Project Gutenberg Etext Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley
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Madam How and Lady Why, or First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children
by Charles Kingsley
April, 1999 [Etext #1697]
Project Gutenberg Etext Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley
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This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1889 Macmillan and Co. edition.
MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY
PREFACE
My dear boys,--When I was your age, there were no such children's
books as there are now. Those which we had were few and dull, and
the pictures in them ugly and mean: while you have your choice of
books without number, clear, amusing, and pretty, as well as
really instructive, on subjects which were only talked of fifty
years ago by a few learned men, and very little understood even by
them. So if mere reading of books would make wise men, you ought
to grow up much wiser than us old fellows. But mere reading of
wise books will not make you wise men: you must use for
yourselves the tools with which books are made wise; and that is--
your eyes, and ears, and common sense.
Now, among those very stupid old-fashioned boys' books was one
which taught me that; and therefore I am more grateful to it than
if it had been as full of wonderful pictures as all the natural
history books you ever saw. Its name was Evenings at Home; and in
it was a story called "Eyes and no Eyes;" a regular old-fashioned,
prim, sententious story; and it began thus:-
"Well, Robert, where have you been walking this afternoon?" said
Mr. Andrews to one of his pupils at the close of a holiday.
Oh--Robert had been to Broom Heath, and round by Camp Mount, and
home through the meadows. But it was very dull. He hardly saw a
single person. He had much rather have gone by the turnpike-road.
Presently in comes Master William, the other pupil, dressed, I
suppose, as wretched boys used to be dressed forty years ago, in a
frill collar, and skeleton monkey-jacket, and tight trousers
buttoned over it, and hardly coming down to his ancles; and low
shoes, which always came off in sticky ground; and terribly dirty
and wet he is: but he never (he says) had such a pleasant walk in
his life; and he has brought home his handkerchief (for boys had
no pockets in those days much bigger than key-holes) full of
curiosities.
He has got a piece of mistletoe, wants to know what it is; and he
has seen a woodpecker, and a wheat-ear, and gathered strange
flowers on the heath; and hunted a peewit because he thought its
wing was broken, till of course it led him into a bog, and very
wet he got. But he did not mind it, because he fell in with an
old man cutting turf, who told him all about turf-cutting, and
gave him a dead adder. And then he went up a hill, and saw a
grand prospect; and wanted to go again, and make out the geography
of the country from Cary's old county maps, which were the only
maps in those days. And then, because the hill was called Camp
Mount, he looked for a Roman camp, and found one; and then he went
down to the river, saw twenty things more; and so on, and so on,
till he had brought home curiosities enough, and thoughts enough,
to last him a week.
Whereon Mr. Andrews, who seems to have been a very sensible old
gentleman, tells him all about his curiosities: and then it comes
out--if you will believe it--that Master William has been over the
very same ground as Master Robert, who saw nothing at all.
Whereon Mr. Andrews says, wisely enough, in his solemn old-
fashioned way, -
"So it is. One man walks through the world with his eyes open,
another with his eyes shut; and upon this difference depends all
the superiority of knowledge which one man acquires over another.
I have known sailors who had been in all the quarters of the
world, and could tell you nothing but the signs of the tippling-
houses, and the price and quality of the liquor. On the other
hand, Franklin could not cross the Channel without making
observations useful to mankind. While many a vacant thoughtless
youth is whirled through Europe without gaining a single idea
worth crossing the street for, the observing eye and inquiring
mind find matter of improvement and delight in every ramble. You,
then, William, continue to use your eyes. And you, Robert, learn
that eyes were given to you to use."
So said Mr. Andrews: and so I say, dear boys--and so says he who
has the charge of you--to you. Therefore I beg all good boys
among you to think over this story, and settle in their own minds
whether they will be eyes or no eyes; whether they will, as they
grow up, look and see for themselves what happens: or whether
they will let other people look for them, or pretend to look; and
dupe them, and lead them about--the blind leading the blind, till
both fall into the ditch.
I say "good boys;" not merely clever boys, or prudent boys:
because using your eyes, or not using them, is a question of doing
Right or doing Wrong. God has given you eyes; it is your duty to
God to use them. If your parents tried to teach you your lessons
in the most agreeable way, by beautiful picture-books, would it
not be ungracious, ungrateful, and altogether naughty and wrong,
to shut your eyes to those pictures, and refuse to learn? And is
it not altogether naughty and wrong to refuse to learn from your
Father in Heaven, the Great God who made all things, when he
offers to teach you all day long by the most beautiful and most
wonderful of all picture-books, which is simply all things which
you can see, hear, and touch, from the sun and stars above your
head to the mosses and insects at your feet? It is your duty to
learn His lessons: and it is your interest. God's Book, which is
the Universe, and the reading of God's Book, which is Science, can
do you nothing but good, and teach you nothing but truth and
wisdom. God did not put this wondrous world about your young
souls to tempt or to mislead them. If you ask Him for a fish, he
will not give you a serpent. If you ask Him for bread, He will
not give you a stone.
So use your eyes and your intellect, your senses and your brains,
and learn what God is trying to teach you continually by them. I
do not mean that you must stop there, and learn nothing more.
Anything but that. There are things which neither your senses nor
your brains can tell you; and they are not only more glorious, but
actually more true and more real than any things which you can see
or touch. But you must begin at the beginning in order to end at
the end, and sow the seed if you wish to gather the fruit. God
has ordained that you, and every child which comes into the world,
should begin by learning something of the world about him by his
senses and his brain; and the better you learn what they can teach
you, the more fit you will be to learn what they cannot teach you.
The more you try now to understand THINGS, the more you will be
able hereafter to understand men, and That which is above men.
You began to find out that truly Divine mystery, that you had a
mother on earth, simply by lying soft and warm upon her bosom; and
so (as Our Lord told the Jews of old) it is by watching the common
natural things around you, and considering the lilies of the
field, how they grow, that you will begin at least to learn that
far Diviner mystery, that you have a Father in Heaven. And so you
will be delivered (if you will) out of the tyranny of darkness,
and distrust, and fear, into God's free kingdom of light, and
faith, and love; and will be safe from the venom of that tree
which is more deadly than the fabled upas of the East. Who
planted that tree I know not, it was planted so long ago: but
surely it is none of God's planting, neither of the Son of God:
yet it grows in all lands and in all climes, and sends its hidden
suckers far and wide, even (unless we be watchful) into your
hearts and mine. And its name is the Tree of Unreason, whose
roots are conceit and ignorance, and its juices folly and death.
It drops its venom into the finest brains; and makes them call
sense, nonsense; and nonsense, sense; fact, fiction; and fiction,
fact. It drops its venom into the tenderest hearts, alas! and
makes them call wrong, right; and right, wrong; love, cruelty; and
cruelty, love. Some say that the axe is laid to the root of it
just now, and that it is already tottering to its fall: while
others say that it is growing stronger than ever, and ready to
spread its upas-shade over the whole earth. For my part, I know
not, save that all shall be as God wills. The tree has been cut
down already again and again; and yet has always thrown out fresh
shoots and dropped fresh poison from its boughs. But this at
least I know: that any little child, who will use the faculties
God has given him, may find an antidote to all its poison in the
meanest herb beneath his feet.
There, you do not understand me, my boys; and the best prayer I
can offer for you is, perhaps, that you should never need to
understand me: but if that sore need should come, and that poison
should begin to spread its mist over your brains and hearts, then
you will be proof against it; just in proportion as you have used
the eyes and the common sense which God has given you, and have
considered the lilies of the field, how they grow.
C. KINGSLEY.
CHAPTER I--THE GLEN
You find it dull walking up here upon Hartford Bridge Flat this
sad November day? Well, I do not deny that the moor looks
somewhat dreary, though dull it need never be. Though the fog is
clinging to the fir-trees, and creeping among the heather, till
you cannot see as far as Minley Corner, hardly as far as Bramshill
woods--and all the Berkshire hills are as invisible as if it was a
dark midnight--yet there is plenty to be seen here at our very
feet. Though there is nothing left for you to pick, and all the
flowers are dead and brown, except here and there a poor half-
withered scrap of bottle-heath, and nothing left for you to catch
either, for the butterflies and insects are all dead too, except
one poor old Daddy-long-legs, who sits upon that piece of turf,
boring a hole with her tail to lay her eggs in, before the frost
catches her and ends her like the rest: though all things, I say,
seem dead, yet there is plenty of life around you, at your feet, I
may almost say in the very stones on which you tread. And though
the place itself be dreary enough, a sheet of flat heather and a
little glen in it, with banks of dead fern, and a brown bog
between them, and a few fir-trees struggling up--yet, if you only
have eyes to see it, that little bit of glen is beautiful and
wonderful,--so beautiful and so wonderful and so cunningly
devised, that it took thousands of years to make it; and it is
not, I believe, half finished yet.
How do I know all that? Because a fairy told it me; a fairy who
lives up here upon the moor, and indeed in most places else, if
people have but eyes to see her. What is her name? I cannot
tell. The best name that I can give her (and I think it must be
something like her real name, because she will always answer if
you call her by it patiently and reverently) is Madam How. She
will come in good time, if she is called, even by a little child.
And she will let us see her at her work, and, what is more, teach
us to copy her. But there is another fairy here likewise, whom we
can hardly hope to see. Very thankful should we be if she lifted
even the smallest corner of her veil, and showed us but for a
moment if it were but her finger tip--so beautiful is she, and yet
so awful too. But that sight, I believe, would not make us proud,
as if we had had some great privilege. No, my dear child: it
would make us feel smaller, and meaner, and more stupid and more
ignorant than we had ever felt in our lives before; at the same
time it would make us wiser than ever we were in our lives before-
-that one glimpse of the great glory of her whom we call Lady Why.
But I will say more of her presently. We must talk first with
Madam How, and perhaps she may help us hereafter to see Lady Why.
For she is the servant, and Lady Why is the mistress; though she
has a Master over her again--whose name I leave for you to guess.
You have heard it often already, and you will hear it again, for
ever and ever.
But of one thing I must warn you, that you must not confound Madam
How and Lady Why. Many people do it, and fall into great mistakes
thereby,--mistakes that even a little child, if it would think,
need not commit. But really great philosophers sometimes make
this mistake about Why and How; and therefore it is no wonder if
other people make it too, when they write children's books about
the wonders of nature, and call them "Why and Because," or "The
Reason Why." The books are very good books, and you should read
and study them: but they do not tell you really "Why and
Because," but only "How and So." They do not tell you the "Reason
Why" things happen, but only "The Way in which they happen."
However, I must not blame these good folks, for I have made the
same mistake myself often, and may do it again: but all the more
shame to me. For see--you know perfectly the difference between
How and Why, when you are talking about yourself. If I ask you,
"Why did we go out to-day?" You would not answer, "Because we
opened the door." That is the answer to "How did we go out?" The
answer to Why did we go out is, "Because we chose to take a walk."
Now when we talk about other things beside ourselves, we must
remember this same difference between How and Why. If I ask you,
"Why does fire burn you?" you would answer, I suppose, being a
little boy, "Because it is hot;" which is all you know about it.
But if you were a great chemist, instead of a little boy, you
would be apt to answer me, I am afraid, "Fire burns because the
vibratory motion of the molecules of the heated substance
communicates itself to the molecules of my skin, and so destroys
their tissue;" which is, I dare say, quite true: but it only
tells us how fire burns, the way or means by which it burns; it
does not tell us the reason why it burns.
But you will ask, "If that is not the reason why fire burns, what
is?" My dear child, I do not know. That is Lady Why's business,
who is mistress of Mrs. How, and of you and of me; and, as I
think, of all things that you ever saw, or can see, or even dream.
And what her reason for making fire burn may be I cannot tell.
But I believe on excellent grounds that her reason is a very good
one. If I dare to guess, I should say that one reason, at least,
why fire burns, is that you may take care not to play with it, and
so not only scorch your finger, but set your whole bed on fire,
and perhaps the house into the bargain, as you might be tempted to
do if putting your finger in the fire were as pleasant as putting
sugar in your mouth.
My dear child, if I could once get clearly into your head this
difference between Why and How, so that you should remember them
steadily in after life, I should have done you more good than if I
had given you a thousand pounds.
But now that we know that How and Why are two very different
matters, and must not be confounded with each other, let us look
for Madam How, and see her at work making this little glen; for,
as I told you, it is not half made yet. One thing we shall see at
once, and see it more and more clearly the older we grow; I mean
her wonderful patience and diligence. Madam How is never idle for
an instant. Nothing is too great or too small for her; and she
keeps her work before her eye in the same moment, and makes every
separate bit of it help every other bit. She will keep the sun
and stars in order, while she looks after poor old Mrs. Daddy-
long-legs there and her eggs. She will spend thousands of years
in building up a mountain, and thousands of years in grinding it
down again; and then carefully polish every grain of sand which
falls from that mountain, and put it in its right place, where it
will be wanted thousands of years hence; and she will take just as
much trouble about that one grain of sand as she did about the
whole mountain. She will settle the exact place where Mrs. Daddy-
long-legs shall lay her eggs, at the very same time that she is
settling what shall happen hundreds of years hence in a stair
millions of miles away. And I really believe that Madam How knows
her work so thoroughly, that the grain of sand which sticks now to
your shoe, and the weight of Mrs. Daddy-long-legs' eggs at the
bottom of her hole, will have an effect upon suns and stars ages
after you and I are dead and gone. Most patient indeed is Madam
How. She does not mind the least seeing her own work destroyed;
she knows that it must be destroyed. There is a spell upon her,
and a fate, that everything she makes she must unmake again: and
yet, good and wise woman as she is, she never frets, nor tires,
nor fudges her work, as we say at school. She takes just as much
pains to make an acorn as to make a peach. She takes just as much
pains about the acorn which the pig eats, as about the acorn which
will grow into a tall oak, and help to build a great ship. She
took just as much pains, again, about the acorn which you crushed
under your foot just now, and which you fancy will never come to
anything. Madam How is wiser than that. She knows that it will
come to something. She will find some use for it, as she finds a
use for everything. That acorn which you crushed will turn into
mould, and that mould will go to feed the roots of some plant,
perhaps next year, if it lies where it is; or perhaps it will be
washed into the brook, and then into the river, and go down to the
sea, and will feed the roots of some plant in some new continent
ages and ages hence: and so Madam How will have her own again.
You dropped your stick into the river yesterday, and it floated
away. You were sorry, because it had cost you a great deal of
trouble to cut it, and peel it, and carve a head and your name on
it. Madam How was not sorry, though she had taken a great deal
more trouble with that stick than ever you had taken. She had
been three years making that stick, out of many things, sunbeams
among the rest. But when it fell into the river, Madam How knew
that she should not lose her sunbeams nor anything else: the
stick would float down the river, and on into the sea; and there,
when it got heavy with the salt water, it would sink, and lodge,
and be buried, and perhaps ages hence turn into coal; and ages
after that some one would dig it up and burn it, and then out
would come, as bright warm flame, all the sunbeams that were
stored away in that stick: and so Madam How would have her own
again. And if that should not be the fate of your stick, still
something else will happen to it just as useful in the long run;
for Madam How never loses anything, but uses up all her scraps and
odds and ends somehow, somewhere, somewhen, as is fit and proper
for the Housekeeper of the whole Universe. Indeed, Madam How is
so patient that some people fancy her stupid, and think that,
because she does not fall into a passion every time you steal her
sweets, or break her crockery, or disarrange her furniture,
therefore she does not care. But I advise you as a little boy,
and still more when you grow up to be a man, not to get that fancy
into your head; for you will find that, however good-natured and
patient Madam How is in most matters, her keeping silence and not
seeming to see you is no sign that she has forgotten. On the
contrary, she bears a grudge (if one may so say, with all respect
to her) longer than any one else does; because she will always
have her own again. Indeed, I sometimes think that if it were not
for Lady Why, her mistress, she might bear some of her grudges for
ever and ever. I have seen men ere now damage some of Madam How's
property when they were little boys, and be punished by her all
their lives long, even though she had mended the broken pieces, or
turned them to some other use. Therefore I say to you, beware of
Madam How. She will teach you more kindly, patiently, and
tenderly than any mother, if you want to learn her trade. But if,
instead of learning her trade, you damage her materials and play
with her tools, beware lest she has her own again out of you.
Some people think, again, that Madam How is not only stupid, but
ill-tempered and cruel; that she makes earthquakes and storms, and
famine and pestilences, in a sort of blind passion, not caring
where they go or whom they hurt; quite heedless of who is in the
way, if she wants to do anything or go anywhere. Now, that Madam
How can be very terrible there can be no doubt: but there is no
doubt also that, if people choose to learn, she will teach them to
get out of her way whenever she has business to do which is
dangerous to them. But as for her being cruel and unjust, those
may believe it who like. You, my dear boys and girls, need not
believe it, if you will only trust to Lady Why; and be sure that
Why is the mistress and How the servant, now and for ever. That
Lady Why is utterly good and kind I know full well; and I believe
that, in her case too, the old proverb holds, "Like mistress, like
servant;" and that the more we know of Madam How, the more we
shall be content with her, and ready to submit to whatever she
does: but not with that stupid resignation which some folks
preach who do not believe in lady Why--that is no resignation at
all. That is merely saying -
"What can't be cured
Must be endured,"
like a donkey when he turns his tail to a hail-storm,--but the
true resignation, the resignation which is fit for grown people
and children alike, the resignation which is the beginning and the
end of all wisdom and all religion, is to believe that Lady Why
knows best, because she herself is perfectly good; and that as she
is mistress over Madam How, so she has a Master over her, whose
name--I say again--I leave you to guess.
So now that I have taught you not to be afraid of Madam How, we
will go and watch her at her work; and if we do not understand
anything we see, we will ask her questions. She will always show
us one of her lesson books if we give her time. And if we have to
wait some time for her answer, you need not fear catching cold,
though it is November; for she keeps her lesson books scattered
about in strange places, and we may have to walk up and down that
hill more than once before we can make out how she makes the glen.
Well--how was the glen made? You shall guess it if you like, and
I will guess too. You think, perhaps, that an earthquake opened
it?
My dear child, we must look before we guess. Then, after we have
looked a little, and got some grounds for guessing, then we may
guess. And you have no ground for supposing there ever was an
earthquake here strong enough to open that glen. There may have
been one: but we must guess from what we do know, and not from
what we do not.
Guess again. Perhaps it was there always, from the beginning of
the world? My dear child, you have no proof of that either.
Everything round you is changing in shape daily and hourly, as you
will find out the longer you live; and therefore it is most
reasonable to suppose that this glen has changed its shape, as
everything else on earth has done. Besides, I told you not that
Madam How had made the glen, but that she was making it, and as
yet has only half finished. That is my first guess; and my next
guess is that water is making the glen--water, and nothing else.
You open your young eyes. And I do not blame you. I looked at
this very glen for fifteen years before I made that guess; and I
have looked at it some ten years since, to make sure that my guess
held good. For man after all is very blind, my dear boy, and very
stupid, and cannot see what lies under his own feet all day long;
and if Lady Why, and He whom Lady Why obeys, were not very patient
and gentle with mankind, they would have perished off the face of
the earth long ago, simply from their own stupidity. I, at least,
was very stupid in this case, for I had my head full of
earthquakes, and convulsions of nature, and all sorts of prodigies
which never happened to this glen; and so, while I was trying to
find what was not there, I of course found nothing. But when I
put them all out of my head, and began to look for what was there,
I found it at once; and lo and behold! I had seen it a thousand
times before, and yet never learnt anything from it, like a stupid
man as I was; though what I learnt you may learn as easily as I
did.
And what did I find?
The pond at the bottom of the glen.
You know that pond, of course? You don't need to go there? Very
well. Then if you do, do not you know also that the pond is
always filling up with sand and mud; and that though we clean it
out every three or four years, it always fills again? Now where
does that sand and mud come from?
Down that stream, of course, which runs out of this bog. You see
it coming down every time there is a flood, and the stream fouls.
Very well. Then, said Madam How to me, as soon as I recollected
that, "Don't you see, you stupid man, that the stream has made the
glen, and the earth which runs down the stream was all once part
of the hill on which you stand." I confess I was very much
ashamed of myself when she said that. For that is the history of
the whole mystery. Madam How is digging away with her soft spade,
water. She has a harder spade, or rather plough, the strongest
and most terrible of all ploughs; but that, I am glad to say, she
has laid by in England here.
Water? But water is too simple a thing to have dug out all this
great glen.
My dear child, the most wonderful part of Madam How's work is,
that she does such great things and so many different things, with
one and the same tool, which looks to you so simple, though it
really is not so. Water, for instance, is not a simple thing, but
most complicated; and we might spend hours in talking about water,
without having come to the end of its wonders. Still Madam How is
a great economist, and never wastes her materials. She is like
the sailor who boasted (only she never boasts) that, if he had but
a long life and a strong knife, he would build St. Paul's
Cathedral before he was done. And Madam How has a very long life,
and plenty of time; and one of the strongest of all her tools is
water. Now if you will stoop down and look into the heather, I
will show you how she is digging out the glen with this very mist
which is hanging about our feet. At least, so I guess.
For see how the mist clings to the points of the heather leaves,
and makes drops. If the hot sun came out the drops would dry, and
they would vanish into the air in light warm steam. But now that
it is dark and cold they drip, or run down the heather-stems, to
the ground. And whither do they go then? Whither will the water
go,--hundreds of gallons of it perhaps,--which has dripped and run
through the heather in this single day? It will sink into the
ground, you know. And then what will become of it? Madam How
will use it as an underground spade, just as she uses the rain (at
least, when it rains too hard, and therefore the rain runs off the
moor instead of sinking into it) as a spade above ground.
Now come to the edge of the glen, and I will show you the mist
that fell yesterday, perhaps, coming out of the ground again, and
hard at work.
You know of what an odd, and indeed of what a pretty form all
these glens are. How the flat moor ends suddenly in a steep
rounded bank, almost like the crest of a wave--ready like a wave-
crest to fall over, and as you know, falling over sometimes, bit
by bit, where the soil is bare.
Oh, yes; you are very fond of those banks. It is "awfully jolly,"
as you say, scrambling up and down them, in the deep heath and
fern; besides, there are plenty of rabbit-holes there, because
they are all sand; while there are no rabbit-holes on the flat
above, because it is all gravel.
Yes; you know all about it: but you know, too, that you must not
go too far down these banks, much less roll down them, because
there is almost certain to be a bog at the bottom, lying upon a
gentle slope; and there you get wet through.
All round these hills, from here to Aldershot in one direction,
and from here to Windsor in another, you see the same shaped
glens; the wave-crest along their top, and at the foot of the
crest a line of springs which run out over the slopes, or well up
through them in deep sand-galls, as you call them--shaking
quagmires which are sometimes deep enough to swallow up a horse,
and which you love to dance upon in summer time. Now the water of
all these springs is nothing but the rain, and mist, and dew,
which has sunk down first through the peaty soil, and then through
the gravel and sand, and there has stopped. And why? Because
under the gravel (about which I will tell you a strange story one
day) and under the sand, which is what the geologists call the
Upper Bagshot sand, there is an entirely different set of beds,
which geologists call the Bracklesham beds, from a place near the
New Forest; and in those beds there is a vein of clay, and through
that clay the water cannot get, as you have seen yourself when we
dug it out in the field below to puddle the pond-head; and very
good fun you thought it, and a very pretty mess you made of
yourself. Well: because the water cannot get though this clay,
and must go somewhere, it runs out continually along the top of
the clay, and as it runs undermines the bank, and brings down sand
and gravel continually for the next shower to wash into the stream
below.
Now think for one moment how wonderful it is that the shape of
these glens, of which you are so fond, was settled by the
particular order in which Madam How laid down the gravel and sand
and mud at the bottom of the sea, ages and ages ago. This is what
I told you, that the least thing that Madam How does to-day may
take effect hundreds and thousands of years hence.
But I must tell you I think there was a time when this glen was of
a very different shape from what it is now; and I dare say,
according to your notions, of a much prettier shape. It was once
just like one of those Chines which we used to see at Bournemouth.
You recollect them? How there was a narrow gap in the cliff of
striped sands and gravels; and out of the mouth of that gap, only
a few feet across, there poured down a great slope of mud and sand
the shape of half a bun, some wet and some dry, up which we used
to scramble and get into the Chine, and call the Chine what it was
in the truest sense, Fairyland. You recollect how it was all
eaten out into mountain ranges, pinnacles, steep cliffs of white,
and yellow, and pink, standing up against the clear blue sky; till
we agreed that, putting aside the difference of size, they were as
beautiful and grand as any Alps we had ever seen in pictures. And
how we saw (for there could be no mistake about it there) that the
Chine was being hollowed out by the springs which broke out high
up the cliff, and by the rain which wore the sand into furrowed
pinnacles and peaks. You recollect the beautiful place, and how,
when we looked back down it we saw between the miniature mountain
walls the bright blue sea, and heard it murmur on the sands
outside. So I verily believe we might have done, if we had stood
somewhere at the bottom of this glen thousands of years ago. We
should have seen the sea in front of us; or rather, an arm of the
sea; for Finchampstead ridges opposite, instead of being covered
with farms, and woodlands, and purple heath above, would have been
steep cliffs of sand and clay, just like those you see at
Bournemouth now; and--what would have spoilt somewhat the beauty
of the sight--along the shores there would have floated, at least
in winter, great blocks and floes of ice, such as you might have
seen in the tideway at King's Lynn the winter before last,
growling and crashing, grubbing and ploughing the sand, and the
gravel, and the mud, and sweeping them away into seas towards the
North, which are now all fruitful land. That may seem to you like
a dream: yet it is true; and some day, when we have another talk
with Madam How, I will show even a child like you that it was
true.
But what could change a beautiful Chine like that at Bournemouth
into a wide sloping glen like this of Bracknell's Bottom, with a
wood like Coombs', many acres large, in the middle of it? Well
now, think. It is a capital plan for finding out Madam How's
secrets, to see what she might do in one place, and explain by it
what she has done in another. Suppose now, Madam How had orders
to lift up the whole coast of Bournemouth only twenty or even ten
feet higher out of the sea than it is now. She could do that
easily enough, for she has been doing so on the coast of South
America for ages; she has been doing so this very summer in what
hasty people would call a hasty, and violent, and ruthless way;
though I shall not say so, for I believe that Lady Why knows best.
She is doing so now steadily on the west coast of Norway, which is
rising quietly--all that vast range of mountain wall and iron-
bound cliff--at the rate of some four feet in a hundred years,
without making the least noise or confusion, or even causing an
extra ripple on the sea; so light and gentle, when she will, can
Madam How's strong finger be.
Now, if the mouth of that Chine at Bournemouth was lifted twenty
feet out of the sea, one thing would happen,--that the high tide
would not come up any longer, and wash away the cake of dirt at
the entrance, as we saw it do so often. But if the mud stopped
there, the mud behind it would come down more slowly, and lodge
inside more and more, till the Chine was half filled-up, and only
the upper part of the cliffs continue to be eaten away, above the
level where the springs ran out. So gradually the Chine, instead
of being deep and narrow, would become broad and shallow; and
instead of hollowing itself rapidly after every shower of rain, as
you saw the Chine at Bournemouth doing, would hollow itself out
slowly, as this glen is doing now. And one thing more would
happen,--when the sea ceased to gnaw at the foot of the cliffs
outside, and to carry away every stone and grain of sand which
fell from them, the cliffs would very soon cease to be cliffs; the
rain and the frost would still crumble them down, but the dirt
that fell would lie at their feet, and gradually make a slope of
dry land, far out where the shallow sea had been; and their tops,
instead of being steep as now, would become smooth and rounded;
and so at last, instead of two sharp walls of cliff at the Chine's
mouth, you might have --just what you have here at the mouth of
this glen,--our Mount and the Warren Hill,--long slopes with
sheets of drifted gravel and sand at their feet, stretching down
into what was once an icy sea, and is now the Vale of Blackwater.
And this I really believe Madam How has done simply by lifting
Hartford Bridge Flat a few more feet out of the sea, and leaving
the rest to her trusty tool, the water in the sky.
That is my guess: and I think it is a good guess, because I have
asked Madam How a hundred different questions about it in the last
ten years, and she always answered them in the same way, saying,
"Water, water, you stupid man." But I do not want you merely to
depend on what I say. If you want to understand Madam How, you
must ask her questions yourself, and make up your mind yourself
like a man, instead of taking things at hearsay or second-hand,
like the vulgar. Mind, by "the vulgar" I do not mean poor people:
I mean ignorant and uneducated people, who do not use their brains
rightly, though they may be fine ladies, kings, or popes. The
Bible says, "Prove all things: hold fast that which is good." So
do you prove my guess, and if it proves good, hold it fast.
And how can I do that?
First, by direct experiment, as it is called. In plain English--
go home and make a little Hartford Bridge Flat in the stable-yard;
and then ask Mrs. How if she will not make a glen in it like this
glen here. We will go home and try that. We will make a great
flat cake of clay, and put upon it a cap of sand; and then we will
rain upon it out of a watering-pot; and see if Mrs. How does not
begin soon to make a glen in the side of the heap, just like those
on Hartford Bridge Flat. I believe she will; and certainly, if
she does, it will be a fresh proof that my guess is right. And
then we will see whether water will not make glens of a different
shape than these, if it run over soils of a different kind. We
will make a Hartford Bridge Flat turned upside down--a cake of
sand with a cap of clay on the top; and we will rain on that out
of our watering-pot, and see what sort of glens we make then. I
can guess what they will be like, because I have seen them--steep
overhanging cliffs, with very narrow gullies down them: but you
shall try for yourself, and make up your mind whether you think me
right or wrong. Meanwhile, remember that those gullies too will
have been made by water.
And there is another way of "verifying my theory," as it is
called; in plain English, seeing if my guess holds good; that is,
to look at other valleys--not merely the valleys round here, but
valleys in clay, in chalk, in limestone, in the hard slate rock
such as you saw in Devonshire--and see whether my guess does not
hold good about them too; whether all of them, deep or shallow,
broad or narrow, rock or earth, may not have been all hollowed out
by running water. I am sure if you would do this you would find
something to amuse you, and something to instruct you, whenever
you wish. I know that I do. To me the longest railroad journey,
instead of being stupid, is like continually turning over the
leaves of a wonderful book, or looking at wonderful pictures of
old worlds which were made and unmade thousands of years ago. For
I keep looking, not only at the railway cuttings, where the bones
of the old worlds are laid bare, but at the surface of the ground;
at the plains and downs, banks and knolls, hills and mountains;
and continually asking Mrs. How what gave them each its shape:
and I will soon teach you to do the same. When you do, I tell you
fairly her answer will be in almost every case, "Running water."
Either water running when soft, as it usually is; or water running
when it is hard--in plain words, moving ice.
About that moving ice, which is Mrs. How's stronger spade, I will
tell you some other time; and show you, too, the marks of it in
every gravel pit about here. But now, I see, you want to ask a
question; and what is it?
Do I mean to say that water has made great valleys, such as you
have seen paintings and photographs of,--valleys thousands of feet
deep, among mountains thousands of feet high?
Yes, I do. But, as I said before, I do not like you to take my
word upon trust. When you are older you shall go to the
mountains, and you shall judge for yourself. Still, I must say
that I never saw a valley, however deep, or a cliff, however high,
which had not been scooped out by water; and that even the
mountain-tops which stand up miles aloft in jagged peaks and
pinnacles against the sky were cut out at first, and are being cut
and sharpened still, by little else save water, soft and hard;
that is, by rain, frost, and ice.
Water, and nothing else, has sawn out such a chasm as that through
which the ships run up to Bristol, between Leigh Wood and St.
Vincent's Rocks. Water, and nothing else, has shaped those peaks
of the Matterhorn, or the Weisshorn, or the Pic du Midi of the
Pyrenees, of which you have seen sketches and photographs. Just
so water might saw out Hartford Bridge Flat, if it had time
enough, into a labyrinth of valleys, and hills, and peaks standing
alone; as it has done already by Ambarrow, and Edgbarrow, and the
Folly Hill on the other side of the vale.
I see you are astonished at the notion that water can make Alps.
But it was just because I knew you would be astonished at Madam
How's doing so great a thing with so simple a tool, that I began
by showing you how she was doing the same thing in a small way
here upon these flats. For the safest way to learn Madam How's
methods is to watch her at work in little corners at commonplace
business, which will not astonish or frighten us, nor put huge
hasty guesses and dreams into our heads. Sir Isaac Newton, some
will tell you, found out the great law of gravitation, which holds
true of all the suns and stars in heaven, by watching an apple
fall: and even if he did not find it out so, he found it out, we
know, by careful thinking over the plain and commonplace fact,
that things have weight. So do you be humble and patient, and
watch Madam How at work on little things. For that is the way to
see her at work upon all space and time.
What? you have a question more to ask?
Oh! I talked about Madam How lifting up Hartford Bridge Flat.
How could she do that? My dear child, that is a long story, and I
must tell it you some other time. Meanwhile, did you ever see the
lid of a kettle rise up and shake when the water inside boiled?
Of course; and of course, too, remember that Madam How must have
done it. Then think over between this and our next talk, what
that can possibly have to do with her lifting up Hartford Bridge
Flat. But you have been longing, perhaps, all this time to hear
more about Lady Why, and why she set Madam How to make Bracknell's
Bottom.
My dear child, the only answer I dare give to that is: Whatever
other purposes she may have made it for, she made it at least for
this--that you and I should come to it this day, and look at, and
talk over it, and become thereby wiser and more earnest, and we
will hope more humble and better people. Whatever else Lady Why
may wish or not wish, this she wishes always, to make all men wise
and all men good. For what is written of her whom, as in a
parable, I have called Lady Why?
"The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His
works of old.
"I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the
earth was.
"When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were
no fountains abounding with water.
"Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought
forth:
"While as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the
highest part of the dust of the world.
"When He prepared the heavens, I was there: when He set a compass
upon the face of the depth:
"When He established the clouds above: when He strengthened the
fountains of the deep:
"When He gave to the sea His decree, that the waters should not
pass His commandment: when He appointed the foundations of the
earth:
"Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him: and I was daily
His delight, rejoicing always before Him:
"Rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; and my delights
were with the sons of men.
"Now therefore hearken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are
they that keep my ways."
That we can say, for it has been said for us already. But beyond
that we can say, and need say, very little. We were not there, as
we read in the Book of Job, when God laid the foundations of the
earth. "We see," says St. Paul, "as in a glass darkly, and only
know in part." "For who," he asks again, "has known the mind of
the Lord, or who hath been His counsellor? . . . For of Him, and
through Him, and to Him, are all things: to whom be glory for
ever and ever. Amen." Therefore we must not rashly say, this or
that is Why a thing has happened; nor invent what are called
"final causes," which are not Lady Why herself, but only our
little notions of what Lady Why has done, or rather what we should
have done if we had been in her place. It is not, indeed, by
thinking that we shall find out anything about Lady Why. She
speaks not to our eyes or to our brains, like Madam How, but to
that inner part of us which we call our hearts and spirits, and
which will endure when eyes and brain are turned again to dust.
If your heart be pure and sober, gentle and truthful, then Lady
Why speaks to you without words, and tells you things which Madam
How and all her pupils, the men of science, can never tell. When
you lie, it may be, on a painful sick-bed, but with your mother's
hand in yours; when you sit by her, looking up into her loving
eyes; when you gaze out towards the setting sun, and fancy golden
capes and islands in the clouds, and seas and lakes in the blue
sky, and the infinite rest and peace of the far west sends rest
and peace into your young heart, till you sit silent and happy,
you know not why; when sweet music fills your heart with noble and
tender instincts which need no thoughts or words; ay, even when
you watch the raging thunderstorm, and feel it to be, in spite of
its great awfulness, so beautiful that you cannot turn your eyes
away: at such times as these Lady Why is speaking to your soul of
souls, and saying, "My child, this world is a new place, and
strange, and often terrible: but be not afraid. All will come
right at last. Rest will conquer Restlessness; Faith will conquer
Fear; Order will conquer Disorder; Health will conquer Sickness;
Joy will conquer Sorrow; Pleasure will conquer Pain; Life will
conquer Death; Right will conquer Wrong. All will be well at
last. Keep your soul and body pure, humble, busy, pious--in one
word, be good: and ere you die, or after you die, you may have
some glimpse of Me, the Everlasting Why: and hear with the ears,
not of your body but of your spirit, men and all rational beings,
plants and animals, ay, the very stones beneath your feet, the
clouds above your head, the planets and the suns away in farthest
space, singing eternally,
"'Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power,
for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are
and were created."'
CHAPTER II--EARTHQUAKES
So? You have been looking at that beautiful drawing of the ruin
of Arica in the Illustrated London News: and it has puzzled you
and made you sad. You want to know why God killed all those
people--mothers among them, too, and little children?
Alas, my dear child! who am I that I should answer you that?
Have you done wrong in asking me? No, my dear child; no. You
have asked me because you are a human being and a child of God,
and not merely a cleverer sort of animal, an ape who can read and
write and cast accounts. Therefore it is that you cannot be
content, and ought not to be content, with asking how things
happen, but must go on to ask why. You cannot be content with
knowing the causes of things; and if you knew all the natural
science that ever was or ever will be known to men, that would not
satisfy you; for it would only tell you the CAUSES of things,
while your souls want to know the REASONS of things besides; and
though I may not be able to tell you the reasons of things, or
show you aught but a tiny glimpse here and there of that which I
called the other day the glory of Lady Why, yet I believe that
somehow, somewhen, somewhere, you will learn something of the
reason of things. For that thirst to know WHY was put into the
hearts of little children by God Himself; and I believe that God
would never have given them that thirst if He had not meant to
satisfy it.
There--you do not understand me. I trust that you will understand
me some day. Meanwhile, I think--I only say I THINK--you know I
told you how humble we must be whenever we speak of Lady Why--that
we may guess at something like a good reason for the terrible
earthquakes in South America. I do not wish to be hard upon poor
people in great affliction: but I cannot help thinking that they
have been doing for hundreds of years past something very like
what the Bible calls "tempting God"--staking their property and
their lives upon the chances of no earthquakes coming, while they
ought to have known that an earthquake might come any day. They
have fulfilled (and little thought I that it would be fulfilled so
soon) the parable that I told you once, of the nation of the Do-
as-you-likes, who lived careless and happy at the foot of the
burning mountain, and would not be warned by the smoke that came
out of the top, or by the slag and cinders which lay all about
them; till the mountain blew up, and destroyed them miserably.
Then I think that they ought to have expected an earthquake.
Well--it is not for us to judge any one, especially if they live
in a part of the world in which we have not been ourselves. But I
think that we know, and that they ought to have known, enough
about earthquakes to have been more prudent than they have been
for many a year. At least we will hope that, though they would
not learn their lesson till this year, they will learn it now, and
will listen to the message which I think Madam How has brought
them, spoken in a voice of thunder, and written in letters of
flame.
And what is that?
