The Strange Adventures of a PebbleHawksworth, Hallam
Science
The Strange Adventures of a Pebble
Hawksworth, Hallam
Geology -- Juvenile literature; Physical geography -- Juvenile literature
Another thing: How do the fairies of Roseland remember every spring
just how a rose looked, when the roses of last year have been dead
and gone so long? You see they work without a model, something great
artists seldom do; and in some kinds of work, as busts and portraits
and landscapes, never do at all. Even the most powerful microscope
doesn't show any pattern in the seed for the seed to go by in growing
into the finished plant; or in an egg to tell it what kind of a bird it
is expected to be. No, not the trace of a pattern. What then, guides
the growth of the seed; of an oak, say, so that it finally and always
takes the family form? Some Power, evidently, as intelligent as the
power that moves the hand of the human artist when he paints that oak
into his landscape. How many of us have stopped to think that not only
in the world of mind but in the material world itself, all forms of
_power_ are as invisible as the fairies that work unseen in the rosebud
and the little birds' egg and the big rock? All power--what we call
steam power, wind power, electric power and the rest--are not only
unseen but unseeable, unfeelable, untastable. We know steam power only
when heat gets into the water and makes steam; electric power only when
it gets into a wire or a dynamo; or, passing by unseen ways through the
air, moves the wireless telegraph receiver; gravity power only when it
moves something as the water of a waterfall; or when it is helping to
hold things--the earth and the other worlds--in their appointed paths.
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
You can easily see why evolution is the most talked about of
all phases of science--of the study of this wonderful world we
live in. One reason is it's such an astonishing thing in itself,
this relationship of all forms of life, trees, kittens, birds,
and everything; another reason is that in reading the books on
evolution you're taken into every field of knowledge and into the
most curious and striking aspect of things in those fields. Could
anything be stranger, for example, than a little theatre in a
chicken's egg, over which pass strange shadowy forms that seem to
retell, in a kind of moving picture show, the story of how one form
of life developed out of another?
Drummond's "Ascent of Man" tells about that and covers the whole
subject of evolution. It is one of the books which no one who has
heard of this wonderful story of life should fail to read. Doctor
Drummond's way of telling the story is very attractive. Readers
from the Eighth Grade up to the Eightieth will delight in it,
and they won't stop until they read it from cover to cover. I'll
guarantee that!
Then take such a book as "The World of Life," by Wallace. "Alice in
Wonderland" is nothing to it. Here are some of the things you will
find in it:
How there got to be different kinds of rabbits and what islands
have to do with it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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