magnesia, and even silica, or flint. 
 In all kinds of earth there is some iron, and we shall 
 see presently that this is very important to the plant. 
 
 Suppose, then, that our primrose has begun to 
 drink in water at its roots. How is it to get this 
 water up into the stem and leaves, seeing that the 
 whole plant is made of closed bags or cells? It does 
 it in a very curious way, which you can prove for your- 
 selves. Whenever two fluids, one thicker than the 
 other, such as molasses and water for example, are 
 only separated by a skin or any porous substance, they 
 will always mix, the thinner one oozing through the 
 skin into the thicker one. If you tie a piece of bladder 
 over a glass tube, fill the tube half-full of molasses, and 
 then let the covered end rest in a bottle of water, in 
 a few hours the water will get in to the molasses and 
 the mixture will rise up in the tube till it flows over the 
 
THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. 1^1 
 
 top. Now, the saps and juices of plants are thicker 
 than water, so, directly the water enters the cells at 
 the root it oozes up into the cells above, and mixes 
 with the sap. Then the matter in those cells becomes 
 thinner than in the cells above, so it too oozes up, 
 and in this way cell by cell the water is pumped up 
 into the leaves. 
 
 When it gets there it finds our old friends the sun- 
 beams hard at work. If you have ever tried to grow 
 a plant in a cellar, you will know that in the dark its 
 leaves remain white and sickly. . It is only in the sun- 
 light that a beautiful delicate green tint is given to 
 them, and you will remember from Lecture II that 
 this green tint shows that the leaf has used all the 
 sun- waves except those which make you see green; 
 but why should it do this only when it has grown up 
 in the sunshine? 
 
 The reason is this: when the sunbeam darts into 
 the leaf and sets all its particles quivering, it divides 
 the protoplasm into two kinds, collected into different 
 cells. One of these remains white, but the other kind, 
 near the surface, is altered by the sunlight and by the 
 help of the. iron brought in by the water. This par- 
 ticular kind of protoplasm, which is called " chloro- 
 phyll," will have nothing to do with the green waves 
 and throws them back, so that every little grain of 
 this protoplasm looks green . and gives the leaf its 
 green colour. 
 
 It is these little green cells that by the help of the 
 sun-waves digest the food of the plant and turn the 
 water and gases into useful sap and juices. We saw 
 in Lecture III that when we breathe-in air, we use 
 
j62 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 up the oxygen in it and send back out of our mouths 
 carbonic acid, which is a gas made of oxygen and 
 carbon. 
 
 Now, every living thing wants carbon to feed upon, 
 but plants cannot take it in my itself, because carbon 
 is solid (the blacklead in your pencils is pure carbon), 
 and a plant cannot eat, it can only drink-in fluids and 
 gases. Here the little green cells help it out of its 
 
 difficulty. They take in 
 or absorb out of the air 
 the carbonic-acid gas 
 which we have given out 
 of our mouths, and then 
 81- by the help of the sun- 
 waves they tear the car- 
 bon and oxygen apart. 
 Flo. 42.-Oxygen-bubbles rising Mogt ^ 
 
 from laurel-leaves in water. J & * 
 
 throw back into the air 
 
 for us to use, but the carbon they keep. 
 
 If you will take some fresh laurel-leaves and put 
 them into a tumbler of water turned upside-down in 
 a saucer of water, and set the tumbler in the sunshine, 
 you will soon see little bright bubbles rising up and 
 clinging to the glass. These are bubbles of oxygen 
 gas, and they tell you that they have been set free by 
 the green cells which have torn from them the carbon 
 of the carbonic acid in the water. 
 
 But what becomes of the carbon? And what use 
 is made of the water which we have kept waiting all 
 this time in the leaves? Water, you already know, 
 is made of hydrogen and oxygen; but perhaps you 
 will be surprised when I tell you that starch, sugar, 
 
THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. 16$ 
 
 and oil, which we get from plants, are nothing more 
 than hydrogen and oxygen in different quantities 
 joined to carbon. 
 
 It is very difficult at first to picture such a black 
 thing as carbon making part of delicate leaves and 
 beautiful flowers, and still more of pure white sugar. 
 But we can make an experiment by which we can 
 draw the hydrogen and oxygen out of common loaf 
 sugar, and then you will see the carbon stand out in 
 all its blackness. I have here a plate with a heap of 
 white sugar in it. I pour upon it first some hot water 
 to melt and warm it, and 
 then some strong sulphuric 
 acid. This acid does noth- 
 ing more than simply draw 
 the hydrogen and oxygen FlG - 43- Carbon rising up 
 oi- r from white sugar. 
 
 out. See ! in a few moments 
 
 a black mass of carbon begins to rise, all of which 
 has come out of the white sugar you saw just now.* 
 You see, then, that from the whitest substance in 
 plants we can get this black carbon; and in truth, 
 one-half of the dry part of every plant is composed 
 of it. 
 
 Now look at my plant again, and tell me if we have 
 not already found a curious history? Fancy that you 
 see the water creeping in at the roots, oozing up from 
 cell to cell till it reaches the leaves, and there meet- 
 
 * The common dilute sulphuric acid of commerce is not strong 
 enough for this experiment, and any child who wants to get pure 
 sulphuric acid must take some elder person with him, otherwise 
 the chemist will not sell it to him. Great care must be taken in 
 using it, as it burns everything it touches. 
 12 
 
164 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 ing the carbon which has just come out of the air, and 
 being worked up with it by the sun-waves into starch, 
 or sugar, or oils. 
 
 But meanwhile, how is new protoplasm to be 
 formed? for without this active substance none of the 
 work can go on. Here comes into use a lazy gas 
 we spoke of in Lecture III. There we thought that 
 nitrogen was of no use except to float oxygen in the 
 air, but here we shall find it very useful. So far as 
 we know, plants cannot take up nitrogen out of the 
 air, but they can get it out of the ammonia which the 
 water brings in at their roots. 
 
 Ammonia, you will remember, is a strong-smelling 
 gas, made of hydrogen and nitrogen, and which is 
 often almost stifling near a manure-heap. When you 
 manure a plant you help it to get this ammonia, but 
 at any time it gets some from the soil and also from 
 the rain-drops which bring it down in the air. Out 
 of this ammonia the plant takes the nitrogen and 
 works it up with the three elements, carbon, oxygen, 
 and hydrogen, to make the substances called albumi- 
 noids, which form a large part of the food of the 
 plant, and it is these albuminoids which go to make 
 protoplasm. You will notice that while the starch and 
 other substances are only made of three elements, the 
 active protoplasm is made of these three added to a 
 fourth, nitrogen, and it also contains phosphorus and 
 sulphur. 
 
 And so hour after hour and day after day our prim- 
 rose goes on pumping up water and ammonia from 
 its roots to its leaves, drinking in carbonic acid from 
 the air, and using the sun-waves to work them all up 
 
THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. ^5 
 
 into food to be sent to all parts of its body. In this 
 way these leaves act, you see, as the stomach of the 
 plant, and digest its food. 
 
 Sometimes more water is drawn up into the leaves 
 than can be used, and then the leaf opens thousands 
 of little mouths in the skin of its under surface, which 
 let the drops out just as drops of perspiration ooze 
 through our skin when we are overheated. These 
 little mouths, which are called stomates (a, Fig. 44), 
 are made of two flattened cells, fit- 
 ting against each other. When the 
 air is damp and the plant has too 
 much water these lie open and let it 
 out, but when the air is dry, and 
 the plant wants to keep as much 
 water as it can, then they are closely 
 shut. There are as many as a hun- FlG - 
 dred thousand of these mouths 
 under one apple-leaf, so you may imagine how small 
 they often are. 
 
 Plants which only live one year, such as migno- 
 nette, the sweet pea, and the poppy, take in just enough 
 food to supply their daily wants and to make the seeds 
 we shall speak of presently. Then, as soon as their 
 seeds are ripe their roots begin to shrivel, and water 
 is no longer carried up. The green cells can no longer 
 get food to digest, and they themselves are broken 
 up by the sunbeams and turn yellow, and the plant dies. 
 
 But many plants are more industrious than the 
 sweet pea and mignonette, and lay by store for another 
 year, and our primrose is one of these. Look at this 
 thick solid mass below the primrose leaves, out of 
 
X 66 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 which the roots spring. This is really the stem of 
 the primrose hidden underground, and all the starch, 
 albuminoids, etc., which the plant can spare as it 
 grows, are sent down into this underground stem and 
 stored up there, to lie quietly in the ground through 
 the long winter, and then when the warm spring comes 
 this stem begins to send out leaves for a new plant. 
 
 We have now seen how a plant springs up, feeds 
 itself, grows, stores up food, withers, and dies; but we 
 have said nothing yet about its beautiful flowers or 
 how it forms its seeds. If we look down close to the 
 bottom of the leaves in a primrose root in spring-time, 
 we shall always find three or four little green buds 
 nestling in among the leaves, and day by day we may 
 see the stalk of these buds lengthening till they reach 
 up into the open sunshine, and then the flower opens 
 and shows its beautiful pale-yellow crown. 
 
 We all know that seeds are formed in the flower, 
 and that the seeds are necessary to grow into new 
 plants. But do we know the history of how they are 
 formed, or what is the use of the different parts of 
 the bud? Let us examine them all, and then I think 
 you will agree with me that this is not the least won- 
 derful part of the plant. 
 
 Remember that the seed is the one important thing, 
 and then notice how the flower protects it. First, look 
 at the outside green covering, which we call the calyx. 
 See how closely it fits in the bud, so that no insects 
 can creep in to gnaw the flower, nor any harm come 
 to it from cold or blight. Then, when the calyx opens, 
 notice that the yellow leaves which form the crown or 
 
THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. 
 
 I6 7 
 
 corolla, are each alternate with one of the calyx leaves, 
 so that anything which got past the first covering 
 would be stopped by the second. Lastly, when the 
 delicate corolla has opened out, look at those curious 
 yellow bags just at the top of the tube (b, 2, Fig, 45). 
 What is their use? 
 
 FIG. 45. The two forms of the Primrose-flower, a, Stigma or 
 sticky head of the seed-vessel, b, Anthers of the stamens. 
 c, Corolla or crown of the flower, d, Calyx or outer cover- 
 ing, sv, Seed-vessel. A, Enlarged pistil, with pollen-grain 
 resting on the stigma and growing down to the ovule. 
 0, Ovules. 
 
 But I fancy I see two or three little questioning 
 faces which seem to say, " I see no yellow bags at 
 the top of the tube." Well, I cannot tell whether 
 you can or not in the specimen you have in your 
 hand; for one of the most curious things about prim- 
 rose flowers is, that some of them have these yellow 
 bags at the top of the tube and some of them hidden 
 down right in the middle. But this I can tell you: 
 those of you who have got no yellow bags at the top 
 will have a round knob there (i a, Fig. 45), and will 
 find the yellow bags (&) buried in the tube. Those, 
 
168 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 on the other hand, who have the yellow bags (2 b, 
 Fig. 45) at the top will find the knob (a) half-way 
 down the tube. 
 
 Now for the use of these yellow bags, which are 
 called the anthers of the stamens, the stalk on which 
 they grow being called the filament or thread. If you 
 can manage to split them open you will find that they 
 have a yellow powder in them, called pollen, the same 
 as the powder which sticks to your nose when you 
 put it into a lily; and if you look with a magnifying 
 glass at the little green knob in the centre of the 
 flower you will probably see some of this yellow dust 
 sticking on it (A, Fig. 45). We will leave it there 
 for a time, and examine the body called the pistil, to 
 which the knob belongs. Pull off the yellow corolla 
 (which will come off quite easily), and turn back the 
 green leaves. You will then see that the knob stands 
 on the top of a column, and at the bottom of this col- 
 umn there is a round ball (sv), which is a vessel for 
 holding the seeds. In this diagram (A, Fig. 45) I 
 have drawn the whole of this curious ball and column 
 as if cut in half, so that we may see what is in it. In 
 the middle of the ball, in a cluster, there are a number 
 of round transparent little bodies, looking something 
 like round green orange-cells full of juice. They are 
 really cells full of protoplasm, with one little dark 
 spot in each of them, which by-and-by is to make our 
 little plantlet that we found in the seed. 
 
 " These, then, are seeds," you will say. Not yet ; 
 they are only ovules, or little bodies which may be- 
 come seeds. If they were left as they are they would 
 all wither and die. But those little yellow grains of 
 
THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. 169 
 
 pollen, which we saw sticking to the knob at the top, 
 are coming down to help them. As soon as these yel- 
 low grains touch the sticky knob or stigma, as it is 
 called, they throw out tubes, which grow down the col- 
 umn until they reach the ovules. In each one of these 
 they find a tiny hole, and into this they creep, and then 
 they pour into the ovule all the protoplasm from the 
 pollen-grain which is sticking above, and this enables 
 it to grow into a real seed, with a tiny plantlet inside. 
 
 This is how the plant forms its seed to bring up 
 new little ones next year, while the leaves and the roots 
 are at work preparing the necessary food. Think 
 sometimes when you walk in the woods, how hard 
 at work the little plants and big trees are, all around 
 you. You breathe in the nice fresh oxygen they have 
 been throwing out, and little think that it is they who 
 are making the country so fresh and pleasant, and 
 that while they look as if they were doing nothing 
 but enjoying the bright sunshine, they are really ful- 
 filling their part in the world by the help of this sun- 
 shine; earning their food from the ground; working 
 it up; turning their leaves where they can best get 
 light (and in this it is chiefly the violet sun-waves that 
 help them), growing, even at night, by making new 
 cells out of the food they have taken in the day; stor- 
 ing up for the winter; putting out their flowers and 
 making their seeds, and all the while smiling so pleas- 
 antly in quiet nooks and sunny dells that it makes us 
 glad to see them. 
 
 But why should the primroses have such golden 
 crowns? plain green ones would protect the seed quite 
 as well. Ah! now we come to a secret well worth 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 knowing. Look at the two primrose flowers, i and 2, 
 Fig. 45, p. 167, and tell me how you think the dust 
 gets on to the top of the sticky knob or stigma. No. 
 2 seems easy enough to explain, for it looks as if the 
 pollen could fall down easily from the stamens on to 
 the knob, but it cannot fall up, as it would have to do 
 in No. i. Now the curious truth is, as Mr. Darwin 
 has shown, that neither of these flowers can get the 
 dust easily for themselves, but of the two No. I has 
 the least difficulty. 
 
 Look at a withered primrose, and see how it holds 
 its head down, and after a little while the yellow crown 
 falls off. It is just about as it is falling that the 
 anthers or bags of the stamens burst open, and then, 
 in No. i (Fig. 46), they are dragged over the knob 
 
 FIG. 46. Corolla of Primrose falling off. i, Primrose with long 
 pistil, and stamens in the tube, same as i of Fig. 45. 2, 
 Primrose with short pistil, and stamens at mouth of tube, 2, 
 Fig. 45- 
 
 and some of the grains stick there. But in the other 
 form of primrose, No. 2, when the flower falls off, the 
 stamens do not come near the knob, so it has no chance 
 of getting any pollen; and while the primrose is up- 
 
THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. \<j\ 
 
 right the tube is so narrow that the dust does not 
 easily fall. But, as I have said, neither kind gets it 
 very easily, nor is it good for them if they do. The 
 seeds are much stronger and better if the dust or pol- 
 len of one flower is carried away and left on the knob 
 or stigma of another flower; and the only way this 
 can be done is by insects flying from one flower to an- 
 other and carrying the dust on their legs and bodies. 
 
 If you suck the end of the tube of the primrose 
 flower you will find it tastes sweet, because a drop of 
 honey has been lying there. When the insects go in 
 to get this honey, they brush themselves against the 
 yellow dust-bags, and some of the dust sticks to them, 
 and then when they go to the next flower they rub it 
 off on to its sticky knob. 
 
 Look at No. i and No. 2 (Fig. 45) and you will see 
 at once that if an insect goes into No. I and the pollen 
 sticks to him, when he goes into No. 2 just that part 
 of his body on which the pollen is will touch the 
 knob; and so the flowers become what we call 
 " crossed," that is, the pollen-dust of the one feeds the 
 ovule of the other. And just the same thing will hap- 
 pen if he flies from No. 2 to No. i. There the dust 
 will be just in the position to touch the knob which 
 sticks out of the flower. 
 