My dear child, if the landlord of our house was in the habit of
pulling the roof down upon our heads, and putting gunpowder under
the foundations to blow us up, do you not think we should know
what he meant, even though he never spoke a word? He would be
very wrong in behaving so, of course: but one thing would be
certain,--that he did not intend us to live in his house any
longer if he could help it; and was giving us, in a very rough
fashion, notice to quit. And so it seems to me that these poor
Spanish Americans have received from the Landlord of all
landlords, who can do no wrong, such a notice to quit as perhaps
no people ever had before; which says to them in unmistakable
words, "You must leave this country: or perish." And I believe
that that message, like all Lady Why's messages, is at heart a
merciful and loving one; that if these Spaniards would leave the
western coast of Peru, and cross the Andes into the green forests
of the eastern side of their own land, they might not only live
free from earthquakes, but (if they would only be good and
industrious) become a great, rich, and happy nation, instead of
the idle, and useless, and I am afraid not over good, people which
they have been. For in that eastern part of their own land God's
gifts are waiting for them, in a paradise such as I can neither
describe nor you conceive;--precious woods, fruits, drugs, and
what not--boundless wealth, in one word--waiting for them to send
it all down the waters of the mighty river Amazon, enriching us
here in the Old World, and enriching themselves there in the New.
If they would only go and use these gifts of God, instead of
neglecting them as they have been doing for now three hundred
years, they would be a blessing to the earth, instead of being--
that which they have been.
God grant, my dear child, that these poor people may take the
warning that has been sent to them; "The voice of God revealed in
facts," as the great Lord Bacon would have called it, and see not
only that God has bidden them leave the place where they are now,
but has prepared for them, in their own land, a home a thousand
times better than that in which they now live.
But you ask, How ought they to have known that an earthquake would
come?
Well, to make you understand that, we must talk a little about
earthquakes, and what makes them; and in order to find out that,
let us try the very simplest cause of which we can think. That is
the wise and scientific plan.
Now, whatever makes these earthquakes must be enormously strong;
that is certain. And what is the strongest thing you know of in
the world? Think . . .
Gunpowder?
Well, gunpowder is strong sometimes: but not always. You may
carry it in a flask, or in your hand, and then it is weak enough.
It only becomes strong by being turned into gas and steam. But
steam is always strong. And if you look at a railway engine,
still more if you had ever seen--which God forbid you should--a
boiler explosion, you would agree with me, that the strongest
thing we know of in the world is steam.
Now I think that we can explain almost, if not quite, all that we
know about earthquakes, if we believe that on the whole they are
caused by steam and other gases expanding, that is, spreading out,
with wonderful quickness and strength. Of course there must be
something to make them expand, and that is HEAT. But we will not
talk of that yet.
Now do you remember that riddle which I put to you the other day?-
-"What had the rattling of the lid of the kettle to do with
Hartford Bridge Flat being lifted out of the ancient sea?"
The answer to the riddle, I believe, is--Steam has done both. The
lid of the kettle rattles, because the expanding steam escapes in
little jets, and so causes a LID-QUAKE. Now suppose that there
was steam under the earth trying to escape, and the earth in one
place was loose and yet hard, as the lid of the kettle is loose
and yet hard, with cracks in it, it may be, like the crack between
the edge of the lid and the edge of the kettle itself: might not
the steam try to escape through the cracks, and rattle the surface
of the earth, and so cause an EARTHQUAKE?
So the steam would escape generally easily, and would only make a
passing rattle, like the earthquake of which the famous jester
Charles Selwyn said that it was quite a young one, so tame that
you might have stroked it; like that which I myself once felt in
the Pyrenees, which gave me very solemn thoughts after a while,
though at first I did nothing but laugh at it; and I will tell you
why.
I was travelling in the Pyrenees; and I came one evening to the
loveliest spot--a glen, or rather a vast crack in the mountains,
so narrow that there was no room for anything at the bottom of it,
save a torrent roaring between walls of polished rock. High above
the torrent the road was cut out among the cliffs, and above the
road rose more cliffs, with great black cavern mouths, hundreds of
feet above our heads, out of each of which poured in foaming
waterfalls streams large enough to turn a mill, and above them
mountains piled on mountains, all covered with woods of box, which
smelt rich and hot and musky in the warm spring air. Among the
box-trees and fallen boulders grew hepaticas, blue and white and
red, such as you see in the garden; and little stars of gentian,
more azure than the azure sky. But out of the box-woods above
rose giant silver firs, clothing the cliffs and glens with tall
black spires, till they stood out at last in a jagged saw-edge
against the purple evening sky, along the mountain ranges,
thousands of feet aloft; and beyond them again, at the head of the
valley, rose vast cones of virgin snow, miles away in reality, but
looking so brilliant and so near that one fancied at the first
moment that one could have touched them with one's hand. Snow-
white they stood, the glorious things, seven thousand feet into
the air; and I watched their beautiful white sides turn rose-
colour in the evening sun, and when he set, fade into dull cold
gray, till the bright moon came out to light them up once more.
When I was tired of wondering and admiring, I went into bed; and
there I had a dream--such a dream as Alice had when she went into
Wonderland--such a dream as I dare say you may have had ere now.
Some noise or stir puts into your fancy as you sleep a whole long
dream to account for it; and yet that dream, which seems to you to
be hours long, has not taken up a second of time; for the very
same noise which begins the dream, wakes you at the end of it:
and so it was with me. I dreamed that some English people had
come into the hotel where I was, and were sleeping in the room
underneath me; and that they had quarrelled and fought, and broke
their bed down with a tremendous crash, and that I must get up,
and stop the fight; and at that moment I woke and heard coming up
the valley from the north such a roar as I never heard before or
since; as if a hundred railway trains were rolling underground;
and just as it passed under my bed there was a tremendous thump,
and I jumped out of bed quicker than I ever did in my life, and
heard the roaring sound die away as it rolled up the valley
towards the peaks of snow. Still I had in my head this notion of
the Englishmen fighting in the room below. But then I recollected
that no Englishmen had come in the night before, and that I had
been in the room below, and that there was no bed in it. Then I
opened my window--a woman screamed, a dog barked, some cocks and
hens cackled in a very disturbed humour, and then I could hear
nothing but the roaring of the torrent a hundred feet below. And
then it flashed across me what all the noise was about; and I
burst out laughing and said "It is only an earthquake," and went
to bed
Next morning I inquired whether any one had heard a noise. No,
nobody had heard anything. And the driver who had brought me up
the valley only winked, but did not choose to speak. At last at
breakfast I asked the pretty little maid who waited what was the
meaning of the noise I heard in the night, and she answered, to my
intense amusement, "Ah! bah! ce n'etait qu'un tremblement de
terre; il y en a ici toutes les six semaines." Now the secret was
out. The little maid, I found, came from the lowland far away,
and did not mind telling the truth: but the good people of the
place were afraid to let out that they had earthquakes every six
weeks, for fear of frightening visitors away: and because they
were really very good people, and very kind to me, I shall not
tell you what the name of the place is.
Of course after that I could do no less than ask Madam How, very
civilly, how she made earthquakes in that particular place,
hundreds of miles away from any burning mountain? And this was
the answer I THOUGHT she gave, though I am not so conceited as to
say I am sure.
As I had come up the valley I had seen that the cliffs were all
beautiful gray limestone marble; but just at this place they were
replaced by granite, such as you may see in London Bridge or at
Aberdeen. I do not mean that the limestone changed to granite,
but that the granite had risen up out of the bottom of the valley,
and had carried the limestone (I suppose) up on its back hundreds
of feet into the air. Those caves with the waterfalls pouring
from their mouths were all on one level, at the top of the
granite, and the bottom of the limestone. That was to be
expected; for, as I will explain to you some day, water can make
caves easily in limestone: but never, I think, in granite. But I
knew that besides these cold springs which came out of the caves,
there were hot springs also, full of curious chemical salts, just
below the very house where I was in. And when I went to look at
them, I found that they came out of the rock just where the
limestone and the granite joined. "Ah," I said, "now I think I
have Madam How's answer. The lid of one of her great steam
boilers is rather shaky and cracked just here, because the granite
has broken and torn the limestone as it lifted it up; and here is
the hot water out of the boiler actually oozing out of the crack;
and the earthquake I heard last night was simply the steam
rumbling and thumping inside, and trying to get out."
And then, my dear child, I fell into a more serious mood. I said
to myself, "If that stream had been a little, only a little
stronger, or if the rock above it had been only a little weaker,
it would have been no laughing matter then; the village might have
been shaken to the ground; the rocks hurled into the torrent; jets
of steam and of hot water, mixed, it may be, with deadly gases,
have roared out of the riven ground; that might have happened
here, in short, which has happened and happens still in a hundred
places in the world, whenever the rocks are too weak to stand the
pressure of the steam below, and the solid earth bursts as an
engine boiler bursts when the steam within it is too strong." And
when those thoughts came into my mind, I was in no humour to jest
any more about "young earthquakes," or "Madam How's boilers;" but
rather to say with the wise man of old, "It is of the Lord's
mercies that we are not consumed."
Most strange, most terrible also, are the tricks which this
underground steam plays. It will make the ground, which seems to
us so hard and firm, roll and rock in waves, till people are sea-
sick, as on board a ship; and that rocking motion (which is the
most common) will often, when it is but slight, set the bells
ringing in the steeples, or make the furniture, and things on
shelves, jump about quaintly enough. It will make trees bend to
and fro, as if a wind was blowing through them; open doors
suddenly, and shut them again with a slam; make the timbers of the
floors and roofs creak, as they do in a ship at sea; or give men
such frights as one of the dock-keepers at Liverpool got in the
earthquake in 1863, when his watchbox rocked so, that he thought
some one was going to pitch him over into the dock. But these are
only little hints and warnings of what it can do. When it is
strong enough, it will rock down houses and churches into heaps of
ruins, or, if it leaves them standing, crack them from top to
bottom, so that they must be pulled down and rebuilt.
You saw those pictures of the ruins of Arica, about which our talk
began; and from them you can guess well enough for yourself what a
town looks like which has been ruined by an earthquake. Of the
misery and the horror which follow such a ruin I will not talk to
you, nor darken your young spirit with sad thoughts which grown
people must face, and ought to face. But the strangeness of some
of the tricks which the earthquake shocks play is hardly to be
explained, even by scientific men. Sometimes, it would seem, the
force runs round, making the solid ground eddy, as water eddies in
a brook. For it will make straight rows of trees crooked; it will
twist whole walls round--or rather the ground on which the walls
stand--without throwing them down; it will shift the stones of a
pillar one on the other sideways, as if a giant had been trying to
spin it like a teetotum, and so screwed it half in pieces. There
is a story told by a wise man, who saw the place himself, of the
whole furniture of one house being hurled away by an earthquake,
and buried under the ruins of another house; and of things carried
hundreds of yards off, so that the neighbours went to law to
settle who was the true owner of them. Sometimes, again, the
shock seems to come neither horizontally in waves, nor circularly
in eddies, but vertically, that is, straight up from below; and
then things--and people, alas! sometimes--are thrown up off the
earth high into the air, just as things spring up off the table if
you strike it smartly enough underneath. By that same law (for
there is a law for every sort of motion) it is that the earthquake
shock sometimes hurls great rocks off a cliff into the valley
below. The shock runs through the mountain till it comes to the
cliff at the end of it; and then the face of the cliff, if it be
at all loose, flies off into the air. You may see the very same
thing happen, if you will put marbles or billiard-balls in a row
touching each other, and strike the one nearest you smartly in the
line of the row. All the balls stand still, except the last one,
and that flies off. The shock, like the earthquake shock, has run
through them all; but only the end one, which had nothing beyond
it but soft air, has been moved; and when you grow old, and learn
mathematics, you will know the law of motion according to which
that happens, and learn to apply what the billiard-balls have
taught you, to explain the wonders of an earthquake. For in this
case, as in so many more, you must watch Madam How at work on
little and common things, to find out how she works in great and
rare ones. That is why Solomon says that "a fool's eyes are in
the ends of the earth," because he is always looking out for
strange things which he has not seen, and which he could not
understand if he saw; instead of looking at the petty commonplace
matters which are about his feet all day long, and getting from
them sound knowledge, and the art of getting more sound knowledge
still.
Another terrible destruction which the earthquake brings, when it
is close to the seaside, is the wash of a great sea wave, such as
swept in last year upon the island of St. Thomas, in the West
Indies; such as swept in upon the coast of Peru this year. The
sea moans, and sinks back, leaving the shore dry; and then comes
in from the offing a mighty wall of water, as high as, or higher
than, many a tall house; sweeps far inland, washing away quays and
houses, and carrying great ships in with it; and then sweeps back
again, leaving the ships high and dry, as ships were left in Peru
this year.
Now, how is that wave made? Let us think. Perhaps in many ways.
But two of them I will tell you as simply as I can, because they
seem the most likely, and probably the most common.
Suppose, as the earthquake shock ran on, making the earth under
the sea heave and fall in long earth-waves, the sea-bottom sank
down. Then the water on it would sink down too, and leave the
shore dry; till the sea-bottom rose again, and hurled the water up
again against the land. This is one way of explaining it, and it
may be true. For certain it is, that earthquakes do move the
bottom of the sea; and certain, too, that they move the water of
the sea also, and with tremendous force. For ships at sea during
an earthquake feel such a blow from it (though it does them no
harm) that the sailors often rush upon deck fancying that they
have struck upon a rock; and the force which could give a ship,
floating in water, such a blow as that, would be strong enough to
hurl thousands of tons of water up the beach, and on to the land.
But there is another way of accounting for this great sea wave,
which I fancy comes true sometimes.
Suppose you put an empty india-rubber ball into water, and then
blow into it through a pipe. Of course, you know, as the ball
filled, the upper side of it would rise out of the water. Now,
suppose there were a party of little ants moving about upon that
ball, and fancying it a great island, or perhaps the whole world--
what would they think of the ball's filling and growing bigger?
If they could see the sides of the basin or tub in which the ball
was, and were sure that they did not move, then they would soon
judge by them that they themselves were moving, and that the ball
was rising out of the water. But if the ants were so short-
sighted that they could not see the sides of the basin, they would
be apt to make a mistake, because they would then be like men on
an island out of sight of any other land. Then it would be
impossible further to tell whether they were moving up, or whether
the water was moving down; whether their ball was rising out of
the water, or the water was sinking away from the ball. They
would probably say, "The water is sinking and leaving the ball
dry."
Do you understand that? Then think what would happen if you
pricked a hole in the ball. The air inside would come hissing
out, and the ball would sink again into the water. But the ants
would probably fancy the very opposite. Their little heads would
be full of the notion that the ball was solid and could not move,
just as our heads are full of the notion that the earth is solid
and cannot move; and they would say, "Ah! here is the water rising
again." Just so, I believe, when the sea seems to ebb away during
the earthquake, the land is really being raised out of the sea,
hundreds of miles of coast, perhaps, or a whole island, at once,
by the force of the steam and gas imprisoned under the ground.
That steam stretches and strains the solid rocks below, till they
can bear no more, and snap, and crack, with frightful roar and
clang; then out of holes and chasms in the ground rush steam,
gases--often foul and poisonous ones--hot water, mud, flame,
strange stones--all signs that the great boiler down below has
burst at last.
Then the strain is eased. The earth sinks together again, as the
ball did when it was pricked; and sinks lower, perhaps, than it
was before: and back rushes the sea, which the earth had thrust
away while it rose, and sweeps in, destroying all before it.
Of course, there is a great deal more to be said about all this:
but I have no time to tell you now. You will read it, I hope, for
yourselves when you grow up, in the writings of far wiser men than
I. Or perhaps you may feel for yourselves in foreign lands the
actual shock of a great earthquake, or see its work fresh done
around you. And if ever that happens, and you be preserved during
the danger, you will learn for yourself, I trust, more about
earthquakes than I can teach you, if you will only bear in mind
the simple general rules for understanding the "how" of them which
I have given you here.
But you do not seem satisfied yet? What is it that you want to
know?
Oh! There was an earthquake here in England the other night,
while you were asleep; and that seems to you too near to be
pleasant. Will there ever be earthquakes in England which will
throw houses down, and bury people in the ruins?
My dear child, I think you may set your heart at rest upon that
point. As far as the history of England goes back, and that is
more than a thousand years, there is no account of any earthquake
which has done any serious damage, or killed, I believe, a single
human being. The little earthquakes which are sometimes felt in
England run generally up one line of country, from Devonshire
through Wales, and up the Severn valley into Cheshire and
Lancashire, and the south-west of Scotland; and they are felt more
smartly there, I believe, because the rocks are harder there than
here, and more tossed about by earthquakes which happened ages and
ages ago, long before man lived on the earth. I will show you the
work of these earthquakes some day, in the tilting and twisting of
the layers of rock, and in the cracks (faults, as they are called)
which run through them in different directions. I showed you some
once, if you recollect, in the chalk cliff at Ramsgate--two set of
cracks, sloping opposite ways, which I told you were made by two
separate sets of earthquakes, long, long ago, perhaps while the
chalk was still at the bottom of a deep sea. But even in the
rocky parts of England the earthquake-force seems to have all but
died out. Perhaps the crust of the earth has become too thick and
solid there to be much shaken by the gases and steam below. In
this eastern part of England, meanwhile, there is but little
chance that an earthquake will ever do much harm, because the
ground here, for thousands of feet down, is not hard and rocky,
but soft--sands, clays, chalk, and sands again; clays, soft
limestones, and clays again--which all act as buffers to deaden
the earthquake shocks, and deaden too the earthquake noise.
And how?
Put your ear to one end of a soft bolster, and let some one hit
the other end. You will hear hardly any noise, and will not feel
the blow at all. Put your ear to one end of a hard piece of wood,
and let some one hit the other. You will hear a smart tap; and
perhaps feel a smart tap, too. When you are older, and learn the
laws of sound, and of motion among the particles of bodies, you
will know why. Meanwhile you may comfort yourself with the
thought that Madam How has (doubtless by command of Lady Why)
prepared a safe soft bed for this good people of Britain--not that
they may lie and sleep on it, but work and till, plant and build
and manufacture, and thrive in peace and comfort, we will trust
and pray, for many a hundred years to come. All that the steam
inside the earth is likely to do to us, is to raise parts of this
island (as Hartford Bridge Flats were raised, ages ago, out of the
old icy sea) so slowly, probably, that no man can tell whether
they are rising or not. Or again, the steam-power may be even now
dying out under our island, and letting parts of it sink slowly
into the sea, as some wise friends of mine think that the fens in
Norfolk and Cambridgeshire are sinking now. I have shown you
where that kind of work has gone on in Norfolk; how the brow of
Sandringham Hill was once a sea-cliff, and Dersingham Bog at its
foot a shallow sea; and therefore that the land has risen there.
How, again, at Hunstanton Station there is a beach of sea-shells
twenty feet above high-water mark, showing that the land has risen
there likewise. And how, farther north again, at Brancaster,
there are forests of oak, and fir, and alder, with their roots
still in the soil, far below high-water mark, and only uncovered
at low tide; which is a plain sign that there the land has sunk.
You surely recollect the sunken forest at Brancaster, and the
beautiful shells we picked up in its gullies, and the millions of
live Pholases boring into the clay and peat which once was firm
dry land, fed over by giant oxen, and giant stags likewise, and
perhaps by the mammoth himself, the great woolly elephant whose
teeth the fishermen dredge up in the sea outside? You recollect
that? Then remember that as that Norfolk shore has changed, so
slowly but surely is the whole world changing around us. Hartford
Bridge Flat here, for instance, how has it changed! Ages ago it
was the gravelly bottom of a sea. Then the steam-power
underground raised it up slowly, through long ages, till it became
dry land. And ages hence, perhaps, it will have become a sea-
bottom once more. Washed slowly by the rain, or sunk by the dying
out of the steam-power underground, it will go down again to the
place from whence it came. Seas will roll where we stand now, and
new lands will rise where seas now roll. For all things on this
earth, from the tiniest flower to the tallest mountain, change and
change all day long. Every atom of matter moves perpetually; and
nothing "continues in one stay." The solid-seeming earth on which
you stand is but a heaving bubble, bursting ever and anon in this
place and in that. Only above all, and through all, and with all,
is One who does not move nor change, but is the same yesterday,
to-day, and for ever. And on Him, my child, and not on this
bubble of an earth, do you and I, and all mankind, depend.
But I have not yet told you why the Peruvians ought to have
expected an earthquake. True. I will tell you another time.
CHAPTER III--VOLCANOS
You want to know why the Spaniards in Peru and Ecuador should have
expected an earthquake.
Because they had had so many already. The shaking of the ground
in their country had gone on perpetually, till they had almost
ceased to care about it, always hoping that no very heavy shock
would come; and being, now and then, terribly mistaken.
For instance, in the province of Quito, in the year 1797, from
thirty to forty thousand people were killed at once by an
earthquake. One would have thought that warning enough: but the
warning was not taken: and now, this very year, thousands more
have been killed in the very same country, in the very same way.
They might have expected as much. For their towns are built, most
of them, close to volcanos--some of the highest and most terrible
in the world. And wherever there are volcanos there will be
earthquakes. You may have earthquakes without volcanos, now and
then; but volcanos without earthquakes, seldom or never.
How does that come to pass? Does a volcano make earthquakes? No;
we may rather say that earthquakes are trying to make volcanos.
For volcanos are the holes which the steam underground has burst
open that it may escape into the air above. They are the chimneys
of the great blast-furnaces underground, in which Madam How pounds
and melts up the old rocks, to make them into new ones, and spread
them out over the land above.
And are there many volcanos in the world? You have heard of
Vesuvius, of course, in Italy; and Etna, in Sicily; and Hecla, in
Iceland. And you have heard, too, of Kilauea, in the Sandwich
Islands, and of Pele's Hair--the yellow threads of lava, like fine
spun glass, which are blown from off its pools of fire, and which
the Sandwich Islanders believed to be the hair of a goddess who
lived in the crater;--and you have read, too, I hope, in Miss
Yonge's Book of Golden Deeds, the noble story of the Christian
chieftainess who, in order to persuade her subjects to become
Christians also, went down into the crater and defied the goddess
of the volcano, and came back unhurt and triumphant.
But if you look at the map, you will see that there are many, many
more. Get Keith Johnston's Physical Atlas from the schoolroom--of
course it is there (for a schoolroom without a physical atlas is
like a needle without an eye)--and look at the map which is called
"Phenomena of Volcanic Action."
You will see in it many red dots, which mark the volcanos which
are still burning: and black dots, which mark those which have
been burning at some time or other, not very long ago, scattered
about the world. Sometimes they are single, like the red dot at
Otaheite, or at Easter Island in the Pacific. Sometimes the are
in groups, or clusters, like the cluster at the Sandwich Islands,
or in the Friendly Islands, or in New Zealand. And if we look in
the Atlantic, we shall see four clusters: one in poor half-
destroyed Iceland, in the far north, one in the Azores, one in the
Canaries, and one in the Cape de Verds. And there is one dot in
those Canaries which we must not overlook, for it is no other than
the famous Peak of Teneriffe, a volcano which is hardly burnt out
yet, and may burn up again any day, standing up out of the sea
more than 12,000 feet high still, and once it must have been
double that height. Some think that it is perhaps the true Mount
Atlas, which the old Greeks named when first they ventured out of
the Straits of Gibraltar down the coast of Africa, and saw the
great peak far to the westward, with the clouds cutting off its
top; and said that it was a mighty giant, the brother of the
Evening Star, who held up the sky upon his shoulders, in the midst
of the Fortunate Islands, the gardens of the daughter of the
Evening Star, full of strange golden fruits; and that Perseus had
turned him into stone, when he passed him with the Gorgon's Head.
But you will see, too, that most of these red and black dots run
in crooked lines; and that many of the clusters run in lines
likewise.
Look at one line: by far the largest on the earth. You will
learn a good deal of geography from it.
The red dots begin at a place called the Terribles, on the east
side of the Bay of Bengal. They run on, here and there, along the
islands of Sumatra and Java, and through the Spice Islands; and at
New Guinea the line of red dots forks. One branch runs south-
east, through islands whose names you never heard, to the Friendly
Islands, and to New Zealand. The other runs north, through the
Philippines, through Japan, through Kamschatka; and then there is
a little break of sea, between Asia and America: but beyond it,
the red dots begin again in the Aleutian Islands, and then turn
down the whole west coast of America, down from Mount Elias (in
what was, till lately, Russian America) towards British Columbia.
Then, after a long gap, there are one or two in Lower California
(and we must not forget the terrible earthquake which has just
shaken San Francisco, between those two last places); and when we
come down to Mexico we find the red dots again plentiful, and only
too plentiful; for they mark the great volcanic line of Mexico, of
which you will read, I hope, some day, in Humboldt's works. But
the line does not stop there. After the little gap of the Isthmus
of Panama, it begins again in Quito, the very country which has
just been shaken, and in which stand the huge volcanos Chimborazo,
Pasto, Antisana, Cotopaxi, Pichincha, Tunguragua,--smooth cones
from 15,000 to 20,000 feet high, shining white with snow, till the
heat inside melts it off, and leaves the cinders of which the
peaks are made all black and ugly among the clouds, ready to burst
in smoke and fire. South of them again, there is a long gap, and
then another line of red dots--Arequiba, Chipicani, Gualatieri,
Atacama,--as high as, or higher than those in Quito; and this,
remember, is the other country which has just been shaken. On the
sea-shore below those volcanos stood the hapless city of Arica,
whose ruins we saw in the picture. Then comes another gap; and
then a line of more volcanos in Chili, at the foot of which
happened that fearful earthquake of 1835 (besides many more) of
which you will read some day in that noble book The Voyage of the
Beagle; and so the line of dots runs down to the southernmost
point of America.
What a line we have traced! Long enough to go round the world if
it were straight. A line of holes out of which steam, and heat,
and cinders, and melted stones are rushing up, perpetually, in one
place and another. Now the holes in this line which are near each
other have certainly something to do with each other. For
instance, when the earth shook the other day round the volcanos of
Quito, it shook also round the volcanos of Peru, though they were
600 miles away. And there are many stories of earthquakes being
felt, or awful underground thunder heard, while volcanos were
breaking out hundreds of miles away. I will give you a very
curious instance of that.
If you look at the West Indies on the map, you will see a line of
red dots runs through the Windward Islands: there are two
volcanos in them, one in Guadaloupe, and one in St. Vincent (I
will tell you a curious story, presently, about that last), and
little volcanos (if they have ever been real volcanos at all),
which now only send out mud, in Trinidad. There the red dots
stop: but then begins along the north coast of South America a
line of mountain country called Cumana, and Caraccas, which has
often been horribly shaken by earthquakes. Now once, when the
volcano in St. Vincent began to pour out a vast stream of melted
lava, a noise like thunder was heard underground, over thousands
of square miles beyond those mountains, in the plains of Calabozo,
and on the banks of the Apure, more than 600 miles away from the
volcano,--a plain sign that there was something underground which
joined them together, perhaps a long crack in the earth. Look for
yourselves at the places, and you will see that (as Humboldt says)
it is as strange as if an eruption of Mount Vesuvius was heard in
the north of France.
So it seems as if these lines of volcanos stood along cracks in
the rind of the earth, through which the melted stuff inside was
for ever trying to force its way; and that, as the crack got
stopped up in one place by the melted stuff cooling and hardening
again into stone, it was burst in another place, and a fresh
volcano made, or an old one re-opened.
Now we can understand why earthquakes should be most common round
volcanos; and we can understand, too, why they would be worst
before a volcano breaks out, because then the steam is trying to
escape; and we can understand, too, why people who live near
volcanos are glad to see them blazing and spouting, because then
they have hope that the steam has found its way out, and will not
make earthquakes any more for a while. But still that is merely
foolish speculation on chance. Volcanos can never be trusted. No
one knows when one will break out, or what it will do; and those
who live close to them--as the city of Naples is close to Mount
Vesuvius--must not be astonished if they are blown up or swallowed
up, as that great and beautiful city of Naples may be without a
warning, any day.
For what happened to that same Mount Vesuvius nearly 1800 years
ago, in the old Roman times? For ages and ages it had been lying
quiet, like any other hill. Beautiful cities were built at its
foot, filled with people who were as handsome, and as comfortable,
and (I am afraid) as wicked, as people ever were on earth. Fair
gardens, vineyards, olive-yards, covered the mountain slopes. It
was held to be one of the Paradises of the world. As for the
mountain's being a burning mountain, who ever thought of that? To
be sure, on the top of it was a great round crater, or cup, a mile
or more across, and a few hundred yards deep. But that was all
overgrown with bushes and wild vines, full of boars and deer.
What sign of fire was there in that? To be sure, also, there was
an ugly place below by the sea-shore, called the Phlegraen fields,
where smoke and brimstone came out of the ground, and a lake
called Avernus over which poisonous gases hung, and which (old
stories told) was one of the mouths of the Nether Pit. But what
of that? It had never harmed any one, and how could it harm them?
So they all lived on, merrily and happily enough, till, in the
year A.D. 79 (that was eight years, you know, after the Emperor
Titus destroyed Jerusalem), there was stationed in the Bay of
Naples a Roman admiral, called Pliny, who was also a very studious
and learned man, and author of a famous old book on natural
history. He was staying on shore with his sister; and as he sat
in his study she called him out to see a strange cloud which had
been hanging for some time over the top of Mount Vesuvius. It was
in shape just like a pine-tree; not, of course, like one of our
branching Scotch firs here, but like an Italian stone pine, with a
long straight stem and a flat parasol-shaped top. Sometimes it
was blackish, sometimes spotted; and the good Admiral Pliny, who
was always curious about natural science, ordered his cutter and
went away across the bay to see what it could be. Earthquake
shocks had been very common for the last few days; but I do not
suppose that Pliny had any notion that the earthquakes and the
cloud had aught to do with each other. However, he soon found out
that they had, and to his cost. When he got near the opposite
shore some of the sailors met him and entreated him to turn back.
Cinders and pumice-stones were falling down from the sky, and
flames breaking out of the mountain above. But Pliny would go on:
he said that if people were in danger, it was his duty to help
them; and that he must see this strange cloud, and note down the
different shapes into which it changed. But the hot ashes fell
faster and faster; the sea ebbed out suddenly, and left them
nearly dry, and Pliny turned away to a place called Stabiae, to
the house of his friend Pomponianus, who was just going to escape
in a boat. Brave Pliny told him not to be afraid, ordered his
bath like a true Roman gentleman, and then went into dinner with a
cheerful face. Flames came down from the mountain, nearer and
nearer as the night drew on; but Pliny persuaded his friend that
they were only fires in some villages from which the peasants had
fled, and then went to bed and slept soundly. However, in the
middle of the night they found the courtyard being fast filled
with cinders, and, if they had not woke up the Admiral in time, he
would never have been able to get out of the house. The
earthquake shocks grew stronger and fiercer, till the house was
ready to fall; and Pliny and his friend, and the sailors and the
slaves, all fled into the open fields, amid a shower of stones and
cinders, tying pillows over their heads to prevent their being
beaten down. The day had come by this time, but not the dawn--for
it was still pitch dark as night. They went down to their boats
upon the shore; but the sea raged so horribly that there was no
getting on board of them. Then Pliny grew tired, and made his men
spread a sail for him, and lay down on it; but there came down
upon them a rush of flames, and a horrible smell of sulphur, and
all ran for their lives. Some of the slaves tried to help the
Admiral upon his legs; but he sank down again overpowered with the
brimstone fumes, and so was left behind. When they came back
again, there he lay dead, but with his clothes in order and his
face as quiet as if he had been only sleeping. And that was the
end of a brave and learned man--a martyr to duty and to the love
of science.
But what was going on in the meantime? Under clouds of ashes,
cinders, mud, lava, three of those happy cities were buried at
once--Herculaneum, Pompeii, Stabiae. They were buried just as the
people had fled from them, leaving the furniture and the
earthenware, often even jewels and gold, behind, and here and
there among them a human being who had not had time to escape from
the dreadful deluge of dust. The ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii
have been dug into since; and the paintings, especially in
Pompeii, are found upon the walls still fresh, preserved from the
air by the ashes which have covered them in. When you are older
you perhaps will go to Naples, and see in its famous museum the
curiosities which have been dug out of the ruined cities; and you
will walk, I suppose, along the streets of Pompeii and see the
wheel-tracks in the pavement, along which carts and chariots
rumbled 2000 years ago. Meanwhile, if you go nearer home, to the
Crystal Palace and to the Pompeian Court, as it is called, you
will see an exact model of one of these old buried houses, copied
even to the very paintings on the wells, and judge for yourself,
as far as a little boy can judge, what sort of life these
thoughtless, luckless people lived 2000 years ago.
And what had become of Vesuvius, the treacherous mountain? Half
or more than half of the side of the old crater had been blown
away, and what was left, which is now called the Monte Somma,
stands in a half circle round the new cone and new crater which is
burning at this very day. True, after that eruption which killed
Pliny, Vesuvius fell asleep again, and did not awake for 134
years, and then again for 269 years but it has been growing more
and more restless as the ages have passed on, and now hardly a
year passes without its sending out smoke and stones from its
crater, and streams of lava from its sides.
And now, I suppose, you will want to know what a volcano is like,
and what a cone, and a crater, and lava are?
What a volcano is like, it is easy enough to show you; for they
are the most simply and beautifully shaped of all mountains, and
they are alike all over the world, whether they be large or small.
Almost every volcano in the world, I believe, is, or has been
once, of the shape which you see in the drawing opposite; even
those volcanos in the Sandwich Islands, of which you have often
heard, which are now great lakes of boiling fire upon flat downs,
without any cone to them at all. They, I believe, are volcanos
which have fallen in ages ago: just as in Java a whole burning
mountain fell in on the night of the 11th of August, in the year
1772. Then, after a short and terrible earthquake, a bright cloud
suddenly covered the whole mountain. The people who dwelt around
it tried to escape; but before the poor souls could get away the
earth sunk beneath their feet, and the whole mountain fell in and
was swallowed up with a noise as if great cannon were being fired.
Forty villages and nearly 3000 people were destroyed, and where
the mountain had been was only a plain of red-hot stones. In the
same way, in the year 1698, the top of a mountain in Quito fell in
in a single night, leaving only two immense peaks of rock behind,
and pouring out great floods of mud mixed with dead fish; for
there are underground lakes among those volcanos which swarm with
little fish which never see the light.
But most volcanos as I say, are, or have been, the shape of the
one which you see here. This is Cotopaxi, in Quito, more than
19,000 feet in height. All those sloping sides are made of
cinders and ashes, braced together, I suppose, by bars of solid
lava-stone inside, which prevent the whole from crumbling down.
The upper part, you see, is white with snow, as far down as a line
which is 15,000 feet above the sea; for the mountain is in the
tropics, close to the equator, and the snow will not lie in that
hot climate any lower down. But now and then the snow melts off
and rushes down the mountain side in floods of water and of mud,
and the cindery cone of Cotopaxi stands out black and dreadful
against the clear blue sky, and then the people of that country
know what is coming. The mountain is growing so hot inside that
it melts off its snowy covering; and soon it will burst forth with
smoke and steam, and red-hot stones and earthquakes, which will
shake the ground, and roars that will be heard, it may be,
hundreds of miles away.
And now for the words cone, crater, lava. If I can make you
understand those words, you will see why volcanos must be in
general of the shape of Cotopaxi.
Cone, crater, lava: those words make up the alphabet of volcano
learning. The cone is the outside of a huge chimney; the crater
is the mouth of it. The lava is the ore which is being melted in
the furnace below, that it may flow out over the surface of the
old land, and make new land instead.
And where is the furnace itself? Who can tell that? Under the
roots of the mountains, under the depths of the sea; down "the
path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not
seen: the lion's whelp hath not trodden it, nor the fierce lion
passed by it. There He putteth forth His hand upon the rock; He
overturneth the mountain by the roots; He cutteth out rivers among
the rocks; and His eye seeth every precious thing"--while we, like
little ants, run up and down outside the earth, scratching, like
ants, a few feet down, and calling that a deep ravine; or peeping
a few feet down into the crater of a volcano, unable to guess what
precious things may lie below--below even the fire which blazes
and roars up through the thin crust of the earth. For of the
inside of this earth we know nothing whatsoever: we only know
that it is, on an average, several times as heavy as solid rock;
but how that can be, we know not.
So let us look at the chimney, and what comes out of it; for we
can see very little more.
Why is a volcano like a cone?
For the same cause for which a molehill is like a cone, though a
very rough one; and that the little heaps which the burrowing
beetles make on the moor, or which the ant-lions in France make in
the sand, are all something in the shape of a cone, with a hole
like a crater in the middle. What the beetle and the ant-lion do
on a very little scale, the steam inside the earth does on a great
scale. When once it has forced a vent into the outside air, it
tears out the rocks underground, grinds them small against each
other, often into the finest dust, and blasts them out of the hole
which it has made. Some of them fall back into the hole, and are
shot out again: but most of them fall round the hole, most of
them close to it, and fewer of them farther off, till they are
piled up in a ring round it, just as the sand is piled up round a
beetle's burrow. For days, and weeks, and months this goes on;
even it may be for hundreds of years: till a great cone is formed
round the steam vent, hundreds or thousands of feet in height, of
dust and stones, and of cinders likewise. For recollect, that
when the steam has blown away the cold earth and rock near the
surface of the ground, it begins blowing out the hot rocks down
below, red-hot, white-hot, and at last actually melted. But
these, as they are hurled into the cool air above, become ashes,
cinders, and blocks of stone again, making the hill on which they
fall bigger and bigger continually. And thus does wise Madam How
stand in no need of bricklayers, but makes her chimneys build
themselves.
And why is the mouth of the chimney called a crater?
Crater, as you know, is Greek for a cup. And the mouth of these
chimneys, when they have become choked and stopped working, are
often just the shape of a cup, or (as the Germans call them)
kessels, which means kettles, or caldrons. I have seen some of
them as beautifully and exactly rounded as if a cunning engineer
had planned them, and had them dug out with the spade. At first,
of course, their sides and bottom are nothing but loose stones,
cinders, slag, ashes, such as would be thrown out of a furnace.
But Madam How, who, whenever she makes an ugly desolate place,
always tries to cover over its ugliness, and set something green
to grow over it, and make it pretty once more, does so often and
often by her worn-out craters. I have seen them covered with
short sweet turf, like so many chalk downs. I have seen them,
too, filled with bushes, which held woodcocks and wild boars.
Once I came on a beautiful round crater on the top of a mountain,
which was filled at the bottom with a splendid crop of potatoes.
Though Madam How had not put them there herself, she had at least
taught the honest Germans to put them there. And often Madam How
turns her worn-out craters into beautiful lakes. There are many
such crater-lakes in Italy, as you will see if ever you go there;
as you may see in English galleries painted by Wilson, a famous
artist who died before you were born. You recollect Lord
Macaulay's ballad, "The Battle of the Lake Regillus"? Then that
Lake Regillus (if I recollect right) is one of these round crater
lakes. Many such deep clear blue lakes have I seen in the Eifel,
in Germany; and many a curious plant have I picked on their
shores, where once the steam blasted, and the earthquake roared,
and the ash-clouds rushed up high into the heaven, and buried all
the land around in dust, which is now fertile soil. And long did
I puzzle to find out why the water stood in some craters, while
others, within a mile of them perhaps, were perfectly dry. That I
never found out for myself. But learned men tell me that the
ashes which fall back into the crater, if the bottom of it be wet
from rain, will sometimes "set" (as it is called) into a hard
cement; and so make the bottom of the great bowl waterproof, as if
it were made of earthenware.
