I HAVE promised to introduce you today to the fairy-land of
science - a somewhat bold promise, seeing that most of you
probably look upon science as a bundle of dry facts, while fairy-
land is all that is beautiful, and full of poetry and
imagination. But I thoroughly believe myself, and hope to prove
to you, that science is full of beautiful pictures, of real
poetry, and of wonder-working fairies; and what is more, I
promise you they shall be true fairies, whom you will love just
as much when you are old and greyheaded as when you are young;
for you will be able to call them up wherever you wander by land
or by sea, through meadow or through wood, through water or
through air; and though they themselves will always remain
invisible, yet you will see their wonderful poet at work
everywhere around you.
Let us first see for a moment what kind of tales science has to
tell, and how far they are equal to the old fairy tales we all
know so well. Who does not remember the tale of the "Sleeping
Beauty in the Wood," and how under the spell of the angry fairy
the maiden pricked herself with the spindle and slept a hundred
years? How the horses in the stall, the dogs in the court-yard,
the doves on the roof, the cook who was boxing the scullery boy's
ears in the kitchen, and the king and queen with all their
courtiers in the hall remained spell-bound, while a thick hedge
grew up all round the castle and all within was still as death.
But when the hundred years had passed the valiant prince came,
the thorny hedge opened before him bearing beautiful flowers; and
he, entering the castle, reached the room where the princess lay,
and with one sweet kiss raised her and all around her to life
again.
Can science bring any tale to match this?
Tell me, is there anything in this world more busy and active
than water, as it rushes along in the swift brook, or dashes over
the stones, or spouts up in the fountain, or trickles down from
the roof, or shakes itself into ripples on the surface of the
pond as the wind blows over it? But have you never seen this
water spell-bound and motionless? Look out of the window some
cold frosty morning in winter, at the little brook which
yesterday was flowing gently past the house, and see how still it
lies, with the stones over which it was dashing now held tightly
in its icy grasp. Notice the wind-ripples on the pond; they have
become fixed and motionless. Look up at the roof of the house.
There, instead of living doves merely charmed to sleep, we have
running water caught in the very act of falling and turned into
transparent icicles, decorating the eaves with a beautiful
crystal fringe. On every tree and bush you will catch the water-
drops napping, in the form of tiny crystals; while the fountain
looks like a tree of glass with long down-hanging pointed leaves.
Even the damp of your own breath lies rigid and still on the
window-pane frozen into delicate patterns like fern-leaves of
ice.
All this water was yesterday flowing busily, or falling drop by
drop, or floating invisibly in the air; now it is all caught and
spell-bound - by whom? By the enchantments of the frost-giant
who holds it fast in his grip and will not let it go.
But wait awhile, the deliverer is coming. In a few weeks or
days, or it may be in a few hours, the brave sun will shine down;
the dull-grey, leaden sky will melt before his, as the hedge gave
way before the prince in the fairy tale, and when the sunbeam
gently kisses the frozen water it will be set free. Then the
brook will flow rippling on again; the frost-drops will be shaken
down from the trees, the icicles fall from the roof, the moisture
trickle down the window-pane, and in the bright, warm sunshine
all will be alive again.
Is not this a fairy tale of nature? and such as these it is
which science tells.
Again, who has not heard of Catskin, who came out of a hollow
tree, bringing a walnut containing three beautiful dresses - the
first glowing as the sun, the second pale and beautiful as the
moon, the third spangled like the star-lit sky, and each so fine
and delicate that all three could be packed into a walnut shell;
and each one of these tiny structures is not the mere dress but
the home of a living animal. It is a tiny, tiny shell-palace
made of the most delicate lacework, each pattern being more
beautiful than the last; and what is more, the minute creature
that lives in it has built it out of the foam of the sea, though
he himself is nothing more than a drop of jelly.