 Therefore, we can see clearly that it is good for the 
 primrose that bees and other insects should come to 
 it, and anything it can do to entice them will be use- 
 ful. Now, do you not think that when an insect once 
 knew that the pale-yellow crown showed where honey 
 was to be found, he would soon spy these crowns out 
 as he flew along? or if they were behind a hedge, and 
 
1^2 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 he could not see them, would not the sweet scent tell 
 him where to come and look for them? And so we 
 see that the pretty sweet-scented corolla is not only 
 delightful for us to look at and to smell, but it is 
 really very useful in helping the primrose to make 
 strong healthy seeds out of which the young plants 
 are to grow next year. 
 
 And now let us see what we have learned. We be- 
 gan with a tiny seed, though we did not then know 
 how this seed had been made. We saw the plantlet 
 buried in it, and learned how it fed at first on prepared 
 food, but soon began to make living matter for itself 
 out of gases taken from the water and the air. How 
 ingeniously it pumped up the water through the cells 
 to its stomach the leaves ! And how marvellously 
 the sun-waves entering there formed the little green 
 granules, and then helped them to make food and 
 living protoplasm ! At this point we might have gone 
 further, and studied how the fibres and all the different 
 vessels of the plant are formed, and a wondrous his- 
 tory it would have been. But it was too long for one 
 hour's lecture, and you must read it for yourselves in 
 books on botany. We had to pass on to the flower, 
 and learn the use of the covering leaves, the gaily col- 
 oured crown attracting the insects, the dust-bags hold- 
 ing the pollen, the little ovules each with the germ 
 of a new plantlet, lying hidden in the seed-vessel, wait- 
 ing for the pollen-grains to grow down to them. 
 Lastly, when the pollen crept in at the tiny opening 
 we learned that the ovule had now all it wanted to 
 grow into a perfect seed. 
 
THE LIFE OF A PRIMROSE. 
 
 173 
 
 And so we came back to a primrose seed, the point 
 from which we started; and we have a history of our 
 primrose from its birth to the day when its leaves 
 and flowers wither away and it dies down for the 
 winter. 
 
 But what fairies are they which have been at work 
 here? First, the busy little fairy Life in the active 
 protoplasm; and secondly, the sun- waves. We have 
 seen that it was by the help of the sunbeams that the 
 green granules were made, and the water, carbonic 
 acid, and nitrogen worked up into the living plant. 
 And in doing this work the sun-waves were caught 
 and their strength used up, so that they could no 
 longer quiver back into space. But are they gone for 
 ever? So long as the leaves or the stem or the root 
 of the plant remain they are gone, but when those are 
 destroyed we can get them back again. Take a hand- 
 ful of dry withered plants and light them with a match, 
 then as the leaves burn and are turned back again to 
 carbonic acid, nitrogen, and water, our sunbeams come 
 back again in the flame and heat. 
 
 And the life of the plant? What is it, and why is 
 this protoplasm always active and busy? I cannot 
 tell you. Study as we may, the life of the tiny plant 
 is as much a mystery as your life and mine. It came, 
 like all things, from the bosom of the Great Father, 
 but we cannot tell how it came nor what it is. We 
 can see the active grains moving under the microscope, 
 but we cannot see the power that moves them. We 
 only know it is a power given to the plant, as to you 
 and to me, to enable it to live its life, and to do its 
 useful work in the world. 
 
174 T & FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF A PIECE OF COAL. 
 
 HAVE here a piece of 
 coal (Fig. 47), which, 
 though it has been cut 
 with some care so as to have a smooth face, is really 
 in no other way different from any ordinary lump 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 
 
 175 
 
 which you can pick for yourself out of the coal- 
 scuttle. Our work to-day is to relate the history of 
 this black lump ; to learn what it is, what it has been, 
 and what it will be. 
 
 It looks uninteresting enough at first sight, and yet 
 if we examine it closely we shall find some questions 
 
 FIG. 47. Piece of coal, a, Smooth face, showing laminae of 
 thin layers. 
 
 to ask even about its appearance. Look at the smooth 
 face of this specimen and see if you can explain those 
 fine lines which run across so close together as to 
 look like the edges of the leaves of a book. Try to 
 break a piece of soft coal, and you will find that it will 
 split much more easily along those lines than across 
 the other way of the lump; and if you wish to light 
 a fire quickly you should always put this lined face 
 downward so that the heat can force its way up 
 through these cracks and gradually split up the 
 block. Then again if you break the coal carefully 
 along one of these lines you will find a fine film of 
 charcoal lying in the crack, and you will begin to sus- 
 pect that this black coal must have been built up 
 
176 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 in very thin layers, with a kind of black dust between 
 them. 
 
 The next thing you will call to mind is that this 
 coal burns and gives flame and heat, and that this 
 means that in some way sunbeams are imprisoned in 
 it; lastly, this will lead you to think of plants, and 
 how they work up the strength of the sunbeams into 
 their leaves, and hide black carbon in even the purest 
 and whitest substance they contain. 
 
 Is coal made of burned plants, then ? Not burned 
 ones, for if so it would not burn again; but you may 
 have read how the makers of charcoal take wood and 
 bake it without letting it burn, and then it turns black 
 and will afterward make a very good fire; and so 
 you will see that it is probable that our piece of 
 coal is made of plants which have been baked and 
 altered, but which still have much sunbeam strength* 
 bottled up in them, which can be set free as they 
 burn. - 
 
 If you will take an imaginary journey with me to 
 a coal-pit you will see that we have very good evi- 
 dence that coal is made of plants, for in all coal- 
 mines we find remains of them at every step we 
 take. 
 
 Let us imagine that we have put on old clothes 
 which will not spoil, and have stepped into the iron 
 basket (see Fig. 48) called by the miners a cage, and 
 are being let down the shaft to the gallery where the 
 miners are at work. Most of them will probably be 
 in the gallery b, because a great deal of the coal in 
 a has been already taken out. But we will stop in a 
 because there we can see a great deal of the roof and 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 
 
 177 
 
 the floor. When we land on the floor of the gallery 
 we shall find ourselves in a kind of tunnel with railway 
 lines laid along it and trucks laden with coal coming 
 toward the cage to be drawn up, while empty ones 
 are running back to be loaded where the miners are 
 at work. Taking lamps in our hands and keeping 
 out of the way of the trucks, we will first throw the 
 
 FIG. 48. Imaginary section of a coal-mine. 
 
 light on the roof, which is made of shale or hardened 
 clay. We shall not have gone many yards before 
 we see impressions of plants in the shale, like those in 
 this specimen (Fig. 49), which was taken out of a coal- 
 mine at Neath in Glamorganshire in England. You 
 will recognise at once the marks of -ferns (a), for they 
 look like those you gather in the hedges of an ordinary 
 country lane, and that long striped branch (6) does not 
 look unlike a reed, and indeed it is something of this 
 kind, as we shall see by-and-by. You will find plenty 
 of these impressions of plants as you go along the gal- 
 
jjrg THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 lery and look up at the roof, and with them there will 
 be others with spotted stems, or with stems having a 
 curious diamond pattern upon them, and many ferns 
 of various kinds. 
 
 Next look down at your feet and examine the floor. 
 
 FIG. 49. A piece of shale with impressions of ferns and Cala- 
 mite stems. 
 
 You will not have to search long before you will al- 
 most certainly find a piece of stone like that repre- 
 
 FIG. 50. Stigmaria root or underground stem of Sigillaria. 
 
 sented in Fig. 50, which has also come from Neath 
 Colliery.* This fossil, which is the cast of a piece of a 
 
 * I am much indebted to Mr. John Williams, of Neath, for 
 procuring these fossils for me ; and also to Professor Judd for 
 lending me some for an earlier lecture. 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 
 
 plant, puzzled those who found it for a very long time. 
 At last, however, Mr. Binney found the specimen 
 growing to the bottom of the trunk of one of the fossil 
 trees with spotted stems, called Sigillaria; and' so 
 proved that this curious pitted stone is a piece of fossil 
 root, or rather underground stem, like that which we 
 found in the primrose, and that the little pits or 
 dents in it are scars where the rootlets once were 
 given off. 
 
 Whole masses of these root-stems, with ribbon-like 
 roots lying scattered near them, are found buried in 
 the layer of clay called the underclay which makes the 
 floor of the coal, and they prove to us that this under- 
 clay must have been once the ground in which the 
 roots of the coal-plants grew. You will feel still more 
 sure of this when you find that there is not only one 
 straight gallery of coal, but that galleries branch out 
 right and left, and that everywhere you find the coal 
 lying like a sandwich between the floor and the ro.of, 
 showing that, quite a large piece of country must be 
 covered by these remains of plants all rooted in the 
 underclay. 
 
 But how about the coal itself? It seems likely, 
 when we find roots below and leaves and stems above, 
 that the middle is made of plants, but can we prove 
 it? We shall see presently that it has been so crushed 
 and altered by being buried deep in the ground that 
 the traces of leaves have almost been destroyed, though 
 people who are used to examining with the miscro- 
 scope, can see the crushed remains of plants in thin 
 slices of coal. 
 
 But fortunately for us, perfect .pieces of plants have 
 
!8o THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 been preserved even in the coal-bed itself. Do you 
 remember our learning in Lecture IV that water 
 with lime in it petrifies things, that is, leaves car- 
 bonate of lime to fill up grain by grain the fibres 
 of an animal or plant as the living matter decays, 
 and so keeps an exact representation of the ob- 
 ject? 
 
 Now, it so happens that in a coal-bed at South 
 Ouram, near Halifax, in Canada, as well as in some 
 other places, carbonate of lime trickled in before the 
 plants were turned to coal, and made some round nod- 
 ules in the plant-bed, which look like cannon-balls. 
 Afterward, when all the rest of the bed was turned into 
 coal, these round balls remained crystallized, and by 
 cutting thin transparent slices across the nodule we 
 can distinctly see the leaves and stems and curious 
 little round bodies which make up the coal. Several 
 such sections may be seen at the British Museum, and 
 when we compare these fragments of plants with those 
 which we find above and below the coal-bed, we find 
 that they agree,, thus proving that coal is made of 
 plants, and of those plants whose roots grew in the 
 clay floor, while their heads reached up far above 
 where the roof now is. 
 
 The next question is, what kind of plants were 
 these? Have we anything like them living in the 
 world now? You might perhaps think that it would 
 be impossible to decide this question from mere petri- 
 fied pieces of plants. But many men have spent their 
 whole lives in deciphering all the fragments that could 
 be found, and though the section given in Fig. 51 
 may look to you quite incomprehensible, yet a botanist 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 
 
 181 
 
 can read it as we read a book. For example, at S 
 and L, where stems are cut across, he can learn ex- 
 actly how they were built up inside, and compare 
 
 FIG. 51. Contents of a coal-ball. (Carruthers.)* S, Stem of 
 Sigillaria cut across. Z, Stem of Lepidodendron cut across. 
 Z', Stem of Lepidodendron cut lengthways. /, Cone of 
 Lepidodendron (Lepidostrobus) cut across. C, Stem of Cala- 
 mite cut across, c, c, c, Fruit of Calamite lengthways and 
 across, f, Stem of a fern with fragments of fern-leaves 
 scattered round it. The small round dots scattered here 
 and there are the larger spores which have fallen out of the 
 fruit-cones. 
 
 * I am much indebted to Mr. Carruthers, of the British 
 Museum, for allowing me to copy this figure from his original 
 diagram of a coal-ball, and also for giving me much valuable 
 assistance. 
 
182 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 them with the stems of living plants, while the fruits 
 c c and the little round spores lying near them, tell 
 him their history as well as if he had gathered them 
 from the tree. In this way we have learned to know 
 very fairly what the plants of the coal were like, and 
 
 you will be surprised 
 when I tell you that the 
 huge trees of the coal- 
 forests, of which we 
 sometimes find trunks 
 in the coal-mines from 
 ten to fifty feet long, are 
 only represented on the 
 earth now by small in- 
 significant plants, scarce- 
 ly ever more than two 
 feet, arid often not many 
 inches high. 
 
 Have you ever seen 
 the little club-moss 
 or Lycopodium which 
 grows in bogs, swamps, 
 and moist woods near- 
 ly all over the United States, from Lake Superior 
 to Virginia and Carolina, on heaths and mountains? 
 At the end of each of its branches it bears a cone made 
 of scaly leaves ; and fixed to the inside of each of these 
 leaves is a case called a sporangium, full of little spores 
 or moss-seeds, as we may call them, though they are 
 not exactly like true seeds. In one of these club- 
 mosses called Selaginella, the cases B near the bottom 
 of the cone contain large spores b, while those near the 
 
 FIG. 52. Selaginella selaginoides . 
 Species of club-moss bearing 
 two kinds of spores. 
 
FIG. 53. A FOREST OF THE COAL PERIOD. 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. ^3 
 
 top, A, contain a powdery dust a. These spores are 
 full of resin, and they are collected on the Continent 
 for making artificial lightning in the theatres, because 
 they flare when lighted. 
 
 Now this little Selaginella is of all living plants the 
 one most like some of the gigantic trees of the coal- 
 forests. If you look at this picture of a coal-for- 
 est (Fig. 53), you will find it difficult perhaps to 
 believe that those great trees, with diamond mark- 
 ings all up the trunk, hanging over from the right 
 to the left of the picture, and covering all the top 
 with their boughs, could be in any way relations of 
 the little Selaginella ; yet we find branches of them 
 in the beds above the coal, bearing cones larger 
 but just like Selaginella cones ; and what is most 
 curious, the spores in these cones are exactly the 
 same kind and not any larger than those of the club- 
 moss. 
 
 These trees are called by botanists Lepidodendrons, 
 or scaly trees; there are numbers of them in all coal- 
 mines, and one trunk has been found 49 feet long. 
 Their branches were divided in a curious forked man- 
 ner and bore cones at the ends. The spores which 
 fell from these cones are found flattened in the coal, 
 and they may be seen scattered about in the coal-ball 
 
 (Fig. 51). 
 
 Another famous tree which grew in the coal-forests 
 was the one whose roots we found in the floor or 
 under clay of the coal. It has been called Sigillaria, 
 because it has marks like seals (sigillum, a seal) all 
 up the trunk, due to the scars left by the leaves when 
 they fell from the tree. You will see the Sigillarias 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 on the left-hand side of the coal-forest picture, having 
 those curious tufts of leaves springing out of them at 
 
 the top. Their stems 
 make up a great deal oi 
 the coal, and the bark 
 of their trunks is often 
 found in the clays above, 
 squeezed flat in lengths 
 of 30, 60, or 70 feet. 
 Sometimes, instead of 
 being flat the bark is 
 still in the shape of a 
 trunk, and the interior is 
 filled with sand; and 
 then the trunk is very 
 heavy, and if the miners 
 do not prop the roof up 
 well it falls down , and 
 kills those beneath it. 
 Stigmaria (Fig. 50, page 
 
 178) is the root of the 
 FIG. 54. Equisetum or horsetail. . ., , . . 
 
 Sigillana, and is found 
 
 in the clays below the coal. Botanists are not yet 
 quite certain about the seed-cases of this tree, but Mr. 
 Carruthers believes that they grew inside the base of 
 the leaves, as they do in the quillwort, a small plant 
 which grows at the bottom of mountain lakes in Eu- 
 rope and America. 
 
 But what is that curious reed-like stem we found 
 in the piece of shale (see Fig. 49) ? That stem is very 
 important, for it belonged to a plant called a Calamite, 
 which, as we shall see presently, helped to sift the 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 185 
 
 earth away from the coal and keep it pure. This plant 
 was a near relation of the " horsetail," or Equisetum, 
 which grows in our marshes; only, just as in the case 
 of the other trees, it was enormously larger, being 
 often 20 feet high, whereas the little Equisetum, Fig. 
 54, is seldom more than a foot, and never more than 6 
 feet high in North America, though in tropical South 
 America they are much higher. Still, if you have ever 
 gathered " horsetails," you will see at once that those 
 trees in the foreground of the picture (Fig. 53), with 
 leaves arranged in stars round the branches, are only 
 larger copies of the little marsh-plant; and the 
 seed-vessels of the two plants are almost exactly the 
 same. 
 
