Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children

out to sea, and forming part of a coral island, and then of a limestone

e! Did it come from

rlds on worlds older than they are here, though they were made in the

are these wonderful things coiled and tangled together, like

; for see, they are joined together at their larger ends; a

too; and it has a stalk, jointed, too, as plants sometimes are; a

s like one. The creature most akin to

hes which one finds on the be

tty book (and learned book, too), Forbes's British Star-fishes? You like to look it

sandstars dance; and the other who is trying to p

t end? Here it is. No, you shall not look at the vignettes now. We must mind business. Now look at this one; the F

have no

llines and sea-weeds; and it is not till afterwards that it breaks loose from that stalk, and swims away freely into the wi

animal should grow on

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

o

at bush a separate living thing, with its own mouth, and arms, and stomach, budding and growing fresh li

wond

your finger, for it, too, is ma

made of li

en you cut your finger,

cou

ce; 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

a-creatures called, which 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 mout

l 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 s

t strange an

ear 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

w it was made, and how the stalked star-fish, which

y for fancying that a fos

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 mistak

mals and plants? The boys at the village school sa

worms bite too. They are wrong; and they must be told that they are

hat swallows sleep all the win

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

is

nd 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 wh

tone; 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 wh

hat, though his nurse had never heard of Ammonites, she was a wise old dame enough, and knew a hu

o

ave never grown up alive and strong. And if she had not known how to m

she no

of them believed for many hundred years. And no one can be blamed fo

might have

Ammonite was a shell? It is not the least lik

tom of the sea? No more reason, my dear child, than you would have to guess that this stone had

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 neighb

about the exquisite sha

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,

re such thin

e children we can guess at the beauty of their ancestors; just as from the coral-reefs which exist now we can guess how t

s a coral-

Museum full of corals, madrepores, b

y

e 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 animal

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

the delicate little co

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 m

n an island be made i

ds 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 hundred

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?" An

ise above the surface of the

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-n

led "instinct"; and does not think and reason, just as you and I think and reason, though of course not in

y coral-reefs in Br

it 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

ral-reef and coral-mud, which is now called the carboniferous limestone. You see red and purple patches rising out of

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

range 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. Y

from plants and trees, and did plant

nd 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

e 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 lon

e till they became cliffs at Br

s 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

now that the high mountains in Wales were ages older than Windsor Forest, upon whi

t 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;

ng more you want to know? for you look

n the world while al

at there were; the cave-men, of whom I told you, lived many ages after the coal

re was no one to see those beaut

, 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, whi