Madam How and Lady Why

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Madam How and Lady Why


And the more Synthesis waxed in pride, and the more he trampled upon his
poor brother, the more reckless he grew, and the more willing to deceive
himself. If his real flowers would not grow, he cut out paper flowers,
and painted them and said that they would do just as well as natural
ones. If his dolls would not work, he put strings and wires behind them
to make them nod their heads and open their eyes, and then persuaded
other people, and perhaps half-persuaded himself, that they were alive.
If the hand of his weather-glass went down, he nailed it up to insure a
fine day, and tortured, burnt, or murdered every one who said it did not
keep up of itself. And many other foolish and wicked things he did,
which little boys need not hear of yet.

But at last his punishment came, according to the laws of his
grandmother, Madam How, which are like the laws of the Medes and
Persians, and alter not, as you and all mankind will sooner or later
find; for he grew so rich and powerful that he grew careless and lazy,
and thought about nothing but eating and drinking, till people began to
despise him more and more. And one day he left the dungeon of Analysis
so ill guarded, that Analysis got out and ran away. Great was the hue
and cry after him; and terribly would he have been punished had he been
caught. But, lo and behold, folks had grown so disgusted with Synthesis
that they began to take the part of Analysis. Poor men hid him in their
cottages, and scholars in their studies. And when war arose about
him,--and terrible wars did arise,--good kings, wise statesmen, gallant
soldiers, spent their treasure and their lives in fighting for him. All
honest folk welcomed him, because he was honest; and all wise folk used
him, for, instead of being a conceited tyrant like Synthesis, he showed
himself the most faithful, diligent, humble of servants, ready to do
every man's work, and answer every man's questions. And among them all
he got so well fed that he grew very shortly into the giant that he ought
to have been all along; and was, and will be for many a year to come,
perfectly able to take care of himself.

As for poor Synthesis, he really has fallen so low in these days, that
one cannot but pity him. He now goes about humbly after his brother,
feeding on any scraps that are thrown to him, and is snubbed and rapped
over the knuckles, and told one minute to hold his tongue and mind his
own business, and the next that he has no business at all to mind, till
he has got into such a poor way that some folks fancy he will die, and
are actually digging his grave already, and composing his epitaph. But
they are trying to wear the bear's skin before the bear is killed; for
Synthesis is not dead, nor anything like it; and he will rise up again
some day, to make good friends with his brother Analysis, and by his help
do nobler and more beautiful work than he has ever yet done in the world.

So now Analysis has got the upper hand; so much so that he is in danger
of being spoilt by too much prosperity, as his brother was before him; in
which case he too will have his fall; and a great deal of good it will do
him. And that is the end of my story, and a true story it is.

Now you must remember, whenever you have to do with him, that Analysis,
like fire, is a very good servant, but a very bad master. For, having
got his freedom only of late years or so, he is, like young men when they
come suddenly to be their own masters, apt to be conceited, and to fancy
that he knows everything, when really he knows nothing, and can never
know anything, but only knows about things, which is a very different
matter. Indeed, nowadays he pretends that he can teach his old
grandmother, Madam How, not only how to suck eggs, but to make eggs into
the bargain; while the good old lady just laughs at him kindly, and lets
him run on, because she knows he will grow wiser in time, and learn
humility by his mistakes and failures, as I hope you will from yours.

However, Analysis is a very clever young giant, and can do wonderful work
as long as he meddles only with dead things, like this bit of lime. He
can take it to pieces, and tell you of what things it is made, or seems
to be made; and take them to pieces again, and tell you what each of them
is made of; and so on, till he gets conceited, and fancies that he can
find out some one Thing of all things (which he calls matter), of which
all other things are made; and some Way of all ways (which he calls
force), by which all things are made: but when he boasts in that way, old
Madam How smiles, and says, "My child, before you can say that, you must
remember a hundred things which you are forgetting, and learn a hundred
thousand things which you do not know;" and then she just puts her hand
over his eyes, and Master Analysis begins groping in the dark, and
talking the saddest nonsense. So beware of him, and keep him in his own
place, and to his own work, or he will flatter you, and get the mastery
of you, and persuade you that he can teach you a thousand things of which
he knows no more than he does why a duck's egg never hatches into a
chicken. And remember, if Master Analysis ever grows saucy and conceited
with you, just ask him that last riddle, and you will shut him up at
once.