 These great trees, the Lepidodendrons, the Sigil- 
 larias, and the Calamites, together with large tree- 
 ferns and 'smaller ferns, are the chief plants that we 
 know of in the coal-forests. It seems very strange at 
 first that they should have been so large when their 
 descendants are now so small, but if you look at our 
 chief plants and trees now, you will find that nearly 
 all of them bear flowers, and this is a great advantage 
 to them, because it tempts the insects to bring them 
 the pollen-dust, as we saw in the last lecture. 
 
 Now the Lepidodendrons and their companions 
 had no true flowers, but only these seed-cases which 
 we have mentioned; but as there were no flowering 
 plants in their time, and they had the ground all to 
 themselves, they grew fine and large. By-and-by, 
 however, when the flowering plants came in, these be- 
 gan to crowd out the old giants of the coal-forests, so 
 that they dwindled and dwindled from century to cen- 
 
1 86 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 tury till their great-great-grandchildren, thousands of 
 generations after, only lift up their tiny heads in 
 marshes and on heaths, and tell us that they were big 
 once upon a time. 
 
 And indeed they . must have been magnificent in 
 those olden days, when they grew ihick and tall in 
 the lonely marches where plants and trees were the 
 chief inhabitants. We find no traces in the clay-beds 
 of the coal to lead us to suppose that men lived in 
 those days, nor lions, nor tigers, nor even birds to fly 
 among the trees; but these grand forests were almost 
 silent, except when a huge animal something like a 
 gigantic newt or frog went croaking through the 
 marsh, or a kind of grasshopper chirruped on the land. 
 But these forms of life were few and far between, com- 
 pared to the huge trees and tangled masses of ferns 
 and reeds which covered the whole ground, or were re- 
 flected in the bosom of the large pools and lakes round 
 about which they grew. 
 
 And now, if you have some idea of the plants and 
 trees of the coal, it is time to ask how these plants 
 became buried in the earth and made pure coal, in- 
 stead of decaying away and leaving behind only a 
 mixture of earth and leaves? 
 
 To answer this question, I must ask you to take 
 another journey with me to Norfolk in Virginia, be- 
 cause there we can see a state of things something 
 like the marshes of the coal-forests. All round about 
 Norfolk the land is low, flat, and marshy, and to the 
 south of the town, stretching far away into North 
 Carolina, is a large, desolate swamp, no less than forty 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 187 
 
 miles long and twenty-five broad. The whole place is 
 one enormous quagmire, overgrown with water-plants 
 and trees. The soil is as black as ink from the old, 
 dead leaves, grasses, roots, and stems which lie in it; 
 and so soft, that everything would sink into it, if it 
 were not for the matted roots of the mosses, ferns, 
 and other plants which bind it together. You may 
 dig down for ten or fifteen feet, and find nothing 
 but peat made of the remains of plants which have 
 lived and died there in succession for ages and ages, 
 while the black trunks of the fallen trees lie here 
 and there, gradually being covered up by the dead 
 plants. 
 
 The whole place is so still, gloomy, and desolate, 
 that it goes by the name of the " Great Dismal 
 Swamp," and you see we have here what might well 
 be the beginning of a bed of coal; for we know that 
 peat when dried becomes firm and makes an excellent 
 fire, and that if it were pressed till it was hard and 
 solid it would not be unlike coal. If, then, we can 
 explain how this peaty bed has been kept pure from 
 earth, we shall be able to understand how a coal-bed 
 may have been formed, even though the plants and 
 trees which grow in this swamp are different from 
 those which grew in the coal-forests. 
 
 The explanation is not difficult; streams flow con- 
 stantly, or rather ooze into the Great Dismal Swamp 
 from the land that lies to the west, but instead of 
 bringing mud in with them as rivers bring to the sea, 
 they bring only clear, pure water, because, as they 
 filter for miles through the dense jungle of reeds, 
 ferns, and shrubs which grow round the marsh, all 
 
1 88 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 the earth is sifted out and left behind. In this way 
 the spongy mass of dead plants remains free from 
 earthy grains, while the water and the shade of the 
 thick forest of trees prevent the leaves, stems, etc., 
 from being decomposed by the air and sun. And 
 so year after year as the plants die they leave their 
 remains for other plants to take root in, and the peaty 
 mass grows thicker and thicker, while tall cedar trees 
 and evergreens live and die in these vast, swampy for- 
 ests, and being in loose ground are easily blown down 
 by the wind, and leave their trunks to be covered up 
 by the growing moss and weeds. 
 
 Now we know that there were plenty of ferns and 
 of large Calamites growing thickly together in the 
 coal-forests, for we find their remains everywhere in 
 the clay, so we can easily picture to ourselves how the 
 dense jungle formed by these plants would fringe the 
 coal-swamp, as the present plants do the Great Dis- 
 mal Swamp, and would keep out all earthy matter, so 
 that year after year the plants would die and form 
 a thick bed of peat, afterward to become coal. 
 
 The next thing we have to account for is the bed 
 of shale or hardened clay covering over the coal. Now 
 we know that from time to time land has gone slowly 
 up and down on our globe so as in some places to 
 carry the dry ground under the sea, and in others to 
 raise the sea-bed above the water. Let us suppose, 
 then, that the Great Dismal Swamp was gradually to 
 sink down so that the sea washed over it and killed 
 the reeds and shrubs. Then the streams from the 
 west would not be sifted any longer but would bring 
 down mud, and leave it, as in the delta of the Nile or 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 
 
 189 
 
 Mississippi, to make a layer over the dead plants. 
 You will easily understand that this mud would have 
 many pieces of dead trees and plants in it, which were 
 stifled and died as it covered them over; and thus the 
 remains would be preserved like those which we find 
 now in the roof of the coal-galleries. 
 
 But still there are the thick sandstones in the coal- 
 mine to be explained. How did they come there? 
 To explain them, we must suppose that the ground 
 went on sinking till the sea covered the whole place 
 where once the swamp had been, and then sea-sand 
 would be thrown down over the clay and gradually 
 pressed down by the weight of new sand above, till it 
 formed solid sandstone and our coal-bed became buried 
 deeper and deeper in the earth. 
 
 At last, after long ages, when the thick mass of 
 sandstones above the bed b (Fig. 48, p. 177) had been 
 laid down, the sinking must have stopped and the land 
 have risen a little, so that the sea was driven back; 
 and then the rivers would bring down earth again and 
 make another clay-bed. Then a new forest would 
 spring up, the ferns, Calamites, Lepidodendrons, and 
 Sigillarias would gradually form another jungle, and 
 many hundreds of feet above the buried coal-bed b, a 
 second bed of peat and vegetable matter would begin 
 to accumulate to form the coal-bed a. 
 
 Such is the history of how the coal which we now 
 dig out of the depths of the earth once grew as beauti- 
 ful plants on the surface. We cannot tell exactly all 
 the ground over which these forests grew, because 
 some of the coal they made has been carried away 
 
190 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 since by rivers and cut down by the waves of the sea, 
 but we can say that wherever there is coal now, there 
 they must have been. 
 
 But what is it that has changed these beds of dead 
 plants into hard, stony coal? In the first place you 
 must remember they have been pressed down under 
 an enormous weight of rocks above them. We can 
 learn something about this even from our common 
 lead pencils. At one time the graphite or pure carbon, 
 of which the blacklead (as we wrongly call it) of our 
 pencils is made, was dug solid out of the earth. But 
 so much has now been used that they are obliged 
 to collect the graphite dust, and press it under a heavy 
 weight, and this makes such solid pieces that they can 
 cut them into leads for ordinary cedar pencils. 
 
 Now the pressure which we can exert by machinery 
 is absolutely nothing compared to the weight of all 
 those hundreds of feet of solid rock which lie over the 
 coal-beds, and which has pressed them down for thou- 
 sands and perhaps millions of years; and besides this, 
 we know that parts of the inside of the earth are very 
 hot, and many of the rocks in which coal is found are 
 altered by heat. So we can picture to ourselves that 
 the coal was not only squeezed into a solid mass, but 
 often much of the oil and gas which were in the leaves 
 of the plants was driven out by heat, and the whole 
 baked, as it were, into one substance. The difference 
 between coal which flames and coal which burns only 
 with a red heat, is chiefly that one has been baked 
 and crushed more than the other. Coal which flames 
 has still got in it the tar and the gas and the oils 
 which the plant stored up in i{s leaves, and these when 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. JQJ 
 
 they escape again give back the sunbeams in a bright 
 flame. The hard stone coal, such as anthracite, on the 
 contrary, has lost a great part of these oils, and only 
 carbon remains, which seizes hold of the oxygen of the 
 air and burns without flame. Coke is pure carbon, 
 which we make artificially by driving out the oils and 
 gases from coal, and the gas we burn is part of what 
 is driven out. 
 
 We can easily make coal-gas here in this room. I 
 have brought a tobacco-pipe, the bowl of which is 
 filled with a little powdered coal, and the broad end 
 cemented up with Stourbridge clay. When we place 
 this bowl over a spirit-lamp and make it very hot, the 
 gas is driven out at the narrow end of the pipe and 
 lights easily (see Fig. 55). This is the way all our gas 
 
 FIG. 55. 
 
 is made, only that furnaces are used to bake the coal 
 in, and the gas is passed into large reservoirs till it is 
 wanted for use. 
 
 You will find it difficult at first to understand how 
 coal can be so full of oil and tar and gases, until you 
 have tried to think over how much of all these there is 
 
10,2 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 in plants, and especially in seeds think of the oils of 
 almonds, of lavender, of cloves, and of caraways; and 
 the oils of turpentine which we get from the pines, 
 and out of which tar is made. When you remember 
 these and many more, and also how the seeds of the 
 club-moss now are largely charged with oil, you will 
 easily imagine that the large masses of coal-plants 
 which have been pressed together and broken and 
 crushed, would give out a great deal of oil which, 
 when made very hot, rises up as gas. You may often 
 yourself see tar oozing out of the lumps of soft coal 
 in a fire, and making little black bubbles which burst 
 and burn. It is from this tar that James Young first 
 made paraffin oil, and the spirit benzone comes from 
 the same source. 
 
 In the ages that have passed since the vegetation 
 that now forms our coal was deposited its slow decom- 
 position, perhaps under conditions of great heat and 
 pressure, has resulted in vast natural accumulations of 
 this coal-oil and also of coal-gas in the interior of the 
 earth. 
 
 The great storehouses that contain these valu- 
 able products of the ancient coal-forests are only to 
 be found where the bending of the strata makes great 
 caverns. The rocks and earth above the rocks con- 
 stituting the domes over the great natural cisterns or 
 tanks often press, as may well be supposed, with enor- 
 mous weight upon the inclosed coal-oil or gas. 
 
 When these oil wells, as they are called, were first 
 discovered, and before any efficient means of restrain- 
 ing the flow had been contrived, the oil frequently 
 burst forth, and, carrying away the barriers erected 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 
 
 193 
 
 against it, overflowed the country, tainting the air, be- 
 fouling the soil, and poisoning all the streams in its 
 neighbourhood. 
 
 
 FIG. 56. Spouting oil well. 
 
 In the great Russian 
 field of Baku the flow of 
 coal-oil is still more diffi- 
 cult to control than in 
 our own country. The 
 heaviest derricks have 
 been swept away like 
 straws, well casings blown high in air, and the- oil 
 in columns as thick as a man's body has spouted 
 14 
 
 
194 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 up for days fully two hundred feet above the surface 
 of the earth, forming, as it flowed toward the sea, rivers 
 of oil many miles in length. The force of coal-gas es- 
 caping from the coal-gas wells in Indiana, Pennsyl- 
 vania, and Ohio, has been known to blow out drills of 
 nearly a ton in weight, and to burst the doubly-riveted 
 tanks and heavy iron mains which were used in at- 
 tempting to confine it, so that it was for a time thought 
 that nothing could be contrived that would withstand 
 its pressure. The roar of the escaping gas could be 
 heard for miles, and schools had to be closed and 
 all business suspended in the vicinity of the wells. 
 If the gas was set on fire, as sometimes happened, 
 the roaring was increased to such an extent that 
 workmen who were obliged to remain in its neigh- 
 bourhood were made deaf for life, and the light from 
 the well could in some cases be seen for forty miles 
 around. 
 
 Until the last few years, however, the very exist- 
 ence of most of these great reservoirs of potential en- 
 ergy was unsuspected, and although coal-oil skimmed 
 from the surface of pools in oil-bearing localities was 
 sometimes employed to a limited extent, mostly as a 
 medicine, it is only of late years it has been found in 
 quantities sufficient to allow its extended use. Yet so 
 rapid has its applications to uncounted domestic, me- 
 chanical, and industrial purposes advanced that it may 
 already justly claim to materially modify our progress 
 in the arts and sciences. 
 
 Not only is mineral oil now used to cook our 
 food, to light our houses, and to drive our engines, but 
 the manufacture of a great number of articles and of 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 195 
 
 widely used substances, such as glass and iron, has 
 not only been greatly improved, but made much 
 cheaper by its use. 
 
 From benzone, again, we get a liquid called aniline, 
 from which are made so many of our beautiful dyes 
 mauve, magenta, and violet; and what is still more 
 curious, the bitter almonds, pear-drops, and many 
 other candies which children like so w r ell, are actually 
 flavoured by essences which come out of coal-tar, and 
 
 FIG. 57. Making artificial albumen. 
 
 sugar itself is many times less sweet than saccharine, 
 which has the same origin. Thus from coal we get not 
 only nearly all our heat and our light, but beautiful 
 colours, sweets, and pleasant flavours. We spoke just 
 now of the plants of the coal as being without beautiful 
 flowers, and yet we see that long, long after their death 
 they give us lovely colours and tints as beautiful as any 
 in flower-world now. 
 
I9 6 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 But without doubt what promises to be the most 
 important as well as the most useful product of coal-tar 
 is albumen, which Professor Lilienfeld has succeeded 
 in obtaining from it. Albumen, with starchy, sugary, 
 and acid substances, constitutes the basis of both ani- 
 mal and vegetable foods. An ounce of pure albumen 
 has twenty times the nourishing power of the same 
 weight of meat. It will nearly equal in this respect 
 a peck of potatoes, besides having the quality of not 
 interfering with digestion even though eaten exclu- 
 sively for months at a time. 
 
 Wonderful as it may appear to us that nauseous, 
 black, ill-smelling coal-tar can be made to yield de- 
 licious and delicate essences, such as caffein, which is 
 the essential principle of tea and coffee, artificial vanil- 
 lin, exactly equivalent to the crystallized product of 
 the vanilla bean, and the essence of bitter almonds, 
 yet when we find that it can also be transformed into 
 the most wholesome and nutritious of palatable food, 
 this seems little short of miraculous, and to call for 
 the exercise of a power fully as wonderful as any as.- 
 cribed to magician or fairy, almost in appearance as 
 great as that which could turn stones into bread. 
 
 Think, then, how much we owe to these plants 
 which lived and died so long ago! If they had been 
 able to reason, perhaps they might have said that 
 they did not seem of much use in the world. They 
 had no pretty flowers, and there was no one to ad- 
 'mire their beautiful green foliage except a few croak- 
 ing reptiles, and little crickets and grasshoppers; and 
 they lived and died all on one spot, generation after 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 197 
 
 generation, without seeming to do much good to any- 
 thing or anybody. Then they were covered up and 
 put out of sight, and down in the dark earth they 
 were pressed all out of shape and lost their beauty 
 and became only black, hard coal. There they^ 
 lay for centuries and centuries, and thousands and 
 thousands of years, and still no one seemed to want 
 them. 
 
 At last, one day, long, long after man had been 
 living on the earth, and had been burning wood for 
 fires, and so gradually using up the trees in the forests, 
 it was discovered that this black stone would burn, 
 and from that time coal has been becoming every day 
 more and more useful. Without it not only should 
 we have been without warmth in our houses, or light 
 in our streets when the stock of forest-wood was used 
 up; but we could never have melted large quantities 
 of iron-stone and extracted iron. We have proof of 
 this in the county of Sussex, in England. The whole 
 country is full of ironstone. Iron-foundries were at 
 work there as long as there was wood enough to sup- 
 ply them, but gradually the works fell into disuse, and 
 the last furnace was put out in the year 1809. So 
 now, because there is no coal in Sussex, the iron) 
 lies idle; while in the North, where the ironstone is 
 near the coal-mines, hundreds of tons are melted out 
 every day. 
 
