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

by Charles Kingsley

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.