And why?

Because Analysis can only explain to you a little about dead things, like
stones--inorganic things as they are called. Living things--organisms,
as they are called--he cannot explain to you at all. When he meddles
with them, he always ends like the man who killed his goose to get the
golden eggs. He has to kill his goose, or his flower, or his insect,
before he can analyse it; and then it is not a goose, but only the corpse
of a goose; not a flower, but only the dead stuff of the flower.

And therefore he will never do anything but fail, when he tries to find
out the life in things. How can he, when he has to take the life out of
them first? He could not even find out how a plum-pudding is made by
merely analysing it. He might part the sugar, and the flour, and the
suet; he might even (for he is very clever, and very patient too, the
more honour to him) take every atom of sugar out of the flour with which
it had got mixed, and every atom of brown colour which had got out of the
plums and currants into the body of the pudding, and then, for aught I
know, put the colouring matter back again into the plums and currants;
and then, for aught I know, turn the boiled pudding into a raw one
again,--for he is a great conjurer, as Madam How's grandson is bound to
be: but yet he would never find out how the pudding was made, unless some
one told him the great secret which the sailors in the old story
forgot--that the cook boiled it in a cloth.

This is Analysis's weak point--don't let it be yours--that in all his
calculations he is apt to forget the cloth, and indeed the cook likewise.
No doubt he can analyse the matter of things: but he will keep forgetting
that he cannot analyse their form.

Do I mean their shape?

No, my child; no. I mean something which makes the shape of things, and
the matter of them likewise, but which folks have lost sight of nowadays,
and do not seem likely to get sight of again for a few hundred years. So
I suppose that you need not trouble your head about it, but may just
follow the fashions as long as they last.

About this piece of lime, however, Analysis can tell us a great deal. And
we may trust what he says, and believe that he understands what he says.

Why?

Think now. If you took your watch to pieces, you would probably spoil it
for ever; you would have perhaps broken, and certainly mislaid, some of
the bits; and not even a watchmaker could put it together again. You
would have analysed the watch wrongly. But if a watchmaker took it to
pieces then any other watchmaker could put it together again to go as
well as ever, because they both understand the works, how they fit into
each other, and what the use and the power of each is. Its being put
together again rightly would be a proof that it had been taken to pieces
rightly.

And so with Master Analysis. If he can take a thing to pieces so that
his brother Synthesis can put it together again, you may be sure that he
has done his work rightly.

Now he can take a bit of chalk to pieces, so that it shall become several
different things, none of which is chalk, or like chalk at all. And then
his brother Synthesis can put them together again, so that they shall
become chalk, as they were before. He can do that very nearly, but not
quite. There is, in every average piece of chalk, something which he
cannot make into chalk again when he has once unmade it.

What that is I will show you presently; and a wonderful tale hangs
thereby. But first we will let Analysis tell us what chalk is made of,
as far as he knows.

He will say--Chalk is carbonate of lime.

But what is carbonate of lime made of?

Lime and carbonic acid.

And what is lime?

The oxide of a certain metal, called calcium.

What do you mean?

That quicklime is a certain metal mixed with oxygen gas; and slacked lime
is the same, mixed with water.

So lime is a metal. What is a metal? Nobody knows.

And what is oxygen gas? Nobody knows.

Well, Analysis, stops short very soon. He does not seem to know much
about the matter.

Nay, nay, you are wrong there. It is just "about the matter" that he
does know, and knows a great deal, and very accurately; what he does not
know is the matter itself. He will tell you wonderful things about
oxygen gas--how the air is full of it, the water full of it, every living
thing full of it; how it changes hard bright steel into soft, foul rust;
how a candle cannot burn without it, or you live without it. But what it
is he knows not.

Will he ever know?

That is Lady Why's concern, and not ours. Meanwhile he has a right to
find out if he can. But what do you want to ask him next?

What? Oh! What carbonic acid is. He can tell you that. Carbon and
oxygen gas.

But what is carbon?

Nobody knows.

Why, here is this stupid Analysis at fault again.