 Again, without coal we could have had no engines 
 of any kind, and consequently no large manufactories 
 of cotton goods, linen goods, or cutlery. In fact, al- 
 most everything we use could only have been made 
 with difficulty and in small quantities; and even if we 
 
igg THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 could have made them it would have been impossible 
 to have sent them so quickly all over the world with- 
 out coal, for we could have had no railways or steam- 
 ships, but must have carried all goods along canals, 
 and by slow sailing vessels. We ourselves must have 
 taken days to perform journeys now made in a few 
 hours, and months to reach other countries across 
 the sea. 
 
 In consequence of this we should have remained a 
 very poor people. Without manufactories and indus- 
 tries we should have had to live chiefly by tilling the 
 ground, and everyone being obliged to toil for their 
 daily bread, there would have been much less time 
 or opportunity for anyone to study science, or litera- 
 ture, or history, or to provide themselves with com- 
 forts and refinements of life. 
 
 All this then, those plants and trees of the far-off 
 ages, which seemed to lead such useless lives, have 
 done and are doing for us. There are many people 
 in the world who complain that life is dull, that they 
 do not see the use of it, and that there seems no work 
 specially for them to do. I would advise such people, 
 whether they are grown up or little children, to read 
 the story of the plants which form the coal. These 
 saw no results during their own short existences, they 
 only lived and enjoyed the bright sunshine, and did 
 their work, and were content. And now thousands, 
 probably millions, of years after they lived and died, 
 civilization owes her progress, and we much of our 
 happiness and comfort, to the sunbeams which those 
 plants wove into their lives. 
 
 They burst forth again in our fires, in our brilliant 
 
A PIECE OF COAL. 199 
 
 lights, and in our engines, and do the greater part of 
 our work; teaching us 
 
 "That nothing walks with aimless feet, 
 That not one life shall be destroyed, 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God hath made the pile complete." 
 
 In Memoriam, liv. 
 
2oO THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 
 BEES IN THE HIVE. 
 
 TTT 
 
 I AM going to ask you to visit with me to-day one 
 of the most wonderful cities in the world. It is a 
 city with no human beings in it, and yet it is densely 
 
BEES IN THE HIVE. 2OI 
 
 populated, for such a city may contain from twenty 
 thousand to sixty thousand inhabitants. In it you 
 will find streets, but no pavements, for the inhabitants 
 walk along the walls of the houses; while in the 
 houses you will see no windows, for each house just 
 fits its owner, and the door is the only opening in 
 it. Though made without hands these houses are 
 most evenly and regularly built in tiers one above the 
 other ; and here and there a few royal palaces, larger 
 and more spacious than the rest, catch the eye con- 
 spicuously as they stand out at the corners of the 
 streets. 
 
 Some of the ordinary houses are used to live in, 
 while others serve as storehouses where food is laid up 
 in the summer to feed the inhabitants during the 
 winter, when they are not allowed to go outside the 
 walls. Not that the gates are ever shut : that is not 
 necessary, for in this wonderful city each citizen fol- 
 lows the laws ; going out when it is time to go out, 
 coming home at proper hours, and staying at home 
 when it is his or her duty. And in the winter, when 
 it is very cold outside, the inhabitants, having no fires, 
 keep themselves warm within the city by clustering 
 together, and never venturing out of doors. 
 
 One single queen reigns over the whole of this 
 numerous population, and you might perhaps fancy 
 that, having so many subjects to work for her and 
 wait upon her, she would do nothing but amuse her- 
 self. On the contrary, she too obeys the laws laid 
 down for her guidance, and never, except on one or 
 two state occasions, goes out of the city, but works as 
 hard as the rest in performing her own royal duties. 
 
2O2 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 From sunrise to sunset, whenever the weather is 
 fine, all is life, activity, and bustle in this busy city. 
 Though the gates are so narrow that two inhabitants 
 can only just pass each other on their way through 
 them, yet thousands go in and out every hour of the 
 day ; some bringing in materials to build new houses, 
 others food and provisions to store up for the winter ; 
 and while all appears confusion and disorder among 
 this rapidly moving throng, yet in reality each has her 
 own work to do, and perfect order reigns over the 
 whole. 
 
 Even if you did not already know from the title of- 
 the lecture what city this is that I am describing, you 
 would no doubt guess that it is a beehive. For where 
 in the whole world, except indeed upon an ant-hill, can 
 we find so busy, so industrious, or so orderly a com- 
 munity as among the bees? More than a hundred 
 years ago, a blind naturalist, Francois Huber, set him- 
 self to study the habits of these wonderful insects, 
 and with the help of his wife and an intelligent man- 
 servant managed to learn most of their secrets. Before 
 his time all naturalists had failed in watching bees, 
 because if they put them in hives with glass windows, 
 the bees, not liking the light, closed up the windows 
 with cement before they began to work. But Huber 
 invented a hive which he could open and close at will, 
 putting a glass hive inside it, and by this means he 
 was able to surprise the bees at their work. Thanks 
 to his studies, and to those of other naturalists who 
 have followed in his steps, we now know almost as 
 much about the home of bees as we do about our own ; 
 and if we follow out to-day the building of a bee city 
 
BEES IN THE HIVE. 203 
 
 and the life of its inhabitants, I think you will ac- 
 knowledge that they are a wonderful community, and 
 that it is a great compliment to anyone to say that he 
 or she is "as busy as a bee." 
 
 * In order to begin at the beginning of the story, 
 let us suppose that we go into a country garden 
 one fine morning in May when the sun is shining 
 brightly overhead, and that we see hanging from the 
 bough of an old apple-tree a black object which looks 
 very much like a large plum-pudding. On approach- 
 ing it, however, we see that it is a large cluster or 
 swarm of bees clinging to each other by their legs; 
 each bee with its two fore-legs clinging to the two 
 hinder legs of the one above it. In this way as many 
 as 20,000 bees may be clinging together, and yet they 
 hang so freely that a bee, even from quite the centre 
 of the swarm, can disengage herself from her neigh- 
 bours and pass through to the outside of the cluster 
 whenever she wishes. 
 
 If these bees were left to themselves, they would 
 find a home after, a time in a hollow tree, or under 
 the roof of a house, or in some other cavity, and begin 
 to build their honeycomb there. But as we do not 
 wish to lose their honey we will bring a hive, and, 
 holding it under the swarm, shake the bough gently 
 so that the bees fall into it, and cling to the sides 
 as we turn it over on a piece of clean linen, on the 
 stand where the hive is to be. 
 
 And now let us suppose that we are able to watch 
 what is going on in the hive. Before five minutes 
 are over the industrious little insects have begun to 
 
204 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 disperse and to make arrangements in their new home. 
 A number (perhaps about two thousand) of large, 
 lumbering bees of a darker colour than the rest, will, 
 it is true, wander aimlessly about the hive, and wait 
 for the others to feed them and house them ; but these 
 are the drones, or male bees (3, Fig. 58), who never 
 do any work except during one or two days in their 
 whole lives. But the smaller working bees (i, Fig. 58) 
 begin to be busy at once. Some fly off in search of 
 
 FIG. 58. i. Worker bee. 2. Queen-bee. 3. Drone or male bee. 
 
 honey. Others walk carefully all round the inside of 
 the hive to see if there are any cracks in it; and if 
 there are, they go off to the horse-chestnut trees, 
 poplars, hollyhocks, or other plants which have sticky 
 buds, and gather a kind of gum called " propolis," 
 with which they cement the cracks and make them 
 air-tight. Others again, cluster round one bee (2, Fig. 
 58) blacker than the rest and having a longer body 
 
BEES IN THE HIVE. 2O5 
 
 and shorter wings ; for this is the queen-bee, the moth- 
 er of the hive, and she must be watched and tended. 
 
 But the largest number begin to hang in a cluster 
 from the roof just as they did from the bough of the 
 apple-tree. What are they doing there ? Watch for a 
 little while and you will soon see one bee come out 
 from among its companions and settle on the top of 
 the inside of the hive, turning herself round and round, 
 so as to push the other bees back, and to make a space 
 in which she can work. Then she will begin to pick 
 at the under part of her body with her fore-legs, and 
 will bring a scale of wax from a curious sort of pocket 
 under her abdomen. Holding this wax in her claws, 
 she will bite it with her hard, pointed upper jaws, 
 which move to and fro sideways like a pair of pincers, 
 then, moistening it with her tongue into a kind of 
 paste, she will draw it out like a ribbon and plaster it 
 on the top of the hive. 
 
 After that she will take another piece ; for she has 
 eight of these little wax-pockets, and she will go on 
 till they are all exhausted. Then she will fly away 
 out of the hive, leaving a small wax lump on the hive 
 ceiling or on the bar stretched across it ; then her place 
 will be taken by another bee who will go through 
 the same manoeuvres. This bee will be followed by 
 another, and another, till a large wall of wax has 
 been built, hanging from the bar of the hive as in 
 Fig- 59> on ly that it will not yet have cells fashioned 
 in it. 
 
 Meanwhile the bees which have been gathering 
 honey out of doors begin to come back laden. But 
 they cannot store their honey, for there are no cells 
 
206 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 made yet to put it in; neither can they build combs 
 with the rest, for they have no wax in their wax- 
 pockets. So they just go and hang quietly on to the 
 other bees, and there they remain for twenty-four 
 hours, during which time they digest the honey they 
 
 have gathered, and part of 
 
 it forms wax and oozes 
 out from the scales under 
 their body. Then they 
 are prepared to join the 
 
 others at work and plaster 
 wax on to the hive. 
 
 And now, as soon as a 
 rough lump of wax is 
 ready, another set of bees 
 FIG. 59. Plate of wax with bases come to do their work, 
 of cells, hanging from the These are called the nms _ 
 bar of a hive. -71 ^i 
 
 ing bees, because they pre- 
 pare the cells and feed the young ones. One of these 
 bees, standing on the roof of the hive, begins to force 
 her head into the wax, biting with her jaws and moving 
 her head to and fro. Soon she has made the begin- 
 ning of a round hollow, and then she passes on to 
 make another, while a second bee takes her place and 
 enlarges the first one. As many as twenty bees will 
 be employed in this way, one after another, upon each 
 hole before it is large enough for the base of a cell. 
 
 Meanwhile another set of nursing bees have been 
 working just in the same way on the other side of the 
 wax, and so a series of hollows are made back to back 
 all over the comb. Then the bees form the walls of 
 the cells, and soon a number of six-sided tubes, about 
 
BEES IN THE HIVE. 
 
 207 
 
 half an inch deep, stand all along each side of the 
 comb ready to receive honey or bee-eggs. 
 
 You can see the shape of these cells in c, d, Fig. 60, 
 and notice how closely they fit into each other. Even 
 the ends are so shaped that, as they lie back to back, 
 the bottom of one cell (B, Fig. 60) fits into the space 
 between the ends of three cells meeting it from the 
 opposite side (A, Fig. 60), while they fit into the spaces 
 around it. Upon this plan the clever little bees fill 
 every atom of space, use the least possible quantity of 
 
 FIG. 60. B shows in the centre the closed end of a cell which 
 would fit into the space in the centre of the three closed 
 cells in A, while the ends of these three would fit into the 
 spaces in B. c, d, side-view of cells. 
 
 wax, and make the cells lie so closely together that 
 the whole comb is kept warm when the young bees 
 are in it. 
 
 There are some kinds of bees who do not live in 
 hives, but each one builds a home of its own. These 
 bees such as the upholsterer bee, which digs a hole in 
 the earth and lines it with flowers and leaves, and the 
 mason bee, which builds in walls do not make six- 
 sided cells, but round ones, for room is no object to 
 them. But nature has gradually taught the little hive- 
 bee to build its cells more and more closely, till they 
 
208 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 fit perfectly within each other. If you make a number 
 of round holes close together in a soft substance, and 
 then squeeze the substance evenly from all sides, the 
 rounds will gradually take a. six-sided form, showing 
 that this is the closest shape into which they can be 
 compressed. Although the bee does not know this, 
 yet as she gnaws away every bit of wax that can be 
 spared she brings the holes into this shape. 
 
 As soon as one comb is finished, the bees begin 
 another by the side of it, leaving a narrow lane be- 
 tween, just broad enough for two bees to pass back to 
 back as they crawl along, and so the work goes on 
 till the hive is full of combs. 
 
 As soon, however, as a length of about five or six 
 inches of the first comb has been made into cells, 
 the bees which are bringing home honey no longer 
 hang to make it into wax, but begin to store it in the 
 cells. We all know where the bees go to fetch their 
 honey, and how, when a bee settles on a flower, she 
 thrusts into it her small tongue-like proboscis, which 
 is really a lengthened under-lip, and sucks out the 
 drop of honey. This she swallows, passing it down 
 her throat into a honey-bag or first stomach, which 
 lies between her throat and her real stomach, and 
 when she gets back to the hive she can empty this bag 
 and pass the honey back through her mouth again 
 into the honey-cells. 
 
 But if you watch bees carefully, especially in the 
 spring-time, you will find that they carry off something 
 else besides honey. Early in the morning, when the 
 dew is on the ground, or later in the day, in moist, 
 shady places, you may see a bee rubbing itself against 
 
BEES IN THE HIVE. 209 
 
 a flower, or biting those bags of yellow dust or pollen 
 which we mentioned in Lecture VII. When she has 
 covered herself with pollen, she wall brush it off with 
 her feet, and, bringing it to her mouth, she will moist- 
 en and roll it into a little ball, and then pass it back 
 from the first pair of legs to the second and so to the 
 third or hinder pair. Here she will pack it into a 
 little hairy groove called a " basket " in the joint of 
 one of the hind legs, where you may see it, looking 
 like a swelled joint, as she hovers among the flowers. 
 She often fills both hind legs in this way, and when 
 she arrives back at the hive the nursing bees take the 
 lumps from her, and eat it themselves, or mix it with 
 honey to feed the young bees ; or, when they have 
 any to spare, store it away in old honey-cells to be 
 used by-and-by. This is the dark, bitter stuff called 
 " bee-bread " which you often find in a honeycomb, 
 especially in a comb which has been filled late in the 
 summer. 
 
 When the bee has been relieved of the bee-bread 
 she goes off to one of the clean cells in the new comb, 
 and, standing on the edge, throws up the honey from 
 the honey-bag into the cell. One cell will hold the 
 contents of many honey-bags, and so the busy little 
 workers have to work all day filling cell after cell, in 
 which the honey lies uncovered, being too thick and 
 sticky to flow out, and is used for daily food unless 
 there is any to spare, and then they close up the cells 
 with wax to keep for the winter. 
 
 Meanwhile, a day or two after the bees have settled 
 in the hive, the queen-bee begins to get very restless, 
 15 
 
210 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 She goes outside the hive and hovers about a little 
 while, and then comes in again, and though generally 
 the bees all look very closely after her to keep her 
 indoors, yet now they let her do as she likes. Again 
 she goes out, and again back, and then, at last, she 
 soars up into the air and flies away. But she is not 
 allowed to go alone. All the drones of the hive rise 
 up after her, forming a guard of honour to follow her 
 wherever she goes. 
 
 In about half-an-hour she comes back again, and 
 then the working bees all gather round her, knowing 
 that now she will remain quietly in the hive and 
 spend all her time in laying eggs : for it is the queen- 
 bee who lays all the eggs in the hive. This she 
 begins to do about two days after her flight. There 
 are now many cells ready besides those filled with 
 honey : and, escorted by several bees, the queen-bee 
 goes to one of these, and, putting her head into it, 
 remains there a second as if she were examining 
 whether it would make a good home for the young 
 bee. Then, coming out, she turns round and lays a 
 small, oval, bluish-white egg in the cell. After this 
 she takes no more notice of it, but goes on to the next 
 cell and the next, doing the same thing, and laying 
 eggs in all the empty cells equally on both sides of 
 the comb. She goes on so quickly that she some- 
 times lays as many as 200 eggs in one day. 
 
 Then the work of the nursing bees begins. In two 
 or three days each egg has become a tiny maggot or 
 larva, and the nursing bees put into its cell a mixture 
 of pollen and honey which they have prepared in their 
 own mouths, thus making a kind of sweet bath in 
 
BEES IN THE HIVE. 211 
 
 which the larva lies. In five or six days the larva 
 grows so fat upon this that it nearly fills the cell, and 
 then the bees seal up the mouth of the cell with a thin 
 cover of wax, made of little rings and with a tiny hole 
 in the centre. 
 
