8 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
have this glorious gift, and love to picture to them- 
selves all that is told them, and to hear the same tale 
over and over again till they see every bit of it as if it 
were real. This is why they are sure to love science 
if its tales are told them aright ; and I, for one, hope 
the day may never come when we may lose that 
childish clearness of vision, which enables us through 
the temporal things which are seen, to realize those 
eternal truths which are unseen. 
If you have this gift of imagination come with me, 
and in these lectures we will look for the invisible 
fairies of nature. 
Watch a shower of rain. Where do the drops come 
from ? and why are they round, or rather slightly 
oval ? In our fourth lecture we shall see that the 
little particles of water of which the rain-drops are 
made, were held apart and invisible in the air by heat, 
one of the most wonderful of our forces * or fairies, 
till the cold wind passed by and chilled the air. Then, 
when there was no longer so much heat, another 
invisible force, cohesion, which is always ready and 
waiting, seized on the tiny particles at once, and 
locked them together in a drop, the closest form in 
which they could lie. Then as the drops became 
larger and larger they fell into the grasp of another 
invisible force, gravitation, which dragged them down 
to the earth, drop by drop, till they made a shower of 
* I am quite aware of the danger incurred by using this word " force " 
especially in the plural ; and how even the most modest little book may 
suffer at the hands of scientific purists by employing it rashly. As, 
however, the better term " energy " would not serve here, I hope I may 
be forgiven for retaining the much-abused term, especially as I sin in 
very good company. 