Nay, nay, again. Be patient with him. If he cannot tell you what carbon
is, he can tell you what is carbon, which is well worth knowing. He will
tell you, for instance, that every time you breathe or speak, what comes
out of your mouth is carbonic acid; and that, if your breath comes on a
bit of slacked lime, it will begin to turn it back into the chalk from
which it was made; and that, if your breath comes on the leaves of a
growing plant, that leaf will take the carbon out of it, and turn it into
wood. And surely that is worth knowing,--that you may be helping to make
chalk, or to make wood, every time you breathe.

Well; that is very curious.

But now, ask him, What is carbon? And he will tell you, that many things
are carbon. A diamond is carbon; and so is blacklead; and so is charcoal
and coke, and coal in part, and wood in part.

What? Does Analysis say that a diamond and charcoal are the same thing?

Yes.

Then his way of taking things to pieces must be a very clumsy one, if he
can find out no difference between diamond and charcoal.

Well, perhaps it is: but you must remember that, though he is very old--as
old as the first man who ever lived--he has only been at school for the
last three hundred years or so. And remember, too, that he is not like
you, who have some one else to teach you. He has had to teach himself,
and find out for himself, and make his own tools, and work in the dark
besides. And I think it is very much to his credit that he ever found
out that diamond and charcoal were the same things. You would never have
found it out for yourself, you will agree.

No: but how did he do it?

He taught a very famous chemist, Lavoisier, about ninety years ago, how
to burn a diamond in oxygen--and a very difficult trick that is; and
Lavoisier found that the diamond when burnt turned almost entirely into
carbonic acid and water, as blacklead and charcoal do; and more, that
each of them turned into the same quantity of carbonic acid, And so he
knew, as surely as man can know anything, that all these things, however
different to our eyes and fingers, are really made of the same
thing,--pure carbon.

But what makes them look and feel so different?

That Analysis does not know yet. Perhaps he will find out some day; for
he is very patient, and very diligent, as you ought to be. Meanwhile, be
content with him: remember that though he cannot see through a milestone
yet, he can see farther into one than his neighbours. Indeed his
neighbours cannot see into a milestone at all, but only see the outside
of it, and know things only by rote, like parrots, without understanding
what they mean and how they are made.

So now remember that chalk is carbonate of lime, and that it is made up
of three things, calcium, oxygen, and carbon; and that therefore its mark
is CaCO(3), in Analysis's language, which I hope you will be able to read
some day.

But how is it that Analysis and Synthesis cannot take all this chalk to
pieces, and put it together again?

Look here; what is that in the chalk?

Oh! a shepherd's crown, such as we often find in the gravel, only fresh
and white.

Well; you know what that was once. I have often told you:--a live sea-
egg, covered with prickles, which crawls at the bottom of the sea.

Well, I am sure that Master Synthesis could not put that together again:
and equally sure that Master Analysis might spend ages in taking it to
pieces, before he found out how it was made. And--we are lucky to-day,
for this lower chalk to the south has very few fossils in it--here is
something else which is not mere carbonate of lime. Look at it.

A little cockle, something like a wrinkled hazel-nut.

No; that is no cockle. Madam How invented that ages and ages before she
thought of cockles, and the animal which lived inside that shell was as
different from a cockle-animal as a sparrow is from a dog. That is a
Terebratula, a gentleman of a very ancient and worn-out family. He and
his kin swarmed in the old seas, even as far back as the time when the
rocks of the Welsh mountains were soft mud; as you will know when you
read that great book of Sir Roderick Murchison's, _Siluria_. But as the
ages rolled on, they got fewer and fewer, these Terebratulae; and now
there are hardly any of them left; only six or seven sorts are left about
these islands, which cling to stones in deep water; and the first time I
dredged two of them out of Loch Fyne, I looked at them with awe, as on
relics from another world, which had lasted on through unnumbered ages
and changes, such as one's fancy could not grasp.

But you will agree that, if Master Analysis took that shell to pieces,
Master Synthesis would not be likely to put it together again; much less
to put it together in the right way, in which Madam How made it.

And what was that?

By making a living animal, which went on growing, that is, making itself;
and making, as it grew, its shell to live in. Synthesis has not found
out yet the first step towards doing that; and, as I believe, he never
will.

But there would be no harm in his trying?