 As soon as the larva is covered in, it begins to give 
 out from its under-lip a whitish, silken film, made of 
 two threads of silk glued together, and with this it 
 spins a covering or cocoon all round itself, and so it 
 remains for about ten days more. At last, just twenty- 
 one days after the egg was laid, the young bee is quite 
 perfect, lying in the cell as in Fig. 61, and she begins 
 to eat her way through the cocoon and through the 
 waxen lid, and scrambles out of her cell. Then the 
 nurses come again to her, stroke her wings and feed 
 her for twenty-four hours, and after that she is quite 
 ready to begin work, and flies out to gather honey 
 and pollen like the rest of the workers. 
 
 By this time the number of working bees in the 
 hive is becoming very great, and the storing of honey 
 and pollen-dust goes on very quickly. Even the empty 
 cells which the young bees have left are cleaned out 
 by the nurses and filled with honey ; and this honey is 
 darker than that stored in clean cells, and which we 
 always call " virgin honey " because it is so pure and 
 clear. 
 
 At last, after six weeks, the queen leaves off laying 
 worker-eggs, and begins to lay, in some rather larger 
 cells, eggs from which drones, or male bees, will grow 
 up in about twenty days. Meanwhile the worker-bees 
 have been building on the edge of the cones some 
 very curious cells (q, Fig. 61) which look like thimbles 
 
212 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 hanging with the open side upward, and about every 
 three days the queen stops in laying drone-eggs and 
 goes to put an egg in one of these cells. Notice that 
 she waits three days between each of these peculiar 
 
 layings, because we shall see 
 presently that there is a good 
 reason for her doing so. 
 
 The nursing bees take 
 great care of these eggs, and 
 instead of putting ordinary 
 food into the cell, they fill 
 it with a sweet, pungent jelly, 
 for the larva is to become a 
 princess and a future queen- 
 bee. Curiously enough, it 
 seems to be the peculiar food 
 and the size of the cell which 
 makes the larva grow into a 
 mother-bee which can lay 
 eggs, for if a hive has the 
 61. Brood-comb cut misfortune to lose its queen, 
 open, with the pupae, ,< , , r ,< . 
 
 . they take one of the orcli- 
 
 or young bees,/,/, in 
 
 the cells. The lower nai T worker-larvse and put it 
 into a royal cell and feed it 
 with jelly, and it becomes a 
 queen-bee. As soon as the 
 princess is shut in like the others, she begins to spin 
 her cocoon, but she does n6t quite close it as the other 
 bees do, but leaves a hole at the top. 
 
 At the end of sixteen days after the first royal 
 egg was laid, the eldest princess begins to try to eat 
 her way out of her cell, and about this time the old 
 
 FIG. 
 
 cells contain eggs, af- 
 terward to become bees. 
 q, a royal cell. 
 
BEES IN THE HIVE. 213 
 
 queen becomes very uneasy, and wanders about dis- 
 tractedly. The reason of this is, that there can never 
 be two queen-bees in one hive, and the queen knows 
 that her daughter will soon be coming out of her 
 cradle and will try to turn her off her throne. So, 
 not wishing to have to fight for her kingdom, she 
 makes up her mind to seek a new home and take a 
 number of her subjects with her. If you watch the 
 hive about this time you will notice many of the bees 
 clustering together after they have brought in their 
 honey, and hanging patiently, in order to have plenty 
 of wax ready to use when they start, while the queen 
 keeps a sharp look-out for a bright, sunny day, on 
 which they can swarm : for bees will never swarm on 
 a wet or doubtful day if they can possibly help it, and 
 w r e can easily understand why, when we consider how 
 the rain would clog their wings and spoil the wax 
 under their bodies. 
 
 Meanwhile the young princess grows very impa- 
 tient, and tries to get out of her cell, but the worker- 
 bees drive her back, for they know there would be a 
 terrible fight if the two queens met. So they close 
 up the hole she has made with fresh wax after having 
 put in some food for her to live upon till she is re- 
 leased. 
 
 At last a suitable day arrives, and about ten or 
 eleven o'clock in the morning the old queen leaves the 
 hive, taking with her about 2000 drones and from 
 12,000 to 20,000 worker-bees, which fly a little way 
 clustering round her till she alights on the bough of 
 some tree, and then they form a compact swarm ready 
 for a new hive or to find a home of their own. 
 
214 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 Leaving them to go their way, we will now return 
 to the old hive. Here the liberated princess is reign- 
 ing in all her glory ; the worker-bees crowd round 
 her, watch over her, and feed her as though they 
 could not do enough to show her honour. But still 
 she is not happy. She is restless, and runs about 
 as if looking for an enemy, and she tries to get at the 
 remaining royal cells where the other young princesses 
 are still shut in. But the workers will not let her 
 touch them, and at last she stands still and begins to 
 beat the air with her wings and to tremble all over, 
 moving more and more quickly, till she makes quite a 
 loud, piping noise. 
 
 Hark ! What is that note answering her ? It is a 
 low, hoarse sound, and it comes from the cell of the 
 next eldest princess. Now we see why the young 
 queen has been so restless. She knows her sister will 
 soon come out, and the louder and stronger the sound 
 becomes within the cell, the sooner she knows the 
 fight will have to begin. And so she makes up her 
 mind to follow her mother's example and to lead off 
 a second swarm. But she cannot always stop to 
 choose a fine day, for her sister is growing very strong 
 and may come out of her cell before she is off. And 
 so the second, or after-swarm, gets ready and goes 
 away. And this explains why princesses' eggs are 
 laid a few days apart, for if they were laid all on the 
 same day, there would be no time for one princess to 
 go off with a swarm before the other came out of her 
 cell. Sometimes, when the workers are not watchful 
 enough, two queens do meet, and then they fight till 
 one is killed ; or sometimes they both go off with the 
 
.BEES IN THE HIVE. 215 
 
 same swarm without finding each other out. But this 
 only delays the fight till they get into the new hive ; 
 sooner or later one must^e killed. 
 
 And now a third queen begins to reign in the old 
 hive, and she is just as restless as the preceding ones, 
 for there are still more princesses to be born. But 
 this time, if no new swarm wants to start, the workers 
 do not try to protect the royal cells. The young 
 queen darts at the first she sees, gnaws a hole with 
 her jaws, and, thrusting in her sting through the hole 
 in the cocoon, kills the young bee while it is still a 
 prisoner. She then goes to the next, and the next, 
 and never rests till all the young princesses are de- 
 stroyed. Then she is contented, for she knows no 
 other queen will come to dethrone her. After a few 
 days she takes her flight in the air with the drones, and 
 comes home to settle down in the hive for the winter. 
 
 Then a very curious scene takes place. The drones 
 are no more use, for the queen will not fly out again, 
 and these idle bees will never do any work in the 
 hive. So the worker-bees begin to kill them, falling 
 upon them, and stinging them to death, and as the 
 drones have no stings they cannot defend themselves, 
 and in a few days there is not a drone, nor even a 
 drone-egg, left in the hive. This massacre seems very 
 sad to us, since the poor drones have never done any 
 harm beyond being hopelessly idle. But it is less sad 
 when we know that they could not live many weeks, 
 even if they were not attacked, and, with winter com- 
 ing, the bees cannot afford to feed useless mouths, 
 so a quick death is probably happier for them than 
 starvation. 
 
2i6 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 And now all the remaining inhabitants of the hive 
 settle down to feeding the young bees and laying in 
 the winter's store. It is at this time, after they have 
 been toiling and saving, that we come and take their 
 honey ; and from a well-stocked hive we may even 
 take 30 Ibs. without starving the industrious little in- 
 habitants. But then we must often feed them in re- 
 turn, and give them sweet syrup in the late autumn 
 and the next early spring when they cannot find any 
 flowers. 
 
 Although the hive has now become comparatively 
 quiet and the work goes on without excitement, yet 
 every single bee is employed in some way, either out 
 of doors or about the hive. Besides the honey col- 
 lectors and the nurses, a certain number of bees are 
 told off to ventilate the hive. You will easily under- 
 stand that where so many insects are packed closely 
 together the heat will become very great, and the air 
 impure and unwholesome. And the bees have no 
 windows that they can open to let in fresh air, so they 
 are obliged to fan it in from the one opening of the 
 hive. The way in which they do this is very interest- 
 ing. Some of the bees stand close to the entrance, 
 with their faces toward it, and opening their wings, 
 so as to make them into fans, they wave them to and 
 fro, producing a current of air. Behind these bees, 
 and all over the floor of the hive, there stand others, 
 this time with their backs toward the entrance, and 
 fan in the same manner, and in this Way air is sent into 
 all the passages. 
 
 Another set of bees clean out the cells after the 
 young bees are born, and make them fit to receive 
 
BEES IN THE HIVE. 
 
 honey, while others guard the entrance of the hive to 
 keep away the destructive wax-moth, which tries to 
 lay its eggs in the comb so that its young ones may 
 feed on the honey. All industrious people have to 
 guard their property against thieves and vagabonds, 
 and the bees have many intruders, such as wasps and 
 snails and slugs, which creep in whenever they get 
 a chance. If they succeed in escaping the sentinel 
 bees, then a fight takes place within the hive, and the 
 invader is stung to death. 
 
 Sometimes, however, after they have killed the 
 enemy, the bees cannot get rid of his body, for a snail 
 or slug is too heavy to be easily moved, and yet it 
 would make the hive very unhealthy to allow it to 
 remain. In this dilemma the' ingenious little bees 
 fetch the gummy " propolis " from the plant-buds and 
 cement the intruder all over, thus embalming his body 
 and preventing it from decaying. 
 
 And so the life of this wonderful city goes on. 
 Building, harvesting, storing, nursing, ventilating and 
 cleaning from morn till night, the little worker-bee 
 lives for about eight months, and. in that time has 
 done quite her share of work in the world. Only the 
 young bees, born late in the season, live on till the 
 next year to work in the spring. The queen-bee lives 
 longer, probably about two years, and then she too 
 dies, after having had a family of many thousands of 
 children. 
 
 We have already pointed out that in our fairy-land 
 of nature all things work together so as to bring order 
 out of apparent confusion. But though we should 
 naturally expect winds and currents, rivers and clouds, 
 
2i8 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 and even plants to follow fixed laws, we should 
 scarcely have looked for such regularity in the life 
 of the active, independent busy bee. Yet we see that 
 she, too, has her own appointed work to do, and does 
 it regularly and in an orderly manner. In this lecture 
 we have been speaking entirely of the bee within the 
 hive, and noticing how marvellously her instincts 
 guide her in her daily life. But within the last few 
 years we have learned that she performs a most curi- 
 ous and wonderful work in the world outside her 
 home, and that we owe to her not only the sweet 
 honey we eat, but even in a great degree the beauty 
 and gay colours of the flowers which she visits when 
 collecting it. This work will form the subject of our 
 next lecture, and while we love the little bee for her 
 constant industry, patience, and order within the hive, 
 we shall, I think, marvel at the wonderful law of na- 
 ture which guides her in her unconscious mission of 
 love among the flowers which grow around it. 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 
 
 2I 9 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 
 BEES AND FLOWERS. 
 
 HATEVER thoughts 
 
 each one of you may 
 have brought to the lecture 
 to-day, I want you to throw them all aside and fancy 
 yourself to be in a pretty country garden on a hot 
 summer's morning. Perhaps you have been walking, 
 
220 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 or reading, or playing, but it is getting too hot now to 
 do anything ; and so you have chosen the shadiest 
 nook under the old walnut-tree, close to the flower- 
 bed, on the lawn, and would almost like to go to sleep 
 if it were not too early in the day. 
 
 As you lie there thinking of nothing in particular, 
 except how pleasant it is to be idle now and then, 
 you notice a gentle buzzing close to you, and you see 
 that on the flower-bed close by several bees are work- 
 ing busily among the flowers. They do not seem to 
 mind the heat, nor to wish to rest ; and they' fly so 
 lightly and look so happy over their work that it does 
 not tire you to look at them. 
 
 That great humble-bee takes it leisurely enough as 
 she goes lumbering along, poking- her head into the 
 larkspurs, and remaining so long in each you might 
 almost think she had fallen asleep. The brown hive- 
 bee, on the other hand, moves busily and quickly 
 among the stocks, sweet peas, and mignonette. She 
 is evidently out on active duty, and means to get all 
 she can from each flower, so as to carry a good load 
 back to the hive. In some blossoms she does not stay 
 a moment, but draws her head back directly she has 
 popped it in, as if to say, " No honey there." But 
 over the full blossoms she lingers a little, and then 
 scrambles out again with her drop of honey, and goes 
 off to seek more in the next flower. 
 
 Let us watch her a little more closely. There are 
 plenty of different plants growing in the flower-bed, 
 but, curiously enough, she does not go first to one 
 kind and then to another ; but keeps to one, perhaps 
 the mignonette, the whole time, till she flies away. 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 221 
 
 Rouse yourself up to follow her, and you will see she 
 takes her way back to the hive. She may perhaps 
 stop to visit a stray plant of mignonette on her way, 
 but no other flower will tempt her till she has taken 
 her load home. 
 
 Then when she comes back again she may perhaps 
 go to another kind of flower, such as the sweet peas, 
 for instance, and keep to them during the next jour- 
 ney, but it is more likely that she will be true to her 
 old friend the mignonette for the whole day. 
 
 We all know why she makes so many journeys 
 between the garden and the hive, and that she is 
 collecting drops of honey from each flower, and car- 
 rying it to be stored up in the honeycomb for winter's 
 food. How she stores it, and how she also gathers 
 pollen-dust for her bee-bread, we saw in the last lec- 
 ture; to-day we will follow her in her work among 
 the flowers, and see, while they are so useful to her, 
 what she is doing for them in return. 
 
 We have already learned from the life of a prim- 
 rose that plants can make better and stronger seeds 
 when they can get pollen-dust from another plant, than v 
 when they are obliged to use that which grows in the 
 same flower; but I am sure you will be very much 
 surprised to hear that the more we study flowers the 
 more we find that their colours, their scent, and their 
 curious shapes are all so many baits and traps set by 
 nature to entice insects to come to the flowers, and 
 carry this pollen-dust from one to the other. 
 
 So far as we know, it is entirely for this purpose 
 that the plants form honey in different parts of the 
 flower, sometimes in little bags or glands, as in the 
 
222 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 petals of the buttercup flower, sometimes in clear 
 drops, as in the tube of the honeysuckle. This food 
 they prepare for the insects, and then they have all 
 sorts of contrivances to entice* them to come and 
 fetch it. 
 
 You will remember that the plants of the coal had 
 no bright or conspicuous flowers. Now we can under- 
 stand why this was, for there were no flying insects 
 at that time to carry the pollen-dust from flower to 
 flower, and therefore there was no need of coloured 
 flow r ers to attract them. But little by little, as flies, 
 butterflies, moths, and bees began to live. in the world, 
 flowers too began to appear, and plants hung out these 
 gay-coloured signs, as much as to say, " Come to me, 
 and I will give you honey if you will bring me pollen- 
 dust in exchange, so that my seeds may grow healthy 
 and strong." 
 
 We cannot stop to inquire to-day how this all 
 gradually came about, and how the flowers gradually 
 put on gay colours and curious 'shapes to tempt the 
 insects to visit them ; but we will learn something 
 about the way they attract them now, and how you 
 may see it for yourselves if you keep your eyes 
 open. 
 
 For example, if you watch the different kinds of 
 grasses, sedges, and rushes, which have such tiny 
 flowers that you can scarcely see them, you will find 
 that no insects visit them. Neither will you ever find 
 bees buzzing round oak-trees, nut-trees, willows, elms, 
 or birches. But on the pretty and sweet-smelling 
 apples-blossoms, or the strongly scented lime-trees, 
 you will find bees, wasps, and plenty of other insects. 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 22$ 
 
 The reason of this is that grasses, sedges, rushes, 
 nut-trees, willows, and the others we have mentioned, 
 have all of them a great deal of pollen-dust, and as 
 the wind blows them to and fro, it wafts the dust from 
 one flower to another, and so these plants do not want 
 the insects, and it is not worth their while to give out 
 honey, or to have gaudy or sweet-scented flowers to 
 attract them. 
 