Lastly, anyone who has read the 'Wonderful Travellers' must
recollect the man whose sight was so keen that he could hit the
eye of a fly sitting on a tree two miles away. But tell me, can
you see gas before it is lighted, even when it is coming out of
the gas-jet close to your eyes? Yet, if you learn to use that
wonderful instrument the spectroscope, it will enable you to tell
one kind of gas from another, even when they are both ninety-one
millions of miles away on the face of the sun; nay more, it will
read for you the nature of the different gases in the far distant
stars, billions of miles away, and actually tell you whether you
could find there any of the same metals which we have on the
earth.
We might find hundreds of such fairy tales in the domain of
science, but these three will serve as examples, and we much pass
on to make the acquaintance of the science-fairies themselves,
and see if they are as real as our old friends.
Tell me, why do you love fairy-land? what is its charm? Is it
not that things happen so suddenly, so mysteriously, and without
man having anything to do with it? In fairy-land, flowers blow,
houses spring up like Aladdin's palace in a single night, and
people are carried hundreds of miles in an instant by the touch
of a fairy wand.
And then this land is not some distant country to which we can
never hope to travel. It is here in the midst of us, only our
eyes must be opened or we cannot see it. Ariel and Puck did not
live in some unknown region. On the contrary, Ariel's song is
"Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly,
After summer, merrily."
The peasant falls asleep some evening in a wood and his eyes are
opened by a fairy wand, so that he sees the little goblins and
imps dancing around him on the green sward, sitting on mushrooms,
or in the heads of the flowers, drinking out of acorn-cups,
fighting with blades of grass, and riding on grasshoppers.
So, too, the gallant knight, riding to save some poor oppressed
maiden, dashes across the foaming torrent; and just in the
middle, as he is being swept away, his eyes are opened, and he
sees fairy water-nymphs soothing his terrified horse and guiding
him gently to the opposite shore. They are close at hand, these
sprites, to the simple peasant or the gallant knight, or to
anyone who has the gift of the fairies and can see them. but the
man who scoffs at them, and does not believe in them or care for
them, he never sees them. Only now and then they play him an
ugly trick, leading him into some treacherous bog and leaving him
to get out as he may.
Now, exactly all this which is true of the fairies of our
childhood is true too of the fairies of science. There are
forces around us, and among us, which I shall ask you to allow me
to call fairies, and these are ten thousand times more wonderful,
more magical, and more beautiful in their work, than those of the
old fairy tales. They, too, are invisible, and many people live
and die without ever seeing them or caring to see them. These
people go about with their eyes shut, either because they will
not open them, or because no one has taught them how to see.
They fret and worry over their own little work and their own
petty troubles, and do not know how to rest and refresh
themselves, by letting the fairies open their eyes and show them
the calm sweet picture of nature. They are like Peter Bell of
whom Wordsworth wrote:-
"A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."
But we will not be like these, we will open our eyes and ask,
"What are these forces or fairies, and how can we see them?"
Just go out into the country, and sit down quietly and watch
nature at work. Listen to the wind as it blows, look at the
clouds rolling overhead, and waves rippling on the pond at your
feet. Hearken to the brook as it flows by, watch the flower-buds
opening one by one, and then ask yourself, "How all this is
done?" Go out in the evening and see the dew gather drop by drop
upon the grass, or trace the delicate hoar-frost crystals which
bespangle every blade on a winter's morning. Look at the vivid
flashes of lightening in a storm, and listen to the pealing
thunder: and then tell me, by what machinery is all this
wonderful work done? Man does none of it, neither could he stop
it if he were to try; for it is all the work of those invisible
forces or fairies whose acquaintance I wish you to make. Day and
night, summer and winter, storm or calm, these fairies are at
work, and we may hear them and know them, and make friends of
them if we will.
There is only one gift we must have before we can learn to know
them - we must have imagination. I do not mean mere fancy, which
creates unreal images and impossible monsters, but imagination,
the power of making pictures or images in our mind, of that which
is, though it is invisible to us. Most children have this
glorious gift, and love to picture to themselves all that is told
them, and to hear the same tale over and over again till they see
every bit of it as if it were real. This is why they are sure to
love science it its tales are told them aright; and I, for one,
hope the day may never come when we may lose that childish
clearness of vision, which enables us through the temporal things
which are seen, to realize those eternal truths which are unseen.
