12 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE 
prisoned, leapt into flame. Then you spread out your 
hands and cried, " Oh, how nice and warm ! " and 
little thought that you were warming yourself with 
the sunbeams of ages and ages ago. 
This is no fancy tale ; it is literally true, as we 
shall see in Lecture VIII., that the warmth of a coal 
fire could not exist if the plants of long ago had not 
used the sunbeams to make their leaves, holding them 
ready to give up their warmth again whenever those 
crushed leaves are consumed. 
Now, do you believe in, and care for, my fairy-land ? 
Can you see in your imagination fairy Cohesion ever 
ready to lock atoms together when they draw very 
near to each other : or fairy Gravitation dragging 
rain-drops down to the earth : or the fairy of Crystalli- 
zation building up the snow-flakes in the clouds ? Can 
you picture tiny sunbeam-waves of light and heat 
travelling from the sun to the earth ? Do you care to 
know how another strange fairy, Electricity, flings 
the lightning across the sky and causes the rumbling 
thunder ? Would you like to learn how the sun 
makes pictures of the world on which he shines, so 
that we can carry about with us photographs or 
sun-pictures of all the beautiful scenery of the earth ? 
And have you any curiosity about CJiemical action, 
which works such wonders in air, and land, and sea ? 
If you have any wish to know and make friends of 
these invisible forces, the next question is 
How are you to enter the fairy-land of science ? 
There is but one way. Like the knight or peasant 
in the fairy tales, you must open your eyes. There is 