 But wherever you see bright or conspicuous flow- 
 ers you may be quite sure that the plants want the bees 
 or some other winged insect to come and carry their 
 pollen for them. Snowdrops hanging their white 
 heads among their green leaves, crocuses with their 
 violet and yellow flowers, the gaudy poppy, the large- 
 flowered hollyhock or the sunflower, the flaunting 
 dandelion, the pretty pink willow-herb, the clustered 
 blossoms of the mustard and turnip flowers, the bright 
 blue forget-me-not and the delicate little yellow tre- 
 foil, all these are visited by insects, which easily catch 
 sight of them as they pass by and hasten to sip their 
 honey. 
 
 Sir John Lubbock has shown that bees are not only 
 attracted by bright colours, but that they even know 
 one colour from another. He put some honey on slips 
 of glass with coloured papers under them, and when 
 he had accustomed the bees to find the honey al- 
 ways on the blue glass, he washed this glass clean, 
 and put the honey on the red glass instead. Now if 
 the bees had followed only the smell of the honey, 
 they would have flown to the red glass, but they did 
 not. They went first to the blue glass, expecting to 
 find the honey on the usual colour, and it was only 
 
224 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 when they were disappointed that they went off to 
 the red. 
 
 Is it not beautiful to think that the bright pleasant 
 colours we love so much in flowers, are not only orna- 
 mental, but that they are useful and doing their part 
 in keeping up healthy life in our world ? 
 
 Neither must we forget what sweet scents can do. 
 Have you never noticed the delicious smell which 
 comes from beds of mignonette, thyme, rosemary, 
 mint, or sweet alyssum, from the small hidden bunches 
 of laurustinus blossom, or from the tiny flowers of the 
 privet? These plants have found another way of 
 attracting the insects; they have no need of bright 
 colours, for their scent is quite as true and certain a 
 guide. You will be surprised if you once begin to 
 count them up, how many white and dull or dark- 
 looking flowers are sweet-scented, while gaudy flow- 
 ers, such as the tulip, foxglove, and hollyhock, have 
 little or no scent. And then, just as in the world we 
 find some people who have everything to attract others 
 to them, beauty and gentleness, cleverness, kindliness, 
 and loving sympathy, so we find some flowers, like the 
 beautiful lily, the lovely rose, and the delicate hya- 
 cinth, which have colour and scent and graceful shapes 
 all combined. 
 
 But we are not yet nearly at an end of the con- 
 trivances of flowers to secure the visits of insects. 
 Have you not observed that different flowers open 
 and close at different times? The daisy receives its 
 name, day's eye, because it opens at sunrise and 
 closes at sunset, while the evening primrose (CEnothcra 
 biennis) and the night campion (Silene noctiHord) 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 22$ 
 
 spread out their flowers just as the daisy is going to 
 bed. 
 
 What do you think is the reason of this? If you 
 go near a bed of evening primroses just when the sun 
 is setting, you will soon be able to guess, for they will 
 then give out such a sweet scent that you will not 
 doubt for a moment that they are calling the evening 
 moths to come and visit them. The daisy opens by 
 day, because it is visited by day insects, but those 
 particular moths which can carry the pollen-dust of 
 the evening primrose, fly only by night, and if this 
 flower opened by day other insects might steal its 
 honey, while they would not be the right size or shape 
 to touch its pollen-bags and carry the dust. 
 
 It is the same if you pass by a honeysuckle in the 
 evening ; you will be surprised how much stronger its 
 scent is than in the day-time. This is because the 
 sphinx hawk-moth is the favourite visitor of that flow- 
 er, and comes at nightfall, guided by the strong scent, 
 to suck out the honey with its long proboscis, and 
 carry the pollen-dust. 
 
 Again, some flowers close whenever rain is coming. 
 The pimpernel (AnagflUis arvensis) is one of these, 
 hence its name of the " Shepherd's Weather-glass." 
 This little flower closes, no doubt, to prevent its 
 pollen-dust being washed away, for it has no honey; 
 while other flowers do it to protect the drop of honey 
 at the bottom of their corolla. Look at the daisies 
 for example when a storm is coming on ; as the sky 
 grows dark and heavy, you will see them shrink up 
 and close till the sun shines again. They do this 
 because in each of the little yellow florets in the cen- 
 16 
 
226 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 tre of the flower there is a drop of honey which would 
 be quite spoiled if it were washed by the rain. 
 
 And now you will see why cup-shaped flowers so 
 often droop their heads think of the harebell, the 
 snowdrop, the lily-of-the-valley, the campanula, and 
 a host of others ; how pretty they look with their 
 bells hanging so modestly from the slender stalk ! 
 They are bending down to protect the honey-glands 
 within them, for if the cup became full of rain or dew 
 the honey would be useless, and the insects would 
 cease to visit them. 
 
 But it is not only necessary that the flowers should 
 keep their honey for the insects, they also have to 
 take care and keep it for the right kind of insect. 
 Ants are in many cases great enemies to them, for 
 they like honey as much as bees and butterflies do, 
 yet you will easily see that they are so small that if 
 they creep into a flower they pass the anthers without 
 rubbing against them, and so take the honey without 
 doing any good to the plant. Therefore we find 
 numberless contrivances for keeping the ants and other 
 creeping insects away. Look for example at the hairy 
 stalk of the primrose flower ; those little hairs are like 
 a forest to a tiny ant, and they protect the flower from 
 his visits. The Spanish catchfly (Silene otites), on the 
 other hand, has a smooth, but very gummy stem, and 
 on this the insects stick, if they try to climb. Slugs 
 and snails too will often attack and bite flowers, un- 
 less they are kept away by thorns and bristles, such 
 as we find on the teazel and the burdock. And so 
 we are gradually learning that everything which 
 a plant does has its meaning, if we can only find 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 
 
 it out, and that even every insignificant hair has 
 its own proper use, and when we are once aware 
 of this a flower-garden may become quite a new 
 worlcl to us if we open our eyes to all that is going 
 on in it. 
 
 But as we cannot wander among many plants to- 
 day, let us take a few which the bees visit, and see 
 how they contrive not to give up their honey without 
 getting help in return. We will start with the blue 
 wood-geranium, because from it we first began to 
 learn the use of insects to flowers. 
 
 More than a hundred years ago a young German 
 botanist, Christian Conrad Sprengel, noticed some soft 
 hairs growing in the centre of this flower, just round 
 the stamens, and he was so sure that every part of a 
 plant is useful, that he set himself to find out what 
 these hairs meant. He soon discovered that they 
 protected some small honey-bags at the base of the 
 stamens, and kept the rain from washing the honey 
 away, just as our eyebrows prevent the perspiration 
 on our faces from running into our eyes. This led 
 him to notice that plants take great care to keep their 
 honey for insects, and by degrees he proved that they 
 did this in order to tempt the insects to visit them 
 and carry off their pollen. 
 
 The first thing to notice in this little geranium 
 flower is that the purple lines which ornament it all 
 point directly to the place where the honey lies at 
 the bottom of the stamens, and actually serve to lead 
 the bee to the honey; and this is true of the veins 
 and marking of nearly all flowers except of those 
 
228 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 which open by night, and in these they would be useless, 
 
 for the insects would not see them. 
 
 When the geranium first opens, all its ten stamens 
 
 are lying flat on the corolla or coloured crown, as in 
 
 the left-hand flower in Fig. 62, and then the bee can- 
 not get at the honey. 
 But in a short time 
 five stamens begin to 
 raise themselves and 
 cling round the stig- 
 ma or knob at the top 
 of the seed-vessel, as 
 in the middle flower. 
 Now you would think 
 they would leave their 
 dust there. But no ! 
 the stigma is closed 
 up so tight that the 
 dust cannot get on to 
 the sticky part. Now, 
 
 FIG. 62.-G*ra*ium sylvaticum, the however> the bee can 
 Wood Geranium. In the left- 
 
 hand flower the stamens are all S et at the hone y- 
 
 lying down. In the middle glands on the outside 
 
 flower five stamens clasp the of the raised stamens ; 
 
 stigma. In the right - hand and ag he sucks ^ hig 
 
 flower the stigma is open after 11 i j.i 
 
 , back touches the an- 
 
 all the stamens have fallen. 
 
 thers or dust-bags, 
 
 and he carries off the pollen. Then, as soon as all 
 the dust is gone, these five stamens fall down, and the 
 other five spring up. Still, however, the stigma re- 
 mains closed, and the pollen of these stamens, too, 
 may be carried away to another flower. At last these 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 22Q 
 
 five also fall down, and then, and not till then, the 
 stigma opens and lays out its five sticky points, as 
 you may see in the right-hand flower, Fig. 62. 
 
 But its own pollen is all gone, how then will it get 
 any? It will get it from some bee who has just taken 
 it from another and younger flower; and thus you 
 see the blossom is prevented from using its own pollen, 
 and made to use that of another blossom, so that its 
 seeds may grow healthy and strong. 
 
 The garden nasturtium, into whose blossom we saw 
 the humble-bee poking its head, takes still more care 
 of its pollen-dust. It hides its honey down at the end 
 of its long spur, and only sends out one stamen at a 
 time instead of five like the geranium ; and then, when 
 all the stamens have had their turn, the sticky knob 
 comes out last for pollen from another flower. 
 
 All this you may see for yourselves if you find 
 geraniums * in the hedges, and nasturtiums in your 
 garden. But even if you have not these, you may 
 learn the history of another flower quite as curious, 
 and which is found in any field or lane in England, and 
 is not uncommon in America. The common dead-net- 
 tle (Fig. 63) takes a great deal of trouble in order that 
 the bee may carry off its pollen. When you have found 
 one of these plants, take a flower from the ring all 
 round the stalk and tear it gently open, so that you can 
 see down its throat. There, just at the very bottom, 
 you will find a thick fringe of hairs (/, No. 2, Fig. 63), 
 
 * The scarlet and other bright geraniums of our flower-gar- 
 dens are not true geraniums, but pelargoniums. You may, 
 however, watch all these peculiarities in them if you cannot 
 procure the true wild geranium. 
 
230 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 and you will guess at once that these are to protect a 
 drop of honey below. Little insects which would 
 creep into the flower and rob it of its honey without 
 touching the anthers of the stamens (a, Fig. 63) can- 
 
 FIG. 63. Flower of the Dead-Nettie (Lamium album}. I, Whole. 
 2, Cut in half. /, Fringe of hairs protecting honey at base. 
 s, Stigma, a, Anthers of stamens. /, Lip of flower. 
 
 not get past these hairs, and so the drop is kept till 
 the bee comes to fetch it. 
 
 Now look for the stamens : there are four of them 
 (a a), two long and two short, and they are quite 
 hidden under the hood which forms the top of the 
 flower. How will the bee touch them? If you were 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 231 
 
 to watch one, you would find that when the bee 
 alights on the broad lip /, and thrusts her head down 
 the tube, she first of all knocks her back against the 
 little forked tip s. This is the sticky stigma, and she 
 leaves there any dust she has brought from another 
 flower; then, as she must push far in to reach the 
 honey, she rubs the top of her back against the anthers 
 a a, and before she comes out again has carried away 
 the yellow powder on her back, ready to give it to 
 the next flower. 
 
 Do you remember how we noticed at the beginning 
 of the lecture that a bee always likes to visit the same 
 kind of plant in one journey? You see now that this 
 is very useful to the flowers. If the bee went from 
 a dead-nettle to a geranium, the dust would be lost, 
 for it would be of no use to any other plant but a dead- 
 nettle. But since the bee likes to get the same kind 
 of honey each journey, she goes to the same kind 
 of flowers, and places the pollen-dust just where it is 
 wanted. 
 
 There is another flower, called the Salvia, which 
 belongs to the same family as our dead-nettle, and I 
 think you will agree with me that its way of dusting 
 the bee's back is most clever. The Salvia (Fig. 64) is 
 shaped just like the dead-nettle, with a hood and a 
 broad lip, but instead of four stamens it has only two, 
 the other two being shrivelled up. The two that are 
 left have a very strange shape, for the stalk or fila- 
 ment of the stamen (i f) is very short, while the anther, 
 which is in most flowers two little bags stuck together, 
 has here grown out into a long thread a b, with a 
 little dust-bag at one end only. In i, Fig. 64, you 
 
232 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 only see one of these stems, because the flower is cut 
 in half, but in the whole flower, one stands on each 
 side just within the lip. Now, when the bee puts her 
 head into the tube to reach the honey, she passes 
 
 FIG. 64. Flower of the Salv^a. i. Half a flower, showing the 
 filament f, the swinging anther a b, b' a , and the stigma s. 
 2. Bee entering the flower pushes the anther so that it takes 
 the position a 6', No. i, and hits him on the back. '3. Older 
 flower : stigma touching the bee. 
 
 right between these two swinging anthers, and knock- 
 ing against the end b pushes it before her and so brings 
 the dust-bag a plump down on her back, scattering 
 the dust there ! You can easily try this by thrusting 
 a pencil into any Salvia flower, and you will see the 
 anther fall. 
 
 You will notice that all this time the bee does not 
 touch the sticky stigma which hangs high above her; 
 but after the anthers are empty and shrivelled the stalk 
 of the stigma grows longer, and it falls lower down. 
 By-and-by another bee, having pollen on her back, 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 233 
 
 comes to look for honey, and as she goes into No. 3, 
 she rubs against the stigma and leaves upon it the dust 
 from another flower. 
 
 Tell me, has not the Salvia, while remaining so 
 much the same shape as the dead-nettle, devised a 
 wonderful contrivance to make use of the visits of 
 the bee ? 
 
 The sweet white violet (Viola blandd) or the dog 
 violet (Viola canina), which you can gather in any 
 meadow, give up their pollen-dust in quite a different 
 way from the Salvia, and yet it is equally ingenious. 
 Everyone has noticed what an irregular shape this 
 flower has, and that one of its petals has a curious 
 spur sticking out behind. In the tip of this spur 
 and in the spur of the stamen lying in it the violet 
 hides its honey, and to reach it the bee must press 
 past the curious ring of orange-tipped bodies in the 
 middle of the flower. These bodies are the an- 
 thers a a, Fig. 65, which fits tightly round the stig- 
 ma s, so that when the pollen-dust p, which is very 
 dry, comes out of the bags, it remains shut in by the 
 tips as if in a box. Two of these stamens have 
 spurs which lie in the spur of the flower, and have 
 honey at the end of them. Now, when the bee 
 shakes the end of the stigma s, it parts the ring of 
 anthers, and the fine dust falls through upon the 
 insect. 
 
 Let us see for a moment how wonderfully this flow- 
 er is arranged to bring about the carrying of the 
 pollen, as Sprengel pointed out years ago. In the first 
 place, it hangs on a thin stalk, and bends its head down 
 so that the rain cannot come near the honey in the 
 
234 
 
 THE FAIRY -LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 spur, and also so that the pollen-dust falls forward 
 into the front of the little box made by the closed 
 anthers. Then the pollen is quite dry, instead of being 
 sticky as in most plants. This is in order that it may 
 fall easily through the cracks. Then the style or stalk 
 of the stigma is very thin and its tip very broad, so 
 that it quivers easily when the bee touches it, and so 
 shakes the anthers apart, while the anthers themselves 
 fold over to make the box, and yet not so tightly but 
 
 FIG. 65. Section of the Dog Violet. Lubbock. A, Anthers and 
 stigma enlarged, a a, Anthers, s, Stigma. /, Pollen, h, 
 Honey. 
 
 that the dust can fall through when they are shaken. 
 Lastly, if you look at the veins of the flower, you will 
 find that they all point toward the spur where the 
 honey is to be found, so that when the sweet smell of 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 
 
 235 
 
 the flower has brought the bee, she cannot fail to go 
 in at the right place. 
 
 Two more flowers still I want us to examine to- 
 gether, and then I hope you will care to look at every 
 flower you meet, to try and see what insects visit it, and 
 
 FIG. 66. Lotus corniculatus , Bird's-foot Trefoil, i. Full flower: 
 sta, Standard ; iv, Wings ; , Keel. 2. Keel of flower : d, 
 Depression into which wings fit. 3. Interior of flower : .y, 
 Stigma ; /, Pollen ; a, Anthers ; k, Place where honey lies. 
 
 how its pollen-dust is carried. These two flowers are 
 the common Bird's-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and 
 the Early Orchis (Orchis masculd). 
 