Of course not. Let everybody try to do everything they fancy. Even if
they fail, they will have learnt at least that they cannot do it.

But now--and this is a secret which you would never find out for
yourself, at least without the help of a microscope--the greater part of
this lump of chalk is made up of things which neither Analysis can
perfectly take to pieces, nor Synthesis put together again. It is made
of dead organisms, that is, things which have been made by living
creatures. If you washed and brushed that chalk into powder, you would
find it full of little things like the Dentalina in this drawing, and
many other curious forms. I will show you some under the microscope one
day.

They are the shells of animals called Foraminifera, because the shells of
some of them are full of holes, through which they put out tiny arms. So
small they are and so many, that there may be, it is said, forty thousand
of them in a bit of chalk an inch every way. In numbers past counting,
some whole, some broken, some ground to the finest powder, they make up
vast masses of England, which are now chalk downs; and in some foreign
countries they make up whole mountains. Part of the building stone of
the Great Pyramid in Egypt is composed, I am told, entirely of them.

And how did they get into the chalk?

Ah! How indeed? Let us think. The chalk must have been laid down at
the bottom of a sea, because there are sea-shells in it. Besides, we
find little atomies exactly like these alive now in many seas; and
therefore it is fair to suppose these lived in the sea also.

Besides, they were not washed into the chalk by any sudden flood. The
water in which they settled must have been quite still, or these little
delicate creatures would have been ground into powder--or rather into
paste. Therefore learned men soon made up their minds that these things
were laid down at the bottom of a deep sea, so deep that neither wind,
nor tide, nor currents could stir the everlasting calm.

Ah! it is worth thinking over, for it shows how shrewd a giant Analysis
is, and how fast he works in these days, now that he has got free and
well fed;--worth thinking over, I say, how our notions about these little
atomies have changed during the last forty years.

We used to find them sometimes washed up among the sea-sand on the wild
Atlantic coast; and we were taught, in the days when old Dr. Turton was
writing his book on British shells at Bideford, to call them Nautili,
because their shells were like Nautilus shells. Men did not know then
that the animal which lives in them is no more like a Nautilus animal
than it is like a cow.

For a Nautilus, you must know, is made like a cuttlefish, with eyes, and
strong jaws for biting, and arms round them; and has a heart, and gills,
and a stomach; and is altogether a very well-made beast, and, I suspect,
a terrible tyrant to little fish and sea-slugs, just as the cuttlefish
is. But the creatures which live in these little shells are about the
least finished of Madam How's works. They have neither mouth nor
stomach, eyes nor limbs. They are mere live bags full of jelly, which
can take almost any shape they like, and thrust out arms--or what serve
for arms--through the holes in their shells, and then contract them into
themselves again, as this Globigerina does. What they feed on, how they
grow, how they make their exquisitely-formed shells, whether, indeed,
they are, strictly speaking, animals or vegetables, Analysis has not yet
found out. But when you come to read about them, you will find that
they, in their own way, are just as wonderful and mysterious as a
butterfly or a rose; and just as necessary, likewise, to Madam How's
work; for out of them, as I told you, she makes whole sheets of down,
whole ranges of hills.

No one knew anything, I believe, about them, save that two or three kinds
of them were found in chalk, till a famous Frenchman, called D'Orbigny,
just thirty years ago, told the world how he had found many beautiful
fresh kinds; and, more strange still, that some of these kinds were still
alive at the bottom of the Adriatic, and of the harbour of Alexandria, in
Egypt.

Then in 1841 a gentleman named Edward Forbes,--now with God--whose name
will be for ever dear to all who love science, and honour genius and
virtue,--found in the AEgean Sea "a bed of chalk," he said, "full of
Foraminifera, and shells of Pteropods," forming at the bottom of the sea.

And what are Pteropods?

What you might call sea-moths (though they are not really moths), which
swim about on the surface of the water, while the right-whales suck them
in tens of thousands into the great whalebone net which fringes their
jaws. Here are drawings of them. 1. Limacina (on which the whales
feed); and 2. Hyalea, a lovely little thing in a glass shell, which lives
in the Mediterranean.

