The coal on the fire; the table at which I write—what are they made of? Gas and sunbeams; with a small percentage of ash, or earthy salts, which need hardly be taken into account.
Gas and sunbeams. Strange, but true.
The life of the growing plant—and what that life is who can tell?—laid hold of the gases in the air and in the soil; of the carbonic acid, the atmospheric air, the water—for that too is gas. It drank them in through its rootlets: it breathed them in through its leaf-pores, that it might distil them into sap, and bud, and leaf, and wood. But it has to take in another element, without which the distillation and the shaping could never have taken place. It had to drink in the sunbeams—that mysterious and complex force which is for ever pouring from the sun, and making itself partly palpable to our senses as heat and light. So the life of the plant seized the sunbeams, and absorbed them, buried them in itself—no longer as light and heat, but as invisible chemical force, locked up for ages in that woody fibre.
So it is. Lord Lytton told us long ago, in a beautiful song, how
The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose.
But Nature’s poetry was more beautiful than man’s. The wind and the beam loved the rose so well that they made the rose—or rather, the rose took the wind and the beam, and built up out of them, by her own inner life, her exquisite texture, hue, and fragrance.
What next? The rose dies; the timber tree dies; decays down into vegetable fibre, is buried, and turned to coal: but the plant cannot altogether undo its own work. Even in death and decay it cannot set free the sunbeams imprisoned in its tissue. The sun-force must stay, shut up age after age, invisible, but strong; working at its own prison-cells; transmuting them, or making them capable of being transmuted by man, into the manifold products of coal—coke, petroleum, mineral pitch, gases, coal-tar, benzole, delicate aniline dyes, and what not, till its day of deliverance comes.
Man digs it, throws it on the fire, a black, dead-seeming lump. A corner, an atom of it, warms till it reaches the igniting point; the temperature at which it is able to combine with oxygen.
And then, like a dormant live thing, awaking after ages to the sense of its own powers, its own needs, the whole lump is seized, atom after atom, with an infectious hunger for that oxygen which it lost centuries since in the bottom of the earth. It drinks the oxygen in at every pore; and burns.
And so the spell of ages is broken. The sun-force bursts its prison-cells, and blazes into the free atmosphere, as light and heat once more; returning in a moment into the same forms in which it entered the growing leaf a thousand centuries since.