 The Bird's-foot trefoil, Fig. 66,* you will find almost 
 
 * This plant is not found wild in America, but the parts of 
 the flower may be studied, though with slight differences, in the 
 common vetch Vicia sativa\ 
 
236 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 anywhere all through the summer, and you will know 
 it from other flowers very like it by its leaf, which is 
 not a true trefoil, for behind the three usual leaflets 
 of the clover and the shamrock leaf, it has two small 
 leaflets near the stalk. The flower, you will notice, 
 is shaped very like the flower of a pea, and indeed it 
 belongs to the same family, called the Papilionacea? or 
 butterfly family, because the flowers look something 
 like an insect flying. 
 
 In all these flowers the top petal (sta, Fig. 66) 
 stands up like a flag to catch the eye of the insect, 
 and for this reason botanists call it the " standard." 
 Below it are two side-petals w called the " wings," and 
 if you pick these off you will find that the remaining 
 two petals k are joined together at the tip in a shape 
 like the keel of a boat (2, Fig. 66). For this reason 
 they are called the " keel." Notice as we pass that 
 these two last petals have in them a curious little 
 hollow or depression d, and if you look inside the 
 " wings " you will notice a little knob that fits into 
 this hollow, and so locks the two together. We shall 
 see by-and-by that this is important. 
 
 Next let us look at the half-flower when it is cut 
 open, and see what there is inside. There are ten 
 stamens in all, inclosed with the stigma in the keel ; 
 nine are joined together and one is by itself. The 
 anthers of five of these stamens burst open while the 
 flower is still a bud, but the other stamens go on grow- 
 ing, and push the pollen-dust, which is very moist 
 and sticky, right up into the tip of the keel. Here 
 you see it lies right round the stigma s, but as we 
 saw before in the geranium, the stigma is not ripe 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 237 
 
 and sticky yet, and so it does not use the pollen- 
 grains. 
 
 Now suppose that a bee comes to the flower. The 
 honey she has to fetch lies inside the tube at h, and 
 the one stamen being loose she is able to get her 
 proboscis in. But if she is to be of any use to the 
 flower she must uncover the pollen-dust. See how 
 cunningly the flower has contrived this. In order to 
 put her head into the tube the bee must stand upon 
 the wings w, and her weight bends them down. But 
 they are locked to the keel k by the knob fitting in 
 the hole d, and so the keel is pushed down too, and 
 the sticky pollen-dust is uncovered and comes right 
 against the stomach of the bee and sticks there ! As 
 soon as she has done feeding and flies away, up go 
 the wings and the keel with them, covering up any 
 pollen that remains ready for next time. Then when 
 the bee goes to another flower, as she touches the 
 stigma as well as the pollen, she leaves some of the 
 foreign dust upon it, and the flower uses that rather 
 than its own, because it is better for its seeds. If 
 however no bee happens to come to one of these 
 flowers, after a time the stigma becomes sticky and it 
 uses its own pollen : and this is perhaps one reason 
 why the bird's-foot trefoil is so very common, because 
 it can do its own work if the bee does not help it. 
 
 Now we come lastly to the Orchis flower.* Mr. 
 Darwin has written a whole book on the many curi- 
 ous and wonderful ways in which orchids tempt bees 
 and other insects to fertilize them. We can only take 
 the simplest, but I think you will say that even this 
 
 * The nearest species for study in America are the Habenarias. 
 
THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 blossom is more like a conjuror's box than you would 
 have supposed it possible that a flower could be. 
 
 Let us examine it closely. It has six deep-red 
 covering leaves, three c c c t Fig. 67, belonging to the 
 
 FIG. 67. Orchis mascula. c c c, Calyx, co, co, co, Corolla. /, 
 . Pollen-masses, r, Rostellum or lid covering the knob at 
 the end of pollen-masses, s s, Stigmas. P, a Pollinia or 
 pollen-mass, of which a is the pollen and d is the sticky 
 gland which adheres to the head of the bee. sv, Seed-ves- 
 sel, sp, Spur of the flower. 
 
 calyx or outer cup, the three co, co, co, belonging to 
 the corolla or crown of the flower ; but all six are 
 coloured alike, except that the large one in front, 
 called the " lip," has spots and lines upon it which will 
 suggest to you at once that they point to the honey. 
 But where are the anthers, and where is the stigma ? 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 239 
 
 Look just under the arch made by those three 
 bending flower-leaves, and there you will see two 
 small slits, and in these some little club-shaped bodies 
 p p, which you can pick out with the point of a needle. 
 One of these enlarged is shown at P. It is composed 
 of sticky grains of pollen a held together by fine 
 threads on the top of a thin stalk ; and at the bottom 
 of the stalk there is a little round body d. This is 
 all that you will find to represent the stamens of the 
 flower. When these masses of pollen, or pollinia as 
 they are called, are within the flower, the knob at the 
 bottom is covered by a little lid r, shutting them in 
 like the lid of a box, and just below this lid r you will 
 see two yellowish lumps s s, which are very sticky. 
 These are the top of the stigma, and they are just 
 above the seed-vessel 5 v, which you can see in the 
 lowest flower in the picture. 
 
 Now let us see how this flower gives up its pollen. 
 When a bee comes to look for honey in the orchis, 
 she alights on the lip, and guided by the lines makes 
 straight for the opening just in front of the stigmas 
 ^ s. Putting her head into this opening she pushes 
 down into the spur sp, where by biting the inside skin 
 she gets some juicy sap. Notice that she has to bite, 
 which takes time. 
 
 You will see at once that she must touch the 
 stigmas in going in, and so give them any pollen she 
 has on her head. But she also touches the little lid r, 
 and it Hies instantly open, bringing the glands d at the 
 end of the pgllen-masses against her head. These glands 
 are moist and sticky, and while she is gnawing the 
 
240 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 inside of the spur they dry a little and cling to her 
 head and she brings them out with her. Darwin once 
 caught a bee with as many as sixteen of these pollen- 
 masses clinging to her head. 
 
 But if the bee went into the next flower with these 
 pollinia sticking upright, she would simply put them 
 into the same slits in the next flower, she would not 
 touch them against the stigma. Nature, however, has 
 provided against this. As the bee flies along, the 
 glands sticking to its head dry more and more, and as 
 they dry they curl up and drag the pollen-masses 
 down, so that instead of standing upright, as in i, 
 Fig. 67, they point forward, as in 2. 
 
 And now, when the bee goes into the next flower, 
 she will thrust them right against the sticky stigmas, 
 and as they cling there the fine threads which hold 
 the grains together break away, and the flower is 
 fertilized. 
 
 If you will gather some of these orchids during 
 your next spring walk in the woods, and will put a 
 pencil down the tube to represent the head of the bee, 
 you may see the little box open, and the two pollen- 
 masses cling to the pencil. Then if you draw it out 
 you may see them gradually bend forward, and by 
 thrusting your pencil into the next flower you may see 
 the grains of pollen break away, and you will have 
 followed out the work of the bee. 
 
 Do not such wonderful contrivances as these make 
 us long to know and understand all the hidden work 
 that is going on around us among the flowers, the 
 insects, and all forms of life ? I have been able to tell 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 241 
 
 you but very little, but I can promise you that the 
 more you examine, the more you will find marvellous 
 histories such as these in simple field-flowers. 
 
 Long as we have known how useful honey was to 
 the bee, and how it could only get it from flowers, 
 yet it was not till quite lately that we have learned to 
 follow out Sprengel's suggestion, and to trace the use 
 which the bee is to the flower. But now that we have 
 once had our eyes opened, every flower teaches us 
 something new, and we find that each plant adapts 
 itself in a most wonderful way to the insects which 
 visit it, both so as to provide them with honey, and at 
 the same time to make them unconsciously do it good 
 service. 
 
 And so we learn that even among insects and 
 flowers, those who do most for others, receive most 
 in return. The bee and the flower do not either of 
 them reason about the matter, they only go on living 
 their little lives as nature guides them, helping and 
 improving each other. Think for a moment how it 
 would be, if a plant used up all its sap for its own life, 
 and did not give up any to make the drop of honey 
 in its flower. The bees would soon find out that 
 these particular flowers were not worth visiting, and 
 the flower would not get its pollen-dust carried, and 
 would have to do its own work and grow weakly and 
 small. Or suppose, on the other hand, that the bee bit 
 a hole in the bottom of the flower, and so got at the 
 honey, as indeed they sometimes do ; then she would 
 not carry the pollen-dust, and so would not keep up 
 the healthy strong flowers which make her daily food. 
 
 But this, as you see, is not the rule. On the con- 
 17 
 
242 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 trary, the flower feeds the bee, and the bee quite 
 unconsciously helps the flower to make its healthy 
 seed. Nay more; when you are able to read all that 
 has been written on this subject, you will find that 
 we have good reason to think that the flowerless 
 plants of the Coal Period have gradually put on the 
 beautiful colours, sweet scent, and graceful shapes of 
 our present flowers, in consequence of the necessity of 
 attracting insects, and thus we owe our lovely flowers 
 to the mutual kindliness of plants and insects. 
 
 And is there nothing beyond this? Surely there 
 is. Flowers and insects, as we have seen, act without 
 thought or knowledge of what they are doing; but 
 the law of mutual help which guides them is the same 
 which bids you and me be kind and good to all those 
 around us, if we would lead useful and happy lives. 
 And when we see that the Great Power which rules 
 over our universe makes each work for the good of all, 
 even in such humble things as bees and flowers ; and 
 that beauty and loveliness come out of the struggle 
 and striving of all living things ; then, if our own life 
 be sometimes difficult, and the struggle hard to bear, 
 we learn from the flowers that the best way to meet 
 our troubles is to lay up our little drop of honey 
 for others, sure that when they come to sip it they 
 will, even if unconsciously, give us new vigour and 
 courage in return. 
 
 And now we have arrived at the end of those sub- 
 jects which we selected out of the Fairy-land of Sci- 
 ence. You must not for a moment imagine, how- 
 ever, that we have in any way exhausted our fairy 
 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 243 
 
 domain; on the contrary, we have scarcely explored 
 even the outskirts of it. The " History of a Grain of 
 Salt," " A Butterfly's Life," or " The Labours of an 
 Ant," would introduce us to fairies and wonders quite 
 as interesting as those of which we have spoken in 
 these lectures. While " A Plash of Lightning," " An 
 Explosion in a Coal-mine," or " The Eruption of a 
 Volcano," would bring us into the presence of ter- 
 rible giants known and dreaded from time imme- 
 morial. 
 
 But at least we have passed through the gates, and 
 have learned that there is a world of wonder which we 
 may visit if we will ; and that it lies quite close to us, 
 hidden in every dewdrop and gust of wind, in every 
 brook and valley, in every little plant or animal. We 
 have only to stretch out our hand and touch them 
 with the wand of inquiry, and they will answer us 
 and reveal the fairy forces which guide and govern 
 them ; and thus pleasant and happy thoughts may 
 be conjured up at any time, wherever we find our- 
 selves, by simply calling upon nature's fairies and 
 asking them to speak to us. Is it not strange, then, 
 that people should pass them by so often without a 
 thought, and be content to grow up ignorant of all 
 the wonderful powers ever active in the world around 
 them? 
 
 Neither is it pleasure alone which we gain by a 
 study of nature. We cannot examine even a tiny 
 sunbeam, and picture the minute waves of which it 
 is composed, travelling incessantly from the sun, with- 
 out being filled with wonder and awe at the marvellous 
 activity and power displayed in the infinitely small as 
 
244 
 
 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 well as in the infinitely great things of the universe. 
 We cannot become familiar with the facts of gravi- 
 tation, cohesion, or -crystallization, without realizing 
 that the laws of nature are fixed, orderly, and con- 
 stant, and will repay us with failure or success ac- 
 cording as we act ignorantly or wisely ; and thus we 
 shall begin to be afraid of leading careless, useless, and 
 idle lives. We cannot watch the working of the fairy 
 " life " in the primrose or the bee, without learning 
 that living beings as well as inanimate things are 
 governed by these same laws of nature; nor can we 
 contemplate the mutual adaptation of bees and flow- 
 ers without acknowledging that it teaches the truth 
 that those succeed best in life who, whether conscious- 
 ly or unconsciously, do their best for others. 
 
 And so our wanderings in the Fairy-land of Sci- 
 ence will not be wasted, for we shall learn how to 
 guide our own lives, while we cannot fail to see that 
 the forces of nature, whether they are apparently me- 
 chanical, as in gravitation or heat ; or intelligent, as 
 in living beings, are one and all the voice of the Great 
 Creator, and speak to us of His Nature and His Will. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 ADELSBERG STALACTITE GROTTO, 
 
 121. 
 
 Aerial ocean, 53, 73 
 Agassiz on " erratic blocks," 127. 
 Air, bad, in close rooms, 57. 
 carrying water-vapour, 77, 
 
 78, 81, 96. 
 
 elasticity of, 61. 
 
 its pressure on the earth, 64. 
 
 made of two gases, 55. 
 
 rising of hot, 72. 
 
 weight of, 62. 
 
 Air-atoms, forming waves of 
 
 sound, 135. 
 Air-bubbles bursting in waves, 
 
 148. 
 
 Air-currents, cause of, 71. 
 Albuminoids, 157, 164. 
 Almond-seed, 156. 
 Alum Bay Chine, 116. 
 Ammonia in air, 58. 
 Anaxagoras on size of the sun, 29. 
 Antarctic Continent, snowfields 
 
 of, 97. 
 Anthers of stamens, 168. 
 
 bursting of, 170 
 
 Aqueous vapour, whence it comes, 
 
 80. 
 Arbroath, waste of cliffs at, 122. 
 
 Ariel's song, 5. 
 
 Atmosphere causing the spread of 
 light, 74. 
 
 height of, 62. 
 
 weight of, 64-70. 
 
 Aurora borealis, 55, 75. 
 Avalanche, noise of, 152. 
 
 BALLOON ASCENTS, 62. 
 
 Balls illustrating sound waves, 133. 
 
 Barometer and its action, 67-70. 
 
 Bee-bread, 209. 
 
 Bee, pollen-masses on head of, 
 
 239- 
 Bees and flowers useful to each 
 
 other, 242. 
 
 and orchids, 237. 
 
 cementing dead bodies, 217. 
 
 feeding of, 210, 212. 
 
 Huber on, 202. 
 
 length of life of, 217. 
 
 nursing, 206. 
 
 sentinel, 217. 
 
 swarming, 203, 213, 214. 
 
 ventilating, 216. 
 
 visit one set of flowers at a 
 
 time, 221, 231. 
 worker, queen, and drone, 
 
 204. 
 
 245 
 
246 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Bees, young princess, 212. 
 Beetles, timber-boring, 152. 
 Biot, Professor, on sound in tubes, 
 
 137- 
 Bird's-foot trefoil, structure of, 
 
 235- 
 
 Birds, trill of, 153. 
 Bischoff, on lime in River Rhine, 
 
 112. 
 
 Blackgang Chine, 116. 
 Bones of the ear, 142. 
 Bonn, solid matter carried past, 
 
 112. 
 
 Breathing and burning, 57. 
 Brood-comb of bees, 211. 
 Brook, song of the, 148. 
 Burning and breathing, 57. 
 Buttercup, honey-glands in, 222. 
 Buxton, Poole's Cavern, near, 120. 
 
 CALAMITES OF THE COAL, 184. 
 Calyx, use of, 166. 
 Canons of Colorado, 116. 
 Carbon in plants, 162. 
 
 in sugar, 163. 
 
 Carbonate of lime crystals, 120. 
 Carbonic acid in air, 58. 
 Cardboard of colours, revolving, 
 
 41. 
 
 Carruthers, Mr., cited, 181, 184. 
 Caverns, stalactitic, 121. 
 Caves on sea-shore, 122. 
 Cells of a plant, 158. 
 
 of bees, 207. 
 
 Chalk-builders, 4, loo. 
 Chemical action, 12, 16, 56. 
 
 rays, 48. 
 
 Chlorophyll in leaves, 161. 
 Cissy and the drops, 14. 
 