But since then strange discoveries have been made, especially by the
naval officers who surveyed the bottom of the great Atlantic Ocean before
laying down the electric cable between Ireland and America. And this is
what they found:

That at the bottom of the Atlantic were vast plains of soft mud, in some
places 2500 fathoms (15,000 feet) deep; that is, as deep as the Alps are
high. And more: they found out, to their surprise, that the oozy mud of
the Atlantic floor was made up almost entirely of just the same atomies
as make up our chalk, especially globigerinas; that, in fact, a vast bed
of chalk was now forming at the bottom of the Atlantic, with living
shells and sea-animals of the most brilliant colours crawling about on it
in black darkness, and beds of sponges growing out of it, just as the
sponges grew at the bottom of the old chalk ocean, and were all,
generation after generation, turned into flints.

And, for reasons which you will hardly understand, men are beginning now
to believe that the chalk has never ceased to be made, somewhere or
other, for many thousand years, ever since the Winchester Downs were at
the bottom of the sea: and that "the Globigerina-mud is not merely _a_
chalk formation, but a continuation of _the_ chalk formation, so _that we
may be said to be still living in the age of Chalk_." {1} Ah, my little
man, what would I not give to see you, before I die, add one such thought
as that to the sum of human knowledge!

So there the little creatures have been lying, making chalk out of the
lime in the sea-water, layer over layer, the young over the old, the dead
over the living, year after year, age after age--for how long?

Who can tell? How deep the layer of new chalk at the bottom of the
Atlantic is, we can never know. But the layer of live atomies on it is
not an inch thick, probably not a tenth of an inch. And if it grew a
tenth of an inch a year, or even a whole inch, how many years must it
have taken to make the chalk of our downs, which is in some parts 1300
feet thick? How many inches are there in 1300 feet? Do that sum, and
judge for yourself.

One difference will be found between the chalk now forming at the bottom
of the ocean, if it ever become dry land, and the chalk on which you
tread on the downs. The new chalk will be full of the teeth and bones of
whales--warm-blooded creatures, who suckle their young like cows, instead
of laying eggs, like birds and fish. For there were no whales in the old
chalk ocean; but our modern oceans are full of cachalots, porpoises,
dolphins, swimming in shoals round any ship; and their bones and teeth,
and still more their ear-bones, will drop to the bottom as they die, and
be found, ages hence, in the mud which the live atomies make, along with
wrecks of mighty ships

"Great anchors, heaps of pearl,"

and all that man has lost in the deep seas. And sadder fossils yet, my
child, will be scattered on those white plains:--

"To them the love of woman hath gone down,
Dark roll their waves o'er manhood's noble head.
O'er youth's bright locks, and beauty's flowing crown;
Yet shall they hear a voice, 'Restore the dead.'
Earth shall reclaim her precious things from thee.
Give back the dead, thou Sea!"




CHAPTER IX--THE CORAL-REEF


Now you want to know what I meant when I talked of a bit of lime going
out to sea, and forming part of a coral island, and then of a limestone
rock, and then of a marble statue. Very good. Then look at this stone.

What a curious stone! Did it come from any place near here?

No. It came from near Dudley, in Staffordshire, where the soils are
worlds on worlds older than they are here, though they were made in the
same way as these and all other soils. But you are not listening to me.

Why, the stone is full of shells, and bits of coral; and what are these
wonderful things coiled and tangled together, like the snakes in Medusa's
hair in the picture? Are they snakes?

If they are, then they must be snakes who have all one head; for see,
they are joined together at their larger ends; and snakes which are
branched, too, which no snake ever was.

Yes. I suppose they are not snakes. And they grow out of a flower, too;
and it has a stalk, jointed, too, as plants sometimes are; and as fishes'
backbones are too. Is it a petrified plant or flower?

No; though I do not deny that it looks like one. The creature most akin
to it which you ever saw is a star-fish.

What! one of the red star-fishes which one finds on the beach? Its arms
are not branched.

No. But there are star-fishes with branched arms still in the sea. You
know that pretty book (and learned book, too), Forbes's _British Star-
fishes_? You like to look it through for the sake of the vignettes,--the
mermaid and her child playing in the sea.

Oh yes, and the kind bogie who is piping while the sandstars dance; and
the other who is trying to pull out the star-fish which the oyster has
caught.