No doubt, however, electricity, as an active cause, bears directly upon all such phenomena.
I remember many years since being greatly perplexed with the discovery (as I then thought it) that in certain parts of the Isle of Wight, and along the Dorsetshire coast, the rows of dark flints imbedded in the upper chalk of the cliff-ranges were all broken; broken small, so that if one were taken out of its chalk socket it crumbled in your hand. Often and often, I turned this fact over in my mind, and sought some apparent way to account for it. But I think I now see one way to account for it; and which may perhaps be judged worthy of acceptance, until a better solution is hit upon. In Dr. Hook’s experiment with that once common household implement, the “flint and steel,” he found that the sparks which “fly” upon collision taking place are minute spherules of metal. And further, that this metal was now not steel any longer, but iron; the fragments struck off having lost their polarity in the moment of contact with the flint.
This experiment shows that silex possesses some remarkable affinity for the magnetic fluid, since in this case it had robbed the steel of it, for those spherules would not answer to the magnet. May not, therefore, the rows of flints in the cliff have attracted the lightning in severe thunderstorms, and been shivered by the blow? This would not necessarily hurl the chalk down.
The Arabs have a proverb which says, “Under the lamp it is dark.” Certainly, the chief mystery of every animated creature seems to reside in its life, and Life is like a burning lamp. Once the life extinct, we can anatomize and analyze, and arrive at many partial conclusions; but, meanwhile, the life has departed, and we do not know what that was. The nearest thing to its likeness is expression; and animals rank high in the scale of being, according as they command and impart expression. A dog or horse have a great deal; a bird some; a reptile or insect, absolutely none to our eyes.
With these latter, however, their habits, while alive, take the place of any more intelligent expression; especially some of their more excited movements. We know by the sound, when a snake is angry; and as to motion, the attack of a provoked hornet is a startling thing to witness. Ordinarily speaking, however, all their habits tend to concealment; no doubt, for the sake of safety. I believe no one ever sees the Sphynx-moth, called a “Death’s-head” (Acherontia Atropos), on the wing. Yet we discern many others which, like it, fly in the hours of dusk. But this insect whirls through the air like a stone from a sling. It has never yet, in my experience as a naturalist, been my lot to meet with the burrowing insect called an Ant-lion. Only twice in my life have I encountered a slow-worm in the woods of Devon and the Isle of Wight. And to instance the case of a far commoner creature, how seldom does it happen to any one to take the large dragon-fly behind his green leaf!
And yet the problems of inanimate matter are perhaps the most difficult to solve. They have deeply exercised philosophers in every age of the world.
“All things considered,” says Newton, “I think it probable that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, hard, impenetrable, movable particles; of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties as most conduced to the end for which He formed them. And that these primitive particles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any of the sensible porous bodies compounded of them; even so hard as never to wear, or break in pieces; no other power being able to divide what God made one in the first Creation. While these corpuscles remain entire, they may compose bodies of one and the same matter and texture in all ages; but should they wear away or break in pieces, the nature of things depending on them would be changed. Water and earth composed of old worn particles and fragments of particles, would not be of the same nature and texture now with water and earth composed of entire particles at the beginning. And therefore, that Nature may be lasting, the changes of corporeal things are to be placed only in the various separations and new associations of these permanent corpuscles.”
So wrote the man, “Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit,” who at the age of twenty-four had already invented the Fluxional Calculus, discovered the Decomposition of Light, and enunciated and proved, in a series of lemmas, the law of Universal Gravitation.
But soft! What is this which steals upon our senses through bobbing apple-blossoms at the open casement? It is the delicious, oystery smell of the Sea, as the afternoon tide runs in with a sound like that of fairy-bells upon the sand and rock and loose shingle.
That scent, and sight, and sound, are altogether irresistible. We throw aside Dr. Buckland and Hugh Miller, clap on a “wide-awake,” rush down at once by the zig-zag path, and madly catch up a bunch of dripping tangle, and kick a hole in the moist sand, and presently find that our “Balmorals” are ancle-deep in the brine of a nimble wave.