"But if, retaining sense and sight, we could shrink into living atoms and plunge under the water, of what a world of wonders should we then form part! We should find this fairy kingdom peopled with the strangest creatures—creatures that swim with their hair, that have ruby eyes blazing deep in their necks, with telescopic limbs that now are withdrawn wholly within their bodies and now stretched out to many times their own length. Here are some riding at anchor, moored by delicate threads spun out from their toes; and there are others flashing by in glass armor, bristling with sharp spikes or ornamented with bosses and flowing curves; while fastened to a great stem is an animal convolvulus that, by some invisible power, draws a never-ceasing stream of victims into its gaping cup, and tears them to death with hooked jaws deep down within its body.
"Close by it, on the same stem, is something that looks like a filmy heart's-ease. A curious wheelwork runs round its four outspread petals; and a chain of minute things, living and dead, is winding in and out of their curves into a gulf at the back of the flower. What happens to them there we cannot see; for round the stem is raised a tube of golden-brown balls, all regularly piled on each other. Some creature dashes by, and like a flash the flower vanishes within its tube.
"We sink still lower, and now see on the bottom slow gliding lumps of jelly that thrust a shapeless arm out where they will, and grasping their prey with these chance limbs, wrap themselves round their food to get a meal; for they creep without feet, seize without hands, eat without mouths, and digest without stomachs."
Too many, however, still feel only in Nature that which we share "with the weed and the worm;" they love birds as boys do—that is, they love throwing stones at them; or wonder if they are good to eat, as the Esquimaux asked about the watch; or treat them as certain devout Afreedee villagers are said to have treated a descendant of the Prophet—killed him in order to worship at his tomb: but gradually we may hope that the love of Science—the notes "we sound upon the strings of nature" [2]—will become to more and more, as already it is to many, a "faithful and sacred element of human feeling."
Science summons us
"To that cathedral, boundless as our wonder,
Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply;
Its choir the winds and waves, its organ thunder,
Its dome the sky." [3]
Where the untrained eye will see nothing but mire and dirt, Science will often reveal exquisite possibilities. The mud we tread under our feet in the street is a grimy mixture of clay and sand, soot and water. Separate the sand, however, as Ruskin observes—let the atoms arrange themselves in peace according to their nature—and you have the opal. Separate the clay, and it becomes a white earth, fit for the finest porcelain; or if it still further purifies itself, you have a sapphire. Take the soot, and if properly treated it will give you a diamond. While, lastly, the water, purified and distilled, will become a dew-drop, or crystallize into a lovely star. Or, again, you may see as you will in any shallow pool either the mud lying at the bottom, or the image of the heavens above.
Nay, even if we imagine beauties and charms which do not really exist; still if we err at all it is better to do so on the side of charity; like Nasmyth, who tells us in his delightful autobiography, that he used to think one of his friends had a charming and kindly twinkle, and was one day surprised to discover that he had a glass eye.
But I should err indeed were I to dwell exclusively on science as lending interest and charm to our leisure hours. Far from this, it would be impossible to overrate the importance of scientific training on the wise conduct of life.
"Science," said the Royal Commission of 1861, "quickens and cultivates directly the faculty of observation, which in very many persons lies almost dormant through life, the power of accurate and rapid generalization, and the mental habit of method and arrangement; it accustoms young persons to trace the sequence of cause and effect; it familiarizes them with a kind of reasoning which interests them, and which they can promptly comprehend; and it is perhaps the best corrective for that indolence which is the vice of half-awakened minds, and which shrinks from any exertion that is not, like an effort of memory, merely mechanical."