If you have this gift of imagination come with me, and in these
lectures we will look for the invisible fairies of nature.
Watch a shower of rain. Where do the drops come from? and why
are they round, or rather slightly oval? In our fourth lecture
we shall se that the little particles of water of which the
raindrops are made, were held apart and invisible in the air by
heat, one of the most wonderful of our forces* or fairies, till
the cold wind passed by and chilled the air. Then, when there
was no longer so much heat, another invisible force, cohesion,
which is always ready and waiting, seized on the tiny particles
at once, and locked them together in a drop, the closest form in
which they could lie. Then as the drops became larger and larger
they fell into the grasp of another invisible force, gravitation,
which dragged them down to the earth, drop by drop, till they
made a shower of rain. Pause for a moment and think. You have
surely heard of gravitation, by which the sun holds the earth and
the planets, and keeps them moving round him in regular order?
Well, it is this same gravitation which is a t work also whenever
a shower of rain falls to the earth. Who can say that he is not
a great invisible giant, always silently and invisibly toiling in
great things and small whether we wake or sleep?
*(I am quite aware of the danger incurred by using this word
"force", especially in the plural; and how even the most modest
little book may suffer at the hands of scientific purists by
employing it rashly. As, however, the better term "energy" would
not serve here, I hope I may be forgiven for retaining the much-
abused term, especially as I sin in very good company.)
Now the shower is over, the sun comes out and the ground is soon
as dry as though no rain had fallen. Tell me; what has become of
the rain-drops? Part no doubt have sunk into the ground, and as
for the rest, why you will say the sun has dried them up. Yes,
but how? The sun is more than ninety-one millions of miles away;
how has he touched the rain-drops? Have you ever heard that
invisible waves are travelling every second over the space
between the sun and us? We shall see in the next lecture how
these waves are the sun's messengers to the earth, and how they
tear asunder the rain-drops on the ground, scattering them in
tiny particles too small for us to see, and bearing them away to
the clouds. Here are more invisible fairies working every moment
around you, and you cannot even look out of the window without
seeing the work they are doing.
If, however, the day is cold and frosty, the water does not fall
in a shower of rain; it comes down in the shape of noiseless
snow. Go out after such a snow-shower, on a calm day, and look
at some of the flakes which have fallen; you will see, if you
choose good specimens, that they are not mere masses of frozen
water, but that each one is a beautiful six-pointed crystal star.
How have these crystals been built up? What power has been at
work arranging their delicate forms? In the fourth lecture we
shall see that up in the clouds another of our invisible fairies,
which, for want of a better name, we call the "force of
crystallization," has caught hold of the tiny particles of water
before "cohesion" had made them into round drops, and there
silently but rapidly, has moulded them into those delicate
crystal starts know as "snowflakes".
And now, suppose that this snow-shower has fallen early in
February; turn aside for a moment from examining the flakes, and
clear the newly-fallen snow from off the flower-bed on the lawn.
What is this little green tip peeping up out of the ground under
the snowy covering? It is a young snowdrop plant. Can you tell
me why it grows? where it finds its food? what makes it spread
out its leaves and add to its stalk day by day? What fairies are
at work here?
First there is the hidden fairy "life," and of her even our
wisest men know but little. But they know something of her way
of working, and in Lecture VII we shall learn how the invisible
fairy sunbeams have been buy here also; how last year's snowdrop
plant caught them and stored them up in it's bulb, and how now in
the spring, as soon as warmth and moisture creep down into the
earth, these little imprisoned sun-waves begin to be active,
stirring up the matter in the bulb, and making it swell and burst
upwards till it sends out a little shoot through the surface of
the soil. Then the sun-waves above-ground take up the work, and
form green granules in the tiny leaves, helping them to take food
out of the air, while the little rootlets below are drinking
water out of the ground. The invisible life and invisible
sunbeams are busy here, setting actively to work another fairy,
the force of "chemical attraction," and so the little snowdrop
plant grows and blossoms, without any help from you or me.