“How much is billions, mate?” inquired Bill.
“I don’t know,” answered Tom. “Never could find out. You see it’s heaps upon heaps of thousands, for the thousands come first and the billions afterwards; but when I’ve thought uncommon hard, for a long spell at a time, I always get confused, because millions comes in between, d’ye see, and that’s puzzlin’.”
“I think I could give you some notion about these things,” said Fred Borders, who had been quietly listening all the time, but never putting in a word, for, as I have said, Fred was a modest bashful man and seldom spoke much. But we had all come to notice that when Fred spoke, he had always something to say worth hearing; and when he did speak he spoke out boldly enough. We had come to have feelings of respect for our young shipmate, for he was a kind-hearted lad, and we saw by his conversation that he had been better educated than the most of us, so all our tongues stopped as the eyes of the party turned on him.
“Come, Fred, let’s hear it then,” said Tom.
“It’s not much I have to tell,” began Fred, “but it may help to make your minds clearer on this subject. On my first voyage to the whale-fishery (you know, lads, this is my second voyage) I went to the Greenland Seas. We had a young doctor aboard with us—quite a youth; indeed he had not finished his studies at college, but he was cleverer, for all that, than many an older man that had gone through his whole course. I do believe that the reason of his being so clever was, that he was for ever observing things, and studying them, and making notes, and trying to find out reasons. He was never satisfied with knowing a thing; he must always find out why it was. One day I heard him ask the captain what it was that made the sea so green in some parts of those seas. Our captain was an awfully stupid man. So long as he got plenty of oil he didn’t care two straws for the reason of anything. The young doctor had been bothering him that morning with a good many questions, so when he asked him what made the sea green, he answered sharply, ‘I suppose it makes itself green, young man,’ and then he turned from him with a fling.
“The doctor laughed, and came forward among the men, and began to tell us stories and ask questions. Ah! he was a real hearty fellow; he would tell you all kinds of queer things, and would pump you dry of all you knew in no time. Well, but the thing I was going to tell you was this. One of the men said to him he had heard that the greenness of the Greenland Sea was caused by the little things like small bits of jelly on which the whales feed. As soon as he heard this he got a bucket and hauled some sea-water aboard, and for the next ten days he was never done working away with the sea-water; pouring it into tumblers and glasses; looking through it by daylight and by lamplight; tasting it, and boiling it, and examining it with a microscope.”
“What’s a microscope?” inquired one of the men.
“Don’t you know?” said Tom Lokins, “why it’s a glass that makes little things seem big, when ye look through it. I’ve heerd say that beasts that are so uncommon small that you can’t see them at all are made to come into sight and look quite big by means o’ this glass. But I can’t myself say that it’s true.”
“But I can,” said Fred, “for I have seen it with my own eyes. Well, after a good while, I made bold to ask the young doctor what he had found out.
“‘I’ve found,’ said he, ‘that the greenness of these seas is in truth caused by uncountable numbers of medusae—’”