110 TOWN GEOLOGY. [iv. 



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 in- 

 fectious 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 atmos- 

 phere, 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. 



Strange it all is, yet true. But of nature, as of the 

 heart of man, the old saying stands that truth is 

 stranger than fiction. 



