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 cuttlefish, 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-