But what gives the craters this cup-shape at first?
Think--While the steam and stones are being blown out, the crater
is an open funnel, with more or less upright walls inside. As the
steam grows weaker, fewer and fewer stones fall outside, and more
and more fall back again inside. At last they quite choke up the
bottom of the great round hole. Perhaps, too, the lava or melted
rock underneath cools and grows hard, and that chokes up the hole
lower down. Then, down from the round edge of the crater the
stones and cinders roll inward more and more. The rains wash them
down, the wind blows them down. They roll to the middle, and meet
each other, and stop. And so gradually the steep funnel becomes a
round cup. You may prove for yourself that it must be so, if you
will try. Do you not know that if you dig a round hole in the
ground, and leave it to crumble in, it is sure to become cup-
shaped at last, though at first its sides may have been quite
upright, like those of a bucket? If you do not know, get a trowel
and make your little experiment.
And now you ought to understand what "cone" and "crater" mean.
And more, if you will think for yourself, you may guess what would
come out of a volcano when it broke out "in an eruption," as it is
usually called. First, clouds of steam and dust (what you would
call smoke); then volleys of stones, some cool, some burning hot;
and at the last, because it lies lowest of all, the melted rock
itself, which is called lava.
And where would that come out? At the top of the chimney? At the
top of the cone?
No. Madam How, as I told you, usually makes things make
themselves. She has made the chimney of the furnace make itself;
and next she will make the furnace-door make itself.
The melted lava rises in the crater--the funnel inside the cone--
but it never gets to the top. It is so enormously heavy that the
sides of the cone cannot bear its weight, and give way low down.
And then, through ashes and cinders, the melted lava burrows out,
twisting and twirling like an enormous fiery earth-worm, till it
gets to the air outside, and runs off down the mountain in a
stream of fire. And so you may see (as are to be seen on Vesuvius
now) two eruptions at once--one of burning stones above, and one
of melted lava below.
And what is lava?
That, I think, I must tell you another time. For when I speak of
it I shall have to tell you more about Madam How, and her ways of
making the ground on which you stand, than I can say just now.
But if you want to know (as I dare say you do) what the eruption
of a volcano is like, you may read what follows. I did not see it
happen; for I never had the good fortune of seeing a mountain
burning, though I have seen many and many a one which has been
burnt--extinct volcanos, as they are called.
The man who saw it--a very good friend of mine, and a very good
man of science also--went last year to see an eruption on
Vesuvius, not from the main crater, but from a small one which had
risen up suddenly on the outside of it; and he gave me leave (when
I told him that I was writing for children) to tell them what he
saw.
This new cone, he said, was about 200 feet high, and perhaps 80 or
100 feet across at the top. And as he stood below it (it was not
safe to go up it) smoke rolled up from its top, "rosy pink below,"
from the glare of the caldron, and above "faint greenish or
blueish silver of indescribable beauty, from the light of the
moon." But more--By good chance, the cone began to send out, not
smoke only, but brilliant burning stones. "Each explosion," he
says, "was like a vast girandole of rockets, with a noise (such as
rockets would make) like the waves on a beach, or the wind blowing
through shrouds. The mountain was trembling the whole time. So
it went on for two hours and more; sometimes eight or ten
explosions in a minute, and more than 1000 stones in each, some as
large as two bricks end to end. The largest ones mostly fell back
into the crater; but the smaller ones being thrown higher, and
more acted on by the wind, fell in immense numbers on the leeward
slope of the cone" (of course, making it bigger and bigger, as I
have explained already to you), and of course, as they were
intensely hot and bright, making the cone look as if it too was
red-hot. But it was not so, he says, really. The colour of the
stones was rather "golden, and they spotted the black cone over
with their golden showers, the smaller ones stopping still, the
bigger ones rolling down, and jumping along just like hares." "A
wonderful pedestal," he says, "for the explosion which surmounted
it." How high the stones flew up he could not tell. "There was
generally one which went much higher than the rest, and pierced
upwards towards the moon, who looked calmly down, mocking such
vain attempts to reach her." The large stones, of course, did not
rise so high; and some, he says, "only just appeared over the rim
of the cone, above which they came floating leisurely up, to show
their brilliant forms and intense white light for an instant, and
then subside again."
Try and picture that to yourselves, remembering that this was only
a little side eruption, of no more importance to the whole
mountain than the fall of a slate off the roof is of importance to
the whole house. And then think how mean and weak man's
fireworks, and even man's heaviest artillery, are compared with
the terrible beauty and terrible strength of Madam How's artillery
underneath our feet.
C
/ | \
/ | \
A /---+---\ E
/ | \
/-----+-----\ E
Ground / | B \ Ground
---------/ | \------------
| D | | D | D |
--+-----+--+---+-----+------
| | | | |
|
Now look at this figure. It represents a section of a volcano;
that is, one cut in half to show you the inside. A is the cone of
cinders. B, the black line up through the middle, is the funnel,
or crack, through which steam, ashes, lava, and everything else
rises. C is the crater mouth. D D D, which looks broken, are the
old rocks which the steam heaved up and burst before it could get
out. And what are the black lines across, marked E E E? They are
the streams of lava which have burrowed out, some covered up again
in cinders, some lying bare in the open air, some still inside the
cone, bracing it together, holding it up. Something like this is
the inside of a volcano.
CHAPTER IV--THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF A GRAIN OF SOIL
Why, you ask, are there such terrible things as volcanos? Of what
use can they be?
They are of use enough, my child; and of many more uses, doubt
not, than we know as yet, or ever shall know. But of one of their
uses I can tell you.
They make, or help to make, divers and sundry curious things, from
gunpowder to your body and mine.
What? I can understand their helping to make gunpowder, because
the sulphur in it is often found round volcanos; and I know the
story of the brave Spaniard who, when his fellows wanted materials
for gunpowder, had himself lowered in a basket down the crater of
a South American volcano, and gathered sulphur for them off the
burning cliffs: but how can volcanos help to make me? Am I made
of lava? Or is there lava in me?
My child, I did not say that volcanos helped to make you. I said
that they helped to make your body; which is a very different
matter, as I beg you to remember, now and always. Your body is no
more you yourself than the hoop which you trundle, or the pony
which you ride. It is, like them, your servant, your tool, your
instrument, your organ, with which you work: and a very useful,
trusty, cunningly-contrived organ it is; and therefore I advise
you to make good use of it, for you are responsible for it. But
you yourself are not your body, or your brain, but something else,
which we call your soul, your spirit, your life. And that "you
yourself" would remain just the same if it were taken out of your
body, and put into the body of a bee, or of a lion, or any other
body; or into no body at all. At least so I believe; and so, I am
happy to say, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred
and ninety-nine people out of every million have always believed,
because they have used their human instincts and their common
sense, and have obeyed (without knowing it) the warning of a great
and good philosopher called Herder, that "The organ is in no case
the power which works by it;" which is as much as to say, that the
engine is not the engine-driver, nor the spade the gardener.
There have always been, and always will be, a few people who
cannot see that. They think that a man's soul is part of his
body, and that he himself is not one thing, but a great number of
things. They think that his mind and character are only made up
of all the thoughts, and feelings, and recollections which have
passed through his brain; and that as his brain changes, he
himself must change, and become another person, and then another
person again, continually. But do you not agree with them: but
keep in mind wise Herder's warning that you are not to "confound
the organ with the power," or the engine with the driver, or your
body with yourself: and then we will go on and consider how a
volcano, and the lava which flows from it, helps to make your
body.
Now I know that the Scotch have a saying, "That you cannot make
broth out of whinstones" (which is their name for lava). But,
though they are very clever people, they are wrong there. I never
saw any broth in Scotland, as far as I know, but what whinstones
had gone to the making of it; nor a Scotch boy who had not eaten
many a bit of whinstone, and been all the better for it.
Of course, if you simply put the whinstones into a kettle and
boiled them, you would not get much out of them by such rough
cookery as that. But Madam How is the best and most delicate of
all cooks; and she knows how to pound, and soak, and stew
whinstones so delicately, that she can make them sauce and
seasoning for meat, vegetables, puddings, and almost everything
that you eat; and can put into your veins things which were
spouted up red-hot by volcanos, ages and ages since, perhaps at
the bottom of ancient seas which are now firm dry land.
This is very strange--as all Madam How's doings are. And you
would think it stranger still if you had ever seen the flowing of
a lava stream.
Out of a cave of slag and cinders in the black hillside rushes a
golden river, flowing like honey, and yet so tough that you cannot
thrust a stick into it, and so heavy that great stones (if you
throw them on it) float on the top, and are carried down like
corks on water. It is so hot that you cannot stand near it more
than a few seconds; hotter, perhaps, than any fire you ever saw:
but as it flows, the outside of it cools in the cool air, and gets
covered with slag and cinders, something like those which you may
see thrown out of the furnaces in the Black Country of
Staffordshire. Sometimes these cling together above the lava
stream, and make a tunnel, through the cracks in which you may see
the fiery river rushing and roaring down below. But mostly they
are kept broken and apart, and roll and slide over each other on
the top of the lava, crashing and clanging as they grind together
with a horrid noise. Of course that stream, like all streams,
runs towards the lower grounds. It slides down glens, and fills
them up; down the beds of streams, driving off the water in
hissing steam; and sometimes (as it did in Iceland a few years
ago) falls over some cliff, turning what had been a water-fall
into a fire-fall, and filling up the pool below with blocks of
lava suddenly cooled, with a clang and roar like that of chains
shaken or brazen vessels beaten, which is heard miles and miles
away. Of course, woe to the crops and gardens which stand in its
way. It crawls over them all and eats them up. It shoves down
houses; it sets woods on fire, and sends the steam and gas out of
the tree-trunks hissing into the air. And (curiously enough) it
does this often without touching the trees themselves. It flows
round the trunks (it did so in a wood in the Sandwich Islands a
few years ago), and of course sets them on fire by its heat, till
nothing is left of them but blackened posts. But the moisture
which comes out of the poor tree in steam blows so hard against
the lava round that it can never touch the tree, and a round hole
is left in the middle of the lava where the tree was. Sometimes,
too, the lava will spit out liquid fire among the branches of the
trees, which hangs down afterwards from them in tassels of slag,
and yet, by the very same means, the steam in the branches will
prevent the liquid fire burning them off, or doing anything but
just scorch the bark.
But I can tell you a more curious story still. The lava stream,
you must know, is continually sending out little jets of gas and
steam: some of it it may have brought up from the very inside of
the earth; most of it, I suspect, comes from the damp herbage and
damp soil over which it runs. Be that as it may, a lava stream
out of Mount Etna, in Sicily, came once down straight upon the
town of Catania. Everybody thought that the town would be
swallowed up; and the poor people there (who knew no better) began
to pray to St. Agatha--a famous saint, who, they say, was martyred
there ages ago--and who, they fancy, has power in heaven to save
them from the lava stream. And really what happened was enough to
make ignorant people, such as they were, think that St. Agatha had
saved them. The lava stream came straight down upon the town
wall. Another foot, and it would have touched it, and have begun
shoving it down with a force compared with which all the
battering-rams that you ever read of in ancient histories would be
child's toys. But lo and behold! when the lava stream got within
a few inches of the wall it stopped, and began to rear itself
upright and build itself into a wall beside the wall. It rose and
rose, till I believe in one place it overtopped the wall and began
to curl over in a crest. All expected that it would fall over
into the town at last: but no, there it stopped, and cooled, and
hardened, and left the town unhurt. All the inhabitants said, of
course, that St. Agatha had done it: but learned men found out
that, as usual Madam How had done it, by making it do itself. The
lava was so full of gas, which was continually blowing out in
little jets, that when it reached the wall, it actually blew
itself back from the wall; and, as the wall was luckily strong
enough not to be blown down, the lava kept blowing itself back
till it had time to cool. And so, my dear child, there was no
miracle at all in the matter; and the poor people of Catania had
to thank not St. Agatha, and any interference of hers, but simply
Him who can preserve, just as He can destroy, by those laws of
nature which are the breath of His mouth and the servants of His
will.
But in many a case the lava does not stop. It rolls on and on
over the downs and through the valleys, till it reaches the sea-
shore, as it did in Hawaii in the Sandwich Islands this very year.
And then it cools, of course; but often not before it has killed
the fish by its sulphurous gases and heat, perhaps for miles
around. And there is good reason to believe that the fossil fish
which we so often find in rocks, perfect in every bone, lying
sometimes in heaps, and twisted (as I have seen them) as if they
had died suddenly and violently, were killed in this very way,
either by heat from lava streams, or else by the bursting up of
gases poisoning the water, in earthquakes and eruptions in the
bottom of the sea. I could tell you many stories of fish being
killed in thousands by earthquakes and volcanos during the last
few years. But we have not time to tell about everything
And now you will ask me, with more astonishment than ever, what
possible use can there be in these destroying streams of fire?
And certainly, if you had ever seen a lava stream even when cool,
and looked down, as I have done, at the great river of rough black
blocks streaming away far and wide over the land, you would think
it the most hideous and the most useless thing you ever saw. And
yet, my dear child, there is One who told men to judge not
according to the appearance, but to judge righteous judgment. He
said that about matters spiritual and human: but it is quite as
true about matters natural, which also are His work, and all obey
His will.
Now if you had seen, as I have seen, close round the edges of
these lava streams, and sometimes actually upon them, or upon the
great bed of dust and ashes which have been hurled far and wide
out of ancient volcanos, happy homesteads, rich crops, hemp and
flax, and wheat, tobacco, lucerne, roots, and vineyards laden with
white and purple grapes, you would have begun to suspect that the
lava streams were not, after all, such very bad neighbours. And
when I tell you that volcanic soils (as they are called), that is,
soil which has at first been lava or ashes, are generally the
richest soils in the world--that, for instance (as some one told
me the other day), there is soil in the beautiful island of
Madeira so thin that you cannot dig more than two or three inches
down without coming to the solid rock of lava, or what is harder
even, obsidian (which is the black glass which volcanos sometimes
make, and which the old Mexicans used to chip into swords and
arrows, because they had no steel)--and that this soil, thin as it
is, is yet so fertile, that in it used to be grown the grapes of
which the famous Madeira wine was made--when you remember this,
and when you remember, too, the Lothians of Scotland (about which
I shall have to say a little to you just now), then you will
perhaps agree with me, that Lady Why has not been so very wrong in
setting Madam How to pour out lava and ashes upon the surface of
the earth.
For see--down below, under the roots of the mountains, Madam How
works continually like a chemist in his laboratory, melting
together all the rocks, which are the bones and leavings of the
old worlds. If they stayed down below there, they would be of no
use; while they will be of use up here in the open air. For, year
by year--by the washing of rain and rivers, and also, I am sorry
to say, by the ignorant and foolish waste of mankind--thousands
and millions of tons of good stuff are running into the sea every
year, which would, if it could be kept on land, make food for men
and animals, plants and trees. So, in order to supply the
continual waste of this upper world, Madam How is continually
melting up the under world, and pouring it out of the volcanos
like manure, to renew the face of the earth. In these lava rocks
and ashes which she sends up there are certain substances, without
which men cannot live--without which a stalk of corn or grass
cannot grow. Without potash, without magnesia, both of which are
in your veins and mine--without silicates (as they are called),
which give flint to the stems of corn and of grass, and so make
them stiff and hard, and able to stand upright--and very probably
without the carbonic acid gas, which comes out of the volcanos,
and is taken up by the leaves of plants, and turned by Madam How's
cookery into solid wood--without all these things, and I suspect
without a great many more things which come out of volcanos--I do
not see how this beautiful green world could get on at all.
Of course, when the lava first cools on the surface of the ground
it is hard enough, and therefore barren enough. But Madam How
sets to work upon it at once, with that delicate little water-
spade of hers, which we call rain, and with that alone, century
after century, and age after age, she digs the lava stream down,
atom by atom, and silts it over the country round in rich manure.
So that if Madam How has been a rough and hasty workwoman in
pumping her treasures up out of her mine with her great steam-
pumps, she shows herself delicate and tender and kindly enough in
giving them away afterwards.
Nay, even the fine dust which is sometimes blown out of volcanos
is useful to countries far away. So light it is, that it rises
into the sky and is wafted by the wind across the seas. So, in
the year 1783, ashes from the Skaptar Jokull, in Iceland, were
carried over the north of Scotland, and even into Holland,
hundreds of miles to the south.
So, again, when in the year 1812 the volcano of St. Vincent, in
the West India Islands, poured out torrents of lava, after mighty
earthquakes which shook all that part of the world, a strange
thing happened (about which I have often heard from those who saw
it) in the island of Barbados, several hundred miles away. For
when the sun rose in the morning (it was a Sunday morning), the
sky remained more dark than any night, and all the poor negroes
crowded terrified out of their houses into the streets, fancying
the end of the world was come. But a learned man who was there,
finding that, though the sun was risen, it was still pitchy dark,
opened his window, and found that it was stuck fast by something
on the ledge outside, and, when he thrust it open, found the ledge
covered deep in soft red dust; and he instantly said, like a wise
man as he was, "The volcano of St. Vincent must have broken out,
and these are the ashes from it." Then he ran down stairs and
quieted the poor negroes, telling them not to be afraid, for the
end of the world was not coming just yet. But still the dust went
on falling till the whole island, I am told, was covered an inch
thick; and the same thing happened in the other islands round.
People thought--and they had reason to think from what had often
happened elsewhere--that though the dust might hurt the crops for
that year, it would make them richer in years to come, because it
would act as manure upon the soil; and so it did after a few
years; but it did terrible damage at the time, breaking off the
boughs of trees and covering up the crops; and in St. Vincent
itself whole estates were ruined. It was a frightful day, but I
know well that behind that How there was a Why for its happening,
and happening too, about that very time, which all who know the
history of negro slavery in the West Indies can guess for
themselves, and confess, I hope, that in this case, as in all
others, when Lady Why seems most severe she is often most just and
kind.
Ah! my dear child, that I could go on talking to you of this for
hours and days! But I have time now only to teach you the
alphabet of these matters--and, indeed, I know little more than
the alphabet myself; but if the very letters of Madam How's book,
and the mere A, B, AB, of it, which I am trying to teach you, are
so wonderful and so beautiful, what must its sentences be and its
chapters? And what must the whole book be like? But that last
none can read save He who wrote it before the worlds were made.
But now I see you want to ask a question. Let us have it out. I
would sooner answer one question of yours than tell you ten things
without your asking.
Is there potash and magnesia and silicates in the soil here? And
if there is, where did they come from? For there are no volcanos
in England.
Yes. There are such things in the soil; and little enough of
them, as the farmers here know too well. For we here, in Windsor
Forest, are on the very poorest and almost the newest soil in
England; and when Madam How had used up all her good materials in
making the rest of the island, she carted away her dry rubbish and
shot it down here for us to make the best of; and I do not think
that we and our forefathers have done so very ill with it. But
where the rich part, or staple, of our soils came from first it
would be very difficult to say, so often has Madam How made, and
unmade, and re-made England, and sifted her materials afresh every
time. But if you go to the Lowlands of Scotland, you may soon see
where the staple of the soil came from there, and that I was right
in saying that there were atoms of lava in every Scotch boy's
broth. Not that there were ever (as far as I know) volcanos in
Scotland or in England. Madam How has more than one string to her
bow, or two strings either; so when she pours out her lavas, she
does not always pour them out in the open air. Sometimes she
pours them out at the bottom of the sea, as she did in the north
of Ireland and the south-west of Scotland, when she made the
Giant's Causeway, and Fingal's Cave in Staffa too, at the bottom
of the old chalk ocean, ages and ages since. Sometimes she
squirts them out between the layers of rock, or into cracks which
the earthquakes have made, in what are called trap dykes, of which
there are plenty to be seen in Scotland, and in Wales likewise.
And then she lifts the earth up from the bottom of the sea, and
sets the rain to wash away all the soft rocks, till the hard lava
stands out in great hills upon the surface of the ground. Then
the rain begins eating away those lava-hills likewise, and
manuring the earth with them; and wherever those lava-hills stand
up, whether great or small, there is pretty sure to be rich land
around them. If you look at the Geological Map of England and
Ireland, and the red spots upon it, which will show you where
those old lavas are, you will see how much of them there is in
England, at the Lizard Point in Cornwall, and how much more in
Scotland and the north of Ireland. In South Devon, in Shropshire-
-with its beautiful Wrekin, and Caradoc, and Lawley--in Wales,
round Snowdon (where some of the soil is very rich), and, above
all, in the Lowlands of Scotland, you see these red marks, showing
the old lavas, which are always fertile, except the poor old
granite, which is of little use save to cut into building stone,
because it is too full of quartz--that is, flint.
Think of this the next time you go through Scotland in the
railway, especially when you get near Edinburgh. As you run
through the Lothians, with their noble crops of corn, and roots,
and grasses--and their great homesteads, each with its engine
chimney, which makes steam do the work of men--you will see rising
out of the plain, hills of dark rock, sometimes in single knobs,
like Berwick Law or Stirling Crag--sometimes in noble ranges, like
Arthur's Seat, or the Sidlaws, or the Ochils. Think what these
black bare lumps of whinstone are, and what they do. Remember
they are mines--not gold mines, but something richer still--food
mines, which Madam How thrust into the inside of the earth, ages
and ages since, as molten lava rock, and then cooled them and
lifted them up, and pared them away with her ice-plough and her
rain-spade, and spread the stuff of them over the wide carses
round, to make in that bleak northern climate, which once carried
nothing but fir-trees and heather, a soil fit to feed a great
people; to cultivate in them industry, and science, and valiant
self-dependence and self-help; and to gather round the Heart of
Midlothian and the Castle Rock of Edinburgh the stoutest and the
ablest little nation which Lady Why has made since she made the
Greeks who fought at Salamis.
Of those Greeks you have read, or ought to read, in Mr. Cox's
Tales of the Persian War. Some day you will read of them in their
own books, written in their grand old tongue. Remember that Lady
Why made them, as she has made the Scotch, by first preparing a
country for them, which would call out all their courage and their
skill; and then by giving them the courage and the skill to make
use of the land where she had put them.
And now think what a wonderful fairy tale you might write for
yourself--and every word of it true--of the adventures of one atom
of Potash or some other Salt, no bigger than a needle's point, in
such a lava stream as I have been telling of. How it has run
round and round, and will run round age after age, in an endless
chain of change. How it began by being molten fire underground,
how then it became part of a hard cold rock, lifted up into a
cliff, beaten upon by rain and storm, and washed down into the
soil of the plain, till, perhaps, the little atom of mineral met
with the rootlet of some great tree, and was taken up into its sap
in spring, through tiny veins, and hardened the next year into a
piece of solid wood. And then how that tree was cut down, and its
logs, it may be, burnt upon the hearth, till the little atom of
mineral lay among the wood-ashes, and was shovelled out and thrown
upon the field and washed into the soil again, and taken up by the
roots of a clover plant, and became an atom of vegetable matter
once more. And then how, perhaps, a rabbit came by, and ate the
clover, and the grain of mineral became part of the rabbit; and
then how a hawk killed that rabbit, and ate it, and so the grain
became part of the hawk; and how the farmer shot the hawk, and it
fell perchance into a stream, and was carried down into the sea;
and when its body decayed, the little grain sank through the
water, and was mingled with the mud at the bottom of the sea. But
do its wanderings stop there? Not so, my child. Nothing upon
this earth, as I told you once before, continues in one stay.
That grain of mineral might stay at the bottom of the sea a
thousand or ten thousand years, and yet the time would come when
Madam How would set to work on it again. Slowly, perhaps, she
would sink that mud so deep, and cover it up with so many fresh
beds of mud, or sand, or lime, that under the heavy weight, and
perhaps, too, under the heat of the inside of the earth, that Mud
would slowly change to hard Slate Rock; and ages after, it may be,
Madam How might melt that Slate Rock once more, and blast it out;
and then through the mouth of a volcano the little grain of
mineral might rise into the open air again to make fresh soil, as
it had done thousands of years before. For Madam How can
manufacture many different things out of the same materials. She
may have so wrought with that grain of mineral, that she may have
formed it into part of a precious stone, and men may dig it out of
the rock, or pick it up in the river-bed, and polish it, and set
it, and wear it. Think of that--that in the jewels which your
mother or your sisters wear, or in your father's signet ring,
there may be atoms which were part of a live plant, or a live
animal, millions of years ago, and may be parts of a live plant or
a live animal millions of years hence.
Think over again, and learn by heart, the links of this endless
chain of change: Fire turned into Stone--Stone into Soil--Soil
into Plant--Plant into Animal--Animal into Soil--Soil into Stone--
Stone into Fire again--and then Fire into Stone again, and the old
thing run round once more.
So it is, and so it must be. For all things which are born in
Time must change in Time, and die in Time, till that Last Day of
this our little earth, in which,
"Like to the baseless fabric of a vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all things which inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like an unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind."
So all things change and die, and so your body too must change and
die--but not yourself. Madam How made your body; and she must
unmake it again, as she unmakes all her works in Time and Space;
but you, child, your Soul, and Life, and Self, she did not make;
and over you she has no power. For you were not, like your body,
created in Time and Space; and you will endure though Time and
Space should be no more: because you are the child of the Living
God, who gives to each thing its own body, and can give you
another body, even as seems good to Him.
CHAPTER V--THE ICE-PLOUGH
You want to know why I am so fond of that little bit of limestone,
no bigger than my hand, which lies upon the shelf; why I ponder
over it so often, and show it to all sensible people who come to
see me?
I do so, not only for the sake of the person who gave it to me,
but because there is written on it a letter out of Madam How's
alphabet, which has taken wise men many a year to decipher. I
could not decipher that letter when first I saw the stone. More
shame for me, for I had seen it often before, and understood it
well enough, in many another page of Madam How's great book. Take
the stone, and see if you can find out anything strange about it.
Well, it is only a bit of marble as big as my hand, that looks as
if it had been, and really has been, broken off by a hammer. But
when you look again, you see there is a smooth scraped part on one
edge, that seems to have been rubbed against a stone.
Now look at that rubbed part, and tell me how it was done.
You have seen men often polish one stone on another, or scour
floors with a Bath brick, and you will guess at first that this
was polished so: but if it had been, then the rubbed place would
have been flat: but if you put your fingers over it, you will
find that it is not flat. It is rolled, fluted, channelled, so
that the thing or things which rubbed it must have been somewhat
round. And it is covered, too, with very fine and smooth
scratches or grooves, all running over the whole in the same line.
Now what could have done that?
Of course a man could have done it, if he had taken a large round
stone in his hand, and worked the large channellings with that,
and then had taken fine sand and gravel upon the points of his
fingers, and worked the small scratches with that. But this stone
came from a place where man had, perhaps, never stood before,--ay,
which, perhaps, had never seen the light of day before since the
world was made; and as I happen to know that no man made the marks
upon that stone, we must set to work and think again for some tool
of Madam How's which may have made them.
And now I think you must give up guessing, and I must tell you the
answer to the riddle. Those marks were made by a hand which is
strong and yet gentle, tough and yet yielding, like the hand of a
man; a hand which handles and uses in a grip stronger than a
giant's its own carving tools, from the great boulder stone as
large as this whole room to the finest grain of sand. And that is
ICE.
That piece of stone came from the side of the Rosenlaui glacier in
Switzerland, and it was polished by the glacier ice. The glacier
melted and shrank this last hot summer farther back than it had
done for many years, and left bare sheets of rock, which it had
been scraping at for ages, with all the marks fresh upon them.
And that bit was broken off and brought to me, who never saw a
glacier myself, to show me how the marks which the ice makes in
Switzerland are exactly the same as those which the ice has made
in Snowdon and in the Highlands, and many another place where I
have traced them, and written a little, too, about them in years
gone by. And so I treasure this, as a sign that Madam How's ways
do not change nor her laws become broken; that, as that great
philosopher Sir Charles Lyell will tell you, when you read his
books, Madam How is making and unmaking the surface of the earth
now, by exactly the same means as she was making and unmaking ages
and ages since; and that what is going on slowly and surely in the
Alps in Switzerland was going on once here where we stand.
It is very difficult, I know, for a little boy like you to
understand how ice, and much more how soft snow, should have such
strength that it can grind this little stone, much more such
strength as to grind whole mountains into plains. You have never
seen ice and snow do harm. You cannot even recollect the Crimean
Winter, as it was called then; and well for you you cannot,
considering all the misery it brought at home and abroad. You
cannot, I say, recollect the Crimean Winter, when the Thames was
frozen over above the bridges, and the ice piled in little bergs
ten to fifteen feet high, which lay, some of them, stranded on the
shores, about London itself, and did not melt, if I recollect,
until the end of May. You never stood, as I stood, in the great
winter of 1837-8 on Battersea Bridge, to see the ice break up with
the tide, and saw the great slabs and blocks leaping and piling
upon each other's backs, and felt the bridge tremble with their
shocks, and listened to their horrible grind and roar, till one
got some little picture in one's mind of what must be the breaking
up of an ice-floe in the Arctic regions, and what must be the
danger of a ship nipped in the ice and lifted up on high, like
those in the pictures of Arctic voyages which you are so fond of
looking through. You cannot recollect how that winter even in our
little Blackwater Brook the alder stems were all peeled white, and
scarred, as if they had been gnawed by hares and deer, simply by
the rushing and scraping of the ice,--a sight which gave me again
a little picture of the destruction which the ice makes of quays,
and stages, and houses along the shore upon the coasts of North
America, when suddenly setting in with wind and tide, it jams and
piles up high inland, as you may read for yourself some day in a
delightful book called Frost and Fire. You recollect none of
these things. Ice and snow are to you mere playthings; and you
long for winter, that you may make snowballs and play hockey and
skate upon the ponds, and eat ice like a foolish boy till you make
your stomach ache. And I dare say you have said, like many
another boy, on a bright cheery ringing frosty day, "Oh, that it
would be always winter!" You little knew for what you asked. You
little thought what the earth would soon be like, if it were
always winter,--if one sheet of ice on the pond glued itself on to
the bottom of the last sheet, till the whole pond was a solid
mass,--if one snow-fall lay upon the top of another snow-fall till
the moor was covered many feet deep and the snow began sliding
slowly down the glen from Coombs's, burying the green fields,
tearing the trees up by their roots, burying gradually house,
church, and village, and making this place for a few thousand
years what it was many thousand years ago. Good-bye then, after a
very few winters, to bees, and butterflies, and singing-birds, and
flowers; and good-bye to all vegetables, and fruit, and bread;
good-bye to cotton and woollen clothes. You would have, if you
were left alive, to dress in skins, and eat fish and seals, if any
came near enough to be caught. You would have to live in a word,
if you could live at all, as Esquimaux live now in Arctic regions,
and as people had to live in England ages since, in the times when
it was always winter, and icebergs floated between here and
Finchampstead. Oh no, my child: thank Heaven that it is not
always winter; and remember that winter ice and snow, though it is
a very good tool with which to make the land, must leave the land
year by year if that land is to be fit to live in.
I said that if the snow piled high enough upon the moor, it would
come down the glen in a few years through Coombs's Wood; and I
said then you would have a small glacier here--such a glacier (to
compare small things with great) as now comes down so many valleys
in the Alps, or has come down all the valleys of Greenland and
Spitzbergen till they reach the sea, and there end as cliffs of
ice, from which great icebergs snap off continually, and fall and
float away, wandering southward into the Atlantic for many a
hundred miles. You have seen drawings of such glaciers in Captain
Cook's Voyages; and you may see photographs of Swiss glaciers in
any good London print-shop; and therefore you have seen almost as
much about them as I have seen, and may judge for yourself how you
would like to live where it is always winter.
Now you must not ask me to tell you what a glacier is like, for I
have never seen one; at least, those which I have seen were more
than fifty miles away, looking like white clouds hanging on the
gray mountain sides. And it would be an impertinence--that means
a meddling with things which I have no business--to picture to you
glaciers which have been pictured so well and often by gentlemen
who escape every year from their hard work in town to find among
the glaciers of the Alps health and refreshment, and sound
knowledge, and that most wholesome and strengthening of all
medicines, toil.
So you must read of them in such books as Peaks, Passes, and
Glaciers, and Mr. Willes's Wanderings in the High Alps, and
Professor Tyndall's different works; or you must look at them (as
I just now said) in photographs or in pictures. But when you do
that, or when you see a glacier for yourself, you must bear in
mind what a glacier means--that it is a river of ice, fed by a
lake of snow. The lake from which it springs is the eternal snow-
field which stretches for miles and miles along the mountain tops,
fed continually by fresh snow-storms falling from the sky. That
snow slides off into the valleys hour by hour, and as it rushes
down is ground and pounded, and thawed and frozen again into a
sticky paste of ice, which flows slowly but surely till it reaches
the warm valley at the mountain foot, and there melts bit by bit.
The long black lines which you see winding along the white and
green ice of the glacier are the stones which have fallen from the
cliffs above. They will be dropped at the end of the glacier, and
mixed with silt and sand and other stones which have come down
inside the glacier itself, and piled up in the field in great
mounds, which are called moraines, such as you may see and walk on
in Scotland many a time, though you might never guess what they
are.
The river which runs out at the glacier foot is, you must
remember, all foul and milky with the finest mud; and that mud is
the grinding of the rocks over which the glacier has been crawling
down, and scraping them as it scraped my bit of stone with pebbles
and with sand. And this is the alphabet, which, if you learn by
heart, you will learn to understand how Madam How uses her great
ice-plough to plough down her old mountains, and spread the stuff
of them about the valleys to make rich straths of fertile soil.
Nay, so immensely strong, because immensely heavy, is the share of
this her great ice-plough, that some will tell you (and it is not
for me to say that they are wrong) that with it she has ploughed
out all the mountain lakes in Europe and in North America; that
such lakes, for instance, as Ullswater or Windermere have been
scooped clean out of the solid rock by ice which came down these
glaciers in old times. And be sure of this, that next to Madam
How's steam-pump and her rain-spade, her great ice-plough has had,
and has still, the most to do with making the ground on which we
live.
Do I mean that there were ever glaciers here? No, I do not.
There have been glaciers in Scotland in plenty. And if any Scotch
boy shall read this book, it will tell him presently how to find
the marks of them far and wide over his native land. But as you,
my child, care most about this country in which you live, I will
show you in any gravel-pit, or hollow lane upon the moor, the
marks, not of a glacier, which is an ice-river, but of a whole sea
of ice.
Let us come up to the pit upon the top of the hill, and look
carefully at what we see there. The lower part of the pit of
course is a solid rock of sand. On the top of that is a cap of
gravel, five, six, ten feet thick. Now the sand was laid down
there by water at the bottom of an old sea; and therefore the top
of it would naturally be flat and smooth, as the sands at
Hunstanton or at Bournemouth are; and the gravel, if it was laid
down by water, would naturally lie flat on it again: but it does
not. See how the top of the sand is dug out into deep waves and
pits, filled up with gravel. And see, too, how over some of the
gravel you get sand again, and then gravel again, and then sand
again, till you cannot tell where one fairly begins and the other
ends. Why, here are little dots of gravel, six or eight feet
down, in what looks the solid sand rock, yet the sand must have
been opened somehow to put the gravel in.
You say you have seen that before. You have seen the same curious
twisting of the gravel and sand into each other on the top of
Farley Hill, and in the new cutting on Minley Hill; and, best of
all, in the railway cutting between Ascot and Sunningdale, where
upon the top the white sand and gravel is arranged in red and
brown waves, and festoons, and curlicues, almost like Prince of
Wales's feathers. Yes, that last is a beautiful section of ice-
work; so beautiful, that I hope to have it photographed some day.
Now, how did ice do this?
Well, I was many a year before I found out that, and I dare say I
never should have found it out for myself. A gentleman named
Trimmer, who, alas! is now dead, was, I believe, the first to find
it out. He knew that along the coast of Labrador, and other cold
parts of North America, and on the shores, too, of the great river
St. Lawrence, the stranded icebergs, and the ice-foot, as it is
called, which is continually forming along the freezing shores,
grub and plough every tide into the mud and sand, and shove up
before them, like a ploughshare, heaps of dirt; and that, too, the
ice itself is full of dirt, of sand and stones, which it may have
brought from hundreds of miles away; and that, as this ploughshare
of dirty ice grubs onward, the nose of the plough is continually
being broken off, and left underneath the mud; and that, when
summer comes, and the ice melts, the mud falls back into the place
where the ice had been, and covers up the gravel which was in the
ice. So, what between the grubbing of the ice-plough into the
mud, and the dirt which it leaves behind when it melts, the
stones, and sand, and mud upon the shore are jumbled up into
curious curved and twisted layers, exactly like those which Mr.
Trimmer saw in certain gravel-pits. And when I first read about
that, I said, "And exactly like what I have been seeing in every
gravel-pit round here, and trying to guess how they could have
been made by currents of water, and yet never could make any guess
which would do." But after that it was all explained to me; and I
said, "Honour to the man who has let Madam How teach him what she
had been trying to teach me for fifteen years, while I was too
stupid to learn it. Now I am certain, as certain as I can be of
any earthly thing, that the whole of these Windsor Forest Flats
were ages ago ploughed and harrowed over and over again, by ice-
floes and icebergs drifting and stranding in a shallow sea."
And if you say, my dear child, as some people will say, that it is
like building a large house upon a single brick to be sure that
there was an iceberg sea here, just because I see a few curlicues
in the gravel and sand--then I must tell you that there are
sometimes--not often, but sometimes--pages in Madam How's book in
which one single letter tells you as much as a whole chapter; in
which if you find one little fact, and know what it really means,
it makes you certain that a thousand other great facts have
happened. You may be astonished: but you cannot deny your own
eyes, and your own common sense. You feel like Robinson Crusoe
when, walking along the shore of his desert island, he saw for the
first time the print of a man's foot in the sand. How it could
have got there without a miracle he could not dream. But there it
was. One footprint was as good as the footprints of a whole army
would have been. A man had been there; and more men might come.
And in fear of the savages--and if you have read Robinson Crusoe
you know how just his fears were--he went home trembling and
loaded his muskets, and barricaded his cave, and passed sleepless
nights watching for the savages who might come, and who came after
all.
And so there are certain footprints in geology which there is no
mistaking; and the prints of the ice-plough are among them.
For instance:- When they were trenching the new plantation close
to Wellington College station, the men turned up out of the ground
a great many Sarsden stones; that is, pieces of hard sugary sand,
such as Stonehenge is made of. And when I saw these I said, "I
suspect these were brought here by icebergs:" but I was not sure,
and waited. As the men dug on, they dug up a great many large
flints, with bottle-green coats. "Now," I said, "I am sure. For
I know where these flints must have come from." And for reasons
which would be too long to tell you here, I said, "Some time or
other, icebergs have been floating northward from the Hog's Back
over Aldershot and Farnborough, and have been trying to get into
the Vale of Thames by the slope at Wellington College station; and
they have stranded, and dropped these flints." And I am so sure
of that, that if I found myself out wrong after all I should be at
my wit's end; for I should know that I was wrong about a hundred
things besides.