 City of the bees, 200. 
 Clerk-Maxwell on ether, 35. 
 Clouds, how formed, 78, 81. 
 Club-moss and coal-plants, 182. 
 Coal, a piece of, 175. 
 
 essences from, 195. 
 
 imprisoned fairies in, u. 
 
 its growth and purity, 186, 
 
 1 88. 
 
 oils, tar, and gas of, 191. 
 
 ball, contents of a, 181. 
 
 forest, picture of a, 183. 
 
 gas, making of, 191. 
 
 : -mine, section of a, 177. 
 Coal-plants, what they have done 
 
 for us, 195. 
 
 Cobwebs and dewdrops, 87. 
 Cochlea of ear, 144. 
 Cocoon of bees, 210-211. 
 Cohesion and its work, 8, 12, 
 
 83- 
 
 Coke, 191. 
 
 Colorado canons, 116. 
 Colour, bees distinguish, 223. 
 Colours, cause of, 44. 
 
 revolving disk of, 41. 
 
 Coral, Huxley on, 21. 
 
 picture of, 20. 
 
 island, 23. 
 
 Corolla, use of, 170. 
 Corti's organ, 144. 
 Country, sounds of the, 131. 
 Crevasses, 126. 
 Crystallization, 90, 92. 
 
 a. fairy force, 10. 
 
 Crystals in sugar-candy, 89. 
 
 how they form, 92. 
 
 in many substances, 90. 
 
 of sea-salts, 100. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 247 
 
 Crystals of snow, 93. 
 Cumberland, rain in, 84. 
 
 DAISY, opening of the, 224. 
 
 closing in rain, 225. 
 
 Darwin, Mr., cited, 237-240. 
 Dead-nettle, structure of the, 229, 
 
 230. 
 
 Deltas, 119. 
 
 Deposition of mud, 119. 
 Dew, how formed, 86. 
 
 artificial, 87. 
 
 Distillation of water from sea, 96. 
 Drones, slaughter of, 215. 
 
 EAR, construction of the, 141. 
 
 stones, 143. 
 
 Earth, its size compared to the 
 sun, 29. 
 
 Earth-pillars, picture of, 106. 
 
 Earth's state if there were no sun, 
 28. 
 
 Echoes, 138, 139. 
 
 Eggs, laying of queen-bee, 21 1. 
 
 Enemies of bees, 217. 
 
 of plants, 226 
 
 Equisetum, or horse-tail, 185. 
 
 Erratic blocks, 127. 
 
 Ether, waves of the, 35, 85. 
 
 Eustachian tube, 142. 
 
 Evaporation from rivers and seas, 
 80. 
 
 Evening primrose, insects visit- 
 ing, 224. 
 
 Eye, light- waves entering, 38-42. 
 
 FAIRIES, or forces of nature, 6-12. 
 Fairy "Life," 173. 
 Fairy-tales and science, 2. 
 
 Flowers bright to attract insects, 
 223. 
 
 times of opening of, 224. 
 
 Food of a plant, 159. 
 
 Frost bursting water-pipes, 95. 
 
 breaking up the fields, 124. 
 
 GANGES DELTA, 119. 
 Gas, definition of a, 15. 
 
 in coal, 190. 
 
 Gay-Lussac's balloon ascent, 62. 
 Geikie, Mr., cited, 122. 
 Geneva, mud in lake of, 126. 
 Geranium, fertilization of, 227, 
 
 sylvaticum, 228. 
 
 of the garden, 229. 
 
 Glacial Period, 128. 
 Glaciers, 98, 124. 
 
 blocks carried by, 127. 
 
 Glaisher's balloon ascent, 62, 66. 
 
 God in nature, 25. 
 
 Graphite, hardened by pressure, 
 
 190. 
 
 Grass, dew forming on, 86. 
 Gravesend, mud-banks at, 1 19. 
 Gravitation and its work, 8, 12. 
 Great Dismal Swamp, America, 
 
 1 86. 
 Greenland, glaciers of, 124. 
 
 snow-fields of, 97. 
 
 : vapour carried from, 82. 
 
 Gulf of Mexico, vapour carried up 
 
 from, 82. 
 
 i 
 
 j HAILSTONES, how formed, 88. 
 
 I Hard water, 99. 
 
 Hartshorn, spirits of, 58. 
 
 Heat, a fairy force, 8. 
 cut off by water-vapour, 85. 
 
248 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Heat necessary to turn water into 
 vapour, 96. 
 
 of the sun, 32. 
 work done by, 46. 
 
 imprisoned in coal, 47. 
 
 of our bodies, 46. 
 
 Helpfulness, mutual, of insects 
 
 and flowers, 242. 
 Herschel, Sir J., on the sun, 32. 
 Hive-bee, forming cells, 207. 
 Hives, ventilation of, 216. 
 
 bees cementing cracks in, 
 204. 
 
 Hoar-frost, 94. 
 
 Honey, carried by bee, 208. 
 
 secreted by flowers for bees, 
 
 222. 
 
 use of, to the primrose, 171 
 
 Honeysuckle, scent at night, 225. 
 Hooker, Sir J., on rainfall, 83. 
 Horse-tails and calamites, 185. 
 Huber on bees, 202. 
 Huxley, Mr., on coral, 21. 
 
 cited, in. 
 Huyghens on light, 34. 
 
 ICE, formed of pressed snow, 97. 
 
 purity of, 98. 
 
 sculpturing power of, 124. 
 
 water-flowers in, 95. 
 
 Icebergs, 98. 
 
 Imagination in science, 7. 
 Indian Ocean, vapour carried up 
 
 from, 80. 
 Insects attracted by scent and 
 
 colour, 224. 
 
 buzzing of, 152. 
 
 visiting the primrose, 171. 
 
 Iron, use of, in leaves, 161. 
 
 Iron worked in Sussex, 197. 
 Ives, Lieut., on Canons, 117. 
 
 JAR, resonance in a, 149. 
 Judd, Professor, cited, 178. 
 
 KENTUCKY, Mammoth Cave of, 
 
 121. 
 Kettle, crust in a, 112. 
 
 vapour rising from a, 78. 
 
 Khasia Hills, rain in, 83. 
 
 LACE, photographed during lec- 
 ture, 48. 
 
 Lake-district, rain in the, 84. 
 
 Land-breeze and sea-breeze, 73. 
 
 Landslips, 109. 
 
 Lamium album, 230. 
 
 Larva of bees, 210. 
 
 Laws of nature, 24. 
 
 Leather wetted, lifting a weight, 
 65- 
 
 Leaves, oxygen-bubbles rising 
 from, 162. 
 
 stomates in, 165. 
 
 the stomach of a plant, 165. 
 
 Lepidodendrons, trees of coal, 
 181, 183, 185. 
 
 Life of a plant, 173. 
 
 Light, coloured spectrum of, 39. 
 
 dark and light bands of, 37. 
 
 of the sun, 31. 
 
 effect of, on plants, 45. 
 
 reflection of, 43. 
 
 scattered by particles in air, 
 
 74- 
 
 Light-waves entering the eye, 39. 
 
 size of, 38. 
 
 Lightning, 55, 75. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 249 
 
 Limej carbonate of, petrifying, 
 
 120. 
 
 Limpet clinging to a rock, 65. 
 Liquid, definition of a, 15. 
 Lines in flowers, 227. 
 Llanberis Pass, 127. 
 Looking-glass, cause of reflection 
 
 in, 44. 
 
 Lotus corniculatus, 235. 
 Lubbock, Sir J., cited, 223, 234. 
 Lycopodium like coal-plants, 182. 
 
 MAGNETS, attraction and repul- 
 sion of, 91. 
 Martineau, Miss C., on echoes, 
 
 139- 
 Mediterranean, vapour carried up 
 
 from, 82. 
 Mercury, action of, in a barometer, 
 
 68. 
 
 Metal reflecting light, 44. 
 Meteors, height of atmosphere 
 
 shown by, 63. 
 Mississippi delta, 119. 
 Moraines, 125. 
 
 Mountains causing rainfall, 83. 
 Mouse breathing in bell-jar, 57. 
 Mud in river-water, 112. 
 Musical notes, 144, 145-147. 
 
 NASTURTIUM and the bee, 229. 
 Nature and her laws, 24. 
 
 love of, 19. 
 
 Neath Colliery, fossils from, 178. 
 Newton on light, 34. 
 Nile plain and delta, 119. 
 Nitre crystals, how to make, 90. 
 Nitrogen in air, 56. 
 Nodules in coal, 180. 
 
 Noise and music, 145. 
 
 Norfolk, Virginia, Dismal Swamp 
 
 in, 186. 
 Notes of music, 146. 
 
 OIL, its heat and light, 47. 
 
 wells, 192. 
 
 Oils in coal, 190, 191. 
 
 in plants, 157, 163, 192. 
 
 Orange-cells, 158. 
 
 Orchis mascula, its structure, 237. 
 
 Otoliths, or ear-stones, 143. 
 
 Ovules of plants, 166. 
 
 Oxygen in air, 56. 
 
 PAN-PIPES, 150. 
 
 Paper, pressure of air on square 
 inch of, 64. 
 
 Paraffin from coal, 192. 
 I Peat, formation of, 187. 
 I Petrifactions, 120. 
 
 Pelargoniums, 229. 
 
 Pennine Hills causing rainfall, 
 84. 
 
 Peter Bell on a primrose, 7. 
 
 Phosphoric acid, 56. 
 
 Phosphorus burning in air, 56. 
 
 Photography, 48. 
 
 Pimpernel, closing for rain, 225. 
 
 Plant-cells, 158. 
 
 Plant, food of a, 159. 
 
 water rising in a, 160. 
 
 Plants absorbing rain, 84, 
 
 annual and perennial, 165. 
 
 contrivances for protection 
 
 in, 226. 
 
 effect of light on, 45. 
 
 fertilized by wind, 222. 
 
 in a coal-mine, 177. 
 
250 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Plants, light and heat imprisoned 
 in, 173- 
 
 remains in coal-nodules, 180. 
 
 Poker, sound of a vibrating, 
 
 133- 
 Pollen-dust carried by bees, 222. 
 
 of flowers, 234, 236. 
 
 Pollen, gathering of, 208. 
 
 use of, 1 68. 
 
 Pollinia of an orchis, 238. 
 
 Polyps, coral, 21. 
 
 Poole's Cavern, 120. 
 
 Popgun, compressing air in, 61. 
 
 Potash formed, 17. 
 
 Potassium in water, 16. 
 
 Pot-holes, 115. 
 
 Pressure, making coal hard, 190. 
 
 Primrose, corolla falling off, 170. 
 
 Protoplasm, 159. 
 
 green granules of, 161. 
 
 Primrose, the life of a, 154. 
 
 two forms of, 167. 
 
 Princess-bees, slaughter of, 215. 
 Prism giving coloured light, 39. 
 Propolis, or bee-cement, 204. 
 
 QUEEN-BEE, flight of, 209. 
 laying eggs, 210. 
 
 RAIN, causes of, 82, 83. 
 
 fairies working in, 8. 
 
 fall of barometer before, 70. 
 
 Ravine worn by water, 114. 
 Reflection of light, 43. 
 Resonance in a jar, 150. 
 Rhine, amount of lime carried by, 
 
 112. 
 
 Roches moutonnees, 126. 
 Rock hurled by waves, 122. 
 
 ST. JOHN'S WOOD, explosion in, 
 
 138. 
 
 Salvia, bee entering the, 232. 
 Sap of plants, 161. 
 Scent of flowers attracts insects, 
 
 225. 
 
 Science, fairy-tales of, 2. 
 how to study, 18. 
 
 Sculptors, water and ice, 103, 123. 
 Sea-breeze and land-breeze, 73. 
 Sea, why salt, 99 
 
 what becomes of solid matter 
 
 in, 100. 
 
 Seeds, how formed, 169. 
 oils in, 192. 
 
 Selaginella, figure of, 182. 
 
 Shale, piece of, with plants, 178. 
 
 Shelley, cited, 148. 
 
 Shell, music of the, 150. 
 
 Sigillaria, 179, 183. 
 
 Snow, cause of whiteness of, 94. 
 
 fairies working in, 9 
 
 Snow-crystals, 94. 
 
 Snow-drop fairies, 10. 
 
 Snowfields, 97. 
 
 Snow-flakes, crystallization of, 93. 
 
 Solid, definition of a, 15. 
 
 Sound, globes of, 137. 
 
 its nature, 132. 
 
 reflection of, 138. 
 
 Sounds of town and country, 130, 
 132. 
 
 Sound-waves, 135. 
 
 South Ouram, coal-nodules at, 
 180. 
 
 Spectrum, coloured, 40. 
 
 Sphinx hawk-moth visiting honey- 
 suckle, 225. 
 
 Spores of club-moss, 182. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 251 
 
 Spores in coal, 181, 183. 
 Sprengel on insects and flowers, 
 
 227, 233, 241. 
 Springs, 97. 
 
 mineral, 99. 
 
 Stalactites, 120. 
 Stalagmites, 121. 
 Stamens of a flower, 168. 
 Starch in plants, 157, 162. 
 Stars, light of the, 36. 
 
 twinkling of, 75. 
 
 Stigma of a flower, 169. 
 Stigmas of orchids, 238. 
 Stigmaria root, 178. 
 Stomates in leaves, 165. 
 Striae made by ice, i"26, 127. 
 Sugar, carbon in, 163. 
 
 candy crystals, 89. 
 
 Sun, distance of the, 29. 
 
 size of the, 29. 
 
 heat and light of, 32. 
 
 Sunbeams, 27, 42. 
 
 causing colour, 44. 
 
 causing wind, 71. 
 
 how few reach the earth, 32. 
 
 made of many colours, 40. 
 
 rate at which they travel, 38. 
 
 turning water to vapour, 77, 
 
 80. 
 
 Sunrise, 27. 
 
 Sussex, iron worked in, 197. 
 Swamp, Great Dismal, 187. 
 Swarming of bees, 203, 213. 
 Switzerland, glaciers of, 124. 
 
 TAR FROM COAL, IQI. 
 Tennyson's " In Memoriam ' 
 
 cited, 199. 
 poem of a flower, 155. 
 
 Thames, drainage of, in. 
 
 mud-banks, 119. 
 
 Thunder, noise of, 151. 
 
 Trade-winds, 73. 
 
 Treacle and water mixing through 
 
 a membrane, 160. 
 Trees of the coal-forest, 183. 
 Trefoil, structure of flower of, 
 
 235- 
 
 Tumbler of water inverted, 66. 
 Tuning-forks vibrating, 146. 
 Turin, moraines near, 125. 
 Twinkling of stars, 75. 
 Tympanum of the ear, 142. 
 Tyndall, Dr., cited, 78, 91, 95, 
 
 133, 149- 
 
 UNDERCLAYS of coal, 179. 
 Undercliff, Isle of Wight, no. 
 Undulatory theory of light, 33-35. 
 
 VIBRATION OF TUNING-FORKS, 
 
 146. 
 Violet, structure of the, 234. 
 
 WALES, rain in, 84. 
 
 Water, cutting power of, ni-n8. 
 
 "hard," 99. 
 
 heat required to vaporize, 96. 
 
 how it rises in a plant, 160. 
 
 in U tube kept up by pres- 
 sure, 67.- 
 
 solid matter dissolved in, 
 112. 
 
 W T ater-dust, 78. 
 
 Waterfalls, how formed, 114. 
 
 Water-flowers in ice, 95. 
 
 W 7 ater-pipes, cause of bursting of, 
 95- 
 
252 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Water-vapour invisible, 78, 80. 
 
 screening the sun's heat, 85. 
 
 Waves, noise of the, 147, 148. 
 
 of light measured, 37. 
 
 of sound crossing each other, 
 
 139- 
 
 Wave-theory of light, 33-35. 
 Wax, plate of, in hive, 206. 
 
 formation of, 206. 
 
 Weight and pressure of air, 62, 
 
 64. 
 barometer measuring, 67-70. 
 
 Wheel revolving to make musical 
 
 note, 145. 
 
 Williams, Mr. J., cited, 178. 
 Wind, cause of, 71. 
 
 noise of the, 149^151. 
 
 fertilizing plants, 223. 
 
 Winds, land and sea, 72. 
 
 trade-, 73. 
 
 Woodstock Park, echoes in, 139. 
 Work of the sunbeams, 42. 
 
 YOUNG, Dr., cited, 192. 
 
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