strange, more poetical, the more we look at it. The coal on the lire, 

 the table at which I stand, what are they made of? Gas and sunbeams, 

 with a small percentage of ash, or earthy salts, which need hardly be 

 taken into account. 



" 'Gas and sunbeams.' Strange, but true. The life of the growing 

 plant — and what that life is, who can tell? — laid hold of the gases in 

 the air and in the soil, of the carbonic acid, the atmospheric air, the 

 water, for that too is gas. It drank them in through its rootlets; it 

 breathed them in through its leaf pores, that it might distil them into 

 sap, and bud, and leaf, and wood. But it had to take in another ele- 

 ment, without which the distillation and the shaping could never have 

 taken place. It had to drink in the sunbeams, and absorbed them, 

 buried them in itself — no longer as light and heat, but as invisible 

 chemical force, locked up for ages in that woody fibre. 



"So it is! Lord Lytton told us in a beautiful song, how 'the wind 

 and the beam loved the rose.' But nature's poetry is more beautiful 

 than man's. The wind and the beam love the rose — or rather the 

 rose takes the wind and the beam, and builds 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 can not altogether undo 

 its own work. Even in death and decay, it cannot set free the sun- 

 beams imprisoned in its tissue. The sun force must stay, shut up age 

 after age, invisible but strong; working at its own prison cells, trans- 

 muting 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 ig- 

 niting point; the temperature at which it is able to combine with oxy- 

 gen. And then, like a dormant live thing, awaking after ages to the 

 sense of its own powers, its owii needs, the whole lump is seized, atom 

 after atom, with an infectious 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 with the free atmosphere 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." 



NOTE.— If the children are too young- to understand the language of this 

 quotation, it should be omitted. The teacher might, however, translate it 

 into simpler language and make it serve as an interesting object lesson. 

 Should he do this and wish for further information on the subject it may be 

 found in "The Fairy Land of Science," by Arabella Buckley, one of the 

 books in the list adopted by the Indiana Reading Circle Board. 



But while Mr. Kingsley felt that he was helping the people by 

 means of these lectures, he soon decided that he could do far more for 