Or again, if you ever go up Deeside in Scotland, towards Balmoral,
and turn up Glen Muick, towards Alt-na-guisach, of which you may
see a picture in the Queen's last book, you will observe standing
on your right hand, just above Birk Hall, three pretty rounded
knolls, which they call the Coile Hills. You may easily know them
by their being covered with beautiful green grass instead of
heather. That is because they are made of serpentine or volcanic
rock, which (as you have seen) often cuts into beautiful red and
green marble; and which also carries a very rich soil because it
is full of magnesia. If you go up those hills, you get a glorious
view--the mountains sweeping round you where you stand, up to the
top of Lochnagar, with its bleak walls a thousand feet
perpendicular, and gullies into which the sun never shines, and
round to the dark fir forests of the Ballochbuie. That is the arc
of the bow; and the cord of the bow is the silver Dee, more than a
thousand feet below you; and in the centre of the cord, where the
arrow would be fitted in, stands Balmoral, with its Castle, and
its Gardens, and its Park, and pleasant cottages and homesteads
all around. And when you have looked at the beautiful
amphitheatre of forest at your feet, and looked too at the great
mountains to the westward, and Benaun, and Benna-buird and Benna-
muicdhui, with their bright patches of eternal snow, I should
advise you to look at the rock on which you stand, and see what
you see there. And you will see that on the side of the Coiles
towards Lochnagar, and between the knolls of them, are scattered
streams, as it were, of great round boulder stones--which are not
serpentine, but granite from the top of Lochnagar, five miles
away. And you will see that the knolls of serpentine rock, or at
least their backs and shoulders towards Lochnagar, are all
smoothed and polished till they are as round as the backs of
sheep, "roches moutonnees," as the French call ice-polished rocks;
and then, if you understand what that means, you will say, as I
said, "I am perfectly certain that this great basin between me and
Lochnagar, which is now 3000 feet deep of empty air was once
filled up with ice to the height of the hills on which I stand--
about 1700 feet high--and that that ice ran over into Glen Muick,
between these pretty knolls, and covered the ground where Birk
Hall now stands."
And more:- When you see growing on those knolls of serpentine a
few pretty little Alpine plants, which have no business down there
so low, you will have a fair right to say, as I said, "The seeds
of these plants were brought by the ice ages and ages since from
off the mountain range of Lochnagar, and left here, nestling among
the rocks, to found a fresh colony, far from their old mountain
home."
If I could take you with me up to Scotland,--take you, for
instance, along the Tay, up the pass of Dunkeld, or up Strathmore
towards Aberdeen, or up the Dee towards Braemar,--I could show you
signs, which cannot be mistaken, of the time when Scotland was,
just like Spitzbergen or like Greenland now, covered in one vast
sheet of snow and ice from year's end to year's end; when glaciers
were ploughing out its valleys, icebergs were breaking off the icy
cliffs and floating out to sea; when not a bird, perhaps, was to
be seen save sea-fowl, not a plant upon the rocks but a few
lichens, and Alpine saxifrages, and such like--desolation and cold
and lifeless everywhere. That ice-time went on for ages and for
ages; and yet it did not go on in vain. Through it Madam How was
ploughing down the mountains of Scotland to make all those rich
farms which stretch from the north side of the Frith of Forth into
Sutherlandshire. I could show you everywhere the green banks and
knolls of earth, which Scotch people call "kames" and "tomans"--
perhaps brought down by ancient glaciers, or dropped by ancient
icebergs--now so smooth and green through summer and through
winter, among the wild heath and the rough peat-moss, that the old
Scots fancied, and I dare say Scotch children fancy still, fairies
dwelt inside. If you laid your ear against the mounds, you might
hear the fairy music, sweet and faint, beneath the ground. If you
watched the mound at night, you might see the fairies dancing the
turf short and smooth, or riding out on fairy horses, with green
silk clothes and jingling bells. But if you fell asleep upon the
mounds, the fairy queen came out and carried you for seven years
into Fairyland, till you awoke again in the same place, to find
all changed around you, and yourself grown thin and old.
These are all dreams and fancies--untrue, not because they are too
strange and wonderful, but because they are not strange and
wonderful enough: for more wonderful sure than any fairy tale it
is, that Madam How should make a rich and pleasant land by the
brute force of ice.
And were there any men and women in that old age of ice? That is
a long story, and a dark one too; we will talk of it next time.
CHAPTER VI--THE TRUE FAIRY TALE
You asked if there were men in England when the country was
covered with ice and snow. Look at this, and judge for yourself.
What is it? a piece of old mortar? Yes. But mortar which was
made Madam How herself, and not by any man. And what is in it? A
piece of flint and some bits of bone. But look at that piece of
flint. It is narrow, thin, sharp-edged: quite different in shape
from any bit of flint which you or I ever saw among the hundreds
of thousands of broken bits of gravel which we tread on here all
day long; and here are some more bits like it, which came from the
same place--all very much the same shape, like rough knives or
razor blades; and here is a core of flint, the remaining part of a
large flint, from which, as you may see, blades like those have
been split off. Those flakes of flint, my child, were split off
by men; even your young eyes ought to be able to see that. And
here are other pieces of flint--pear-shaped, but flattened, sharp
at one end and left rounded at the other, which look like spear-
heads, or arrow-heads, or pointed axes, or pointed hatchets--even
your young eyes can see that these must have been made by man.
And they are, I may tell you, just like the tools of flint, or of
obsidian, which is volcanic glass, and which savages use still
where they have not iron. There is a great obsidian knife, you
know, in a house in this very parish, which came from Mexico; and
your eye can tell you how like it is to these flint ones. But
these flint tools are very old. If you crack a fresh flint, you
will see that its surface is gray, and somewhat rough, so that it
sticks to your tongue. These tools are smooth and shiny: and the
edges of some of them are a little rubbed from being washed about
in gravel; while the iron in the gravel has stained them reddish,
which it would take hundreds and perhaps thousands of years to do.
There are little rough markings, too, upon some of them, which, if
you look at through a magnifying glass, are iron, crystallised
into the shape of little seaweeds and trees--another sign that
they are very very old. And what is more, near the place where
these flint flakes come from there are no flints in the ground for
hundreds of miles; so that men must have brought them there ages
and ages since. And to tell you plainly, these are scrapers such
as the Esquimaux in North America still use to scrape the flesh
off bones, and to clean the insides of skins.
But did these people (savages perhaps) live when the country was
icy cold? Look at the bits of bone. They have been split, you
see, lengthways; that, I suppose, was to suck the marrow out of
them, as savages do still. But to what animal do the bones
belong? That is the question, and one which I could not have
answered you, if wiser men than I am could not have told me.
They are the bones of reindeer--such reindeer as are now found
only in Lapland and the half-frozen parts of North America, close
to the Arctic circle, where they have six months day and six
months night. You have read of Laplanders, and how they drive
reindeer in their sledges, and live upon reindeer milk; and you
have read of Esquimaux, who hunt seals and walrus, and live in
houses of ice, lighted by lamps fed with the same blubber on which
they feed themselves. I need not tell you about them.
Now comes the question--Whence did these flints and bones come?
They came out of a cave in Dordogne, in the heart of sunny
France,--far away to the south, where it is hotter every summer
than it was here even this summer, from among woods of box and
evergreen oak, and vineyards of rich red wine. In that warm land
once lived savages, who hunted amid ice and snow the reindeer, and
with the reindeer animals stranger still.
And now I will tell you a fairy tale: to make you understand it
at all I must put it in the shape of a tale. I call it a fairy
tale, because it is so strange; indeed I think I ought to call it
the fairy tale of all fairy tales, for by the time we get to the
end of it I think it will explain to you how our forefathers got
to believe in fairies, and trolls, and elves, and scratlings, and
all strange little people who were said to haunt the mountains and
the caves.
Well, once upon a time, so long ago that no man can tell when, the
land was so much higher, that between England and Ireland, and,
what is more, between England and Norway, was firm dry land. The
country then must have looked--at least we know it looked so in
Norfolk--very like what our moors look like here. There were
forests of Scotch fir, and of spruce too, which is not wild in
England now, though you may see plenty in every plantation. There
were oaks and alders, yews and sloes, just as there are in our
woods now. There was buck-bean in the bogs, as there is in
Larmer's and Heath pond; and white and yellow water-lilies, horn-
wort, and pond-weeds, just as there are now in our ponds. There
were wild horses, wild deer, and wild oxen, those last of an
enormous size. There were little yellow roe-deer, which will not
surprise you, for there are hundreds and thousands in Scotland to
this day; and, as you know, they will thrive well enough in our
woods now. There were beavers too: but that must not surprise
you, for there were beavers in South Wales long after the Norman
Conquest, and there are beavers still in the mountain glens of the
south-east of France. There were honest little water-rats too,
who I dare say sat up on their hind legs like monkeys, nibbling
the water-lily pods, thousands of years ago, as they do in our
ponds now. Well, so far we have come to nothing strange: but now
begins the fairy tale. Mixed with all these animals, there
wandered about great herds of elephants and rhinoceroses; not
smooth-skinned, mind, but covered with hair and wool, like those
which are still found sticking out of the everlasting ice cliffs,
at the mouth of the Lena and other Siberian rivers, with the
flesh, and skin, and hair so fresh upon them, that the wild wolves
tear it off, and snarl and growl over the carcase of monsters who
were frozen up thousands of years ago. And with them, stranger
still, were great hippopotamuses; who came, perhaps, northward in
summer time along the sea-shore and down the rivers, having spread
hither all the way from Africa; for in those days, you must
understand, Sicily, and Italy, and Malta--look at your map--were
joined to the coast of Africa: and so it may be was the rock of
Gibraltar itself; and over the sea where the Straits of Gibraltar
now flow was firm dry land, over which hyaenas and leopards,
elephants and rhinoceroses ranged into Spain; for their bones are
found at this day in the Gibraltar caves. And this is the first
chapter of my fairy tale.
Now while all this was going on, and perhaps before this began,
the climate was getting colder year by year--we do not know how;
and, what is more, the land was sinking; and it sank so deep that
at last nothing was left out of the water but the tops of the
mountains in Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales. It sank so deep
that it left beds of shells belonging to the Arctic regions nearly
two thousand feet high upon the mountain side. And so
"It grew wondrous cold,
And ice mast-high came floating by,
As green as emerald."
But there were no masts then to measure the icebergs by, nor any
ship nor human being there. All we know is that the icebergs
brought with them vast quantities of mud, which sank to the
bottom, and covered up that pleasant old forest-land in what is
called boulder-clay; clay full of bits of broken rock, and of
blocks of stone so enormous, that nothing but an iceberg could
have carried them. So all the animals were drowned or driven
away, and nothing was left alive perhaps, except a few little
hardy plants which clung about cracks and gullies in the mountain
tops; and whose descendants live there still. That was a dreadful
time; the worst, perhaps, of all the age of Ice; and so ends the
second chapter of my fairy tale.
Now for my third chapter. "When things come to the worst," says
the proverb, "they commonly mend;" and so did this poor frozen and
drowned land of England and France and Germany, though it mended
very slowly. The land began to rise out of the sea once more, and
rose till it was perhaps as high as it had been at first, and
hundreds of feet higher than it is now: but still it was very
cold, covered, in Scotland at least, with one great sea of ice and
glaciers descending down into the sea, as I said when I spoke to
you about the Ice-Plough. But as the land rose, and grew warmer
too, while it rose, the wild beasts who had been driven out by the
great drowning came gradually back again. As the bottom of the
old icy sea turned into dry land, and got covered with grasses,
and weeds, and shrubs once more, elephants, rhinoceroses,
hippopotamuses, oxen--sometimes the same species, sometimes
slightly different ones--returned to France, and then to England
(for there was no British Channel then to stop them); and with
them came other strange animals, especially the great Irish elk,
as he is called, as large as the largest horse, with horns
sometimes ten feet across. A pair of those horns with the skull
you have seen yourself, and can judge what a noble animal he must
have been. Enormous bears came too, and hyaenas, and a tiger or
lion (I cannot say which), as large as the largest Bengal tiger
now to be seen in India.
And in those days--we cannot, of course, exactly say when--there
came--first I suppose into the south and east of France, and then
gradually onward into England and Scotland and Ireland--creatures
without any hair to keep them warm, or scales to defend them,
without horns or tusks to fight with, or teeth to worry and bite;
the weakest you would have thought of the beasts, and yet stronger
than all the animals, because they were Men, with reasonable
souls. Whence they came we cannot tell, nor why; perhaps from
mere hunting after food, and love of wandering and being
independent and alone. Perhaps they came into that icy land for
fear of stronger and cleverer people than themselves; for we have
no proof, my child, none at all, that they were the first men that
trod this earth. But be that as it may, they came; and so cunning
were these savage men, and so brave likewise, though they had no
iron among them, only flint and sharpened bones, yet they
contrived to kill and eat the mammoths, and the giant oxen, and
the wild horses, and the reindeer, and to hold their own against
the hyaenas, and tigers, and bears, simply because they had wits,
and the dumb animals had none. And that is the strangest part to
me of all my fairy tale. For what a man's wits are, and why he
has them, and therefore is able to invent and to improve, while
even the cleverest ape has none, and therefore can invent and
improve nothing, and therefore cannot better himself, but must
remain from father to son, and father to son again, a stupid,
pitiful, ridiculous ape, while men can go on civilising
themselves, and growing richer and more comfortable, wiser and
happier, year by year--how that comes to pass, I say, is to me a
wonder and a prodigy and a miracle, stranger than all the most
fantastic marvels you ever read in fairy tales.
You may find the flint weapons which these old savages used buried
in many a gravel-pit up and down France and the south of England;
but you will find none here, for the gravel here was made (I am
told) at the beginning of the ice-time, before the north of
England sunk into the sea, and therefore long, long before men
came into this land. But most of their remains are found in caves
which water has eaten out of the limestone rocks, like that famous
cave of Kent's Hole at Torquay. In it, and in many another cave,
lie the bones of animals which the savages ate, and cracked to get
the marrow out of them, mixed up with their flint-weapons and bone
harpoons, and sometimes with burnt ashes and with round stones,
used perhaps to heat water, as savages do now, all baked together
into a hard paste or breccia by the lime. These are in the water,
and are often covered with a floor of stalagmite which has dripped
from the roof above and hardened into stone. Of these caves and
their beautiful wonders I must tell you another day. We must keep
now to our fairy tale. But in these caves, no doubt, the savages
lived; for not only have weapons been found in them, but actually
drawings scratched (I suppose with flint) on bone or mammoth
ivory--drawings of elk, and bull, and horse, and ibex--and one,
which was found in France, of the great mammoth himself, the
woolly elephant, with a mane on his shoulders like a lion's mane.
So you see that one of the earliest fancies of this strange
creature, called man, was to draw, as you and your schoolfellows
love to draw, and copy what you see, you know not why. Remember
that. You like to draw; but why you like it neither you nor any
man can tell. It is one of the mysteries of human nature; and
that poor savage clothed in skins, dirty it may be, and more
ignorant than you (happily) can conceive, when he sat scratching
on ivory in the cave the figures of the animals he hunted, was
proving thereby that he had the same wonderful and mysterious
human nature as you--that he was the kinsman of every painter and
sculptor who ever felt it a delight and duty to copy the beautiful
works of God.
Sometimes, again, especially in Denmark, these savages have left
behind upon the shore mounds of dirt, which are called there
"kjokken-moddings"--"kitchen-middens" as they would say in
Scotland, "kitchen-dirtheaps" as we should say here down South--
and a very good name for them that is; for they are made up of the
shells of oysters, cockles, mussels, and periwinkles, and other
shore-shells besides, on which those poor creatures fed; and
mingled with them are broken bones of beasts, and fishes, and
birds, and flint knives, and axes, and sling stones; and here and
there hearths, on which they have cooked their meals in some rough
way. And that is nearly all we know about them; but this we know
from the size of certain of the shells, and from other reasons
which you would not understand, that these mounds were made an
enormous time ago, when the water of the Baltic Sea was far more
salt than it is now.
But what has all this to do with my fairy tale? This:-
Suppose that these people, after all, had been fairies?
I am in earnest. Of course, I do not mean that these folk could
make themselves invisible, or that they had any supernatural
powers--any more, at least, than you and I have--or that they were
anything but savages; but this I do think, that out of old stories
of these savages grew up the stories of fairies, elves, and
trolls, and scratlings, and cluricaunes, and ogres, of which you
have read so many.
When stronger and bolder people, like the Irish, and the
Highlanders of Scotland, and the Gauls of France, came northward
with their bronze and iron weapons; and still more, when our own
forefathers, the Germans and the Norsemen, came, these poor little
savages with their flint arrows and axes, were no match for them,
and had to run away northward, or to be all killed out; for people
were fierce and cruel in those old times, and looked on every one
of a different race from themselves as a natural enemy. They had
not learnt--alas! too many have not learned it yet--that all men
are brothers for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. So these poor
savages were driven out, till none were left, save the little
Lapps up in the north of Norway, where they live to this day.
But stories of them, and of how they dwelt in caves, and had
strange customs, and used poisoned weapons, and how the elf-bolts
(as their flint arrow-heads are still called) belonged to them,
lingered on, and were told round the fire on winter nights and
added to, and played with half in fun, till a hundred legends
sprang up about them, which used once to be believed by grown-up
folk, but which now only amuse children. And because some of
these savages were very short, as the Lapps and Esquimaux are now,
the story grew of their being so small that they could make
themselves invisible; and because others of them were (but
probably only a few) very tall and terrible, the story grew that
there were giants in that old world, like that famous Gogmagog,
whom Brutus and his Britons met (so old fables tell), when they
landed first at Plymouth, and fought him, and threw him over the
cliff. Ogres, too--of whom you read in fairy tales--I am afraid
that there were such people once, even here in Europe; strong and
terrible savages, who ate human beings. Of course, the legends
and tales about them became ridiculous and exaggerated as they
passed from mouth to mouth over the Christmas fire, in the days
when no one could read or write. But that the tales began by
being true any one may well believe who knows how many cannibal
savages there are in the world even now. I think that, if ever
there was an ogre in the world, he must have been very like a
certain person who lived, or was buried, in a cave in the
Neanderthal, between Elberfeld and Dusseldorf, on the Lower Rhine.
The skull and bones which were found there (and which are very
famous now among scientific men) belonged to a personage whom I
should have been very sorry to meet, and still more to let you
meet, in the wild forest; to a savage of enormous strength of limb
(and I suppose of jaw) likewise
"like an ape,
With forehead villainous low,"
who could have eaten you if he would; and (I fear) also would have
eaten you if he could. Such savages may have lingered (I believe,
from the old ballads and romances, that they did linger) for a
long time in lonely forests and mountain caves, till they were all
killed out by warriors who wore mail-armour and carried steel
sword, and battle-axe, and lance.
But had these people any religion?
My dear child, we cannot know, and need not know. But we know
this--that God beholds all the heathen. He fashions the hearts of
them, and understandeth all their works. And we know also that He
is just and good. These poor folks were, I doubt not, happy
enough in their way; and we are bound to believe (for we have no
proof against it), that most of them were honest and harmless
enough likewise. Of course, ogres and cannibals, and cruel and
brutal persons (if there were any among them), deserved
punishment--and punishment, I do not doubt, they got. But, of
course, again, none of them knew things which you know; but for
that very reason they were not bound to do many things which you
are bound to do. For those to whom little is given, of them shall
little be required. What their religion was like, or whether they
had any religion at all, we cannot tell. But this we can tell,
that known unto God are all His works from the creation of the
world; and that His mercy is over all His works, and He hateth
nothing that He has made. These men and women, whatever they
were, were God's work; and therefore we may comfort ourselves with
the certainty that, whether or not they knew God, God knew them.
And so ends my fairy tale.
But is it not a wonderful tale? More wonderful, if you will think
over it, than any story invented by man. But so it always is.
"Truth," wise men tell us, "is stranger than fiction." Even a
child like you will see that it must be so, if you will but
recollect who makes fiction, and who makes facts.
Man makes fiction: he invents stories, pretty enough, fantastical
enough. But out of what does he make them up? Out of a few
things in this great world which he has seen, and heard, and felt,
just as he makes up his dreams. But who makes truth? Who makes
facts? Who, but God?
Then truth is as much larger than fiction, as God is greater than
man; as much larger as the whole universe is larger than the
little corner of it that any man, even the greatest poet or
philosopher, can see; and as much grander, and as much more
beautiful, and as much more strange. For one is the whole, and
the other is one, a few tiny scraps of the whole. The one is the
work of God; the other is the work of man. Be sure that no man
can ever fancy anything strange, unexpected, and curious, without
finding if he had eyes to see, a hundred things around his feet
more strange, more unexpected, more curious, actually ready-made
already by God. You are fond of fairy tales, because they are
fanciful, and like your dreams. My dear child, as your eyes open
to the true fairy tale which Madam How can tell you all day long,
nursery stories will seem to you poor and dull. All those
feelings in you which your nursery tales call out,--imagination,
wonder, awe, pity, and I trust too, hope and love--will be called
out, I believe, by the Tale of all Tales, the true "Marchen allen
Marchen," so much more fully and strongly and purely, that you
will feel that novels and story-books are scarcely worth your
reading, as long as you can read the great green book, of which
every bud is a letter, and every tree a page.
Wonder if you will. You cannot wonder too much. That you might
wonder all your life long, God put you into this wondrous world,
and gave you that faculty of wonder which he has not given to the
brutes; which is at once the mother of sound science, and a pledge
of immortality in a world more wondrous even than this. But
wonder at the right thing, not at the wrong; at the real miracles
and prodigies, not at the sham. Wonder not at the world of man.
Waste not your admiration, interest, hope on it, its pretty toys,
gay fashions, fine clothes, tawdry luxuries, silly amusements.
Wonder at the works of God. You will not, perhaps, take my advice
yet. The world of man looks so pretty, that you will needs have
your peep at it, and stare into its shop windows; and if you can,
go to a few of its stage plays, and dance at a few of its balls.
Ah--well--After a wild dream comes an uneasy wakening; and after
too many sweet things, comes a sick headache. And one morning you
will awake, I trust and pray, from the world of man to the world
of God, and wonder where wonder is due, and worship where worship
is due. You will awake like a child who has been at a pantomime
over night, staring at the "fairy halls," which are all paint and
canvas; and the "dazzling splendours," which are gas and oil; and
the "magic transformations," which are done with ropes and
pulleys; and the "brilliant elves," who are poor little children
out of the next foul alley; and the harlequin and clown, who
through all their fun are thinking wearily over the old debts
which they must pay, and the hungry mouths at home which they must
feed: and so, having thought it all wondrously glorious, and
quite a fairy land, slips tired and stupid into bed, and wakes
next morning to see the pure light shining in through the delicate
frost-lace on the window-pane, and looks out over fields of virgin
snow, and watches the rosy dawn and cloudless blue, and the great
sun rising to the music of cawing rooks and piping stares, and
says, "This is the true wonder. This is the true glory. The
theatre last night was the fairy land of man; but this is the
fairy land of God."
CHAPTER VII--THE CHALK-CARTS
What do you want to know about next? More about the caves in
which the old savages lived,--how they were made, and how the
curious things inside them got there, and so forth.
Well, we will talk about that in good time: but now--What is that
coming down the hill?
Oh, only some chalk-carts.
Only some chalk-carts? It seems to me that these chalk-carts are
the very things we want; that if we follow them far enough--I do
not mean with our feet along the public road, but with our
thoughts along a road which, I am sorry to say, the public do not
yet know much about--we shall come to a cave, and understand how a
cave is made. Meanwhile, do not be in a hurry to say, "Only a
chalk-cart," or only a mouse, or only a dead leaf. Chalk-carts,
like mice, and dead leaves, and most other matters in the universe
are very curious and odd things in the eyes of wise and reasonable
people. Whenever I hear young men saying "only" this and "only"
that, I begin to suspect them of belonging, not to the noble army
of sages--much less to the most noble army of martyrs,--but to the
ignoble army of noodles, who think nothing interesting or
important but dinners, and balls, and races, and back-biting their
neighbours; and I should be sorry to see you enlisting in that
regiment when you grow up. But think--are not chalk-carts very
odd and curious things? I think they are. To my mind, it is a
curious question how men ever thought of inventing wheels; and,
again, when they first thought of it. It is a curious question,
too, how men ever found out that they could make horses work for
them, and so began to tame them, instead of eating them, and a
curious question (which I think we shall never get answered) when
the first horse-tamer lived, and in what country. And a very
curious, and, to me, a beautiful sight it is, to see those two
noble horses obeying that little boy, whom they could kill with a
single kick.
But, beside all this, there is a question, which ought to be a
curious one to you (for I suspect you cannot answer it)--Why does
the farmer take the trouble to send his cart and horses eight
miles and more, to draw in chalk from Odiham chalk-pit?
Oh, he is going to put it on the land, of course. They are
chalking the bit at the top of the next field, where the copse was
grubbed.
But what good will he do by putting chalk on it? Chalk is not
rich and fertile, like manure, it is altogether poor, barren
stuff: you know that, or ought to know it. Recollect the chalk
cuttings and banks on the railway between Basingstoke and
Winchester--how utterly barren they are. Though they have been
open these thirty years, not a blade of grass, hardly a bit of
moss, has grown on them, or will grow, perhaps, for centuries.
Come, let us find out something about the chalk before we talk
about the caves. The chalk is here, and the caves are not; and
"Learn from the thing that lies nearest you" is as good a rule as
"Do the duty which lies nearest you." Let us come into the
grubbed bit, and ask the farmer--there he is in his gig.
Well, old friend, and how are you? Here is a little boy who wants
to know why you are putting chalk on your field.
Does he then? If he ever tries to farm round here, he will have
to learn for his first rule--No chalk, no wheat.
But why?
Why, is more than I can tell, young squire. But if you want to
see how it comes about, look here at this freshly-grubbed land--
how sour it is. You can see that by the colour of it--some black,
some red, some green, some yellow, all full of sour iron, which
will let nothing grow. After the chalk has been on it a year or
two, those colours will have all gone out of it; and it will turn
to a nice wholesome brown, like the rest of the field; and then
you will know that the land is sweet, and fit for any crop. Now
do you mind what I tell you, and then I'll tell you something
more. We put on the chalk because, beside sweetening the land, it
will hold water. You see, the land about here, though it is often
very wet from springs, is sandy and hungry; and when we drain the
bottom water out of it, the top water (that is, the rain) is apt
to run through it too fast: and then it dries and burns up; and
we get no plant of wheat, nor of turnips either. So we put on
chalk to hold water, and keep the ground moist.
But how can these lumps of chalk hold water? They are not made
like cups.
No: but they are made like sponges, which serves our turn better
still. Just take up that lump, young squire, and you'll see water
enough in it, or rather looking out of it, and staring you in the
face.
Why! one side of the lump is all over thick ice.
So it is. All that water was inside the chalk last night, till it
froze. And then it came squeezing out of the holes in the chalk
in strings, as you may see it if you break the ice across. Now
you may judge for yourself how much water a load of chalk will
hold, even on a dry summer's day. And now, if you'll excuse me,
sir, I must be off to market.
Was it all true that the farmer said?
Quite true, I believe. He is not a scientific man--that is, he
does not know the chemical causes of all these things; but his
knowledge is sound and useful, because it comes from long
experience. He and his forefathers, perhaps for a thousand years
and more, have been farming this country, reading Madam How's
books with very keen eyes, experimenting and watching, very
carefully and rationally; making mistakes often, and failing and
losing their crops and their money; but learning from their
mistakes, till their empiric knowledge, as it is called, helps
them to grow sometimes quite as good crops as if they had learned
agricultural chemistry.
What he meant by the chalk sweetening the land you would not
understand yet, and I can hardly tell you; for chemists are not
yet agreed how it happens. But he was right; and right, too, what
he told you about the water inside the chalk, which is more
important to us just now; for, if we follow it out, we shall
surely come to a cave at last.
So now for the water in the chalk. You can see now why the chalk-
downs at Winchester are always green, even in the hottest summer:
because Madam How has put under them her great chalk sponge. The
winter rains soak into it; and the summer heat draws that rain out
of it again as invisible steam, coming up from below, to keep the
roots of the turf cool and moist under the blazing sun.
You love that short turf well. You love to run and race over the
Downs with your butterfly-net and hunt "chalk-hill blues," and
"marbled whites," and "spotted burnets," till you are hot and
tired; and then to sit down and look at the quiet little old city
below, with the long cathedral roof, and the tower of St. Cross,
and the gray old walls and buildings shrouded by noble trees, all
embosomed among the soft rounded lines of the chalk-hills; and
then you begin to feel very thirsty, and cry, "Oh, if there were
but springs and brooks in the Downs, as there are at home!" But
all the hollows are as dry as the hill tops. There is not a
brook, or the mark of a watercourse, in one of them. You are like
the Ancient Mariner in the poem, with
"Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink."
To get that you must go down and down, hundreds of feet, to the
green meadows through which silver Itchen glides toward the sea.
There you stand upon the bridge, and watch the trout in water so
crystal-clear that you see every weed and pebble as if you looked
through air. If ever there was pure water, you think, that is
pure. Is it so? Drink some. Wash your hands in it and try--You
feel that the water is rough, hard (as they call it), quite
different from the water at home, which feels as soft as velvet.
What makes it so hard?
Because it is full of invisible chalk. In every gallon of that
water there are, perhaps, fifteen grains of solid chalk, which was
once inside the heart of the hills above. Day and night, year
after year, the chalk goes down to the sea; and if there were such
creatures as water-fairies--if it were true, as the old Greeks and
Romans thought, that rivers were living things, with a Nymph who
dwelt in each of them, and was its goddess or its queen--then, if
your ears were opened to hear her, the Nymph of Itchen might say
to you -
So child, you think that I do nothing but, as your sister says
when she sings Mr. Tennyson's beautiful song,
"I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles."
Yes. I do that: and I love, as the Nymphs loved of old, men who
have eyes to see my beauty, and ears to discern my song, and to
fit their own song to it, and tell how
"'I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,
"'And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel
With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel,
"'And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.'"
Yes. That is all true: but if that were all, I should not be let
to flow on for ever, in a world where Lady Why rules, and Madam
How obeys. I only exist (like everything else, from the sun in
heaven to the gnat which dances in his beam) on condition of
working, whether we wish it or not, whether we know it or not. I
am not an idle stream, only fit to chatter to those who bathe or
fish in my waters, or even to give poets beautiful fancies about
me. You little guess the work I do. For I am one of the
daughters of Madam How, and, like her, work night and day, we know
not why, though Lady Why must know. So day by day, and night by
night, while you are sleeping (for I never sleep), I carry,
delicate and soft as I am, a burden which giants could not bear:
and yet I am never tired. Every drop of rain which the south-west
wind brings from the West Indian seas gives me fresh life and
strength to bear my burden; and it has need to do so; for every
drop of rain lays a fresh burden on me. Every root and weed which
grows in every field; every dead leaf which falls in the highwoods
of many a parish, from the Grange and Woodmancote round to
Farleigh and Preston, and so to Brighton and the Alresford downs;-
-ay, every atom of manure which the farmers put on the land--foul
enough then, but pure enough before it touches me--each of these,
giving off a tiny atom of what men call carbonic acid, melts a
tiny grain of chalk, and helps to send it down through the solid
hill by one of the million pores and veins which at once feed and
burden my springs. Ages on ages I have worked on thus, carrying
the chalk into the sea. And ages on ages, it may be, I shall work
on yet; till I have done my work at last, and levelled the high
downs into a flat sea-shore, with beds of flint gravel rattling in
the shallow waves.
She might tell you that; and when she had told you, you would
surely think of the clumsy chalk-cart rumbling down the hill, and
then of the graceful stream, bearing silently its invisible load
of chalk; and see how much more delicate and beautiful, as well as
vast and wonderful, Madam How's work is than that of man.
But if you asked the nymph why she worked on for ever, she could
not tell you. For like the Nymphs of old, and the Hamadryads who
lived, in trees, and Undine, and the little Sea-maiden, she would
have no soul; no reason; no power to say why.
It is for you, who are a reasonable being, to guess why: or at
least listen to me if I guess for you, and say, perhaps--I can
only say perhaps--that chalk may be going to make layers of rich
marl in the sea between England and France; and those marl-beds
may be upheaved and grow into dry land, and be ploughed, and
sowed, and reaped by a wiser race of men, in a better-ordered
world than this: or the chalk may have even a nobler destiny
before it. That may happen to it, which has happened already to
many a grain of lime. It may be carried thousands of miles away
to help in building up a coral reef (what that is I must tell you
afterwards). That coral reef may harden into limestone beds.
Those beds may be covered up, pressed, and, it may be, heated,
till they crystallise into white marble: and out of it fairer
statues be carved, and grander temples built, than the world has
ever yet seen.
And if that is not the reason why the chalk is being sent into the
sea, then there is another reason, and probably a far better one.
For, as I told you at first, Lady Why's intentions are far wiser
and better than our fancies; and she--like Him whom she obeys--is
able to do exceeding abundantly, beyond all that we can ask or
think.
But you will say now that we have followed the chalk-cart a long
way, without coming to the cave.
You are wrong. We have come to the very mouth of the cave. All
we have to do is to say--not "Open Sesame," like Ali Baba in the
tale of the Forty Thieves--but some word or two which Madam Why
will teach us, and forthwith a hill will open, and we shall walk
in, and behold rivers and cascades underground, stalactite pillars
and stalagmite statues, and all the wonders of the grottoes of
Adelsberg, Antiparos, or Kentucky.
Am I joking? Yes, and yet no; for you know that when I joke I am
usually most in earnest. At least, I am now.
But there are no caves in chalk?
No, not that I ever heard of. There are, though, in limestone,
which is only a harder kind of chalk. Madam How could turn this
chalk into hard limestone, I believe, even now; and in more ways
than one: but in ways which would not be very comfortable or
profitable for us Southern folk who live on it. I am afraid that-
-what between squeezing and heating--she would flatten us all out
into phosphatic fossils, about an inch thick; and turn Winchester
city into a "breccia" which would puzzle geologists a hundred
thousand years hence. So we will hope that she will leave our
chalk downs for the Itchen to wash gently away, while we talk
about caves, and how Madam How scoops them out by water
underground, just in the same way, only more roughly, as she melts
the chalk.
Suppose, then, that these hills, instead of being soft, spongy
chalk, were all hard limestone marble, like that of which the font
in the church is made. Then the rainwater, instead of sinking
through the chalk as now, would run over the ground down-hill, and
if it came to a crack (a fault, as it is called) it would run down
between the rock; and as it ran it would eat that hole wider and
wider year by year, and make a swallow-hole--such as you may see
in plenty if you ever go up Whernside, or any of the high hills in
Yorkshire--unfathomable pits in the green turf, in which you may
hear the water tinkling and trickling far, far underground.
And now, before we go a step farther, you may understand, why the
bones of animals are so often found in limestone caves. Down such
swallow-holes how many beasts must fall: either in hurry and
fright, when hunted by lions and bears and such cruel beasts; or
more often still in time of snow, when the holes are covered with
drift; or, again, if they died on the open hill-sides, their bones
might be washed in, in floods, along with mud and stones, and
buried with them in the cave below; and beside that, lions and
bears and hyaenas might live in the caves below, as we know they
did in some caves, and drag in bones through the caves' mouths;
or, again, savages might live in that cave, and bring in animals
to eat, like the wild beasts; and so those bones might be mixed
up, as we know they were, with things which the savages had left
behind--like flint tools or beads; and then the whole would be
hardened, by the dripping of the limestone water, into a paste of
breccia just like this in my drawer. But the bones of the savages
themselves you would seldom or never find mixed in it--unless some
one had fallen in by accident from above. And why? (For there is
a Why? to that question: and not merely a How?) Simply because
they were men; and because God has put into the hearts of all men,
even of the lowest savages, some sort of reverence for those who
are gone; and has taught them to bury, or in some other way take
care of, their bones.
But how is the swallow-hole sure to end in a cave?
Because it cannot help making a cave for itself if it has time.
Think: and you will see that it must be so. For that water must
run somewhere; and so it eats its way out between the beds of the
rock, making underground galleries, and at last caves and lofty
halls. For it always eats, remember, at the bottom of its
channel, leaving the roof alone. So it eats, and eats, more in
some places and less in others, according as the stone is harder
or softer, and according to the different direction of the rock-
beds (what we call their dip and strike); till at last it makes
one of those wonderful caverns about which you are so fond of
reading--such a cave as there actually is in the rocks of the
mountain of Whernside, fed by the swallow-holes around the
mountain-top; a cave hundreds of yards long, with halls, and
lakes, and waterfalls, and curtains and festoons of stalactite
which have dripped from the roof, and pillars of stalagmite which
have been built up on the floor below. These stalactites (those
tell me who have seen them) are among the most beautiful of all
Madam How's work; sometimes like branches of roses or of grapes;
sometimes like statues; sometimes like delicate curtains, and I
know not what other beautiful shapes. I have never seen them, I
am sorry to say, and therefore I cannot describe them. But they
are all made in the same way; just in the same way as those little
straight stalactites which you may have seen hanging, like
icicles, in vaulted cellars, or under the arches of a bridge. The
water melts more lime than it can carry, and drops some of it
again, making fresh limestone grain by grain as it drips from the
roof above; and fresh limestone again where it splashes on the
floor below: till if it dripped long enough, the stalactite
hanging from above would meet the stalagmite rising from below,
and join in one straight round white graceful shaft, which would
seem (but only seem) to support the roof of the cave. And out of
that cave--though not always out of the mouth of it--will run a
stream of water, which seems to you clear as crystal, though it is
actually, like the Itchen at Winchester, full of lime; so full of
lime, that it makes beds of fresh limestone, which are called
travertine--which you may see in Italy, and Greece, and Asia
Minor: or perhaps it petrifies, as you call it, the weeds in its
bed, like that dropping-well at Knaresborough, of which you have
often seen a picture. And the cause is this: the water is so
full of lime, that it is forced to throw away some of it upon
everything it touches, and so incrusts with stone--though it does
not turn to stone--almost anything you put in it. You have seen,
or ought to have seen, petrified moss and birds' nests and such
things from Knaresborough Well: and now you know a little, though
only a very little, of how the pretty toys are made.
Now if you can imagine for yourself (though I suppose a little boy
cannot) the amount of lime which one of these subterranean rivers
would carry away, gnawing underground centuries after centuries,
day and night, summer and winter, then you will not be surprised
at the enormous size of caverns which may be seen in different
parts of the world--but always, I believe, in limestone rock. You
would not be surprised (though you would admire them) at the
caverns of Adelsberg, in Carniola (in the south of Austria, near
the top of the Adriatic), which runs, I believe, for miles in
length; and in the lakes of which, in darkness from its birth
until its death, lives that strange beast, the Proteus a sort of
long newt which never comes to perfection--I suppose for want of
the genial sunlight which makes all things grow. But he is blind;
and more, he keeps all his life the same feathery gills which
newts have when they are babies, and which we have so often looked
at through the microscope, to see the blood-globules run round and
round inside. You would not wonder, either, at the Czirknitz
Lake, near the same place, which at certain times of the year
vanishes suddenly through chasms under water, sucking the fish
down with it; and after a certain time boils suddenly up again
from the depths, bringing back with it the fish, who have been
swimming comfortably all the time in a subterranean lake; and
bringing back, too (and, extraordinary as this story is, there is
good reason to believe it true), live wild ducks who went down
small and unfledged, and come back full-grown and fat, with water-
weeds and small fish in their stomachs, showing they have had
plenty to feed on underground. But--and this is the strangest
part of the story, if true--they come up unfledged just as they
went down, and are moreover blind from having been so long in
darkness. After a while, however, folks say their eyes get right,
their feathers grow, and they fly away like other birds.
