[53] Timæus.
[54] The Odyssey.
Isn't it a striking thing how the big sea that can look so fierce takes such tender care of the little coral people? And what extraordinary folks these coral people are! Any good article about them will tell you worlds of interesting things. For instance, you will find the people of whole villages living together with only one backbone. I mean not one backbone apiece but one backbone among them all!
And they have the queerest way with their stomachs, a kind of co-operative digestion, of co-operative housekeeping. (Your mother will be particularly interested in this because it shows the "community kitchen" idea has been thoroughly tried out and it works! If you don't know about "community kitchens" among human housekeepers ask mother to tell you, and then you tell her what you found out about these strange little housekeepers of the sea.)
CHAPTER XI
(NOVEMBER)
It is a noble thing for men ... to make the face of a wall look infinite, and its edge against the sky like an horizon; or even if less than this be reached, it is still delightful to mark the play of passing light on its broad surface, and to see by how many artifices and gradations of tinting and shadow, time and storm will set their wild signatures upon it.
—Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Architecture.
THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALLS
One of the most interesting things in this whole wonderful story of the life history of the world is how men were first able to read it at all. For we know they didn't find it written out in plain print as we have it now. Neither was it told in any one language so that getting hold of the thread of the story they could unravel it all, as other learned men did the picture writing of the Egyptians and the wedge-shaped marks on Assyrian bricks.