THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. II 
work, and form green granules in the tiny leaves, 
helping them to take food out of the air, while the 
little rootlets below are drinking water out of the 
ground. The invisible life and invisible sunbeams are 
busy here, setting Actively to work another fairy, the 
force of " chemical attraction," and so the little snow- 
drop plant grows and blossoms, without any help from 
you or me. 
One picture more, and then I hope you will believe 
in my fairies. From the cold garden, you run into the 
house, and find the fire laid indeed in the grate, but 
the wood dead and the coals black, waiting to be 
lighted. You strike a match, and soon there is a 
blazing fire. Where does the heat come from ? Why 
do the coals burn and give out a glowing light ? Have 
you not read of gnomes buried down deep in the earth, 
in mines, and held fast there till some fairy wand 
has released them, and allowed them to come to earth 
again ? Well, thousands and millions of years ago, 
those coals were plants ; and, like the snowdrop in 
the garden of to-day, they caught the sunbeams and 
worked them into their leaves. Then the plants died 
and were buried deep in the earth and the sunbeams 
with them ; and like the gnomes they lay imprisoned 
till the coals were dug out by the miners, and brought 
to your grate ; and just now you yourself took hold 
of the fairy wand which was to release them. You 
struck a match, and its atoms clashing with atoms of 
oxygen in the air, set the invisible fairies " heat " and 
" chemical attraction " to work, and they were soon 
busy within the wood and the coals causing their 
atoms too to clash ; and the sunbeams, so long im- 