Neither would you be surprised (if you recollect that Madam How is
a very old lady indeed, and that some of her work is very old
likewise) at that Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the largest cave in
the known world, through which you may walk nearly ten miles on
end, and in which a hundred miles of gallery have been explored
already, and yet no end found to the cave. In it (the guides will
tell you) there are "226 avenues, 47 domes, 8 cataracts, 23 pits,
and several rivers;" and if that fact is not very interesting to
you (as it certainly is not to me) I will tell you something which
ought to interest you: that this cave is so immensely old that
various kinds of little animals, who have settled themselves in
the outer parts of it, have had time to change their shape, and to
become quite blind; so that blind fathers and mothers have blind
children, generation after generation.
There are blind rats there, with large shining eyes which cannot
see--blind landcrabs, who have the foot-stalks of their eyes (you
may see them in any crab) still left; but the eyes which should be
on the top of them are gone. There are blind fish, too, in the
cave, and blind insects; for, if they have no use for their eyes
in the dark, why should Madam How take the trouble to finish them
off?
One more cave I must tell you of, to show you how old some caves
must be, and then I must stop; and that is the cave of Caripe, in
Venezuela, which is the most northerly part of South America.
There, in the face of a limestone cliff, crested with enormous
flowering trees, and festooned with those lovely creepers of which
you have seen a few small ones in hothouses, there opens an arch
as big as the west front of Winchester Cathedral, and runs
straight in like a cathedral nave for more than 1400 feet. Out of
it runs a stream; and along the banks of that stream, as far as
the sunlight strikes in, grow wild bananas, and palms, and lords
and ladies (as you call them), which are not, like ours, one foot,
but many feet high. Beyond that the cave goes on, with
subterranean streams, cascades, and halls, no man yet knows how
far. A friend of mine last year went in farther, I believe, than
any one yet has gone; but, instead of taking Indian torches made
of bark and resin, or even torches made of Spanish wax, such as a
brave bishop of those parts used once when he went in farther than
any one before him, he took with him some of that beautiful
magnesium light which you have seen often here at home. And in
one place, when he lighted up the magnesium, he found himself in a
hall full 300 feet high--higher far, that is, than the dome of St.
Paul's--and a very solemn thought it was to him, he said, that he
had seen what no other human being ever had seen; and that no ray
of light had ever struck on that stupendous roof in all the ages
since the making of the world. But if he found out something
which he did not expect, he was disappointed in something which he
did expect. For the Indians warned him of a hole in the floor
which (they told him) was an unfathomable abyss. And lo and
behold, when he turned the magnesium light upon it, the said abyss
was just about eight feet deep. But it is no wonder that the poor
Indians with their little smoky torches should make such mistakes;
no wonder, too, that they should be afraid to enter far into those
gloomy vaults; that they should believe that the souls of their
ancestors live in that dark cave; and that they should say that
when they die they will go to the Guacharos, as they call the
birds that fly with doleful screams out of the cave to feed at
night, and in again at daylight, to roost and sleep.
Now, it is these very Guacharo birds which are to me the most
wonderful part of the story. The Indians kill and eat them for
their fat, although they believe they have to do with evil
spirits. But scientific men who have studied these birds will
tell you that they are more wonderful than if all the Indians'
fancies about them were true. They are great birds, more than
three feet across the wings, somewhat like owls, somewhat like
cuckoos, somewhat like goatsuckers; but, on the whole, unlike
anything in the world but themselves; and instead of feeding on
moths or mice, they feed upon hard dry fruits, which they pick off
the trees after the set of sun. And wise men will tell you, that
in making such a bird as that, and giving it that peculiar way of
life, and settling it in that cavern, and a few more caverns in
that part of the world, and therefore in making the caverns ready
for them to live in, Madam How must have taken ages and ages, more
than you can imagine or count.
But that is among the harder lessons which come in the latter part
of Madam How's book. Children need not learn them yet; and they
can never learn them, unless they master her alphabet, and her
short and easy lessons for beginners, some of which I am trying to
teach you now.
But I have just recollected that we are a couple of very stupid
fellows. We have been talking all this time about chalk and
limestone, and have forgotten to settle what they are, and how
they were made. We must think of that next time. It will not do
for us (at least if we mean to be scientific men) to use terms
without defining them; in plain English, to talk about--we don't
know what.
CHAPTER VIII--MADAM HOW'S TWO GRANDSONS
You want to know, then, what chalk is? I suppose you mean what
chalk is made of?
Yes. That is it.
That we can only help by calling in the help of a very great giant
whose name is Analysis.
A giant?
Yes. And before we call for him I will tell you a very curious
story about him and his younger brother, which is every word of it
true.
Once upon a time, certainly as long ago as the first man, or
perhaps the first rational being of any kind, was created, Madam
How had two grandsons. The elder is called Analysis, and the
younger Synthesis. As for who their father and mother were, there
have been so many disputes on that question that I think children
may leave it alone for the present. For my part, I believe that
they are both, like St. Patrick, "gentlemen, and come of decent
people;" and I have a great respect and affection for them both,
as long as each keeps in his own place and minds his own business.
Now you must understand that, as soon as these two baby giants
were born, Lady Why, who sets everything to do that work for which
it is exactly fitted, set both of them their work. Analysis was
to take to pieces everything he found, and find out how it was
made. Synthesis was to put the pieces together again, and make
something fresh out of them. In a word, Analysis was to teach men
Science; and Synthesis to teach them Art.
But because Analysis was the elder, Madam How commanded Synthesis
never to put the pieces together till Analysis had taken them
completely apart. And, my child, if Synthesis had obeyed that
rule of his good old grandmother's, the world would have been far
happier, wealthier, wiser, and better than it is now.
But Synthesis would not. He grew up a very noble boy. He could
carve, he could paint, he could build, he could make music, and
write poems: but he was full of conceit and haste. Whenever his
elder brother tried to do a little patient work in taking things
to pieces, Synthesis snatched the work out of his hands before it
was a quarter done, and began putting it together again to suit
his own fancy, and, of course, put it together wrong. Then he
went on to bully his elder brother, and locked him up in prison,
and starved him, till for many hundred years poor Analysis never
grew at all, but remained dwarfed, and stupid, and all but blind
for want of light; while Synthesis, and all the hasty conceited
people who followed him, grew stout and strong and tyrannous, and
overspread the whole world, and ruled it at their will. But the
fault of all the work of Synthesis was just this: that it would
not work. His watches would not keep time, his soldiers would not
fight, his ships would not sail, his houses would not keep the
rain out. So every time he failed in his work he had to go to
poor Analysis in his dungeon, and bully him into taking a thing or
two to pieces, and giving him a few sound facts out of them, just
to go on with till he came to grief again, boasting in the
meantime that he and not Analysis had found out the facts. And at
last he grew so conceited that he fancied he knew all that Madam
How could teach him, or Lady Why either, and that he understood
all things in heaven and earth; while it was not the real heaven
and earth that he was thinking of, but a sham heaven and a sham
earth, which he had built up out of his guesses and his own
fancies.
And the more Synthesis waxed in pride, and the more he trampled
upon his poor brother, the more reckless he grew, and the more
willing to deceive himself. If his real flowers would not grow,
he cut out paper flowers, and painted them and said that they
would do just as well as natural ones. If his dolls would not
work, he put strings and wires behind them to make them nod their
heads and open their eyes, and then persuaded other people, and
perhaps half-persuaded himself, that they were alive. If the hand
of his weather-glass went down, he nailed it up to insure a fine
day, and tortured, burnt, or murdered every one who said it did
not keep up of itself. And many other foolish and wicked things
he did, which little boys need not hear of yet.
But at last his punishment came, according to the laws of his
grandmother, Madam How, which are like the laws of the Medes and
Persians, and alter not, as you and all mankind will sooner or
later find; for he grew so rich and powerful that he grew careless
and lazy, and thought about nothing but eating and drinking, till
people began to despise him more and more. And one day he left
the dungeon of Analysis so ill guarded, that Analysis got out and
ran away. Great was the hue and cry after him; and terribly would
he have been punished had he been caught. But, lo and behold,
folks had grown so disgusted with Synthesis that they began to
take the part of Analysis. Poor men hid him in their cottages,
and scholars in their studies. And when war arose about him,--and
terrible wars did arise,--good kings, wise statesmen, gallant
soldiers, spent their treasure and their lives in fighting for
him. All honest folk welcomed him, because he was honest; and all
wise folk used him, for, instead of being a conceited tyrant like
Synthesis, he showed himself the most faithful, diligent, humble
of servants, ready to do every man's work, and answer every man's
questions. And among them all he got so well fed that he grew
very shortly into the giant that he ought to have been all along;
and was, and will be for many a year to come, perfectly able to
take care of himself.
As for poor Synthesis, he really has fallen so low in these days,
that one cannot but pity him. He now goes about humbly after his
brother, feeding on any scraps that are thrown to him, and is
snubbed and rapped over the knuckles, and told one minute to hold
his tongue and mind his own business, and the next that he has no
business at all to mind, till he has got into such a poor way that
some folks fancy he will die, and are actually digging his grave
already, and composing his epitaph. But they are trying to wear
the bear's skin before the bear is killed; for Synthesis is not
dead, nor anything like it; and he will rise up again some day, to
make good friends with his brother Analysis, and by his help do
nobler and more beautiful work than he has ever yet done in the
world.
So now Analysis has got the upper hand; so much so that he is in
danger of being spoilt by too much prosperity, as his brother was
before him; in which case he too will have his fall; and a great
deal of good it will do him. And that is the end of my story, and
a true story it is.
Now you must remember, whenever you have to do with him, that
Analysis, like fire, is a very good servant, but a very bad
master. For, having got his freedom only of late years or so, he
is, like young men when they come suddenly to be their own
masters, apt to be conceited, and to fancy that he knows
everything, when really he knows nothing, and can never know
anything, but only knows about things, which is a very different
matter. Indeed, nowadays he pretends that he can teach his old
grandmother, Madam How, not only how to suck eggs, but to make
eggs into the bargain; while the good old lady just laughs at him
kindly, and lets him run on, because she knows he will grow wiser
in time, and learn humility by his mistakes and failures, as I
hope you will from yours.
However, Analysis is a very clever young giant, and can do
wonderful work as long as he meddles only with dead things, like
this bit of lime. He can take it to pieces, and tell you of what
things it is made, or seems to be made; and take them to pieces
again, and tell you what each of them is made of; and so on, till
he gets conceited, and fancies that he can find out some one Thing
of all things (which he calls matter), of which all other things
are made; and some Way of all ways (which he calls force), by
which all things are made: but when he boasts in that way, old
Madam How smiles, and says, "My child, before you can say that,
you must remember a hundred things which you are forgetting, and
learn a hundred thousand things which you do not know;" and then
she just puts her hand over his eyes, and Master Analysis begins
groping in the dark, and talking the saddest nonsense. So beware
of him, and keep him in his own place, and to his own work, or he
will flatter you, and get the mastery of you, and persuade you
that he can teach you a thousand things of which he knows no more
than he does why a duck's egg never hatches into a chicken. And
remember, if Master Analysis ever grows saucy and conceited with
you, just ask him that last riddle, and you will shut him up at
once.
And why?
Because Analysis can only explain to you a little about dead
things, like stones--inorganic things as they are called. Living
things--organisms, as they are called--he cannot explain to you at
all. When he meddles with them, he always ends like the man who
killed his goose to get the golden eggs. He has to kill his
goose, or his flower, or his insect, before he can analyse it; and
then it is not a goose, but only the corpse of a goose; not a
flower, but only the dead stuff of the flower.
And therefore he will never do anything but fail, when he tries to
find out the life in things. How can he, when he has to take the
life out of them first? He could not even find out how a plum-
pudding is made by merely analysing it. He might part the sugar,
and the flour, and the suet; he might even (for he is very clever,
and very patient too, the more honour to him) take every atom of
sugar out of the flour with which it had got mixed, and every atom
of brown colour which had got out of the plums and currants into
the body of the pudding, and then, for aught I know, put the
colouring matter back again into the plums and currants; and then,
for aught I know, turn the boiled pudding into a raw one again,--
for he is a great conjurer, as Madam How's grandson is bound to
be: but yet he would never find out how the pudding was made,
unless some one told him the great secret which the sailors in the
old story forgot--that the cook boiled it in a cloth.
This is Analysis's weak point--don't let it be yours--that in all
his calculations he is apt to forget the cloth, and indeed the
cook likewise. No doubt he can analyse the matter of things: but
he will keep forgetting that he cannot analyse their form.
Do I mean their shape?
No, my child; no. I mean something which makes the shape of
things, and the matter of them likewise, but which folks have lost
sight of nowadays, and do not seem likely to get sight of again
for a few hundred years. So I suppose that you need not trouble
your head about it, but may just follow the fashions as long as
they last.
About this piece of lime, however, Analysis can tell us a great
deal. And we may trust what he says, and believe that he
understands what he says.
Why?
Think now. If you took your watch to pieces, you would probably
spoil it for ever; you would have perhaps broken, and certainly
mislaid, some of the bits; and not even a watchmaker could put it
together again. You would have analysed the watch wrongly. But
if a watchmaker took it to pieces then any other watchmaker could
put it together again to go as well as ever, because they both
understand the works, how they fit into each other, and what the
use and the power of each is. Its being put together again
rightly would be a proof that it had been taken to pieces rightly.
And so with Master Analysis. If he can take a thing to pieces so
that his brother Synthesis can put it together again, you may be
sure that he has done his work rightly.
Now he can take a bit of chalk to pieces, so that it shall become
several different things, none of which is chalk, or like chalk at
all. And then his brother Synthesis can put them together again,
so that they shall become chalk, as they were before. He can do
that very nearly, but not quite. There is, in every average piece
of chalk, something which he cannot make into chalk again when he
has once unmade it.
What that is I will show you presently; and a wonderful tale hangs
thereby. But first we will let Analysis tell us what chalk is
made of, as far as he knows.
He will say--Chalk is carbonate of lime.
But what is carbonate of lime made of?
Lime and carbonic acid.
And what is lime?
The oxide of a certain metal, called calcium.
What do you mean?
That quicklime is a certain metal mixed with oxygen gas; and
slacked lime is the same, mixed with water.
So lime is a metal. What is a metal? Nobody knows.
And what is oxygen gas? Nobody knows.
Well, Analysis, stops short very soon. He does not seem to know
much about the matter.
Nay, nay, you are wrong there. It is just "about the matter" that
he does know, and knows a great deal, and very accurately; what he
does not know is the matter itself. He will tell you wonderful
things about oxygen gas--how the air is full of it, the water full
of it, every living thing full of it; how it changes hard bright
steel into soft, foul rust; how a candle cannot burn without it,
or you live without it. But what it is he knows not.
Will he ever know?
That is Lady Why's concern, and not ours. Meanwhile he has a
right to find out if he can. But what do you want to ask him
next?
What? Oh! What carbonic acid is. He can tell you that. Carbon
and oxygen gas.
But what is carbon?
Nobody knows.
Why, here is this stupid Analysis at fault again.
Nay, nay, again. Be patient with him. If he cannot tell you what
carbon is, he can tell you what is carbon, which is well worth
knowing. He will tell you, for instance, that every time you
breathe or speak, what comes out of your mouth is carbonic acid;
and that, if your breath comes on a bit of slacked lime, it will
begin to turn it back into the chalk from which it was made; and
that, if your breath comes on the leaves of a growing plant, that
leaf will take the carbon out of it, and turn it into wood. And
surely that is worth knowing,--that you may be helping to make
chalk, or to make wood, every time you breathe.
Well; that is very curious.
But now, ask him, What is carbon? And he will tell you, that many
things are carbon. A diamond is carbon; and so is blacklead; and
so is charcoal and coke, and coal in part, and wood in part.
What? Does Analysis say that a diamond and charcoal are the same
thing?
Yes.
Then his way of taking things to pieces must be a very clumsy one,
if he can find out no difference between diamond and charcoal.
Well, perhaps it is: but you must remember that, though he is
very old--as old as the first man who ever lived--he has only been
at school for the last three hundred years or so. And remember,
too, that he is not like you, who have some one else to teach you.
He has had to teach himself, and find out for himself, and make
his own tools, and work in the dark besides. And I think it is
very much to his credit that he ever found out that diamond and
charcoal were the same things. You would never have found it out
for yourself, you will agree.
No: but how did he do it?
He taught a very famous chemist, Lavoisier, about ninety years
ago, how to burn a diamond in oxygen--and a very difficult trick
that is; and Lavoisier found that the diamond when burnt turned
almost entirely into carbonic acid and water, as blacklead and
charcoal do; and more, that each of them turned into the same
quantity of carbonic acid, And so he knew, as surely as man can
know anything, that all these things, however different to our
eyes and fingers, are really made of the same thing,--pure carbon.
But what makes them look and feel so different?
That Analysis does not know yet. Perhaps he will find out some
day; for he is very patient, and very diligent, as you ought to
be. Meanwhile, be content with him: remember that though he
cannot see through a milestone yet, he can see farther into one
than his neighbours. Indeed his neighbours cannot see into a
milestone at all, but only see the outside of it, and know things
only by rote, like parrots, without understanding what they mean
and how they are made.
So now remember that chalk is carbonate of lime, and that it is
made up of three things, calcium, oxygen, and carbon; and that
therefore its mark is CaCO(3), in Analysis's language, which I
hope you will be able to read some day.
But how is it that Analysis and Synthesis cannot take all this
chalk to pieces, and put it together again?
Look here; what is that in the chalk?
Oh! a shepherd's crown, such as we often find in the gravel, only
fresh and white.
Well; you know what that was once. I have often told you: --a
live sea-egg, covered with prickles, which crawls at the bottom of
the sea.
Well, I am sure that Master Synthesis could not put that together
again: and equally sure that Master Analysis might spend ages in
taking it to pieces, before he found out how it was made. And--we
are lucky to-day, for this lower chalk to the south has very few
fossils in it--here is something else which is not mere carbonate
of lime. Look at it.
A little cockle, something like a wrinkled hazel-nut.
No; that is no cockle. Madam How invented that ages and ages
before she thought of cockles, and the animal which lived inside
that shell was as different from a cockle-animal as a sparrow is
from a dog. That is a Terebratula, a gentleman of a very ancient
and worn-out family. He and his kin swarmed in the old seas, even
as far back as the time when the rocks of the Welsh mountains were
soft mud; as you will know when you read that great book of Sir
Roderick Murchison's, Siluria. But as the ages rolled on, they
got fewer and fewer, these Terebratulae; and now there are hardly
any of them left; only six or seven sorts are left about these
islands, which cling to stones in deep water; and the first time I
dredged two of them out of Loch Fyne, I looked at them with awe,
as on relics from another world, which had lasted on through
unnumbered ages and changes, such as one's fancy could not grasp.
But you will agree that, if Master Analysis took that shell to
pieces, Master Synthesis would not be likely to put it together
again; much less to put it together in the right way, in which
Madam How made it.
And what was that?
By making a living animal, which went on growing, that is, making
itself; and making, as it grew, its shell to live in. Synthesis
has not found out yet the first step towards doing that; and, as I
believe, he never will.
But there would be no harm in his trying?
Of course not. Let everybody try to do everything they fancy.
Even if they fail, they will have learnt at least that they cannot
do it.
But now--and this is a secret which you would never find out for
yourself, at least without the help of a microscope--the greater
part of this lump of chalk is made up of things which neither
Analysis can perfectly take to pieces, nor Synthesis put together
again. It is made of dead organisms, that is, things which have
been made by living creatures. If you washed and brushed that
chalk into powder, you would find it full of little things like
the Dentalina in this drawing, and many other curious forms. I
will show you some under the microscope one day.
They are the shells of animals called Foraminifera, because the
shells of some of them are full of holes, through which they put
out tiny arms. So small they are and so many, that there may be,
it is said, forty thousand of them in a bit of chalk an inch every
way. In numbers past counting, some whole, some broken, some
ground to the finest powder, they make up vast masses of England,
which are now chalk downs; and in some foreign countries they make
up whole mountains. Part of the building stone of the Great
Pyramid in Egypt is composed, I am told, entirely of them.
And how did they get into the chalk?
Ah! How indeed? Let us think. The chalk must have been laid
down at the bottom of a sea, because there are sea-shells in it.
Besides, we find little atomies exactly like these alive now in
many seas; and therefore it is fair to suppose these lived in the
sea also.
Besides, they were not washed into the chalk by any sudden flood.
The water in which they settled must have been quite still, or
these little delicate creatures would have been ground into
powder--or rather into paste. Therefore learned men soon made up
their minds that these things were laid down at the bottom of a
deep sea, so deep that neither wind, nor tide, nor currents could
stir the everlasting calm.
Ah! it is worth thinking over, for it shows how shrewd a giant
Analysis is, and how fast he works in these days, now that he has
got free and well fed;--worth thinking over, I say, how our
notions about these little atomies have changed during the last
forty years.
We used to find them sometimes washed up among the sea-sand on the
wild Atlantic coast; and we were taught, in the days when old Dr.
Turton was writing his book on British shells at Bideford, to call
them Nautili, because their shells were like Nautilus shells. Men
did not know then that the animal which lives in them is no more
like a Nautilus animal than it is like a cow.
For a Nautilus, you must know, is made like a cuttlefish, with
eyes, and strong jaws for biting, and arms round them; and has a
heart, and gills, and a stomach; and is altogether a very well-
made beast, and, I suspect, a terrible tyrant to little fish and
sea-slugs, just as the cuttlefish is. But the creatures which
live in these little shells are about the least finished of Madam
How's works. They have neither mouth nor stomach, eyes nor limbs.
They are mere live bags full of jelly, which can take almost any
shape they like, and thrust out arms--or what serve for arms--
through the holes in their shells, and then contract them into
themselves again, as this Globigerina does. What they feed on,
how they grow, how they make their exquisitely-formed shells,
whether, indeed, they are, strictly speaking, animals or
vegetables, Analysis has not yet found out. But when you come to
read about them, you will find that they, in their own way, are
just as wonderful and mysterious as a butterfly or a rose; and
just as necessary, likewise, to Madam How's work; for out of them,
as I told you, she makes whole sheets of down, whole ranges of
hills.
No one knew anything, I believe, about them, save that two or
three kinds of them were found in chalk, till a famous Frenchman,
called D'Orbigny, just thirty years ago, told the world how he had
found many beautiful fresh kinds; and, more strange still, that
some of these kinds were still alive at the bottom of the
Adriatic, and of the harbour of Alexandria, in Egypt.
Then in 1841 a gentleman named Edward Forbes,--now with God--whose
name will be for ever dear to all who love science, and honour
genius and virtue,-- found in the AEgean Sea "a bed of chalk," he
said, "full of Foraminifera, and shells of Pteropods," forming at
the bottom of the sea.
And what are Pteropods?
What you might call sea-moths (though they are not really moths),
which swim about on the surface of the water, while the right-
whales suck them in tens of thousands into the great whalebone net
which fringes their jaws. Here are drawings of them. 1. Limacina
(on which the whales feed); and 2. Hyalea, a lovely little thing
in a glass shell, which lives in the Mediterranean.
But since then strange discoveries have been made, especially by
the naval officers who surveyed the bottom of the great Atlantic
Ocean before laying down the electric cable between Ireland and
America. And this is what they found:
That at the bottom of the Atlantic were vast plains of soft mud,
in some places 2500 fathoms (15,000 feet) deep; that is, as deep
as the Alps are high. And more: they found out, to their
surprise, that the oozy mud of the Atlantic floor was made up
almost entirely of just the same atomies as make up our chalk,
especially globigerinas; that, in fact, a vast bed of chalk was
now forming at the bottom of the Atlantic, with living shells and
sea-animals of the most brilliant colours crawling about on it in
black darkness, and beds of sponges growing out of it, just as the
sponges grew at the bottom of the old chalk ocean, and were all,
generation after generation, turned into flints.
And, for reasons which you will hardly understand, men are
beginning now to believe that the chalk has never ceased to be
made, somewhere or other, for many thousand years, ever since the
Winchester Downs were at the bottom of the sea: and that "the
Globigerina-mud is not merely A chalk formation, but a
continuation of THE chalk formation, so THAT WE MAY BE SAID TO BE
STILL LIVING IN THE AGE OF CHALK." {1} Ah, my little man, what
would I not give to see you, before I die, add one such thought as
that to the sum of human knowledge!
So there the little creatures have been lying, making chalk out of
the lime in the sea-water, layer over layer, the young over the
old, the dead over the living, year after year, age after age--for
how long?
Who can tell? How deep the layer of new chalk at the bottom of
the Atlantic is, we can never know. But the layer of live atomies
on it is not an inch thick, probably not a tenth of an inch. And
if it grew a tenth of an inch a year, or even a whole inch, how
many years must it have taken to make the chalk of our downs,
which is in some parts 1300 feet thick? How many inches are there
in 1300 feet? Do that sum, and judge for yourself.
One difference will be found between the chalk now forming at the
bottom of the ocean, if it ever become dry land, and the chalk on
which you tread on the downs. The new chalk will be full of the
teeth and bones of whales--warm-blooded creatures, who suckle
their young like cows, instead of laying eggs, like birds and
fish. For there were no whales in the old chalk ocean; but our
modern oceans are full of cachalots, porpoises, dolphins, swimming
in shoals round any ship; and their bones and teeth, and still
more their ear-bones, will drop to the bottom as they die, and be
found, ages hence, in the mud which the live atomies make, along
with wrecks of mighty ships
"Great anchors, heaps of pearl,"
and all that man has lost in the deep seas. And sadder fossils
yet, my child, will be scattered on those white plains:-
"To them the love of woman hath gone down,
Dark roll their waves o'er manhood's noble head.
O'er youth's bright locks, and beauty's flowing crown;
Yet shall they hear a voice, 'Restore the dead.'
Earth shall reclaim her precious things from thee.
Give back the dead, thou Sea!"
CHAPTER IX--THE CORAL-REEF
Now you want to know what I meant when I talked of a bit of lime
going out to sea, and forming part of a coral island, and then of
a limestone rock, and then of a marble statue. Very good. Then
look at this stone.
What a curious stone! Did it come from any place near here?
No. It came from near Dudley, in Staffordshire, where the soils
are worlds on worlds older than they are here, though they were
made in the same way as these and all other soils. But you are
not listening to me.
Why, the stone is full of shells, and bits of coral; and what are
these wonderful things coiled and tangled together, like the
snakes in Medusa's hair in the picture? Are they snakes?
If they are, then they must be snakes who have all one head; for
see, they are joined together at their larger ends; and snakes
which are branched, too, which no snake ever was.
Yes. I suppose they are not snakes. And they grow out of a
flower, too; and it has a stalk, jointed, too, as plants sometimes
are; and as fishes' backbones are too. Is it a petrified plant or
flower?
No; though I do not deny that it looks like one. The creature
most akin to it which you ever saw is a star-fish.
What! one of the red star-fishes which one finds on the beach?
Its arms are not branched.
No. But there are star-fishes with branched arms still in the
sea. You know that pretty book (and learned book, too), Forbes's
British Star-fishes? You like to look it through for the sake of
the vignettes,--the mermaid and her child playing in the sea.
Oh yes, and the kind bogie who is piping while the sandstars
dance; and the other who is trying to pull out the star-fish which
the oyster has caught.
Yes. But do you recollect the drawing of the Medusa's head, with
its curling arms, branched again and again without end? Here it
is. No, you shall not look at the vignettes now. We must mind
business. Now look at this one; the Feather-star, with arms
almost like fern-fronds. And in foreign seas there are many other
branched star-fish beside.
But they have no stalks?
Do not be too sure of that. This very feather-star, soon after it
is born, grows a tiny stalk, by which it holds on to corallines
and sea-weeds; and it is not till afterwards that it breaks loose
from that stalk, and swims away freely into the wide water. And
in foreign seas there are several star-fish still who grow on
stalks all their lives, as this fossil one did.
How strange that a live animal should grow on a stalk, like a
flower!
Not quite like a flower. A flower has roots, by which it feeds in
the soil. These things grow more like sea-weeds, which have no
roots, but only hold on to the rock by the foot of the stalk, as a
ship holds on by her anchor. But as for its being strange that
live animals should grow on stalks, if it be strange it is common
enough, like many far stranger things. For under the water are
millions on millions of creatures, spreading for miles on miles,
building up at last great reefs of rocks, and whole islands, which
all grow rooted first to the rock, like sea-weeds; and what is
more, they grow, most of them, from one common root, branching
again and again, and every branchlet bearing hundreds of living
creatures, so that the whole creation is at once one creature and
many creatures. Do you not understand me?
No.
Then fancy to yourself a bush like that hawthorn bush, with
numberless blossoms, and every blossom on that bush a separate
living thing, with its own mouth, and arms, and stomach, budding
and growing fresh live branches and fresh live flowers, as fast as
the old ones die: and then you will see better what I mean.
How wonderful!
Yes; but not more wonderful than your finger, for it, too, is made
up of numberless living things.
My finger made of living things?
What else can it be? When you cut your finger, does not the place
heal?
Of course.
And what is healing but growing again? And how could the atoms of
your fingers grow, and make fresh skin, if they were not each of
them alive? There, I will not puzzle you with too much at once;
you will know more about all that some day. Only remember now,
that there is nothing wonderful in the world outside you but has
its counterpart of something just as wonderful, and perhaps more
wonderful, inside you. Man is the microcosm, the little world,
said the philosophers of old; and philosophers nowadays are
beginning to see that their old guess is actual fact and true.
But what are these curious sea-creatures called, which are
animals, yet grow like plants?
They have more names than I can tell you, or you remember. Those
which helped to make this bit of stone are called coral-insects:
but they are not really insects, and are no more like insects than
you are. Coral-polypes is the best name for them, because they
have arms round their mouths, something like a cuttle-fish, which
the ancients called Polypus. But the animal which you have seen
likest to most of them is a sea-anemone.
Look now at this piece of fresh coral--for coral it is, though not
like the coral which your sister wears in her necklace. You see
it is full of pipes; in each of those pipes has lived what we will
call, for the time being, a tiny sea-anemone, joined on to his
brothers by some sort of flesh and skin; and all of them together
have built up, out of the lime in the sea-water, this common
house, or rather town, of lime.
But is it not strange and wonderful?
Of course it is: but so is everything when you begin to look into
it; and if I were to go on, and tell you what sort of young ones
these coral-polypes have, and what becomes of them, you would hear
such wonders, that you would be ready to suspect that I was
inventing nonsense, or talking in my dreams. But all that belongs
to Madam How's deepest book of all, which is called the BOOK OF
KIND: the book which children cannot understand, and in which
only the very wisest men are able to spell out a few words, not
knowing, and of course not daring to guess, what wonder may come
next.
Now we will go back to our stone, and talk about how it was made,
and how the stalked star-fish, which you mistook for a flower,
ever got into the stone.
Then do you think me silly for fancying that a fossil star-fish
was a flower?
I should be silly if I did. There is no silliness in not knowing
what you cannot know. You can only guess about new things, which
you have never seen before, by comparing them with old things,
which you have seen before; and you had seen flowers, and snakes,
and fishes' backbones, and made a very fair guess from them.
After all, some of these stalked star-fish are so like flowers,
lilies especially, that they are called Encrinites; and the whole
family is called Crinoids, or lily-like creatures, from the Greek
work KRINON, a lily; and as for corals and corallines, learned
men, in spite of all their care and shrewdness, made mistake after
mistake about them, which they had to correct again and again,
till now, I trust, they have got at something very like the truth.
No, I shall only call you silly if you do what some little boys
are apt to do--call other boys, and, still worse, servants or poor
people, silly for not knowing what they cannot know.
But are not poor people often very silly about animals and plants?
The boys at the village school say that slowworms are poisonous;
is not that silly?
Not at all. They know that adders bite, and so they think that
slowworms bite too. They are wrong; and they must be told that
they are wrong, and scolded if they kill a slowworm. But silly
they are not.
But is it not silly to fancy that swallows sleep all the winter at
the bottom of the pond?
I do not think so. The boys cannot know where the swallows go;
and if you told them--what is true--that the swallows find their
way every autumn through France, through Spain, over the Straits
of Gibraltar, into Morocco, and some, I believe, over the great
desert of Zahara into Negroland: and if you told them--what is
true also--that the young swallows actually find their way into
Africa without having been along the road before; because the old
swallows go south a week or two first, and leave the young ones to
guess out the way for themselves: if you told them that, then
they would have a right to say, "Do you expect us to believe that?
That is much more wonderful than that the swallows should sleep in
the pond."
But is it?
Yes; to them. They know that bats and dormice and other things
sleep all the winter; so why should not swallows sleep? They see
the swallows about the water, and often dipping almost into it.
They know that fishes live under water, and that many insects--
like May-flies and caddis-flies and water-beetles--live sometimes
in the water, sometimes in the open air; and they cannot know--you
do not know--what it is which prevents a bird's living under
water. So their guess is really a very fair one; no more silly
than that of the savages, who when they first saw the white men's
ships, with their huge sails, fancied they were enormous sea-
birds; and when they heard the cannons fire, said that the ships
spoke in thunder and lightning. Their guess was wrong, but not
silly; for it was the best guess they could make.
But I do know of one old woman who was silly. She was a boy's
nurse, and she gave the boy a thing which she said was one of the
snakes which St. Hilda turned into stone; and told him that they
found plenty of them at Whitby, where she was born, all coiled up;
but what was very odd, their heads had always been broken of. And
when he took it, to his father, he told him it was only a fossil
shell--an Ammonite. And he went back and laughed at his nurse,
and teased her till she was quite angry.
Then he was very lucky that she did not box his ears, for that was
what he deserved. I dare say that, though his nurse had never
heard of Ammonites, she was a wise old dame enough, and knew a
hundred things which he did not know, and which were far more
important than Ammonites, even to him.
How?
Because if she had not known how to nurse him well, he would
perhaps have never grown up alive and strong. And if she had not
known how to make him obey and speak the truth, he might have
grown up a naughty boy.
But was she not silly?
No. She only believed what the Whitby folk, I understand, have
some of them believed for many hundred years. And no one can be
blamed for thinking as his forefathers did, unless he has cause to
know better.
Surely she might have known better?
How? What reason could she have to believe the Ammonite was a
shell? It is not the least like cockles, or whelks, or any shell
she ever saw.
What reason either could she have to guess that Whitby cliff had
once been coral-mud, at the bottom of the sea? No more reason, my
dear child, than you would have to guess that this stone had been
coral-mud likewise, if I did not teach you so,--or rather, try to
make you teach yourself so.
No. I say it again. If you wish to learn, I will only teach you
on condition that you do not laugh at, or despise, those good and
honest and able people who do not know or care about these things,
because they have other things to think of: like old John out
there ploughing. He would not believe you--he would hardly
believe me--if we told him that this stone had been once a swarm
of living things, of exquisite shapes and glorious colours. And
yet he can plough and sow, and reap and mow, and fell and strip,
and hedge and ditch, and give his neighbours sound advice, and
take the measure of a man's worth from ten minutes' talk, and say
his prayers, and keep his temper, and pay his debts,--which last
three things are more than a good many folks can do who fancy
themselves a whole world wiser than John in the smock-frock.
Oh, but I want to hear about the exquisite shapes and glorious
colours.
Of course you do, little man. A few fine epithets take your fancy
far more than a little common sense and common humility; but in
that you are no worse than some of your elders. So now for the
exquisite shapes and glorious colours. I have never seen them;
though I trust to see them ere I die. So what they are like I can
only tell from what I have learnt from Mr. Darwin, and Mr.
Wallace, and Mr. Jukes, and Mr. Gosse, and last, but not least,
from one whose soul was as beautiful as his face, Lucas Barrett,--
too soon lost to science,--who was drowned in exploring such a
coral-reef as this stone was once.
Then there are such things alive now?
Yes, and no. The descendants of most of them live on, altered by
time, which alters all things; and from the beauty of the children
we can guess at the beauty of their ancestors; just as from the
coral-reefs which exist now we can guess how the coral-reefs of
old were made. And that this stone was once part of a coral-reef
the corals in it prove at first sight.
And what is a coral-reef like?
You have seen the room in the British Museum full of corals,
madrepores, brain-stones, corallines, and sea-ferns?
Oh yes.
Then fancy all those alive. Not as they are now, white stone:
but covered in jelly; and out of every pore a little polype, like
a flower, peeping out. Fancy them of every gaudy colour you
choose. No bed of flowers, they say, can be more brilliant than
the corals, as you look down on them through the clear sea.
Fancy, again, growing among them and crawling over them, strange
sea-anemones, shells, star-fish, sea-slugs, and sea-cucumbers with
feathery gills, crabs, and shrimps, and hundreds of other animals,
all as strange in shape, and as brilliant in colour. You may let
your fancy run wild. Nothing so odd, nothing so gay, even entered
your dreams, or a poet's, as you may find alive at the bottom of
the sea, in the live flower-gardens of the sea-fairies.
There will be shoals of fish, too, playing in and out, as strange
and gaudy as the rest,--parrot-fish who browse on the live coral
with their beak-like teeth, as cattle browse on grass; and at the
bottom, it may be, larger and uglier fish, who eat the crabs and
shell-fish, shells and all, grinding them up as a dog grinds a
bone, and so turning shells and corals into fine soft mud, such as
this stone is partly made of.
But what happens to all the delicate little corals if a storm
comes on?
What, indeed? Madam How has made them so well and wisely, that,
like brave and good men, the more trouble they suffer the stronger
they are. Day and night, week after week, the trade-wind blows
upon them, hurling the waves against them in furious surf,
knocking off great lumps of coral, grinding them to powder,
throwing them over the reef into the shallow water inside. But
the heavier the surf beats upon them, the stronger the polypes
outside grow, repairing their broken houses, and building up fresh
coral on the dead coral below, because it is in the fresh sea-
water that beats upon the surf that they find most lime with which
to build. And as they build they form a barrier against the surf,
inside of which, in water still as glass, the weaker and more
delicate things can grow in safety, just as these very Encrinites
may have grown, rooted in the lime-mud, and waving their slender
arms at the bottom of the clear lagoon. Such mighty builders are
these little coral polypes, that all the works of men are small
compared with theirs. One single reef, for instance, which is
entirely made by them, stretches along the north-east coast of
Australia for nearly a thousand miles. Of this you must read some
day in Mr. Jukes's Voyage of H.M.S. "Fly." Every island
throughout a great part of the Pacific is fringed round each with
its coral-reef, and there are hundreds of islands of strange
shapes, and of Atolls, as they are called, or ring-islands, which
are composed entirely of coral, and of nothing else.
A ring-island? How can an island be made in the shape of a ring?
Ah! it was a long time before men found out that riddle. Mr.
Darwin was the first to guess the answer, as he has guessed many
an answer beside. These islands are each a ring, or nearly a ring
of coral, with smooth shallow water inside: but their outsides
run down, like a mountain wall, sheer into seas hundreds of
fathoms deep. People used to believe, and reasonably enough, that
the coral polypes began to build up the islands from the very
bottom of the deep sea.
But that would not account for the top of them being of the shape
of a ring; and in time it was found out that the corals would not
build except in shallow water, twenty or thirty fathoms deep at
most, and men were at their wits' ends to find out the riddle.
Then said Mr. Darwin, "Suppose one of those beautiful South Sea
Islands, like Tahiti, the Queen of Isles, with its ring of coral-
reef all round its shore, began sinking slowly under the sea. The
land, as it sunk, would be gone for good and all: but the coral-
reef round it would not, because the coral polypes would build up
and up continually upon the skeletons of their dead parents, to
get to the surface of the water, and would keep close to the top
outside, however much the land sunk inside; and when the island
had sunk completely beneath the sea, what would be left? What
must be left but a ring of coral reef, around the spot where the
last mountain peak of the island sank beneath the sea?" And so
Mr. Darwin explained the shapes of hundreds of coral islands in
the Pacific; and proved, too, some strange things besides (he
proved, and other men, like Mr. Wallace, whose excellent book on
the East Indian islands you must read some day, have proved in
other ways) that there was once a great continent, joined perhaps
to Australia and to New Guinea, in the Pacific Ocean, where is now
nothing but deep sea, and coral-reefs which mark the mountain
ranges of that sunken world.
But how does the coral ever rise above the surface of the water
and turn into hard stone?
Of course the coral polypes cannot build above the high-tide mark;
but the surf which beats upon them piles up their broken fragments
just as a sea-beach is piled up, and hammers them together with
that water hammer which is heavier and stronger than any you have
ever seen in a smith's forge. And then, as is the fashion of
lime, the whole mass sets and becomes hard, as you may see mortar
set; and so you have a low island a few feet above the sea. Then
sea-birds come to it, and rest and build; and seeds are floated
thither from far lands; and among them almost always the cocoa-
nut, which loves to grow by the sea-shore, and groves of cocoa
palms grow up upon the lonely isle. Then, perhaps, trees and
bushes are drifted thither before the trade-wind; and entangled in
their roots are seeds of other plants, and eggs or cocoons of
insects; and so a few flowers and a few butterflies and beetles
set up for themselves upon the new land. And then a bird or two,
caught in a storm and blown away to sea finds shelter in the
cocoa-grove; and so a little new world is set up, in which (you
must remember always) there are no four-footed beasts, nor snakes,
nor lizards, nor frogs, nor any animals that cannot cross the sea.
And on some of those islands they may live (indeed there is reason
to believe they have lived), so long, that some of them have
changed their forms, according to the laws of Madam How, who
sooner or later fits each thing exactly for the place in which it
is meant to live, till upon some of them you may find such strange
and unique creatures as the famous cocoa-nut crab, which learned
men call Birgus latro. A great crab he is, who walks upon the
tips of his toes a foot high above the ground. And because he has
often nothing to eat but cocoa-nuts, or at least they are the best
things he can find, cocoa-nuts he has learned to eat, and after a
fashion which it would puzzle you to imitate. Some say that he
climbs up the stems of the cocoa-nut trees, and pulls the fruit
down for himself; but that, it seems, he does not usually do.
What he does is this: when he finds a fallen cocoa-nut, he begins
tearing away the thick husk and fibre with his strong claws; and
he knows perfectly well which end to tear it from, namely, from
the end where the three eye-holes are, which you call the monkey's
face, out of one of which you know, the young cocoa-nut tree would
burst forth. And when he has got to the eye-holes, he hammers
through one of them with the point of his heavy claw. So far, so
good: but how is he to get the meat out? He cannot put his claw
in. He has no proboscis like a butterfly to insert and suck with.
He is as far off from his dinner as the fox was when the stork
offered him a feast in a long-necked jar. What then do you think
he does? He turns himself round, puts in a pair of his hind
pincers, which are very slender, and with them scoops the meat out
of the cocoa-nut, and so puts his dinner into his mouth with his
hind feet. And even the cocoa-nut husk he does not waste; for he
lives in deep burrows which he makes like a rabbit; and being a
luxurious crab, and liking to sleep soft in spite of his hard
shell, he lines them with a quantity of cocoa-nut fibre, picked
out clean and fine, just as if he was going to make cocoa-nut
matting of it. And being also a clean crab, as I hope you are a
clean little boy, he goes down to the sea every night to have his
bath and moisten his gills, and so lives happy all his days, and
gets so fat in his old age that he carries about his body nearly a
quart of pure oil.
That is the history of the cocoa-nut crab. And if any one tells
me that that crab acts only on what is called "instinct"; and does
not think and reason, just as you and I think and reason, though
of course not in words as you and I do: then I shall be inclined
to say that that person does not think nor reason either.
Then were there many coral-reefs in Britain in old times?
Yes, many and many, again and again; some whole ages older than
this, a bit of which you see, and some again whole ages newer.
But look: then judge for yourself. Look at this geological map.
Wherever you see a bit of blue, which is the mark for limestone,
you may say, "There is a bit of old coral-reef rising up to the
surface." But because I will not puzzle your little head with too
many things at once, you shall look at one set of coral-reefs
which are far newer than this bit of Dudley limestone, and which
are the largest, I suppose, that ever were in this country; or, at
least, there is more of them left than of any others.
Look first at Ireland. You see that almost all the middle of
Ireland is coloured blue. It is one great sheet of old coral-reef
and coral-mud, which is now called the carboniferous limestone.
You see red and purple patches rising out of it, like islands--and
islands I suppose they were, of hard and ancient rock, standing up
in the middle of the coral sea.
But look again, and you will see that along the west coast of
Ireland, except in a very few places, like Galway Bay, the blue
limestone does not come down to the sea; the shore is coloured
purple and brown, and those colours mark the ancient rocks and
high mountains of Mayo and Galway and Kerry, which stand as
barriers to keep the raging surf of the Atlantic from bursting
inland and beating away, as it surely would in course of time, the
low flat limestone plain of the middle of Ireland. But the same
coral-reefs once stretched out far to the westward into the
Atlantic Ocean; and you may see the proof upon that map. For in
the western bays, in Clew Bay with its hundred islands, and Galway
Bay with its Isles of Arran, and beautiful Kenmare, and beautiful
Bantry, you see little blue spots, which are low limestone
islands, standing in the sea, overhung by mountains far aloft.
You have often heard those islands in Kenmare Bay talked of, and
how some whom you know go to fish round them by night for turbot
and conger; and when you hear them spoken of again, you must
recollect that they are the last fragments of a great fringing
coral-reef, which will in a few thousand years follow the fate of
the rest, and be eaten up by the waves, while the mountains of
hard rock stand round them still unchanged.
Now look at England, and there you will see patches at least of a
great coral-reef which was forming at the same time as that Irish
one, and on which perhaps some of your schoolfellows have often
stood. You have heard of St. Vincent's Rocks at Bristol, and the
marble cliffs, 250 feet in height, covered in part with rich wood
and rare flowers, and the Avon running through the narrow gorge,
and the stately ships sailing far below your feet from Bristol to
the Severn sea. And you may see, for here they are, corals from
St. Vincent's Rocks, cut and polished, showing too that they also,
like the Dudley limestone, are made up of corals and of coral-mud.
Now, whenever you see St. Vincent's Rocks, as I suspect you very
soon will, recollect where you are, and use your fancy, to paint
for yourself a picture as strange as it is true. Fancy that those
rocks are what they once were, a coral-reef close to the surface
of a shallow sea. Fancy that there is no gorge of the Avon, no
wide Severn sea--for those were eaten out by water ages and ages
afterwards. But picture to yourself the coral sea reaching away
to the north, to the foot of the Welsh mountains; and then fancy
yourself, if you will, in a canoe, paddling up through the coral-
reefs, north and still north, up the valley down which the Severn
now flows, up through what is now Worcestershire, then up through
Staffordshire, then through Derbyshire, into Yorkshire, and so on
through Durham and Northumberland, till your find yourself stopped
by the Ettrick hills in Scotland; while all to the westward of
you, where is now the greater part of England, was open sea. You
may say, if you know anything of the geography of England,
"Impossible! That would be to paddle over the tops of high
mountains; over the top of the Peak in Derbyshire, over the top of
High Craven and Whernside and Pen-y-gent and Cross Fell, and to
paddle too over the Cheviot Hills, which part England and
Scotland." I know it, my child, I know it. But so it was once on
a time. The high limestone mountains which part Lancashire and
Yorkshire--the very chine and backbone of England--were once
coral-reefs at the bottom of the sea. They are all made up of the
carboniferous limestone, so called, as your little knowledge of
Latin ought to tell you, because it carries the coal; because the
coalfields usually lie upon it. It may be impossible in your
eyes: but remember always that nothing is impossible with God.
But you said that the coal was made from plants and trees, and did
plants and trees grow on this coral-reef?
That I cannot say. Trees may have grown on the dry parts of the
reef, as cocoa-nuts grow now in the Pacific. But the coal was not
laid down upon it till long afterwards, when it had gone through
many and strange changes. For all through the chine of England,
and in a part of Ireland too, there lies upon the top of the
limestone a hard gritty rock, in some places three thousand feet
thick, which is commonly called "the mill-stone grit." And above
that again the coal begins. Now to make that 3000 feet of hard
rock, what must have happened? The sea-bottom must have sunk,
slowly no doubt, carrying the coral-reefs down with it, 3000 feet
at least. And meanwhile sand and mud, made from the wearing away
of the old lands in the North must have settled down upon it. I
say from the North--for there are no fossils, as far as I know, or
sign of life, in these rocks of mill-stone grit; and therefore it
is reasonable to suppose that they were brought from a cold
current at the Pole, too cold to allow sea-beasts to live,--quite
cold enough, certainly, to kill coral insects, who could only
thrive in warm water coming from the South.
Then, to go on with my story, upon the top of these mill-stone
grits came sand and mud, and peat, and trees, and plants, washed
out to sea, as far as we can guess, from the mouths of vast rivers
flowing from the West, rivers as vast as the Amazon, the
Mississippi, or the Orinoco are now; and so in long ages, upon the
top of the limestone and upon the top of the mill-stone grit, were
laid down those beds of coal which you see burnt now in every
fire.
But how did the coral-reefs rise till they became cliffs at
Bristol and mountains in Yorkshire?
The earthquake steam, I suppose, raised them. One earthquake
indeed, or series of earthquakes, there was, running along between
Lancashire and Yorkshire, which made that vast crack and upheaval
in the rocks, the Craven Fault, running, I believe, for more than
a hundred miles, and lifting the rocks in some places several
hundred feet. That earthquake helped to make the high hills which
overhang Manchester and Preston, and all the manufacturing county
of Lancashire. That earthquake helped to make the perpendicular
cliff at Malham Cove, and many another beautiful bit of scenery.
And that and other earthquakes, by heating the rocks from the
fires below, may have helped to change them from soft coral into
hard crystalline marble as you see them now, just as volcanic heat
has hardened and purified the beautiful white marbles of
Pentelicus and Paros in Greece, and Carrara in Italy, from which
statues are carved unto this day. Or the same earthquake may have
heated and hardened the limestones simply by grinding and
squeezing them; or they may have been heated and hardened in the
course of long ages simply by the weight of the thousands of feet
of other rock which lay upon them. For pressure, you must
remember, produces heat. When you strike flint and steel
together, the pressure of the blow not only makes bits of steel
fly off, but makes them fly off in red-hot sparks. When you
hammer a piece of iron with a hammer, you will soon find it get
quite warm. When you squeeze the air together in your pop-gun,
you actually make the air inside warmer, till the pellet flies
out, and the air expands and cools again. Nay, I believe you
cannot hold up a stone on the palm of your hand without that stone
after a while warming your hand, because it presses against you in
trying to fall, and you press against it in trying to hold it up.
And recollect above all the great and beautiful example of that
law which you were lucky enough to see on the night of the 14th of
November 1867, how those falling stars, as I told you then, were
coming out of boundless space, colder than any ice on earth, and
yet, simply by pressing against the air above our heads, they had
their motion turned into heat, till they burned themselves up into
trains of fiery dust. So remember that wherever you have pressure
you have heat, and that the pressure of the upper rocks upon the
lower is quite enough, some think, to account for the older and
lower rocks being harder than the upper and newer ones.
But why should the lower rocks be older and the upper rocks newer?
You told me just now that the high mountains in Wales were ages
older than Windsor Forest, upon which we stand: but yet how much
lower we are here than if we were on a Welsh mountain.
Ah, my dear child, of course that puzzles you, and I am afraid it
must puzzle you still till we have another talk; or rather it
seems to me that the best way to explain that puzzle to you would
be for you and me to go a journey into the far west, and look into
the matter for ourselves; and from here to the far west we will
go, either in fancy or on a real railroad and steamboat, before we
have another talk about these things.
Now it is time to stop. Is there anything more you want to know?
for you look as if something was puzzling you still.
Were there any men in the world while all this was going on?
I think not. We have no proof that there were not: but also we
have no proof that there were; the cave-men, of whom I told you,
lived many ages after the coal was covered up. You seem to be
sorry that there were no men in the world then.
Because it seems a pity that there was no one to see those
beautiful coral-reefs and coal-forests.
No one to see them, my child? Who told you that? Who told you
there are not, and never have been any rational beings in this
vast universe, save certain weak, ignorant, short-sighted
creatures shaped like you and me? But even if it were so, and no
created eye had ever beheld those ancient wonders, and no created
heart ever enjoyed them, is there not one Uncreated who has seen
them and enjoyed them from the beginning? Were not these
creatures enjoying themselves each after their kind? And was
there not a Father in Heaven who was enjoying their enjoyment, and
enjoying too their beauty, which He had formed according to the
ideas of His Eternal Mind? Recollect what you were told on
Trinity Sunday--That this world was not made for man alone: but
that man, and this world, and the whole Universe was made for God;
for He created all things, and for His pleasure they are, and were
created.
CHAPTER X--FIELD AND WILD
Where were we to go next? Into the far west, to see how all the
way along the railroads the new rocks and soils lie above the
older, and yet how, when we get westward, the oldest rocks rise
highest into the air.
Well, we will go: but not, I think, to-day. Indeed I hardly know
how we could get as far as Reading; for all the world is in the
hay-field, and even the old horse must go thither too, and take
his turn at the hay-cart. Well, the rocks have been where they
are for many a year, and they will wait our leisure patiently
enough: but Midsummer and the hay-field will not wait. Let us
take what God gives when He sends it, and learn the lesson that
lies nearest to us. After all, it is more to my old mind, and
perhaps to your young mind too, to look at things which are young
and fresh and living, rather than things which are old and worn
and dead. Let us leave the old stones, and the old bones, and the
old shells, the wrecks of ancient worlds which have gone down into
the kingdom of death, to teach us their grand lessons some other
day; and let us look now at the world of light and life and
beauty, which begins here at the open door, and stretches away
over the hay-fields, over the woods, over the southern moors, over
sunny France, and sunnier Spain, and over the tropic seas, down to
the equator, and the palm-groves of the eternal summer. If we
cannot find something, even at starting from the open door, to
teach us about Why and How, we must be very short-sighted, or very
shallow-hearted.
There is the old cock starling screeching in the eaves, because he
wants to frighten us away, and take a worm to his children,
without our finding out whereabouts his hole is. How does he know
that we might hurt him? and how again does he not know that we
shall not hurt him? we, who for five-and-twenty years have let him
and his ancestors build under those eaves in peace? How did he
get that quantity of half-wit, that sort of stupid cunning, into
his little brain, and yet get no more? And why (for this is a
question of Why, and not of How) does he labour all day long,
hunting for worms and insects for his children, while his wife
nurses them in the nest? Why, too, did he help her to build that
nest with toil and care this spring, for the sake of a set of
nestlings who can be of no gain or use to him, but only take the
food out of his mouth? Simply out of--what shall I call it, my
child?--Love; that same sense of love and duty, coming surely from
that one Fountain of all duty and all love, which makes your
father work for you. That the mother should take care of her
young, is wonderful enough; but that (at least among many birds)
the father should help likewise, is (as you will find out as you
grow older) more wonderful far. So there already the old starling
has set us two fresh puzzles about How and Why, neither of which
we shall get answered, at least on this side of the grave.
Come on, up the field, under the great generous sun, who quarrels
with no one, grudges no one, but shines alike upon the evil and
the good. What a gay picture he is painting now, with his light-
pencils; for in them, remember, and not in the things themselves
the colour lies. See how, where the hay has been already carried,
he floods all the slopes with yellow light, making them stand out
sharp against the black shadows of the wood; while where the grass
is standing still, he makes the sheets of sorrel-flower blush rosy
red, or dapples the field with white oxeyes.
But is not the sorrel itself red, and the oxeyes white?
What colour are they at night, when the sun is gone?
Dark.
That is, no colour. The very grass is not green at night.
Oh, but it is if you look at it with a lantern.
No, no. It is the light of the lantern, which happens to be
strong enough to make the leaves look green, though it is not
strong enough to make a geranium look red.
Not red?
No; the geranium flowers by a lantern look black, while the leaves
look green. If you don't believe me, we will try.
But why is that?
Why, I cannot tell: and how, you had best ask Professor Tyndall,
if you ever have the honour of meeting him.
But now--hark to the mowing-machine, humming like a giant night-
jar. Come up and look at it, and see how swift and smooth it
shears the long grass down, so that in the middle of the swathe it
seems to have merely fallen flat, and you must move it before you
find that it has been cut off.
Ah, there is a proof to us of what men may do if they will only
learn the lessons which Madam How can teach them. There is that
boy, fresh from the National School, cutting more grass in a day
than six strong mowers could have cut, and cutting it better, too;
for the mowing-machine goes so much nearer to the ground than the
scythe, that we gain by it two hundredweight of hay on every acre.
And see, too, how persevering old Madam How will not stop her
work, though the machine has cut off all the grass which she has
been making for the last three months; for as fast as we shear it
off, she makes it grow again. There are fresh blades, here at our
feet, a full inch long, which have sprung up in the last two days,
for the cattle when they are turned in next week.
But if the machine cuts all the grass, the poor mowers will have
nothing to do.
Not so. They are all busy enough elsewhere. There is plenty of
other work to be done, thank God; and wholesomer and easier work
than mowing with a burning sun on their backs, drinking gallons of
beer, and getting first hot and then cold across the loins, till
they lay in a store of lumbago and sciatica, to cripple them in
their old age. You delight in machinery because it is curious:
you should delight in it besides because it does good, and nothing
but good, where it is used, according to the laws of Lady Why,
with care, moderation, and mercy, and fair-play between man and
man. For example: just as the mowing-machine saves the mowers,
the threshing-machine saves the threshers from rheumatism and
chest complaints,--which they used to catch in the draught and
dust of the unhealthiest place in the whole parish, which is, the
old-fashioned barn's floor. And so, we may hope, in future years
all heavy drudgery and dirty work will be done more and more by
machines, and people will have more and more chance of keeping
themselves clean and healthy, and more and more time to read, and
learn, and think, and be true civilised men and women, instead of
being mere live ploughs, or live manure-carts, such as I have seen
ere now.
A live manure-cart?
Yes, child. If you had seen, as I have seen, in foreign lands,
poor women, haggard, dirty, grown old before their youth was over,
toiling up hill with baskets of foul manure upon their backs, you
would have said, as I have said, "Oh for Madam How to cure that
ignorance! Oh for Lady Why to cure that barbarism! Oh that Madam
How would teach them that machinery must always be cheaper in the
long run than human muscles and nerves! Oh that Lady Why would
teach them that a woman is the most precious thing on earth, and
that if she be turned into a beast of burden, Lady Why--and Madam
How likewise--will surely avenge the wrongs of their human
sister!" There, you do not quite know what I mean, and I do not
care that you should. It is good for little folk that big folk
should now and then "talk over their heads," as the saying is, and
make them feel how ignorant they are, and how many solemn and
earnest questions there are in the world on which they must make
up their minds some day, though not yet. But now we will talk
about the hay: or rather do you and the rest go and play in the
hay and gather it up, build forts of it, storm them, pull them
down, build them up again, shout, laugh, and scream till you are
hot and tired. You will please Madam How thereby, and Lady Why
likewise.
How?
Because Madam How naturally wants her work to succeed, and she is
at work now making you.
Making me?
Of course. Making a man of you, out of a boy. And that can only
be done by the life-blood which runs through and through you. And
the more you laugh and shout, the more pure air will pass into
your blood, and make it red and healthy; and the more you romp and
play--unless you overtire yourself--the quicker will that blood
flow through all your limbs, to make bone and muscle, and help you
to grow into a man.
But why does Lady Why like to see us play?
She likes to see you happy, as she likes to see the trees and
birds happy. For she knows well that there is no food, nor
medicine either, like happiness. If people are not happy enough,
they are often tempted to do many wrong deeds, and to think many
wrong thoughts: and if by God's grace they know the laws of Lady
Why, and keep from sin, still unhappiness, if it goes on too long,
wears them out, body and mind; and they grow ill and die, of
broken hearts, and broken brains, my child; and so at last, poor
souls, find "Rest beneath the Cross."
Children, too, who are unhappy; children who are bullied, and
frightened, and kept dull and silent, never thrive. Their bodies
do not thrive; for they grow up weak. Their minds do not thrive;
for they grow up dull. Their souls do not thrive; for they learn
mean, sly, slavish ways, which God forbid you should ever learn.
Well said the wise man, "The human plant, like the vegetables, can
only flower in sunshine."
So do you go, and enjoy yourself in the sunshine; but remember
this--You know what happiness is. Then if you wish to please Lady
Why, and Lady Why's Lord and King likewise, you will never pass a
little child without trying to make it happier, even by a passing
smile. And now be off, and play in the hay, and come back to me
when you are tired.
Let us lie down at the foot of this old oak, and see what we can
see.
And hear what we can hear, too. What is that humming all round
us, now that the noisy mowing-machine has stopped?
And as much softer than the noise of mowing-machine hum, as the
machines which make it are more delicate and more curious. Madam
How is a very skilful workwoman, and has eyes which see deeper and
clearer than all microscopes; as you would find, if you tried to
see what makes that "Midsummer hum" of which the haymakers are so
fond, because it promises fair weather.
Why, it is only the gnats and flies.
Only the gnats and flies? You might study those gnats and flies
for your whole life without finding out all--or more than a very
little--about them. I wish I knew how they move those tiny wings
of theirs--a thousand times in a second, I dare say, some of them.
I wish I knew how far they know that they are happy--for happy
they must be, whether they know it or not. I wish I knew how they
live at all. I wish I even knew how many sorts there are humming
round us at this moment.
How many kinds? Three or four?
More probably thirty or forty round this single tree.
But why should there be so many kinds of living things? Would not
one or two have done just as well?
Why, indeed? Why should there not have been only one sort of
butterfly, and he only of one colour, a plain brown, or a plain
white?
And why should there be so many sorts of birds, all robbing the
garden at once? Thrushes, and blackbirds, and sparrows, and
chaffinches, and greenfinches, and bullfinches, and tomtits.
And there are four kinds of tomtits round here, remember: but we
may go on with such talk for ever. Wiser men than we have asked
the same question: but Lady Why will not answer them yet.
However, there is another question, which Madam How seems inclined
to answer just now, which is almost as deep and mysterious.
What?
HOW all these different kinds of things became different.
Oh, do tell me!
Not I. You must begin at the beginning, before you can end at the
end, or even make one step towards the end.
What do you mean?
You must learn the differences between things, before you can find
out how those differences came about. You must learn Madam How's
alphabet before you can read her book. And Madam How's alphabet
of animals and plants is, Species, Kinds of things. You must see
which are like, and which unlike; what they are like in, and what
they are unlike in. You are beginning to do that with your
collection of butterflies. You like to arrange them, and those
that are most like nearest to each other, and to compare them.
You must do that with thousands of different kinds of things
before you can read one page of Madam How's Natural History Book
rightly.
But it will take so much time and so much trouble.
God grant that you may not spend more time on worse matters, and
take more trouble over things which will profit you far less. But
so it must be, willy-nilly. You must learn the alphabet if you
mean to read. And you must learn the value of the figures before
you can do a sum. Why, what would you think of any one who sat
down to play at cards--for money too (which I hope and trust you
never will do)--before he knew the names of the cards, and which
counted highest, and took the other?
Of course he would be very foolish.
Just as foolish are those who make up "theories" (as they call
them) about this world, and how it was made, before they have
found out what the world is made of. You might as well try to
find out how this hay-field was made, without finding out first
what the hay is made of.
How the hay-field was made? Was it not always a hay-field?
Ah, yes; the old story, my child: Was not the earth always just
what it is now? Let us see for ourselves whether this was always
a hay-field.
How?
Just pick out all the different kinds of plants and flowers you
can find round us here. How many do you think there are?
Oh--there seem to be four or five.
Just as there were three or four kinds of flies in the air. Pick
them, child, and count. Let us have facts.
How many? What! a dozen already?
Yes--and here is another, and another. Why, I have got I don't
know how many.
Why not? Bring them here, and let us see. Nine kinds of grasses,
and a rush. Six kinds of clovers and vetches; and besides,
dandelion, and rattle, and oxeye, and sorrel, and plantain, and
buttercup, and a little stitchwort, and pignut, and mouse-ear
hawkweed, too, which nobody wants.
Why?
Because they are a sign that I am not a good farmer enough, and
have not quite turned my Wild into Field.
What do you mean?
Look outside the boundary fence, at the moors and woods; they are
forest, Wild--"Wald," as the Germans would call it. Inside the
fence is Field--"Feld," as the Germans would call it. Guess why?
Is it because the trees inside have been felled?
Well, some say so, who know more than I. But now go over the
fence, and see how many of these plants you can find on the moor.
Oh, I think I know. I am so often on the moor.
I think you would find more kinds outside than you fancy. But
what do you know?
That beside some short fine grass about the cattle-paths, there
are hardly any grasses on the moor save deer's hair and glade-
grass; and all the rest is heath, and moss, and furze, and fern.
Softly--not all; you have forgotten the bog plants; and there are
(as I said) many more plants beside on the moor than you fancy.
But we will look into that another time. At all events, the
plants outside are on the whole quite different from the hay-
field.
Of course: that is what makes the field look green and the moor
brown.
Not a doubt. They are so different, that they look like bits of
two different continents. Scrambling over the fence is like
scrambling out of Europe into Australia. Now, how was that
difference made? Think. Don't guess, but think. Why does the
rich grass come up to the bank, and yet not spread beyond it?
I suppose because it cannot get over.
Not get over? Would not the wind blow the seeds, and the birds
carry them? They do get over, in millions, I don't doubt, every
summer.
Then why do they not grow?
Think.
Is there any difference in the soil inside and out?
A very good guess. But guesses are no use without facts. Look.
Oh, I remember now. I know now the soil of the field is brown,
like the garden; and the soil of the moor all black and peaty.
Yes. But if you dig down two or three feet, you will find the
soils of the moor and the field just the same. So perhaps the top
soils were once both alike.
I know.
Well, and what do you think about it now? I want you to look and
think. I want every one to look and think. Half the misery in
the world comes first from not looking, and then from not
thinking. And I do not want you to be miserable.
But shall I be miserable if I do not find out such little things
as this.
You will be miserable if you do not learn to understand little
things: because then you will not be able to understand great
things when you meet them. Children who are not trained to use
their eyes and their common sense grow up the more miserable the
cleverer they are.
Why?
Because they grow up what men call dreamers, and bigots, and
fanatics, causing misery to themselves and to all who deal with
them. So I say again, think.
Well, I suppose men must have altered the soil inside the bank.
Well done. But why do you think so?
Because, of course, some one made the bank; and the brown soil
only goes up to it.
Well, that is something like common sense. Now you will not say
any more, as the cows or the butterflies might, that the hay-field
was always there.
And how did men change the soil?
By tilling it with the plough, to sweeten it, and manuring it, to
make it rich.
And then did all these beautiful grasses grow up of themselves?
You ought to know that they most likely did not. You know the new
enclosures?
Yes.
Well then, do rich grasses come up on them, now that they are
broken up?
Oh no, nothing but groundsel, and a few weeds.
Just what, I dare say, came up here at first. But this land was
tilled for corn, for hundreds of years, I believe. And just about
one hundred years ago it was laid down in grass; that is, sown
with grass seeds.
And where did men get the grass seeds from?
Ah, that is a long story; and one that shows our forefathers
(though they knew nothing about railroads or electricity) were not
such simpletons as some folks think. The way it must have been
done was this. Men watched the natural pastures where cattle get
fat on the wild grass, as they do in the Fens, and many other
parts of England. And then they saved the seeds of those
fattening wild grasses, and sowed them in fresh spots. Often they
made mistakes. They were careless, and got weeds among the seed--
like the buttercups, which do so much harm to this pasture. Or
they sowed on soil which would not suit the seed, and it died.
But at last, after many failures, they have grown so careful and
so clever, that you may send to certain shops, saying what sort of
soil yours is, and they will send you just the seeds which will
grow there, and no other; and then you have a good pasture for as
long as you choose to keep it good.
And how is it kept good?
Look at all those loads of hay, which are being carried off the
field. Do you think you can take all that away without putting
anything in its place?
Why not?
If I took all the butter out of the churn, what must I do if I
want more butter still?
Put more cream in.
So, if I want more grass to grow, I must put on the soil more of
what grass is made of.
But the butter don't grow, and the grass does.
What does the grass grow in?
The soil.
Yes. Just as the butter grows in the churn. So you must put
fresh grass-stuff continually into the soil, as you put fresh
cream into the churn. You have heard the farm men say, "That crop
has taken a good deal out of the land"?
Yes.
Then they spoke exact truth. What will that hay turn into by
Christmas? Can't you tell? Into milk, of course, which you will
drink; and into horseflesh too, which you will use.
Use horseflesh? Not eat it?
No; we have not got as far as that. We did not even make up our
minds to taste the Cambridge donkey. But every time the horse
draws the carriage, he uses up so much muscle; and that muscle he
must get back again by eating hay and corn; and that hay and corn
must be put back again into the land by manure, or there will be
all the less for the horse next year. For one cannot eat one's
cake and keep it too; and no more can one eat one's grass.
So this field is a truly wonderful place. It is no ugly pile of
brick and mortar, with a tall chimney pouring out smoke and evil
smells, with unhealthy, haggard people toiling inside. Why do you
look surprised?
Because--because nobody ever said it was. You mean a manufactory.
Well, and this hay-field is a manufactory: only like most of
Madam How's workshops, infinitely more beautiful, as well as
infinitely more crafty, than any manufactory of man's building.
It is beautiful to behold, and healthy to work in; a joy and
blessing alike to the eye, and the mind, and the body: and yet it
is a manufactory.
But a manufactory of what?
Of milk of course, and cows, and sheep, and horses; and of your
body and mine--for we shall drink the milk and eat the meat. And
therefore it is a flesh and milk manufactory. We must put into it
every year yard-stuff, tank-stuff, guano, bones, and anything and
everything of that kin, that Madam How may cook it for us into
grass, and cook the grass again into milk and meat. But if we
don't give Madam How material to work on, we cannot expect her to
work for us. And what do you think will happen then? She will
set to work for herself. The rich grasses will dwindle for want
of ammonia (that is smelling salts), and the rich clovers for want
of phosphates (that is bone-earth): and in their places will come
over the bank the old weeds and grass off the moor, which have not
room to get in now, because the ground is coveted already. They
want no ammonia nor phosphates--at all events they have none, and
that is why the cattle on the moor never get fat. So they can
live where these rich grasses cannot. And then they will conquer
and thrive; and the Field will turn into Wild once more.
Ah, my child, thank God for your forefathers, when you look over
that boundary mark. For the difference between the Field and the
Wild is the difference between the old England of Madam How's
making, and the new England which she has taught man to make,
carrying on what she had only begun and had not time to finish.
That moor is a pattern bit left to show what the greater part of
this land was like for long ages after it had risen out of the
sea; when there was little or nothing on the flat upper moors save
heaths, and ling, and club-mosses, and soft gorse, and needle-
whin, and creeping willows; and furze and fern upon the brows; and
in the bottoms oak and ash, beech and alder, hazel and mountain
ash, holly and thorn, with here and there an aspen or a buckthorn
(berry-bearing alder as you call it), and everywhere--where he
could thrust down his long root, and thrust up his long shoots--
that intruding conqueror and insolent tyrant, the bramble. There
were sedges and rushes, too, in the bogs, and coarse grass on the
forest pastures--or "leas" as we call them to this day round here-
-but no real green fields; and, I suspect, very few gay flowers,
save in spring the sheets of golden gorse, and in summer the
purple heather. Such was old England--or rather, such was this
land before it was England; a far sadder, damper, poorer land than
now. For one man or one cow or sheep which could have lived on it
then, a hundred can live now. And yet, what it was once, that it
might become again,--it surely would round here, if this brave
English people died out of it, and the land was left to itself
once more.
What would happen then, you may guess for yourself, from what you
see happen whenever the land is left to itself, as it is in the
wood above. In that wood you can still see the grass ridges and
furrows which show that it was once ploughed and sown by man;
perhaps as late as the time of Henry the Eighth, when a great deal
of poor land, as you will read some day, was thrown out of
tillage, to become forest and down once more. And what is the
mount now? A jungle of oak and beech, cherry and holly, young and
old all growing up together, with the mountain ash and bramble and
furze coming up so fast beneath them, that we have to cut the
paths clear again year by year. Why, even the little cow-wheat, a
very old-world plant, which only grows in ancient woods, has found
its way back again, I know not whence, and covers the open spaces
with its pretty yellow and white flowers. Man had conquered this
mount, you see, from Madam How, hundreds of years ago. And she
always lets man conquer her, because Lady Why wishes man to
conquer: only he must have a fair fight with Madam How first, and
try his strength against hers to the utmost. So man conquered the
wood for a while; and it became cornfield instead of forest: but
he was not strong and wise enough three hundred years ago to keep
what he had conquered; and back came Madam How, and took the place
into her own hands, and bade the old forest trees and plants come
back again--as they would come if they were not stopped year by
year, down from the wood, over the pastures--killing the rich
grasses as they went, till they met another forest coming up from
below, and fought it for many a year, till both made peace, and
lived quietly side by side for ages.
Another forest coming up from below? Where would it come from?
From where it is now. Come down and look along the brook, and
every drain and grip which runs into the brook. What is here?
Seedling alders, and some withies among them.
Very well. You know how we pull these alders up, and cut them
down, and yet they continually come again. Now, if we and all
human beings were to leave this pasture for a few hundred years,
would not those alders increase into a wood? Would they not kill
the grass, and spread right and left, seeding themselves more and
more as the grass died, and left the ground bare, till they met
the oaks and beeches coming down the hill? And then would begin a
great fight, for years and years, between oak and beech against
alder and willow.
But how can trees fight? Could they move or beat each other with
their boughs?
Not quite that; though they do beat each other with their boughs,
fiercely enough, in a gale of wind; and then the trees who have
strong and stiff boughs wound those who have brittle and limp
boughs, and so hurt them, and if the storms come often enough,
kill them. But among these trees in a sheltered valley the larger
and stronger would kill the weaker and smaller by simply
overshadowing their tops, and starving their roots; starving them,
indeed, so much when they grow very thick, that the poor little
acorns, and beech mast, and alder seeds would not be able to
sprout at all. So they would fight, killing each other's
children, till the war ended--I think I can guess how.
How?
The beeches are as dainty as they are beautiful; and they do not
like to get their feet wet. So they would venture down the hill
only as far as the dry ground lasts, and those who tried to grow
any lower would die. But the oaks are hardy, and do not care much
where they grow. So they would fight their way down into the wet
ground among the alders and willows, till they came to where their
enemies were so thick and tall, that the acorns as they fell could
not sprout in the darkness. And so you would have at last, along
the hill-side, a forest of beech and oak, lower down a forest of
oak and alder, and along the stream-side alders and willows only.
And that would be a very fair example of the great law of the
struggle for existence, which causes the competition of species.
What is that?
Madam How is very stern, though she is always perfectly just; and
therefore she makes every living thing fight for its life, and
earn its bread, from its birth till its death; and rewards it
exactly according to its deserts, and neither more nor less.
And the competition of species means, that each thing, and kind of
things, has to compete against the things round it; and to see
which is the stronger; and the stronger live, and breed, and
spread, and the weaker die out.
But that is very hard.
I know it, my child, I know it. But so it is. And Madam How, no
doubt, would be often very clumsy and very cruel, without meaning
it, because she never sees beyond her own nose, or thinks at all
about the consequences of what she is doing. But Lady Why, who
does think about consequences, is her mistress, and orders her
about for ever. And Lady Why is, I believe, as loving as she is
wise; and therefore we must trust that she guides this great war
between living things, and takes care that Madam How kills nothing
which ought not to die, and takes nothing away without putting
something more beautiful and something more useful in its place;
and that even if England were, which God forbid, overrun once more
with forests and bramble-brakes, that too would be of use somehow,
somewhere, somewhen, in the long ages which are to come hereafter.
And you must remember, too, that since men came into the world
with rational heads on their shoulders, Lady Why has been handing
over more and more of Madam How's work to them, and some of her
own work too: and bids them to put beautiful and useful things in
the place of ugly and useless ones; so that now it is men's own
fault if they do not use their wits, and do by all the world what
they have done by these pastures--change it from a barren moor
into a rich hay-field, by copying the laws of Madam How, and
making grass compete against heath. But you look thoughtful:
what is it you want to know?
Why, you say all living things must fight and scramble for what
they can get from each other: and must not I too? For I am a
living thing.
Ah, that is the old question, which our Lord answered long ago,
and said, "Be not anxious what ye shall eat or what ye shall
drink, or wherewithal you shall be clothed. For after all these
things do the heathen seek, and your Heavenly Father knoweth that
ye have need of these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of
God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to
you." A few, very few, people have taken that advice. But they
have been just the salt of the earth, which has kept mankind from
decaying.
But what has that to do with it?
See. You are a living thing, you say. Are you a plant?
No.
Are you an animal?
I do not know. Yes. I suppose I am. I eat, and drink, and
sleep, just as dogs and cats do.
Yes. There is no denying that. No one knew that better than St.
Paul when he told men that they had a flesh; that is, a body, and
an animal's nature in them. But St. Paul told them--of course he
was not the first to say so, for all the wise heathens have known
that--that there was something more in us, which he called a
spirit. Some call it now the moral sentiment, some one thing,
some another, but we will keep to the old word: we shall not find
a better.
Yes, I know that I have a spirit, a soul.
Better to say that you are a spirit. But what does St. Paul say?
That our spirit is to conquer our flesh, and keep it down. That
the man in us, in short, which is made in the likeness of God, is
to conquer the animal in us, which is made in the likeness of the
dog and the cat, and sometimes (I fear) in the likeness of the ape
or the pig. You would not wish to be like a cat, much less like
an ape or a pig?
Of course not.
Then do not copy them, by competing and struggling for existence
against other people.
What do you mean?
Did you never watch the pigs feeding?
Yes, and how they grudge and quarrel, and shove each other's noses
out of the trough, and even bite each other because they are so
jealous which shall get most.
That is it. And how the biggest pig drives the others away, and
would starve them while he got fat, if the man did not drive him
off in his turn.
Oh, yes; I know.
Then no wiser than those pigs are worldly men who compete, and
grudge, and struggle with each other, which shall get most money,
most fame, most power over their fellow-men. They will tell you,
my child, that that is the true philosophy, and the true wisdom;
that competition is the natural law of society, and the source of
wealth and prosperity. Do not you listen to them. That is the
wisdom of this world, which the flesh teaches the animals; and
those who follow it, like the animals, will perish. Such men are
not even as wise as Sweep the retriever.
Not as wise as Sweep?
Not they. Sweep will not take away Victor's bone, though he is
ten times as big as Victor, and could kill him in a moment; and
when he catches a rabbit, does he eat it himself?
Of course not; he brings it and lays it down at our feet.
Because he likes better to do his duty, and be praised for it,
than to eat the rabbit, dearly as he longs to eat it.
But he is only an animal. Who taught him to be generous, and
dutiful, and faithful?
Who, indeed! Not we, you know that, for he has grown up with us
since a puppy. How he learnt it, and his parents before him, is a
mystery, of which we can only say, God has taught them, we know
not how. But see what has happened--that just because dogs have
learnt not to be selfish and to compete--that is, have become
civilised and tame--therefore we let them live with us, and love
them. Because they try to be good in their simple way, therefore
they too have all things added to them, and live far happier, and
more comfortable lives than the selfish wolf and fox.
But why have not all animals found out that?
I cannot tell: there may be wise animals and foolish animals, as
there are wise and foolish men. Indeed there are. I see a very
wise animal there, who never competes; for she has learned
something of the golden lesson--that it is more blessed to give
than to receive; and she acts on what she has learnt, all day
long.
Which do you mean? Why, that is a bee.
Yes, it is a bee: and I wish I were as worthy in my place as that
bee is in hers. I wish I could act up as well as she does to the
true wisdom, which is self-sacrifice. For whom is that bee
working? For herself? If that was all, she only needs to suck
the honey as she goes. But she is storing up the wax under her
stomach, and bee-bread in her thighs--for whom? Not for herself
only, or even for her own children: but for the children of
another bee, her queen. For them she labours all day long, builds
for them, feeds them, nurses them, spends her love and cunning on
them. So does that ant on the path. She is carrying home that
stick to build for other ants' children. So do the white ants in
the tropics. They have learnt not to compete, but to help each
other; not to be selfish, but to sacrifice themselves; and
therefore they are strong.
But you told me once that ants would fight and plunder each
other's nests. And once we saw two hives of bees fighting in the
air, and falling dead by dozens.
My child, do not men fight, and kill each other by thousands with
sharp shot and cold steel, because, though they have learnt the
virtue of patriotism, they have not yet learnt that of humanity?
We must not blame the bees and ants if they are no wiser than men.
At least they are wise enough to stand up for their country, that
is, their hive, and work for it, and die for it, if need be; and
that makes them strong.
But how does that make them strong?
How, is a deep question, and one I can hardly answer yet. But
that it has made them so there is no doubt. Look at the solitary
bees--the governors as we call them, who live in pairs, in little
holes in the banks. How few of them there are; and they never
seem to increase in numbers. Then look at the hive bees, how,
just because they are civilised,--that is, because they help each
other, and feed each other, instead of being solitary and
selfish,--they breed so fast, and get so much food, that if they
were not killed for their honey, they would soon become a
nuisance, and drive us out of the parish.
But then we give them their hives ready made.
True. But in old forest countries, where trees decay and grow
hollow, the bees breed in them.
Yes. I remember the bee tree in the fir avenue.
Well then, in many forests in hot countries the bees swarm in
hollow trees; and they, and the ants, and the white ants, have it
all their own way, and are lords and masters, driving the very
wild beasts before them, while the ants and white ants eat up all
gardens, and plantations, and clothes, and furniture; till it is a
serious question whether in some hot countries man will ever be
able to settle, so strong have the ants grown, by ages of
civilisation, and not competing against their brothers and
sisters.
But may I not compete for prizes against the other boys?
Well, there is no harm in that; for you do not harm the others,
even if you win. They will have learnt all the more, while trying
for the prize; and so will you, even if you don't get it. But I
tell you fairly, trying for prizes is only fit for a child; and
when you become a man, you must put away childish things--
competition among the rest.
But surely I may try to be better and wiser and more learned than
everybody else?
My dearest child, why try for that? Try to be as good, and wise,
and learned as you can, and if you find any man, or ten thousand
men, superior to you, thank God for it. Do you think that there
can be too much wisdom in the world?
Of course not: but I should like to be the wisest man in it.
Then you would only have the heaviest burden of all men on your
shoulders.
Why?
Because you would be responsible for more foolish people than any
one else. Remember what wise old Moses said, when some one came
and told him that certain men in the camp were prophesying--"Would
God all the Lord's people did prophesy!" Yes; it would have saved
Moses many a heartache, and many a sleepless night, if all the
Jews had been wise as he was, and wiser still. So do not you
compete with good and wise men, but simply copy them: and
whatever you do, do not compete with the wolves, and the apes, and
the swine of this world; for that is a game at which you are sure
to be beaten.
Why?
Because Lady Why, if she loves you (as I trust she does), will
take care that you are beaten, lest you should fancy it was really
profitable to live like a cunning sort of animal, and not like a
true man. And how she will do that I can tell you. She will take
care that you always come across a worse man than you are trying
to be,--a more apish man, who can tumble and play monkey-tricks
for people's amusement better than you can; or a more swinish man,
who can get at more of the pig's-wash than you can; or a more
wolfish man, who will eat you up if you do not get out of his way;
and so she will disappoint and disgust you, my child, with that
greedy, selfish, vain animal life, till you turn round and see
your mistake, and try to live the true human life, which also is
divine;--to be just and honourable, gentle and forgiving, generous
and useful--in one word, to fear God, and keep His commandments:
and as you live that life, you will find that, by the eternal laws
of Lady Why, all other things will be added to you; that people
will be glad to know you, glad to help you, glad to employ you,
because they see that you will be of use to them, and will do them
no harm. And if you meet (as you will meet) with people better
and wiser than yourself, then so much the better for you; for they
will love you, and be glad to teach you when they see that you are
living the unselfish and harmless life; and that you come to them,
not as foolish Critias came to Socrates, to learn political
cunning, and become a selfish and ambitious tyrant, but as wise
Plato came, that he might learn the laws of Lady Why, and love
them for her sake, and teach them to all mankind. And so you,
like the plants and animals, will get your deserts exactly,
without competing and struggling for existence as they do.
And all this has come out of looking at the hay-field and the wild
moor.
Why not? There is an animal in you, and there is a man in you.
If the animal gets the upper hand, all your character will fall
back into wild useless moor; if the man gets the upper hand, all
your character will be cultivated into rich and fertile field.
Choose.
Now come down home. The haymakers are resting under the hedge.
The horses are dawdling home to the farm. The sun is getting low,
and the shadows long. Come home, and go to bed while the house is
fragrant with the smell of hay, and dream that you are still
playing among the haycocks. When you grow old, you will have
other and sadder dreams.
CHAPTER XI--THE WORLD'S END
Hullo! hi! wake up. Jump out of bed, and come to the window, and
see where you are.
What a wonderful place!
So it is: though it is only poor old Ireland. Don't you
recollect that when we started I told you we were going to
Ireland, and through it to the World's End; and here we are now
safe at the end of the old world, and beyond us the great
Atlantic, and beyond that again, thousands of miles away, the new
world, which will be rich and prosperous, civilised and noble,
thousands of years hence, when this old world, it may be, will be
dead, and little children there will be reading in their history
books of Ancient England and of Ancient France, as you now read of
Greece and Rome.
But what a wonderful place it is! What are those great green
things standing up in the sky, all over purple ribs and bars, with
their tops hid in the clouds?
Those are mountains; the bones of some old world, whose poor bare
sides Madam How is trying to cover with rich green grass.
And how far off are they?
How I should like to walk up to the top of that one which looks
quite close.
You will find it a long walk up there; three miles, I dare say,
over black bogs and banks of rock, and up corries and cliffs which
you could not climb. There are plenty of cows on that mountain:
and yet they look so small, you could not see them, nor I either,
without a glass. That long white streak, zigzagging down the
mountain side, is a roaring cataract of foam five hundred feet
high, full now with last night's rain; but by this afternoon it
will have dwindled to a little thread; and to-morrow, when you get
up, if no more rain has come down, it will be gone. Madam How
works here among the mountains swiftly and hugely, and sometimes
terribly enough; as you shall see when you have had your
breakfast, and come down to the bridge with me.
But what a beautiful place it is! Flowers and woods and a lawn;
and what is that great smooth patch in the lawn just under the
window?
Is it an empty flower-bed?
Ah, thereby hangs a strange tale. We will go and look at it after
breakfast, and then you shall see with your own eyes one of the
wonders which I have been telling you of.
And what is that shining between the trees?
Water.
Is it a lake?
Not a lake, though there are plenty round here; that is salt
water, not fresh. Look away to the right, and you see it through
the opening of the woods again and again: and now look above the
woods. You see a faint blue line, and gray and purple lumps like
clouds, which rest upon it far away. That, child, is the great
Atlantic Ocean, and those are islands in the far west. The water
which washes the bottom of the lawn was but a few months ago
pouring out of the Gulf of Mexico, between the Bahamas and
Florida, and swept away here as the great ocean river of warm
water which we call the Gulf Stream, bringing with it out of the
open ocean the shoals of mackerel, and the porpoises and whales
which feed upon them. Some fine afternoon we will run down the
bay and catch strange fishes, such as you never saw before, and
very likely see a living whale.
What? such a whale as they get whalebone from, and which eats sea-
moths?
No, they live far north, in the Arctic circle; these are
grampuses, and bottle-noses, which feed on fish; not so big as the
right whales, but quite big enough to astonish you, if one comes
up and blows close to the boat. Get yourself dressed and come
down, and then we will go out; we shall have plenty to see and
talk of at every step.
Now, you have finished your breakfast at last, so come along, and
we shall see what we shall see. First run out across the gravel,
and scramble up that bank of lawn, and you will see what you
fancied was an empty flower-bed.
Why, it is all hard rock.
Ah, you are come into the land of rocks now: out of the land of
sand and gravel; out of a soft young corner of the world into a
very hard, old, weather-beaten corner; and you will see rocks
enough, and too many for the poor farmers, before you go home
again.
But how beautifully smooth and flat the rock is: and yet it is
all rounded.
What is it like?
Like--like the half of a shell.
Not badly said, but think again.
Like--like--I know what it is like. Like the back of some great
monster peeping up through the turf.
You have got it. Such rocks as these are called in Switzerland
"roches moutonnees," because they are, people fancy, like sheep's
backs. Now look at the cracks and layers in it. They run across
the stone; they have nothing to do with the shape of it. You see
that?
Yes: but here are cracks running across them, all along the
stone, till the turf hides them.
Look at them again; they are no cracks; they do not go into the
stone.
I see. They are scratched; something like those on the elder-stem
at home, where the cats sharpen their claws. But it would take a
big cat to make them.
Do you recollect what I told you of Madam How's hand, more
flexible than any hand of man, and yet strong enough to grind the
mountains into paste?
I know. Ice! ice! ice! But are these really ice-marks?
Child, on the place where we now stand, over rich lawns, and warm
woods, and shining lochs, lay once on a time hundreds, it may be
thousands, of feet of solid ice, crawling off yonder mountain-tops
into the ocean there outside; and this is one of its tracks. See
how the scratches all point straight down the valley, and straight
out to sea. Those mountains are 2000 feet high: but they were
much higher once; for the ice has planed the tops off them. Then,
it seems to me, the ice sank, and left the mountains standing out
of it about half their height, and at that level it stayed, till
it had planed down all those lower moors of smooth bare rock
between us and the Western ocean; and then it sank again, and
dwindled back, leaving moraines (that is, heaps of dirt and
stones) all up these valleys here and there, till at the last it
melted all away, and poor old Ireland became fit to live in again.
We will go down the bay some day and look at those moraines, some
of them quite hills of earth, and then you will see for yourself
how mighty a chisel the ice-chisel was, and what vast heaps of
chips it has left behind. Now then, down over the lawn towards
the bridge. Listen to the river, louder and louder every step we
take.
What a roar! Is there a waterfall there?
No. It is only the flood. And underneath the roar of that flood,
do you not hear a deeper note--a dull rumbling, as if from
underground?
Yes. What is it?
The rolling of great stones under water, which are being polished
against each other, as they hurry toward the sea. Now, up on the
parapet of the bridge. I will hold you tight. Look and see Madam
How's rain-spade at work. Look at the terrible yellow torrent
below us, almost filling up the arches of the bridge, and leaping
high in waves and crests of foam.
Oh, the bridge is falling into the water!
Not a bit. You are not accustomed to see water running below you
at ten miles an hour. Never mind that feeling. It will go off in
a few seconds. Look; the water is full six feet up the trunks of
the trees; over the grass and the king fern, and the tall purple
loose-strife -
Oh! Here comes a tree dancing down!
And there are some turfs which have been cut on the mountain. And
there is a really sad sight. Look what comes now.
One--two--three.
Why, they are sheep.
Yes. And a sad loss they will be to some poor fellow in the glen
above.
And oh! Look at the pig turning round and round solemnly in the
corner under the rock. Poor piggy! He ought to have been at home
safe in his stye, and not wandering about the hills. And what are
these coming now?
Butter firkins, I think. Yes. This is a great flood. It is well
if there are no lives lost.
But is it not cruel of Madam How to make such floods?
Well--let us ask one of these men who are looking over the bridge.
Why, what does he say? I cannot understand one word. Is he
talking Irish?
Irish-English at least: but what he said was, that it was a
mighty fine flood entirely, praised be God; and would help on the
potatoes and oats after the drought, and set the grass growing
again on the mountains.
And what is he saying now?
That the river will be full of salmon and white trout after this.
What does he mean?
That under our feet now, if we could see through the muddy water,
dozens of salmon and sea-trout are running up from the sea.
What! up this furious stream?
Yes. What would be death to you is pleasure and play to them. Up
they are going, to spawn in the little brooks among the mountains;
and all of them are the best of food, fattened on the herrings and
sprats in the sea outside, Madam How's free gift, which does not
cost man a farthing, save the expense of nets and rods to catch
them.
How can that be?
I will give you a bit of political economy. Suppose a pound of
salmon is worth a shilling; and a pound of beef is worth a
shilling likewise. Before we can eat the beef, it has cost
perhaps tenpence to make that pound of beef out of turnips and
grass and oil-cake; and so the country is only twopence a pound
richer for it. But Mr. Salmon has made himself out of what he
eats in the sea, and so has cost nothing; and the shilling a pound
is all clear gain. There--you don't quite understand that piece
of political economy. Indeed, it is only in the last two or three
years that older heads than yours have got to understand it, and
have passed the wise new salmon laws, by which the rivers will be
once more as rich with food as the land is, just as they were
hundreds of years ago. But now, look again at the river. What do
you think makes it so yellow and muddy?
Dirt, of course.
And where does that come from?
Off the mountains?
Yes. Tons on tons of white mud are being carried down past us
now; and where will they go?
Into the sea?
Yes, and sink there in the still water, to make new strata at the
bottom; and perhaps in them, ages hence, some one will find the
bones of those sheep, and of poor Mr. Pig too, fossil -
And the butter firkins too. What fun to find a fossil butter
firkin!
But now lift up your eyes to the jagged mountain crests, and their
dark sides all laced with silver streams. Out of every crack and
cranny there aloft, the rain is bringing down dirt, and stones
too, which have been split off by the winter's frosts, deepening
every little hollow, and sharpening every peak, and making the
hills more jagged and steep year by year.
When the ice went away, the hills were all scraped smooth and
round by the glaciers, like the flat rock upon the lawn; and ugly
enough they must have looked, most like great brown buns. But
ever since then, Madam How has been scooping them out again by her
water-chisel into deep glens, mighty cliffs, sharp peaks, such as
you see aloft, and making the old hills beautiful once more. Why,
even the Alps in Switzerland have been carved out by frost and
rain, out of some great flat. The very peak of the Matterhorn, of
which you have so often seen a picture, is but one single point
left of some enormous bun of rock. All the rest has been carved
away by rain and frost; and some day the Matterhorn itself will be
carved away, and its last stone topple into the glacier at its
foot. See, as we have been talking, we have got into the woods.
Oh, what beautiful woods, just like our own.
Not quite. There are some things growing here which do not grow
at home, as you will soon see. And there are no rocks at home,
either, as there are here.
How strange, to see trees growing out of rocks! How do their
roots get into the stone?
There is plenty of rich mould in the cracks for them to feed on -
"Health to the oak of the mountains; he trusts to the might of the
rock-clefts.
Deeply he mines, and in peace feeds on the wealth of the stone."
How many sorts of trees there are--oak, and birch and nuts, and
mountain-ash, and holly and furze, and heather.
And if you went to some of the islands in the lake up in the glen,
you would find wild arbutus--strawberry-tree, as you call it. We
will go and get some one day or other.
How long and green the grass is, even on the rocks, and the ferns,
and the moss, too. Everything seems richer here than at home.
Of course it is. You are here in the land of perpetual spring,
where frost and snow seldom, or never comes.
Oh, look at the ferns under this rock! I must pick some.
Pick away. I will warrant you do not pick all the sorts.
Yes. I have got them all now.
Not so hasty, child; there is plenty of a beautiful fern growing
among that moss, which you have passed over. Look here.
What! that little thing a fern!
Hold it up to the light, and see.
What a lovely little thing, like a transparent sea-weed, hung on
black wire. What is it?
Film fern, Hymenophyllum. But what are you staring at now, with
all your eyes?
Oh! that rock covered with green stars and a cloud of little white
and pink flowers growing out of them.
Aha! my good little dog! I thought you would stand to that game
when you found it.
What is it, though?
You must answer that yourself. You have seen it a hundred times
before.
Why, it is London Pride, that grows in the garden at home.
Of course it is: but the Irish call it St. Patrick's cabbage;
though it got here a long time before St. Patrick; and St. Patrick
must have been very short of garden-stuff if he ever ate it.
But how did it get here from London?
No, no. How did it get to London from hence? For from this
country it came. I suppose the English brought it home in Queen
Bess's or James the First's time.
But if it is wild here, and will grow so well in England, why do
we not find it wild in England too?
For the same reason that there are no toads or snakes in Ireland.
They had not got as far as Ireland before Ireland was parted off
from England. And St. Patrick's cabbage, and a good many other
plants, had not got as far as England.
But why?
Why, I don't know. But this I know: that when Madam How makes a
new sort of plant or animal, she starts it in one single place,
and leaves it to take care of itself and earn its own living--as
she does you and me and every one--and spread from that place all
round as far as it can go. So St. Patrick's cabbage got into this
south-west of Ireland, long, long ago; and was such a brave sturdy
little plant, that it clambered up to the top of the highest
mountains, and over all the rocks. But when it got to the rich
lowlands to the eastward, in county Cork, it found all the ground
taken up already with other plants; and as they had enough to do
to live themselves, they would not let St. Patrick's cabbage
settle among them; and it had to be content with living here in
the far-west--and, what was very sad, had no means of sending word
to its brothers and sisters in the Pyrenees how it was getting on.
What do you mean? Are you making fun of me?
Not the least. I am only telling you a very strange story, which
is literally true. Come, and sit down on this bench. You can't
catch that great butterfly, he is too strong on the wing for you.
But oh, what a beautiful one!
Yes, orange and black, silver and green, a glorious creature. But
you may see him at home sometimes: that plant close to you, you
cannot see at home.
Why, it is only great spurge, such as grows in the woods at home.
No. It is Irish spurge which grows here, and sometimes in
Devonshire, and then again in the west of Europe, down to the
Pyrenees. Don't touch it. Our wood spurge is poisonous enough,
but this is worse still; if you get a drop of its milk on your lip
or eye, you will be in agonies for half a day. That is the evil
plant with which the poachers kill the salmon.
How do they do that?
When the salmon are spawning up in the little brooks, and the
water is low, they take that spurge, and grind it between two
stones under water, and let the milk run down into the pool; and
at that all the poor salmon turn up dead. Then comes the water-
bailiff, and catches the poachers. Then comes the policeman, with
his sword at his side and his truncheon under his arm: and then
comes a "cheap journey" to Tralee Gaol, in which those foolish
poachers sit and reconsider themselves, and determine not to break
the salmon laws--at least till next time.
But why is it that this spurge, and St. Patrick's cabbage, grow
only here in the west? If they got here of themselves, where did
they come from? All outside there is sea; and they could not
float over that.
Come, I say, and sit down on this bench, and I will tell you a
tale,--the story of the Old Atlantis, the sunken land in the far
West. Old Plato, the Greek, told legends of it, which you will
read some day; and now it seems as if those old legends had some
truth in them, after all. We are standing now on one of the last
remaining scraps of the old Atlantic land. Look down the bay. Do
you see far away, under, the mountains, little islands, long and
low?
Oh, yes.
Some of these are old slate, like the mountains; others are
limestone; bits of the old coral-reef to the west of Ireland which
became dry land.
I know. You told me about it.
Then that land, which is all eaten up by the waves now, once
joined Ireland to Cornwall, and to Spain, and to the Azores, and I
suspect to the Cape of Good Hope, and what is stranger, to
Labrador, on the coast of North America.
Oh! How can you know that?
Listen, and I will give you your first lesson in what I call Bio-
geology.
What a long word!
If you can find a shorter one I shall be very much obliged to you,
for I hate long words. But what it means is,--Telling how the
land has changed in shape, by the plants and animals upon it. And
if you ever read (as you will) Mr. Wallace's new book on the
Indian Archipelago, you will see what wonderful discoveries men
may make about such questions if they will but use their common
sense. You know the common pink heather--ling, as we call it?
Of course.
Then that ling grows, not only here and in the north and west of
Europe, but in the Azores too; and, what is more strange, in
Labrador. Now, as ling can neither swim nor fly, does not common
sense tell you that all those countries were probably joined
together in old times?
Well: but it seems so strange.
So it is, my child; and so is everything. But, as the fool says
in Shakespeare -
"A long time ago the world began,
With heigh ho, the wind and the rain."
And the wind and the rain have made strange work with the poor old
world ever since. And that is about all that we, who are not very
much wiser than Shakespeare's fool, can say about the matter. But
again--the London Pride grows here, and so does another saxifrage
very like it, which we call Saxifraga Geum. Now, when I saw those
two plants growing in the Western Pyrenees, between France and
Spain, and with them the beautiful blue butterwort, which grows in
these Kerry bogs--we will go and find some--what could I say but
that Spain and Ireland must have been joined once?
I suppose it must be so.
Again. There is a little pink butterwort here in the bogs, which
grows, too, in dear old Devonshire and Cornwall; and also in the
south-west of Scotland. Now, when I found that too, in the bogs
near Biarritz, close to the Pyrenees, and knew that it stretched
away along the Spanish coast, and into Portugal, what could my
common sense lead me to say but that Scotland, and Ireland, and
Cornwall, and Spain were all joined once? Those are only a few
examples. I could give you a dozen more. For instance, on an
island away there to the west, and only in one spot, there grows a
little sort of lily, which is found I believe in Brittany, and on
the Spanish and Portuguese heaths, and even in North-west Africa.
And that Africa and Spain were joined not so very long ago at the
Straits of Gibraltar there is no doubt at all.
But where did the Mediterranean Sea run out then?
Perhaps it did not run out at all; but was a salt-water lake, like
the Caspian, or the Dead Sea. Perhaps it ran out over what is now
the Sahara, the great desert of sand, for, that was a sea-bottom
not long ago.
But then, how was this land of Atlantis joined to the Cape of Good
Hope?
I cannot say how, or when either. But this is plain: the place
in the world where the most beautiful heaths grow is the Cape of
Good Hope? You know I showed you Cape heaths once at the nursery
gardener's at home.
Oh yes, pink, and yellow, and white; so much larger than ours.
Then it seems (I only say it seems) as if there must have been
some land once to the westward, from which the different sorts of
heath spread south-eastward to the Cape, and north-eastward into
Europe. And that they came north-eastward into Europe seems
certain; for there are no heaths in America or Asia.
But how north-eastward?
Think. Stand with your face to the south and think. If a thing
comes from the south-west--from there, it must go to the north-
east-towards there. Must it not?
Oh yes, I see.
Now then--The farther you go south-west, towards Spain, the more
kinds of heath there are, and the handsomer; as if their original
home, from which they started, was somewhere down there.
More sorts! What sorts?
How many sorts of heath have we at home?
Three, of course: ling, and purple heath, and bottle heath.
And there are no more in all England, or Wales, or Scotland,
except-- Now, listen. In the very farthest end of Cornwall there
are two more sorts, the Cornish heath and the Orange-bell; and
they say (though I never saw it) that the Orange-bell grows near
Bournemouth.
Well. That is south and west too.
So it is: but that makes five heaths. Now in the south and west
of Ireland all these five heaths grow, and two more: the great
Irish heath, with purple bells, and the Mediterranean heath, which
flowers in spring.
Oh, I know them. They grow in the Rhododendron beds at home.
Of course. Now again. If you went down to Spain, you would find
all those seven heaths, and other sorts with them, and those which
are rare in England and Ireland are common there. About Biarritz,
on the Spanish frontier, all the moors are covered with Cornish
heath, and the bogs with Orange-bell, and lovely they are to see;
and growing among them is a tall heath six feet high, which they
call there bruyere, or Broomheath, because they make brooms of it:
and out of its roots the "briar-root" pipes are made. There are
other heaths about that country, too, whose names I do not know;
so that when you are there, you fancy yourself in the very home of
the heaths: but you are not. They must have come from some land
near where the Azores are now; or how could heaths have got past
Africa, and the tropics, to the Cape of Good Hope?
It seems very wonderful, to be able to find out that there was a
great land once in the ocean all by a few little heaths.
Not by them only, child. There are many other plants, and animals
too, which make one think that so it must have been. And now I
will tell you something stranger still. There may have been a
time--some people say that there must--when Africa and South
America were joined by land.
Africa and South America! Was that before the heaths came here,
or after?
I cannot tell: but I think, probably after. But this is certain,
that there must have been a time when figs, and bamboos, and
palms, and sarsaparillas, and many other sorts of plants could get
from Africa to America, or the other way, and indeed almost round
the world. About the south of France and Italy you will see one
beautiful sarsaparilla, with hooked prickles, zigzagging and
twining about over rocks and ruins, trunks and stems: and when
you do, if you have understanding, it will seem as strange to you
as it did to me to remember that the home of the sarsaparillas is
not in Europe, but in the forests of Brazil, and the River Plate.
Oh, I have heard about their growing there, and staining the
rivers brown, and making them good medicine to drink: but I never
thought there were any in Europe.
There are only one or two, and how they got there is a marvel
indeed. But now-- If there was not dry land between Africa and
South America, how did the cats get into America? For they cannot
swim.
Cats? People might have brought them over.
Jaguars and Pumas, which you read of in Captain Mayne Reid's
books, are cats, and so are the Ocelots or tiger cats.
Oh, I saw them at the Zoological Gardens.
But no one would bring them over, I should think, except to put
them in the Zoo.
Not unless they were very foolish.
And much stronger and cleverer than the savages of South America.
No, those jaguars and pumus have been in America for ages: and
there are those who will tell you--and I think they have some
reason on their side--that the jaguar, with his round patches of
spots, was once very much the same as the African and Indian
leopard, who can climb trees well. So when he got into the tropic
forests of America, he took to the trees, and lived among the
branches, feeding on sloths and monkeys, and never coming to the
ground for weeks, till he grew fatter and stronger and far more
terrible than his forefathers. And they will tell you, too, that
the puma was, perhaps--I only say perhaps--something like the
lion, who (you know) has no spots. But when he got into the
forests, he found very little food under the trees, only a very
few deer; and so he was starved, and dwindled down to the poor
little sheep-stealing rogue he is now, of whom nobody is afraid.
Oh, yes! I remember now A. said he and his men killed six in one
day. But do you think it is all true about the pumas and jaguars?
My child, I don't say that it is true: but only that it is likely
to be true. In science we must be cautious and modest, and ready
to alter our minds whenever we learn fresh facts; only keeping
sure of one thing, that the truth, when we find it out, will be
far more wonderful than any notions of ours. See! As we have
been talking we have got nearly home: and luncheon must be ready.
- * *
Why are you opening your eyes at me like the dog when he wants to
go out walking?
Because I want to go out. But I don't want to go out walking. I
want to go in the yacht.
In the yacht? It does not belong to me.
Oh, that is only fun. I know everybody is going out in it to see
such a beautiful island full of ferns, and have a picnic on the
rocks; and I know you are going.
Then you know more than I do myself.
But I heard them say you were going.
Then they know more than I do myself.
But would you not like to go?
I might like to go very much indeed; but as I have been knocked
about at sea a good deal, and perhaps more than I intend to be
again, it is no novelty to me, and there might be other things
which I liked still better: for instance, spending the afternoon
with you.
Then am I not to go?
I think not. Don't pull such a long face: but be a man, and make
up your mind to it, as the geese do to going barefoot.
But why may I not go?
Because I am not Madam How, but your Daddy.
What can that have to do with it?
If you asked Madam How, do you know what she would answer in a
moment, as civilly and kindly as could be? She would say--Oh yes,
go by all means, and please yourself, my pretty little man. My
world is the Paradise which the Irishman talked of, in which "a
man might do what was right in the sight of his own eyes, and what
was wrong too, as he liked it."
Then Madam How would let me go in the yacht?
Of course she would, or jump overboard when you were in it; or put
your finger in the fire, and your head afterwards; or eat Irish
spurge, and die like the salmon; or anything else you liked.
Nobody is so indulgent as Madam How: and she would be the dearest
old lady in the world, but for one ugly trick that she has. She
never tells any one what is coming, but leaves them to find it out
for themselves. She lets them put their fingers in the fire, and
never tells them that they will get burnt.
But that is very cruel and treacherous of her.
My boy, our business is not to call hard names, but to take things
as we find them, as the Highlandman said when he ate the braxy
mutton. Now shall I, because I am your Daddy, tell you what Madam
How would not have told you? When you get on board the yacht, you
will think it all very pleasant for an hour, as long as you are in
the bay. But presently you will get a little bored, and run about
the deck, and disturb people, and want to sit here, there, and
everywhere, which I should not like. And when you get beyond that
headland, you will find the great rollers coming in from the
Atlantic, and the cutter tossing and heaving as you never felt
before, under a burning sun. And then my merry little young
gentleman will begin to feel a little sick; and then very sick,
and more miserable than he ever felt in his life; and wish a
thousand times over that he was safe at home, even doing sums in
long division; and he will give a great deal of trouble to various
kind ladies--which no one has a right to do, if he can help it.
Of course I do not wish to be sick: only it looks such beautiful
weather.
And so it is: but don't fancy that last night's rain and wind can
have passed without sending in such a swell as will frighten you,
when you see the cutter climbing up one side of a wave, and
running down the other; Madam How tells me that, though she will
not tell you yet.
Then why do they go out?
Because they are accustomed to it. They have come hither all
round from Cowes, past the Land's End, and past Cape Clear, and
they are not afraid or sick either. But shall I tell you how you
would end this evening?--at least so I suspect. Lying miserable
in a stuffy cabin, on a sofa, and not quite sure whether you were
dead or alive, till you were bundled into a boat about twelve
o'clock at night, when you ought to be safe asleep, and come home
cold, and wet, and stupid, and ill, and lie in bed all to-morrow.
But will they be wet and cold?
I cannot be sure; but from the look of the sky there to westward,
I think some of them will be. So do you make up your mind to stay
with me. But if it is fine and smooth to-morrow, perhaps we may
row down the bay, and see plenty of wonderful things.
But why is it that Madam How will not tell people beforehand what
will happen to them, as you have told me?
Now I will tell you a great secret, which, alas! every one has not
found out yet. Madam How will teach you, but only by experience.
Lady Why will teach you, but by something very different--by
something which has been called--and I know no better names for
it--grace and inspiration; by putting into your heart feelings
which no man, not even your father and mother, can put there; by
making you quick to love what is right, and hate what is wrong,
simply because they are right and wrong, though you don't know why
they are right and wrong; by making you teachable, modest,
reverent, ready to believe those who are older and wiser than you
when they tell you what you could never find out for yourself:
and so you will be prudent, that is provident, foreseeing, and
know what will happen if you do so-and-so; and therefore what is
really best and wisest for you.
But why will she be kind enough to do that for me?
For the very same reason that I do it. For God's sake. Because
God is your Father in heaven, as I am your father on earth, and He
does not wish His little child to be left to the hard teaching of
Nature and Law, but to be helped on by many, many unsought and
undeserved favours, such as are rightly called "Means of Grace;"
and above all by the Gospel and good news that you are God's
child, and that God loves you, and has helped and taught you, and
will help you and teach you, in a thousand ways of which you are
not aware, if only you will be a wise child, and listen to Lady
Why, when she cries from her Palace of Wisdom, and the feast which
she has prepared, "Whoso is simple let him turn in hither;" and
says to him who wants understanding--"Come, eat of my bread, and
drink of the wine which I have mingled."
"Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom: I am understanding; I have
strength. By me kings reign, and princes decree justice. By me
princes rule, and nobles, even all the judges of the earth. I
love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find
me. Riches and honour are with me; yea, durable riches and
righteousness."
Yes, I will try and listen to Lady Why: but what will happen if I
do not?
That will happen to you, my child--but God forbid it ever should
happen--which happens to wicked kings and rulers, and all men,
even the greatest and cleverest, if they do not choose to reign by
Lady Why's laws, and decree justice according to her eternal ideas
of what is just, but only do what seems pleasant and profitable to
themselves. On them Lady Why turns round, and says--for she, too,
can be awful, ay dreadful, when she needs -
"Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my
hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my
counsel, and would have none of my reproof--" And then come words
so terrible, that I will not speak them here in this happy place:
but what they mean is this:-
That these foolish people are handed over--as you and I shall be
if we do wrong wilfully--to Madam How and her terrible school-
house, which is called Nature and the Law, to be treated just as
the plants and animals are treated, because they did not choose to
behave like men and children of God. And there they learn,
whether they like or not, what they might have learnt from Lady
Why all along. They learn the great law, that as men sow so they
will reap; as they make their bed so they will lie on it: and
Madam How can teach that as no one else can in earth or heaven:
only, unfortunately for her scholars, she is apt to hit so hard
with her rod, which is called Experience, that they never get over
it; and therefore most of those who will only be taught by Nature
and Law are killed, poor creatures, before they have learnt their
lesson; as many a savage tribe is destroyed, ay and great and
mighty nations too--the old Roman Empire among them.
And the poor Jews, who were carried away captive to Babylon?
Yes; they would not listen to Lady Why, and so they were taken in
hand by Madam How, and were seventy years in her terrible school-
house, learning a lesson which, to do them justice, they never
forgot again. But now we will talk of something pleasanter. We
will go back to Lady Why, and listen to her voice. It sounds
gentle and cheerful enough just now. Listen.
What? is she speaking to us now?
Hush! open your eyes and ears once more, for you are growing
sleepy with my long sermon. Watch the sleepy shining water, and
the sleepy green mountains. Listen to the sleepy lapping of the
ripple, and the sleepy sighing of the woods, and let Lady Why talk
to you through them in "songs without words," because they are
deeper than all words, till you, too, fall asleep with your head
upon my knee.
But what does she say?
She says--"Be still. The fulness of joy is peace." There, you
are fast asleep; and perhaps that is the best thing for you; for
sleep will (so I am informed, though I never saw it happen, nor
any one else) put fresh gray matter into your brain; or save the
wear and tear of the old gray matter; or something else--when they
have settled what it is to do: and if so, you will wake up with a
fresh fiddle-string to your little fiddle of a brain, on which you
are playing new tunes all day long. So much the better: but when
I believe that your brain is you, pretty boy, then I shall believe
also that the fiddler is his fiddle.
CHAPTER XII--HOMEWARD BOUND
Come: I suppose you consider yourself quite a good sailor by now?
Oh, yes. I have never been ill yet, though it has been quite
rough again and again.
What you call rough, little man. But as you are grown such a very
good sailor, and also as the sea is all but smooth, I think we
will have a sail in the yacht to-day, and that a tolerably long
one.
Oh, how delightful! but I thought we were going home; and the
things are all packed up.
And why should we not go homewards in the yacht, things and all?
What, all the way to England?
No, not so far as that; but these kind people, when they came into
the harbour last night, offered to take us up the coast to a town,
where we will sleep, and start comfortably home to-morrow morning.
So now you will have a chance of seeing something of the great sea
outside, and of seeing, perhaps, the whale himself.
I hope we shall see the whale. The men say he has been outside
the harbour every day this week after the fish.
Very good. Now do you keep quiet, and out of the way, while we
are getting ready to go on board; and take a last look at this
pretty place, and all its dear kind people.
And the dear kind dogs too, and the cat and the kittens.
- * *
Now, come along, and bundle into the boat, if you have done
bidding every one good-bye; and take care you don't slip down in
the ice-groovings, as you did the other day. There, we are off at
last.
Oh, look at them all on the rock watching us and waving their
handkerchiefs; and Harper and Paddy too, and little Jimsy and Isy,
with their fat bare feet, and their arms round the dogs' necks. I
am so sorry to leave them all.
Not sorry to go home?
No, but-- They have been so kind; and the dogs were so kind. I am
sure they knew we were going, and were sorry too.
Perhaps they were. They knew we were going away, at all events.
They know what bringing out boxes and luggage means well enough.
Sam knew, I am sure; but he did not care for us. He was only
uneasy because he thought Harper was going, and he should lose his
shooting; and as soon as he saw Harper was not getting into the
boat, he sat down and scratched himself, quite happy. But do dogs
think?
Of course they do, only they do not think in words, as we do.
But how can they think without words?
That is very difficult for you and me to imagine, because we
always think in words. They must think in pictures, I suppose, by
remembering things which have happened to them. You and I do that
in our dreams. I suspect that savages, who have very few words to
express their thoughts with, think in pictures, like their own
dogs. But that is a long story. We must see about getting on
board now, and under way.
- * *
Well, and what have you been doing?
Oh, I looked all over the yacht, at the ropes and curious things;
and then I looked at the mountains, till I was tired; and then I
heard you and some gentleman talking about the land sinking, and I
listened. There was no harm in that?
None at all. But what did you hear him say?
That the land must be sinking here, because there were peat-bogs
everywhere below high-water mark. Is that true?
Quite true; and that peat would never have been formed where the
salt water could get at it, as it does now every tide.
But what was it he said about that cliff over there?
He said that cliff on our right, a hundred feet high, was plainly
once joined on to that low island on our left.
What, that long bank of stones, with a house on it?
That is no house. That is a square lump of mud, the last
remaining bit of earth which was once the moraine of a glacier.
Every year it crumbles into the sea more and more; and in a few
years it will be all gone, and nothing left but the great round
boulder-stones which the ice brought down from the glaciers behind
us.
But how does he know that it was once joined to the cliff?
Because that cliff, and the down behind it, where the cows are
fed, is made up, like the island, of nothing but loose earth and
stones; and that is why it is bright and green beside the gray
rocks and brown heather of the moors at its foot. He knows that
it must be an old glacier moraine; and he has reason to think that
moraine once stretched right across the bay to the low island, and
perhaps on to the other shore, and was eaten out by the sea as the
land sank down.
But how does he know that the land sank?
Of that, he says, he is quite certain; and this is what he says.--
Suppose there was a glacier here, where we are sailing now: it
would end in an ice cliff, such as you have seen a picture of in
Captain Cook's Voyages, of which you are so fond. You recollect
the pictures of Christmas Sound and Possession Bay?
Oh yes, and pictures of Greenland and Spitzbergen too, with
glaciers in the sea.
Then icebergs would break off from that cliff, and carry all the
dirt and stones out to sea, perhaps hundreds of miles away,
instead of letting it drop here in a heap; and what did fall in a
heap here the sea would wash down at once, and smooth it over the
sea-bottom, and never let it pile up in a huge bank like that. Do
you understand?
I think I do.
Therefore, he says, that great moraine must have been built upon
dry land, in the open air; and must have sunk since into the sea,
which is gnawing at it day and night, and will some day eat it all
up, as it would eat up all the dry land in the world, if Madam How
was not continually lifting up fresh land, to make up for what the
sea has carried off.
Oh, look there! some one has caught a fish, and is hauling it up.
What a strange creature! It is not a mackerel, nor a gurnet, nor
a pollock.
How do you know that?
Why, it is running along the top of the water like a snake; and
they never do that. Here it comes. It has got a long beak, like
a snipe. Oh, let me see.
See if you like: but don't get in the way. Remember you are but
a little boy.
What is it? a snake with a bird's head?
No: a snake has no fins; and look at its beak: it is full of
little teeth, which no bird has. But a very curious fellow he is,
nevertheless: and his name is Gar-fish. Some call him Green-
bone, because his bones are green.
But what kind of fish is he? He is like nothing I ever saw.
I believe he is nearest to a pike, though his backbone is
different from a pike, and from all other known fishes.
But is he not very rare?
Oh no: he comes to Devonshire and Cornwall with the mackerel, as
he has come here; and in calm weather he will swim on the top of
the water, and play about, and catch flies, and stand bolt upright
with his long nose in the air; and when the fisher-boys throw him
a stick, he will jump over it again and again, and play with it in
the most ridiculous way.
And what will they do with him?
Cut him up for bait, I suppose, for he is not very good to eat.
Certainly, he does smell very nasty.
Have you only just found out that? Sometimes when I have caught
one, he has made the boat smell so that I was glad to throw him
overboard, and so he saved his life by his nastiness. But they
will catch plenty of mackerel now; for where he is they are; and
where they are, perhaps the whale will be; for we are now well
outside the harbour, and running across the open bay; and lucky
for you that there are no rollers coming in from the Atlantic, and
spouting up those cliffs in columns of white foam.
- * *
"Hoch!"
Ah! Who was that coughed just behind the ship?
Who, indeed? look round and see.
There is nobody. There could not be in the sea.
Look--there, a quarter of a mile away.
Oh! What is that turning over in the water, like a great black
wheel? And a great tooth on it, and--oh! it is gone!
Never mind. It will soon show itself again.
But what was it?
The whale: one of them, at least; for the men say there are two
different ones about the bay. That black wheel was part of his
back, as he turned down; and the tooth on it was his back-fin.
But the noise, like a giant's cough?
Rather like the blast of a locomotive just starting. That was his
breath.
What? as loud as that?
Why not? He is a very big fellow, and has big lungs.
How big is he?
I cannot say: perhaps thirty or forty feet long. We shall be
able to see better soon. He will come up again, and very likely
nearer us, where those birds are.
I don't want him to come any nearer.
You really need not be afraid. He is quite harmless.
But he might run against the yacht.
He might: and so might a hundred things happen which never do.
But I never heard of one of these whales running against a vessel;
so I suppose he has sense enough to know that the yacht is no
concern of his, and to keep out of its way.
But why does he make that tremendous noise only once, and then go
under water again?
You must remember that he is not a fish. A fish takes the water
in through his mouth continually, and it runs over his gills, and
out behind through his gill-covers. So the gills suck-up the air
out of the water, and send it into the fish's blood, just as they
do in the newt-larva.
Yes, I know.
But the whale breathes with lungs like you and me; and when he
goes under water he has to hold his breath, as you and I have.
What a long time he can hold it.
Yes. He is a wonderful diver. Some whales, they say, will keep
under for an hour. But while he is under, mind, the air in his
lungs is getting foul, and full of carbonic acid, just as it would
in your lungs, if you held your breath. So he is forced to come
up at last: and then out of his blowers, which are on the top of
his head, he blasts out all the foul breath, and with it the water
which has got into his mouth, in a cloud of spray. Then he sucks
in fresh air, as much as he wants, and dives again, as you saw him
do just now.
And what does he do under water?
Look--and you will see. Look at those birds. We will sail up to
them; for Mr. Whale will probably rise among them soon.
Oh, what a screaming and what a fighting! How many sorts there
are! What are those beautiful little ones, like great white
swallows, with crested heads and forked tails, who hover, and then
dip down and pick up something?
Terns--sea-swallows. And there are gulls in hundreds, you see,
large and small, gray-backed and black-backed; and over them all
two or three great gannets swooping round and round.
Oh! one has fallen into the sea!
Yes, with a splash just like a cannon ball. And here he comes up
again, with a fish in his beak. If he had fallen on your head,
with that beak of his, he would have split it open. I have heard
of men catching gannets by tying a fish on a board, and letting it
float; and when the gannet strikes at it he drives his bill into
the board, and cannot get it out.
But is not that cruel?
I think so. Gannets are of no use, for eating, or anything else.
What a noise! It is quite deafening. And what are those black
birds about, who croak like crows, or parrots?
Look at them. Some have broad bills, with a white stripe on it,
and cry something like the moor-hens at home. Those are razor-
bills.
And what are those who say "marrock," something like a parrot?
The ones with thin bills? they are guillemots, "murres" as we call
them in Devon: but in some places they call them "marrocks," from
what they say.
And each has a little baby bird swimming behind it. Oh! there:
the mother has cocked up her tail and dived, and the little one is
swimming about looking for her! How it cries! It is afraid of
the yacht.
And there she comes up again, and cries "marrock" to call it.
Look at it swimming up to her, and cuddling to her, quite happy.
Quite happy. And do you not think that any one who took a gun and
shot either that mother or that child would be both cowardly and
cruel?
But they might eat them.
These sea-birds are not good to eat. They taste too strong of
fish-oil. They are of no use at all, except that the gulls' and
terns' feathers are put into girls' hats.
Well they might find plenty of other things to put in their hats.
So I think. Yes: it would be very cruel, very cruel indeed, to
do what some do, shoot at these poor things, and leave them
floating about wounded till they die. But I suppose, if one gave
them one's mind about such doings, and threatened to put the new
Sea Fowl Act in force against them, and fine them, and show them
up in the newspapers, they would say they meant no harm, and had
never thought about its being cruel.
Then they ought to think.
They ought; and so ought you. Half the cruelty in the world, like
half the misery, comes simply from people's not thinking; and boys
are often very cruel from mere thoughtlessness. So when you are
tempted to rob birds' nests, or to set the dogs on a moorhen, or
pelt wrens in the hedge, think; and say--How should I like that to
be done to me?
I know: but what are all the birds doing?
Look at the water, how it sparkles. It is alive with tiny fish,
"fry," "brett" as we call them in the West, which the mackerel are
driving up to the top.
Poor little things! How hard on them! The big fish at them from
below, and the birds at them from above. And what is that?
Thousands of fish leaping out of the water, scrambling over each
other's backs. What a curious soft rushing roaring noise they
make!
Aha! The eaters are going to be eaten in turn. Those are the
mackerel themselves; and I suspect they see Mr. Whale, and are
scrambling out of the way as fast as they can, lest he should
swallow them down, a dozen at a time. Look out sharp for him now.
I hope he will not come very near.
No. The fish are going from us and past us. If he comes up, he
will come up astern of us, so look back. There he is!
That? I thought it was a boat.
Yes. He does look very like a boat upside down. But that is only
his head and shoulders. He will blow next.
"Hoch!"
Oh! What a jet of spray, like the Geysers! And the sun made a
rainbow on the top of it. He is quite still now.
Yes; he is taking a long breath or two. You need not hold my hand
so tight. His head is from us; and when he goes down he will go
right away.
Oh, he is turning head over heels! There is his back fin again.
And-- Ah! was that not a slap! How the water boiled and foamed;
and what a tail he had! And how the mackerel flew out of the
water!
Yes. You are a lucky boy to have seen that. I have not seen one
of those gentlemen show his "flukes," as they call them, since I
was a boy on the Cornish coast.
Where is he gone?
Hunting mackerel, away out at sea. But did you notice something
odd about his tail, as you call it--though it is really none?
It looked as if it was set on flat, and not upright, like a
fish's. But why is it not a tail?
Just because it is set on flat, not upright: and learned men will
tell you that those two flukes are the "rudiments"--that is,
either the beginning, or more likely the last remains--of two hind
feet. But that belongs to the second volume of Madam How's Book
of Kind; and you have not yet learned any of the first volume, you
know, except about a few butterflies. Look here! Here are more
whales coming. Don't be frightened. They are only little ones,
mackerel-hunting, like the big one.
What pretty smooth things, turning head over heels, and saying,
"Hush, Hush!"
They don't really turn clean over; and that "Hush" is their way of
breathing.
Are they the young ones of that great monster?
No; they are porpoises. That big one is, I believe, a bottle-
nose. But if you want to know about the kinds of whales, you must
ask Dr. Flower at the Royal College of Surgeons, and not me: and
he will tell you wonderful things about them.--How some of them
have mouths full of strong teeth, like these porpoises; and
others, like the great sperm whale in the South Sea, have huge
teeth in their lower jaws, and in the upper only holes into which
those teeth fit; others like the bottle-nose, only two teeth or so
in the lower jaw; and others, like the narwhal, two straight tusks
in the upper jaw, only one of which grows, and is what you call a
narwhal's horn.
Oh yes. I know of a walking-stick made of one.
And strangest of all, how the right-whales have a few little teeth
when they are born, which never come through the gums; but,
instead, they grow all along their gums, an enormous curtain of
clotted hair, which serves as a net to keep in the tiny sea-
animals on which they feed, and let the water strain out.
You mean whalebone? Is whalebone hair?
So it seems. And so is a rhinoceros's horn. A rhinoceros used to
be hairy all over in old times: but now he carries all his hair
on the end of his nose, except a few bristles on his tail. And
the right-whale, not to be done in oddity, carries all his on his
gums.
But have no whales any hair?
No real whales: but the Manati, which is very nearly a whale, has
long bristly hair left. Don't you remember M.'s letter about the
one he saw at Rio Janeiro?
This is all very funny: but what is the use of knowing so much
about things' teeth and hair?
What is the use of learning Latin and Greek, and a dozen things
more which you have to learn? You don't know yet: but wiser
people than you tell you that they will be of use some day. And I
can tell you, that if you would only study that gar-fish long
enough, and compare him with another fish something like him, who
has a long beak to his lower jaw, and none to his upper--and how
he eats I cannot guess,--and both of them again with certain
fishes like them, which M. Agassiz has found lately, not in the
sea, but in the river Amazon; and then think carefully enough over
their bones and teeth, and their history from the time they are
hatched--why, you would find out, I believe, a story about the
river Amazon itself, more wonderful than all the fairy tales you
ever read.
Now there is luncheon ready. Come down below, and don't tumble
down the companion-stairs; and by the time you have eaten your
dinner we shall be very near the shore.
- * *
So? Here is my little man on deck, after a good night's rest.
And he has not been the least sick, I hear.
Not a bit: but the cabin was so stuffy and hot, I asked leave to
come on deck. What a huge steamer! But I do not like it as well
as the yacht. It smells of oil and steam, and -
And pigs and bullocks too, I am sorry to say. Don't go forward
above them, but stay here with me, and look round.
Where are we now? What are those high hills, far away to the
left, above the lowlands and woods?
Those are the shore of the Old World--the Welsh mountains.
And in front of us I can see nothing but flat land. Where is
that?
That is the mouth of the Severn and Avon; where we shall be in
half an hour more.
And there, on the right, over the low hills, I can see higher
ones, blue and hazy.
Those are an island of the Old World, called now the Mendip Hills;
and we are steaming along the great strait between the Mendips and
the Welsh mountains, which once was coral reef, and is now the
Severn sea; and by the time you have eaten your breakfast we shall
steam in through a crack in that coral-reef; and you will see what
you missed seeing when you went to Ireland, because you went on
board at night.
- * *
Oh! Where have we got to now? Where is the wide Severn Sea?
Two or three miles beyond us; and here we are in narrow little
Avon.
Narrow indeed. I wonder that the steamer does not run against
those rocks. But how beautiful they are, and how the trees hang
down over the water, and are all reflected in it!
Yes. The gorge of the Avon is always lovely. I saw it first when
I was a little boy like you; and I have seen it many a time since,
in sunshine and in storm, and thought it more lovely every time.
Look! there is something curious.
What? Those great rusty rings fixed into the rock?
Yes. Those may be as old, for aught I know, as Queen Elizabeth's
or James's reign.
But why were they put there?
For ships to hold on by, if they lost the tide.
What do you mean?
It is high tide now. That is why the water is almost up to the
branches of the trees. But when the tide turns, it will all rush
out in a torrent which would sweep ships out to sea again, if they
had not steam, as we have, to help them up against the stream. So
sailing ships, in old times, fastened themselves to those rings,
and rode against the stream till the tide turned, and carried them
up to Bristol.
But what is the tide? And why does it go up and down? And why
does it alter with the moon, as I heard you all saying so often in
Ireland?
That is a long story, which I must tell you something about some
other time. Now I want you to look at something else: and that
is, the rocks themselves, in which the rings are. They are very
curious in my eyes, and very valuable; for they taught me a lesson
in geology when I was quite a boy: and I want them to teach it to
you now.
What is there curious in them?
This. You will soon see for yourself, even from the steamer's
deck, that they are not the same rock as the high limestone hills
above. They are made up of red sand and pebbles; and they are a
whole world younger, indeed some say two worlds younger, than the
limestone hills above, and lie upon the top of the limestone. Now
you may see what I meant when I said that the newer rocks, though
they lie on the top of the older, were often lower down than they
are.
But how do you know that they lie on the limestone?
Look into that corner of the river, as we turn round, and you will
see with your own eyes. There are the sandstones, lying flat on
the turned-up edges of another rock.
Yes; I see. The layers of it are almost upright.
Then that upright rock underneath is part of the great limestone
hill above. So the hill must have been raised out of the sea,
ages ago, and eaten back by the waves; and then the sand and
pebbles made a beach at its foot, and hardened into stone; and
there it is. And when you get through the limestone hills to
Bristol, you will see more of these same red sandstone rocks,
spread about at the foot of the limestone-hills, on the other
side.
But why is the sandstone two worlds newer than the limestone?
Because between that sandstone and that limestone come hundreds of
feet of rock, which carry in them all the coal in England. Don't
you remember that I told you that once before?
Oh yes. But I see no coal between them there.
No. But there is plenty of coal between them over in Wales; and
plenty too between them on the other side of Bristol. What you
are looking at there is just the lip of a great coal-box, where
the bottom and the lid join. The bottom is the mountain
limestone; and the lid is the new red sandstone, or Trias, as they
call it now: but the coal you cannot see. It is stowed inside
the box, miles away from here. But now, look at the cliffs and
the downs, which (they tell me) are just like the downs in the
Holy Land; and the woods and villas, high over your head.
And what is that in the air? A bridge?
Yes--that is the famous Suspension Bridge--and a beautiful work of
art it is. Ay, stare at it, and wonder at it, little man, of
course.
But is it not wonderful?
Yes: it was a clever trick to get those chains across the gulf,
high up in the air: but not so clever a trick as to make a single
stone of which those piers are built, or a single flower or leaf
in those woods. The more you see of Madam How's masonry and
carpentry, the clumsier man's work will look to you. But now we
must get ready to give up our tickets, and go ashore, and settle
ourselves in the train; and then we shall have plenty to see as we
run home; more curious, to my mind, than any suspension bridge.
And you promised to show me all the different rocks and soils as
we went home, because it was so dark when we came from Reading.
Very good.
- * *
Now we are settled in the train. And what do you want to know
first?
More about the new rocks being lower than the old ones, though
they lie on the top of them.
Well, look here, at this sketch.
A boy piling up slates? What has that to do with it?
I saw you in Ireland piling slates against a rock just in this
way. And I thought to myself--"That is something like Madam How's
work."
How?
Why, see. The old rock stands for the mountains of the Old World,
like the Welsh mountains, or the Mendip Hills. The slates stand
for the new rocks, which have been piled up against these, one
over the other. But, you see, each slate is lower than the one
before it, and slopes more; till the last slate which you are
putting on is the lowest of all, though it overlies all.
I see now. I see now.
Then look at the sketch of the rocks between this and home. It is
only a rough sketch, of course: but it will make you understand
something more about the matter. Now. You see, the lump marked
- With twisted lines in it. That stands for the Mendip Hills to
the west, which are made of old red sandstone, very much the same
rock (to speak roughly) as the Kerry mountains.
And why are the lines in it twisted?
To show that the strata, the layers in it, are twisted, and set up
at quite different angles from the limestone.
But how was that done?
By old earthquakes and changes which happened in old worlds, ages
on ages since. Then the edges of the old red sandstone were eaten
away by the sea--and some think by ice too, in some earlier age of
ice; and then the limestone coral reef was laid down on them,
"unconformably," as geologists say--just as you saw the new red
sandstone laid down on the edges of the limestone; and so one
world is built up on the edge of another world, out of its scraps
and ruins.
Then do you see B. With a notch in it? That means these
limestone hills on the shoulder of the Mendips; and that notch is
the gorge of the Avon which we have steamed through.
And what is that black above it?
That is the coal, a few miles off, marked C.
And what is this D, which comes next?
That is what we are on now. New red sandstone, lying
unconformably on the coal. I showed it you in the bed of the
river, as we came along in the cab. We are here in a sort of
amphitheatre, or half a one, with the limestone hills around us,
and the new red sandstone plastered on, as it were, round the
bottom of it inside.
But what is this high bit with E against it?
Those are the high hills round Bath, which we shall run through
soon. They are newer than the soil here; and they are (for an
exception) higher too; for they are so much harder than the soil
here, that the sea has not eaten them away, as it has all the
lowlands from Bristol right into the Somersetshire flats.
- * *
There. We are off at last, and going to run home to Reading,
through one of the loveliest lines (as I think) of old England.
And between the intervals of eating fruit, we will geologize on
the way home, with this little bit of paper to show us where we
are.
What pretty rocks!
Yes. They are a boss of the coal measures, I believe, shoved up
with the lias, the lias lying round them. But I warn you I may
not be quite right: because I never looked at a geological map of
this part of the line, and have learnt what I know, just as I want
you to learn simply by looking out of the carriage window.
Look. Here is lias rock in the side of the cutting; layers of
hard blue limestone, and then layers of blue mud between them, in
which, if you could stop to look, you would find fossils in
plenty; and along that lias we shall run to Bath, and then all the
rocks will change.
- * *
Now, here we are at Bath; and here are the handsome fruit-women,
waiting for you to buy.
And oh, what strawberries and cherries!
Yes. All this valley is very rich, and very sheltered too, and
very warm; for the soft south-western air sweeps up it from the
Bristol Channel; so the slopes are covered with fruit-orchards, as
you will see as you get out of the station.
Why, we are above the tops of the houses.
Yes. We have been rising ever since we left Bristol; and you will
soon see why. Now we have laid in as much fruit as is safe for
you, and away we go.
Oh, what high hills over the town! And what beautiful stone
houses! Even the cottages are built of stone.
All that stone comes out of those high hills, into which we are
going now. It is called Bath-stone freestone, or oolite; and it
lies on the top of the lias, which we have just left. Here it is
marked F.
What steep hills, and cliffs too, and with quarries in them! What
can have made them so steep? And what can have made this little
narrow valley?
Madam How's rain-spade from above, I suppose, and perhaps the sea
gnawing at their feet below. Those freestone hills once stretched
high over our heads, and far away, I suppose, to the westward.
Now they are all gnawed out into cliffs,--indeed gnawed clean
through in the bottom of the valley, where the famous hot springs
break out in which people bathe.
Is that why the place is called Bath?
Of course. But the Old Romans called the place Aquae Solis--the
waters of the sun; and curious old Roman remains are found here,
which we have not time to stop and see.
Now look out at the pretty clear limestone stream running to meet
us below, and the great limestone hills closing over us above.
How do you think we shall get out from among them?
Shall we go over their tops?
No. That would be too steep a climb, for even such a great engine
as this.
Then there is a crack which we can get through?
Look and see.
Why, we are coming to a regular wall of hill, and -
And going right through it in the dark. We are in the Box Tunnel.
- * *
There is the light again: and now I suppose you will find your
tongue.
How long it seemed before we came out!
Yes, because you were waiting and watching, with nothing to look
at: but the tunnel is only a mile and a quarter long after all, I
believe. If you had been looking at fields and hedgerows all the
while, you would have thought no time at all had passed.
What curious sandy rocks on each side of the cutting, in lines and
layers.
Those are the freestone still: and full of fossils they are. But
do you see that they dip away from us? Remember that. All the
rocks are sloping eastward, the way we are going; and each new
rock or soil we come to lies on the top of the one before it. Now
we shall run down hill for many a mile, down the back of the
oolites, past pretty Chippenham, and Wootton-Bassett, towards
Swindon spire. Look at the country, child; and thank God for this
fair English land, in which your lot is cast.
What beautiful green fields; and such huge elm trees; and
orchards; and flowers in the cottage gardens!
Ay, and what crops, too: what wheat and beans, turnips and
mangold. All this land is very rich and easily worked; and
hereabouts is some of the best farming in England. The
Agricultural College at Cirencester, of which you have so often
heard, lies thereaway, a few miles to our left; and there lads go
to learn to farm as no men in the world, save English and Scotch,
know how to farm.
But what rock are we on now?
On rock that is much softer than that on the other side of the
oolite hills: much softer, because it is much newer. We have got
off the oolites on to what is called the Oxford clay; and then, I
believe, on to the Coral rag, and on that again lies what we are
coming to now. Do you see the red sand in that field?
Then that is the lowest layer of a fresh world, so to speak; a
world still younger than the oolites--the chalk world.
But that is not chalk, or anything like it.
No, that is what is called Greensand.
But it is not green, it is red.
I know: but years ago it got the name from one green vein in it,
in which the "Coprolites," as you learnt to call them at
Cambridge, are found; and that, and a little layer of blue clay,
called gault, between the upper Greensand and lower Greensand,
runs along everywhere at the foot of the chalk hills.
I see the hills now. Are they chalk?
Yes, chalk they are: so we may begin to feel near home now. See
how they range away to the south toward Devizes, and Westbury, and
Warminster, a goodly land and large. At their feet, everywhere,
run the rich pastures on which the Wiltshire cheese is made; and
here and there, as at Westbury, there is good iron-ore in the
greensand, which is being smelted now, as it used to be in the
Weald of Surrey and Kent ages since. I must tell you about that
some other time.
But are there Coprolites here?
I believe there are: I know there are some at Swindon; and I do
not see why they should not be found, here and there, all the way
along the foot of the downs, from here to Cambridge.
But do these downs go to Cambridge?
Of course they do. We are now in the great valley which runs
right across England from south-west to north-east, from Axminster
in Devonshire to Hunstanton in Norfolk, with the chalk always on
your right hand, and the oolite hills on your left, till it ends
by sinking into the sea, among the fens of Lincolnshire and
Norfolk.
But what made that great valley?
I am not learned enough to tell. Only this I think we can say--
that once on a time these chalk downs on our right reached high
over our heads here, and far to the north; and that Madam How
pared them away, whether by icebergs, or by sea-waves, or merely
by rain, I cannot tell.
Well, those downs do look very like sea-cliffs.
So they do, very like an old shore-line. Be that as it may, after
the chalk was eaten away, Madam How began digging into the soils
below the chalk, on which we are now; and because they were mostly
soft clays, she cut them out very easily, till she came down, or
nearly down, to the harder freestone rocks which run along on our
left hand, miles away; and so she scooped out this great vale,
which we call here the Vale of White Horse; and further on, the
Vale of Aylesbury; and then the Bedford Level; and then the dear
ugly old Fens.
Is this the Vale of White Horse? Oh, I know about it; I have read
The Scouring of the White Horse.
Of course you have; and when you are older you will read a jollier
book still,--Tom Brown's School Days--and when we have passed
Swindon, we shall see some of the very places described in it,
close on our right.
- * *
There is the White Horse Hill.
The White Horse Hill? But where is the horse? I can see a bit of
him: but he does not look like a horse from here, or indeed from
any other place; he is a very old horse indeed, and a thousand
years of wind and rain have spoilt his anatomy a good deal on the
top of that wild down.
And is that really where Alfred fought the Danes?
As certainly, boy, I believe, as that Waterloo is where the Duke
fought Napoleon. Yes: you may well stare at it with all your
eyes, the noble down. It is one of the most sacred spots on
English soil.
Ah, it is gone now. The train runs so fast.
So it does; too fast to let you look long at one thing: but in
return, it lets you see so many more things in a given time than
the slow old coaches and posters did.--Well? what is it?
I wanted to ask you a question, but you won't listen to me.
Won't I? I suppose I was dreaming with my eyes open. You see, I
have been so often along this line--and through this country, too,
long before the line was made--that I cannot pass it without its
seeming full of memories--perhaps of ghosts.
Of real ghosts?
As real ghosts, I suspect, as any one on earth ever saw; faces and
scenes which have printed themselves so deeply on one's brain,
that when one passes the same place, long years after, they start
up again, out of fields and roadsides, as if they were alive once
more, and need sound sense to send them back again into their
place as things which are past for ever, for good and ill. But
what did you want to know?
Why, I am so tired of looking out of the window. It is all the
same: fields and hedges, hedges and fields; and I want to talk.
Fields and hedges, hedges and fields? Peace and plenty, plenty
and peace. However, it may seem dull, now that the grass is cut;
but you would not have said so two months ago, when the fields
were all golden-green with buttercups, and the whitethorn hedges
like crested waves of snow. I should like to take a foreigner
down the Vale of Berkshire in the end of May, and ask him what he
thought of old England. But what shall we talk about?
I want to know about Coprolites, if they dig them here, as they do
at Cambridge.
I don't think they do. But I suspect they will some day.
But why do people dig them?
Because they are rational men, and want manure for their fields.
But what are Coprolites?
Well, they were called Coprolites at first because some folk
fancied they were the leavings of fossil animals, such as you may
really find in the lias at Lynn in Dorsetshire. But they are not
that; and all we can say is, that a long time ago, before the
chalk began to be made, there was a shallow sea in England, the
shore of which was so covered with dead animals, that the bone-
earth (the phosphate of lime) out of them crusted itself round
every bone, and shell, and dead sea-beast on the shore, and got
covered up with fresh sand, and buried for ages as a mine of
wealth.
But how many millions of dead creatures, there must have been!
What killed them?
We do not know. No more do we know how it comes to pass that this
thin band (often only a few inches thick) of dead creatures should
stretch all the way from Dorsetshire to Norfolk, and, I believe,
up through Lincolnshire. And what is stranger still, this same
bone-earth bed crops out on the south side of the chalk at
Farnham, and stretches along the foot of those downs, right into
Kent, making the richest hop lands in England, through Surrey, and
away to Tunbridge. So that it seems as if the bed lay under the
chalk everywhere, if once we could get down to it.
But how does it make the hop lands so rich?
Because hops, like tobacco and vines, take more phosphorus out of
the soil than any other plants which we grow in England; and it is
the washings of this bone-earth bed which make the lower lands in
Farnham so unusually rich, that in some of them--the garden, for
instance, under the Bishop's castle--have grown hops without
resting, I believe, for three hundred years.
But who found out all this about the Coprolites?
Ah--I will tell you; and show you how scientific men, whom
ignorant people sometimes laugh at as dreamers, and mere pickers
up of useless weeds and old stones, may do real service to their
country and their countrymen, as I hope you will some day.
There was a clergyman named Henslow, now with God, honoured by all
scientific men, a kind friend and teacher of mine, loved by every
little child in his parish. His calling was botany: but he knew
something of geology. And some of these Coprolites were brought
him as curiosities, because they had fossils in them. But he (so
the tale goes) had the wit to see that they were not, like other
fossils, carbonate of lime, but phosphate of lime--bone earth.
Whereon he told the neighbouring farmers that they had a mine of
wealth opened to them, if they would but use them for manure. And
after a while he was listened to. Then others began to find them
in the Eastern counties; and then another man, as learned and wise
as he was good and noble--John Paine of Farnham, also now with
God--found them on his own estate, and made much use and much
money of them: and now tens of thousands of pounds' worth of
valuable manure are made out of them every year, in Cambridgeshire
and Bedfordshire, by digging them out of land which was till
lately only used for common farmers' crops.
But how do they turn Coprolites into manure? I used to see them
in the railway trucks at Cambridge, and they were all like what I
have at home--hard pebbles.
They grind them first in a mill. Then they mix them with
sulphuric acid and water, and that melts them down, and parts them
into two things. One is sulphate of lime (gypsum, as it is
commonly called), and which will not dissolve in water, and is of
little use. But the other is what is called superphosphate of
lime, which will dissolve in water; so that the roots of the
plants can suck it up: and that is one of the richest of manures.
Oh, I know: you put superphosphate on the grass last year.
Yes. But not that kind; a better one still. The superphosphate
from the Copiolites is good; but the superphosphate from fresh
bones is better still, and therefore dearer, because it has in it
the fibrine of the bones, which is full of nitrogen, like gristle
or meat; and all that has been washed out of the bone-earth bed
ages and ages ago. But you must learn some chemistry to
understand that.
I should like to be a scientific man, if one can find out such
really useful things by science.
Child, there is no saying what you might find out, or of what use
you may be to your fellow-men. A man working at science, however
dull and dirty his work may seem at times, is like one of those
"chiffoniers," as they call them in Paris--people who spend their
lives in gathering rags and sifting refuse, but who may put their
hands at any moment upon some precious jewel. And not only may
you be able to help your neighbours to find out what will give
them health and wealth: but you may, if you can only get them to
listen to you, save them from many a foolish experiment, which
ends in losing money just for want of science. I have heard of a
man who, for want of science, was going to throw away great sums
(I believe he, luckily for him, never could raise the money) in
boring for coal in our Bagshot sands at home. The man thought
that because there was coal under the heather moors in the North,
there must needs be coal here likewise, when a geologist could
have told him the contrary. There was another man at Hennequin's
Lodge, near the Wellington College, who thought he would make the
poor sands fertile by manuring them with whale oil, of all things
in the world. So he not only lost all the cost of his whale oil,
but made the land utterly barren, as it is unto this day; and all
for want of science.
And I knew a manufacturer, too, who went to bore an Artesian well
for water, and hired a regular well-borer to do it. But,
meanwhile he was wise enough to ask a geologist of those parts how
far he thought it was down to the water. The geologist made his
calculations, and said:
"You will go through so many feet of Bagshot sand; and so many
feet of London clay; and so many feet of the Thanet beds between
them and the chalk: and then you will win water, at about 412
feet; but not, I think, till then."
The well-sinker laughed at that, and said, "He had no opinion of
geologists, and such-like. He never found any clay in England but
what he could get through in 150 feet."
So he began to bore--150 feet, 200, 300: and then he began to
look rather silly; at last, at 405--only seven feet short of what
the geologist had foretold--up came the water in a regular spout.
But, lo and behold, not expecting to have to bore so deep, he had
made his bore much too small; and the sand out of the Thanet beds
"blew up" into the bore, and closed it. The poor manufacturer
spent hundreds of pounds more in trying to get the sand out, but
in vain; and he had at last to make a fresh and much larger well
by the side of the old one, bewailing the day when he listened to
the well-sinker and not to the geologist, and so threw away more
than a thousand pounds. And there is an answer to what you asked
on board the yacht--What use was there in learning little matters
of natural history and science, which seemed of no use at all?
And now, look out again. Do you see any change in the country?
What?
Why, there to the left.
There are high hills there now, as well as to the right. What are
they?
Chalk hills too. The chalk is on both sides of us now. These are
the Chilterns, all away to Ipsden and Nettlebed, and so on across
Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and into Hertfordshire; and on
again to Royston and Cambridge, while below them lies the Vale of
Aylesbury; you can just see the beginning of it on their left. A
pleasant land are those hills, and wealthy; full of noble houses
buried in the deep beech-woods, which once were a great forest,
stretching in a ring round the north of London, full of deer and
boar, and of wild bulls too, even as late as the twelfth century,
according to the old legend of Thomas e Becket's father and the
fair Saracen, which you have often heard.
I know. But how are you going to get through the chalk hills? Is
there a tunnel as there is at Box and at Micheldever?
No. Something much prettier than a tunnel and something which
took a great many years longer in making. We shall soon meet with
a very remarkable and famous old gentleman, who is a great adept
at digging, and at landscape gardening likewise; and he has dug
out a path for himself through the chalk, which we shall take the
liberty of using also. And his name, if you wish to know it, is
Father Thames.
I see him. What a great river!
Yes. Here he comes, gleaming and winding down from Oxford, over
the lowlands, past Wallingford; but where he is going to it is not
so easy to see.
Ah, here is chalk in the cutting at last. And what a high bridge.
And the river far under our feet. Why we are crossing him again!
Yes; he winds more sharply than a railroad can. But is not this
prettier than a tunnel?
Oh, what hanging-woods, and churches; and such great houses, and
pretty cottages and gardens--all in this narrow crack of a valley!
Ay. Old Father Thames is a good landscape gardener, as I said.
There is Basildon--and Hurley--and Pangbourne, with its roaring
lasher. Father Thames has had to work hard for many an age before
he could cut this trench right through the chalk, and drain the
water out of the flat vale behind us. But I suspect the sea
helped him somewhat, or perhaps a great deal, just where we are
now.
The sea?
Yes. The sea was once--and that not so very long ago--right up
here, beyond Reading. This is the uppermost end of the great
Thames valley, which must have been an estuary--a tide flat, like
the mouth of the Severn, with the sea eating along at the foot of
all the hills. And if the land sunk only some fifty feet,--which
is a very little indeed, child, in this huge, ever-changing
world,--then the tide would come up to Reading again, and the
greater part of London and the county of Middlesex be drowned in
salt water.
How dreadful that would be!
Dreadful indeed. God grant that it may never happen. More
terrible changes of land and water have happened, and are
happening still in the world: but none, I think, could happen
which would destroy so much civilisation and be such a loss to
mankind, as that the Thames valley should become again what it
was, geologically speaking, only the other day, when these gravel
banks, over which we are running to Reading, were being washed out
of the chalk cliffs up above at every tide, and rolled on a beach,
as you have seen them rolling still at Ramsgate.
Now here we are at Reading. There is the carriage waiting, and
away we are off home; and when we get home, and have seen
everybody and everything, we will look over our section once more.
But remember, that when you ran through the chalk hills to
Reading, you passed from the bottom of the chalk to the top of it,
on to the Thames gravels, which lie there on the chalk, and on to
the London clay, which lies on the chalk also, with the Thames
gravels always over it. So that, you see, the newest layers, the
London clay and the gravels, are lower in height than the
limestone cliffs at Bristol, and much lower than the old mountain
ranges of Devonshire and Wales, though in geological order they
are far higher; and there are whole worlds of strata, rocks and
clays, one on the other, between the Thames gravels and the
Devonshire hills.
But how about our moors? They are newer still, you said, than the
London clay, because they lie upon it: and yet they are much
higher than we are here at Reading.
Very well said: so they are, two or three hundred feet higher.
But our part of them was left behind, standing up in banks, while
the valley of the Thames was being cut out by the sea. Once they
spread all over where we stand now, and away behind us beyond
Newbury in Berkshire, and away in front of us, all over where
London now stands.
How can you tell that?
Because there are little caps--little patches--of them left on the
tops of many hills to the north of London; just remnants which the
sea, and the Thames, and the rain have not eaten down. Probably
they once stretched right out to sea, sloping slowly under the
waves, where the mouth of the Thames is now. You know the sand-
cliffs at Bournemouth?
Of course.
Then those are of the same age as the Bagshot sands, and lie on
the London clay, and slope down off the New Forest into the sea,
which eats them up, as you know, year by year and day by day. And
here were once perhaps cliffs just like them, where London Bridge
now stands.
- * *
There, we are rumbling away home at last, over the dear old
heather-moors. How far we have travelled--in our fancy at least--
since we began to talk about all these things, upon the foggy
November day, and first saw Madam How digging at the sand-banks
with her water-spade. How many countries we have talked of; and
what wonderful questions we have got answered, which all grew out
of the first question, How were the heather-moors made? And yet
we have not talked about a hundredth part of the things about
which these very heather-moors ought to set us thinking. But so
it is, child. Those who wish honestly to learn the laws of Madam
How, which we call Nature, by looking honestly at what she does,
which we call Fact, have only to begin by looking at the very
smallest thing, pin's head or pebble, at their feet, and it may
lead them--whither, they cannot tell. To answer any one question,
you find you must answer another; and to answer that you must
answer a third, and then a fourth; and so on for ever and ever.
For ever and ever?
Of course. If we thought and searched over the Universe--ay, I
believe, only over this one little planet called earth--for
millions on millions of years, we should not get to the end of our
searching. The more we learnt, the more we should find there was
left to learn. All things, we should find, are constituted
according to a Divine and Wonderful Order, which links each thing
to every other thing; so that we cannot fully comprehend any one
thing without comprehending all things: and who can do that, save
He who made all things? Therefore our true wisdom is never to
fancy that we do comprehend: never to make systems and theories
of the Universe (as they are called) as if we had stood by and
looked on when time and space began to be; but to remember that
those who say they understand, show, simply by so saying, that
they understand nothing at all; that those who say they see, are
sure to be blind; while those who confess that they are blind, are
sure some day to see. All we can do is, to keep up the childlike
heart, humble and teachable, though we grew as wise as Newton or
as Humboldt; and to follow, as good Socrates bids us, Reason
whithersoever it leads us, sure that it will never lead us wrong,
unless we have darkened it by hasty and conceited fancies of our
own, and so have become like those foolish men of old, of whom it
was said that the very light within them was darkness. But if we
love and reverence and trust Fact and Nature, which are the will,
not merely of Madam How, or even of Lady Why, but of Almighty God
Himself, then we shall be really loving, and reverencing, and
trusting God; and we shall have our reward by discovering
continually fresh wonders and fresh benefits to man; and find it
as true of science, as it is of this life and of the life to come-
-that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into
the heart of man to conceive, what God has prepared for those who
love Him.
Footnotes:
{1} I could not resist the temptation of quoting this splendid
generalisation from Dr. Carpenter's Preliminary Report of the
Dredging Operations of H.M.S. "Lightening," 1868. He attributes
it, generously, to his colleague, Dr. Wyville Thomson. Be it
whose it may, it will mark (as will probably the whole Report when
completed) a new era in Bio-Geology.
End of Project Gutenberg Etext Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley