Far from Fairyland (Book 5: Fairy Blue Light - Use Your Imagination eBooks)

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What power has been at work arranging their delicate forms? In the fourth lecture we shall see that up in the clouds another of our invisible fairies, which, for want of a better name, we call the "force of crystallization," has caught hold of the tiny particles of water before "cohesion" had made them into round drops, and there silently but rapidly, has moulded them into those delicate crystal stars known as "snow-flakes.

And now, suppose that this snow-shower has fallen early in February; turn aside for a moment from examining the flakes, and clear the newly-fallen snow from off the flower-bed on the lawn. What is this little green tip peeping up out of the ground under the snowy covering? It is a young snowdrop plant. Can you tell me why it grows? What fairies are at work here? First there is the hidden fairy "life," and of her even our wisest men know but little. But they know something of her way of working, and in Lecture VII.

Then the sun-waves above-ground take up the [Pg 11] 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 snowdrop 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 [Pg 12] prisoned, leapt into flame.

Then you spread out your hands and cried, "Oh, how nice and warm! 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: 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 Chemical 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. There is but one way. Like the knight or peasant in the fairy tales, you must open your eyes. There is [Pg 13] no lack of objects, everything around you will tell some history if touched with the fairy wand of imagination. I have often thought, when seeing some sickly child drawn along the street, lying on its back while other children romp and play, how much happiness might be given to sick children at home or in hospitals, if only they were told the stories which lie hidden in the things around them.

They need not even move from their beds, for sunbeams can fall on them there, and in a sunbeam there are stories enough to occupy a month. The fire in the grate, the lamp by the bedside, the water in the tumbler, the fly on the ceiling above, the flower in the vase on the table, anything, everything, has its history, and can reveal to us nature's invisible fairies.

Only you must wish to see them. If you go through the world looking upon everything only as so much to eat, to drink, and to use, you will never see the fairies of science. But if you ask yourself why things happen, and how the great God above us has made and governs this world of ours; if you listen to the wind, and care to learn why it blows; if you ask the little flower why it opens in the sunshine and closes in the storm; and if when you find questions you cannot answer, you will take the trouble to hunt out in books, or make experiments, to solve your own questions, then you will learn to know and love those fairies.

Mind, I do not advise you to be constantly asking questions of other people; for often a question quickly answered is quickly forgotten, but a difficulty really hunted down is a triumph for ever. For example, [Pg 14] if you ask why the rain dries up from the ground, most likely you will be answered, "that the sun dries it," and you will rest satisfied with the sound of the words.

But if you hold a wet handkerchief before the fire and see the damp rising out of it, then you have some real idea how moisture may be drawn up by heat from the earth. A little foreign niece of mine, only four years old, who could scarcely speak English plainly, was standing one morning near the bedroom window and she noticed the damp trickling down the window-pane. When new drops were formed, I said, "Cissy and auntie have done like this all night in the room.

Then again, you must learn something of the language of science. If you travel in a country with no knowledge of its language, you can learn very little about it: You need not learn hard scientific names, for the best books have the fewest of these, but you must really understand what is meant by ordinary words. For example, how few people can really explain the difference between a solid , such as the wood of the table; a liquid , as water; and a gas , such as I can let off from this gas-jet by turning the tap.

And yet any child can make a picture of this in his mind if only it has been properly put before him. All matter in the world is made up of minute parts or particles; in a solid these particles are locked together so tightly that you must tear them forcibly apart if you wish to alter the shape of the solid piece. If I break or bend this wood I have to force the particles to move round each other, and I have great difficulty in doing it.

But in a liquid , though the particles are still held together, they do not cling so tightly, but are able to roll or glide round each other, so that when you pour water out of a cup on to a table, it loses its cuplike shape and spreads itself out flat. Lastly, in a gas the particles are no longer held together at all, but they try to fly away from each other; and unless you shut a gas in tightly and safely, it will soon have spread all over the room. A solid, therefore, will retain the same bulk and shape unless you forcibly alter it; a liquid will retain the same bulk, but not the same shape if it be left free; a gas will not retain either the same bulk or the same shape, but will spread over as large a space [Pg 16] as it can find wherever it can penetrate.

Such simple things as these you must learn from books and by experiment. Then you must understand what is meant by chemical attraction ; and though I can explain this roughly here, you will have to make many interesting experiments before you will really learn to know this wonderful fairy power. If I dissolve sugar in water, though it disappears it still remains sugar, and does not join itself to the water. I have only to let the cup stand till the water dries, and the sugar will remain at the bottom.

There has been no chemical attraction here. But now I will put something else in water which will call up the fairy power. Here is a little piece of the metal potassium, one of the simple substances of the earth; that is to say, we cannot split it up into other substances, wherever we find it, it is always the same. Now if I put this piece of potassium on the water it does not disappear quietly like the sugar. See how it rolls round and round, fizzing violently, with a blue flame burning round it, and at last goes off with a pop.

You must first know that water is made of two substances, hydrogen and oxygen, and these are not merely held together, but are joined so completely that they have lost themselves and have become [Pg 17] water; and each atom of water is made of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. Now the metal potassium is devotedly fond of oxygen, and the moment I threw it on the water it called the fairy "chemical attraction" to help it, and dragged the atoms of oxygen out of the water and joined them to itself.

In doing this it also caught part of the hydrogen, but only half, and so the rest was left out in the cold. No, not in the cold! Here it found some free oxygen in the air, and it seized upon it so violently, that they made a burning flame, while the potassium with its newly found oxygen and hydrogen sank down quietly into the water as potash. And so you see we have got quite a new substance potash in the basin; made with a great deal of fuss by chemical attraction drawing different atoms together.

When you can really picture this power to yourself it will help you very much to understand what you read and observe about nature. Next, as plants grow around you on every side, and are of so much importance in the world, you must also learn something of the names of the different parts of a flower, so that you may understand those books which explain how a plant grows and lives and forms its seeds. You must also know the common names of the parts of an animal, and of your own body, so that you may be interested in understand [Pg 18] ing the use of the different organs; how you breathe, and how your blood flows; how one animal walks, another flies, and another swims.

Then you must learn something of the various parts of the world, so that you may know what is meant by a river, a plain, a valley, or a delta. All these things are not difficult, you can learn them pleasantly from simple books on physics, chemistry, botany, physiology, and physical geography; and when you understand a few plain scientific terms, then all by yourself, if you will open your eyes and ears, you may wander, happily in the fairy-land of science. Then wherever you go you will find. And now we come to the last part of our subject.

When you have reached and entered the gates of science, how are you to use and enjoy this new and beautiful land? This is a very important question, for you may make a twofold use of it. If you are only ambitious to shine in the world, you may use it chiefly to get prizes, to be at the top of your class, or to pass in examinations; but if you also enjoy discovering its secrets, and desire to learn more and more of nature, and to revel in dreams of its beauty, then you will study science for its own sake as well.

Now it is a good thing to win prizes and be at the top of your class, for it shows that you are industrious; it is a good thing to pass well in examinations, for it shows that you are accurate; but if you study science for this [Pg 19] reason only , do not complain if you find it dull, and dry, and hard to master. You may learn a great deal that is useful, and nature will answer you truthfully if you ask your questions accurately, but she will give you dry facts, just such as you ask for.

If you do not love her for herself she will never take you to her heart. This is the reason why so many complain that science is dry and uninteresting. They forget that though it is necessary to learn accurately, for so only we can arrive at truth, it is equally necessary to love knowledge and make it lovely to those who learn, and to do this we must get at the spirit which lies under the facts. What child which loves its mother's face is content to know only that she has brown eyes, a straight nose, a small mouth, and hair arranged in such and such a manner?

No, it knows that its mother has the sweetest smile of any woman living; that her eyes are loving, her kiss is sweet, and that when she looks grave, then something is wrong which must be put right. And it is in this way that those who wish to enjoy the fairy-land of science must love nature. But it is better still to have a mental picture of the tiny atoms clasping each other, and mingling so as to make a new substance, and to feel how wonderful are the many changing forms of nature.

But it is far sweeter to learn about the life of the little plant, to understand why its peculiar flower is useful to it, and how it feeds itself, and makes its seed.

No one can love dry facts; we must clothe them with real meaning and love the truths they tell, if we wish to enjoy science. Let us take an example to show this. I have here a branch of white coral, a beautiful, delicate piece of nature's work. We will begin by copying a description of it from one of those class-books which suppose children to learn words like parrots, and to repeat them with just as little understanding.

The soft body of the animal is attached to a support, the mouth opening upwards in a row of tentacles. The coral is secreted in the body of the polyp out of the [Pg 21] carbonate of lime in the sea. Thus the coral animalcule rears its polypidom or rocky structure in warm latitudes, and constructs reefs or barriers round islands. It is limited in range of depth from 25 to 30 fathoms. Chemically considered, coral is carbonate of lime; physiologically, it is the skeleton of an animal; geographically it is characteristic of warm latitudes, especially of the Pacific Ocean.

But tell me, does it lead you to love my piece of coral? Have you any picture in your mind of the coral animal, its home, or its manner of working? But now, instead of trying to master this dry, hard passage, take Mr. Huxley's penny lecture on 'Coral and Coral Reefs,' [2] and with the piece of coral in your hand, try really to learn its history.

You will then be able to picture to yourself the coral animal as a kind of sea-anemone, something like those which you have often seen, like red, blue, or green flowers, putting out their feelers in sea-water on our coasts, and drawing in the tiny sea-animals to digest them in that bag of fluid which serves the sea-anemone as a stomach. You will learn how this curious jelly animal can split itself in two, and so form two polyps, or send a bud out of its side and so grow up into a kind of "tree or bush of polyps," or how it can hatch little eggs inside it and throw out young ones from its mouth, provided with little hairs, by means of which they swim to new resting-places.

You will [Pg 22] learn the difference between the animal which builds up the red coral as its skeleton, and the group of animals which build up the white; and you will look with new interest on our piece of white coral, as you read that each of those little cups on its stem with delicate divisions like the spokes of a wheel has been the home of a separate polyp, and that from the sea-water each little jelly animal has drunk in carbonate of lime as you drink in sugar dissolved in water, and then has used it grain by grain to build that delicate cup and add to the coral tree.

We cannot stop to examine all about coral now, we are only learning how to learn, but surely our specimen is already beginning to grow interesting; and when you have followed it out into the great Pacific Ocean, where the wild waves dash restlessly against the coral trees, and have seen these tiny drops of jelly conquering the sea and building huge walls of stone against the rough breakers, you will hardly rest till you know all their history.

Look at that curious circular island in the picture Fig. Such islands as this have been built entirely by the coral animals, and the history of the way in which the reefs have sunk gradually down, as the tiny creatures added to them inch by inch, is as fascinating as the story of the building of any fairy palace in the days of old. Read all this [Pg 23] , and then if you have no coral of your own to examine, go to the British Museum [3] and see the beautiful specimens in the glass cases there, and think that they have been built up under the rolling surf by the tiny jelly animals; and then coral will become a real living thing to you, and you will love the thoughts it awakens.

But people often ask, what is the use of learning all this? If you do not feel by this time how delightful it is to fill your mind with beautiful pictures of nature, perhaps it would be useless to say more. But in this age of ours, when restlessness and love of excitement pervade so many lives, is it nothing to be taken out of ourselves and made to look at the [Pg 24] wonders of nature going on around us?

Do you never feel tired and "out of sorts," and want to creep away from your companions, because they are merry and you are not? Then is the time to read about the stars, and how quietly they keep their course from age to age; or to visit some little flower, and ask what story it has to tell; or to watch the clouds, and try to imagine how the winds drive them across the sky.

No person is so independent as he who can find interest in a bare rock, a drop of water, the foam of the sea, the spider on the wall, the flower underfoot or the stars overhead. And these interests are open to everyone who enters the fairy-land of science. Moreover, we learn from this study to see that there is a law and purpose in everything in the Universe, and it makes us patient when we recognize the quiet noiseless working of nature all around us. Study light, and learn how all colour, beauty, and life depend on the sun's rays; note the winds and currents of the air, regular even in their apparent irregularity, as they carry heat and moisture all over the world.

Watch the water flowing in deep quiet streams, or forming the vast ocean; and then reflect that every drop is guided by invisible forces working according to fixed laws. See plants springing up under the sunlight, learn the secrets of plant life, and how their scents and colours attract the insects. Read how insects cannot live without plants, nor plants without the flitting butterfly or the busy bee.

Arrow to the Sun: Pueblo Indian Tale

Realize that all this is worked by fixed laws, and that out of it even if sometimes in suffering and pain springs the wonderful universe around us. And then say, can you fear [Pg 25] for your own little life, even though it may have its troubles? Can you help feeling a part of this guided and governed nature? We are all groping dimly for the Unseen Power, but no one who loves nature and studies it can ever feel alone or unloved in the world.

Facts, as mere facts, are dry and barren, but nature is full of life and love, and her calm unswerving rule is tending to some great though hidden purpose. You may call this Unseen Power what you will—may lean on it in loving, trusting faith, or bend in reverent and silent awe; but even the little child who lives with nature and gazes on her with open eye, must rise in some sense or other through nature to nature's God. W ho does not love the sunbeams, and feel brighter and merrier as he watches them playing on the wall, sparkling like diamonds on the ripples of the sea, or making bows of coloured light on the waterfall?

Is not the sunbeam so dear to us that it has become a household word for all that is merry and gay? And yet how little even the wisest among us know about the nature and work of these bright messengers of the sun as they dart across space! Did you ever wake quite early in the morning, when it was pitch-dark and you could see nothing, not even your own hand; and then lie watching as time went on till the light came gradually creeping in at the window?

If you have done this you will have noticed that you can at first only just distinguish the dim outline of the furniture; then you can tell the difference between the white cloth on the table and the dark wardrobe beside it; then by degrees all the smaller details, the handles of the drawer, the pattern on the wall, and the different colours of all the objects in the room become clearer and clearer till at last you see all distinctly in broad daylight. What has been happening here? We say that the sun is rising, but we know very well that it is not the sun which moves, but that our earth has been turning slowly round, and bringing the little spot on which we live face to face with the great fiery ball, so that his beams can fall upon us.

Take a small globe, and stick a piece of black plaster over England, then let a lighted lamp represent the sun, and turn the globe slowly, so that the spot creeps round from the dark side away from the lamp, until it catches, first the rays which pass along the side of the globe, then the more direct rays, and [Pg 28] at last stands fully in the blaze of the light.

Just this was happening to our spot of the world as you lay in bed and saw the light appear; and we have to learn to-day what those beams are which fall upon us and what they do for us. First we must learn something about the sun itself, since it is the starting-place of all the sunbeams.

If the sun were a dark mass instead of a fiery one we should have none of these bright cheering messengers, and though we were turned face to face with him every day we should remain in one cold eternal night. Now you will remember we mentioned in the last lecture that it is heat which shakes apart the little atoms of water and makes them float up in the air to fall again as rain; and that if the day is cold they fall as snow, and all the water is turned into ice.

But if the sun were altogether dark, think how bitterly cold it would be; far colder than the most wintry weather ever known, because in the bitterest night some warmth comes out of the earth, where it has been stored from the sunlight which fell during the day. But if we never received any warmth at all, no water would ever rise up into the sky, no rain ever fall, no rivers flow, and consequently no plants could grow and no animals live. All water would be in the form of snow and ice, and the earth would be one great frozen mass with nothing moving upon it. So you see it becomes very interesting for us to learn what the sun is, and how he sends us his beams.

How far away from us do you think he is? On a fine summer's day when we can see him clearly, it looks as if we had only to get into a balloon and [Pg 29] reach him as he sits in the sky, and yet we know roughly that he is more than ninety-one millions of miles distant from our earth. These figures are so enormous that you cannot really grasp them. But imagine yourself in an express train, travelling at the tremendous rate of sixty miles an hour and never stopping. At that rate, if you wished to arrive at the sun to-day you would have been obliged to start years ago.

That is, you must have set off in the early part of the reign of Queen Anne, and you must have gone on, never, never resting, through the reigns of George I. And when you arrived there, how large do you think you would find him to be?

Fairy Blue Light

Anaxagoras, a learned Greek, was laughed at by all his fellow Greeks because he said that the sun was as large as the Peloponnesus, that is about the size of Middlesex. How astonished they would have been if they could have known that not only is he bigger than the whole of Greece, but more than a million times bigger than the whole world!

Our world itself is a very large place, so large that our own country looks only like a tiny speck upon it, and an express train would take nearly a month to travel round it. Yet even our whole globe is nothing in size compared to the sun, for it only measures miles across, while the sun measures more than , Imagine for a moment that you could cut the sun and [Pg 30] the earth each in half as you would cut an apple; then if you were to lay the flat side of the half-earth on the flat side of the half-sun it would take such earths to stretch across the face of the sun.

One of these round spots on the diagram represents the size which our earth would look if placed on the sun; and they are so tiny compared to him that they look only like a string of minute beads stretched across his face. One of the best ways to form an idea of the whole size of the sun is to imagine it to be hollow, like an air-ball, and then see how many earths it would take to fill it.

You would hardly believe that it would take one million, three hundred and thirty-one thousand globes the size of our world squeezed together. Just think, if a huge giant could travel all over the universe and gather worlds, all as big as ours, and were to make first a heap of merely ten such worlds, how huge it would be!

Then he must have a hundred such heaps of ten to make a thousand worlds; and then he must collect again a thousand times that thousand to make a million , and when he had stuffed them all into the sun-ball he would still have only filled three-quarters of it! After hearing this you will not be astonished that such a monster should give out an enormous quantity of light and heat; so enormous that it is almost impossible to form any idea of it. Sir John Herschel has, indeed, tried to picture it for us. He found that a ball of lime with a flame of oxygen and hydrogen playing round it such as we use in magic lanterns and call oxy-hydrogen light becomes so violently hot that it gives the most brilliant artificial light we can get—such that you cannot put your eye near it without injury.

Yet if you wanted to have a light as strong as that of our sun, it would not be enough to make such a lime-ball as big as the sun is. No, you must make it as big as suns, or more than [Pg 32] ,, times as big as our earth, in order to get the right amount of light.

Then you would have a tolerably good artificial sun; for we know that the body of the sun gives out an intense white light, just as the lime-ball does, and that, like it, it has an atmosphere of glowing gases round it. But perhaps we get the best idea of the mighty heat and light of the sun by remembering how few of the rays which dart out on all sides from this fiery ball can reach our tiny globe, and yet how powerful they are. Look at the globe of a lamp in the middle of the room, and see how its light pours out on all sides and into every corner; then take a grain of mustard-seed, which will very well represent the comparative size of our earth, and hold it up at a distance from the lamp.

How very few of all those rays which are filling the room fall on the little mustard-seed, and just so few does our earth catch of the rays which dart out from the sun. In order to see how powerful the sun's rays are, you have only to take a magnifying glass and gather them to a point on a piece of brown paper, for they will set the paper alight. Sir John Herschel tells us that at the Cape of Good Hope the heat was even so great that he cooked a beefsteak and roasted some eggs by merely putting them in the sun, in a box with a glass lid!

Indeed, just as we should all be [Pg 33] frozen to death if the sun were cold, so we should all be burnt up with intolerable heat if his fierce rays fell with all their might upon us. But we have an invisible veil protecting us, made—of what do you think? Of those tiny particles of water which the sunbeams draw up and scatter in the air, and which, as we shall see in Lecture IV. We have now learnt something of the distance, the size, the light, and the heat of the sun—the great source of the sunbeams.

But we are as yet no nearer the answer to the question, What is a sunbeam?

Now suppose I wish to touch you from this platform where I stand, I can do it in two ways. Firstly, I can throw something at you and hit you—in this case a thing will have passed across the space from me to you. Or, secondly, if I could make a violent movement so as to shake the floor of the room, you would feel a quivering motion; and so I should touch you across the whole distance of the room.

But in this case no thing would have passed from me to you but a movement or wave , which passed along the boards of the floor. Again, if I speak to you, how does the sound reach your ear? Not by anything being thrown from my mouth to your ear, but by the motion of the air. When I speak I agitate the air near my mouth, and that makes a wave in the air beyond, and that one, another, and another as we shall see more fully in Lecture VI. Thus we see there are two ways of touching anything at a distance; 1st, by throwing some thing at it and hitting it; 2nd, by sending a movement or wave across to it, as in the case of the quivering boards and the air.

Now the great natural philosopher Newton thought that the sun touched us in the first of these ways, and that sunbeams were made of very minute atoms of matter thrown out by the sun, and making a perpetual cannonade on our eyes. It is easy to understand that this would make us see light and feel heat, just as a blow in the eye makes us see stars, or on the body makes it feel hot: But we know now that there are many facts which cannot be explained on this theory, though we cannot go into them here.

What we will do, is to try and understand what now seems to be the true explanation of a sunbeam. About the same time that Newton wrote, a Dutchman, named Huyghens, suggested that light comes from the sun in tiny waves, travelling across space much in the same way as ripples travel across a pond.

The only difficulty was to explain in what substance these waves could be travelling: There must then be something filling all space between us and the sun, finer than either water or air. And now I must ask you to use all your imagination, for I want you to picture to yourselves something [Pg 35] quite as invisible as the Emperor's new clothes in Andersen's fairy-tale, only with this difference, that our invisible something is very active; and though we can neither see it nor touch it we know it by its effects. You must imagine a fine substance filling all space between us and the sun and the stars.

A substance so very delicate and subtle, that not only is it invisible, but it can pass through solid bodies such as glass, ice, or even wood or brick walls. This substance we call "ether. Now if you can imagine this ether filling every corner of space, so that it is everywhere and passes through everything, ask yourselves, what must happen when a great commotion is going on in one of the large bodies which float in it?

When the atoms of the gases round the sun are clashing violently together to make all its light and heat, do you not think they must shake this ether all around them? And then since the ether stretches on all sides from the sun to our earth and all other planets, must not this quivering travel to us, just as the quivering of the boards would from me to you? Take a basin of water to represent the ether, and take a piece of potassium like that which we used in our last lecture, and hold it with a pair of nippers in the middle of the water.

You will see that as the potassium hisses and the flame burns round it, they will make waves which will travel all over the water to the edge of the basin [Pg 36] and you can imagine how in the same way waves travel over the ether from the sun to us. Straight away from the sun on all sides, never stopping, never resting, but chasing after each other with marvellous quickness, these tiny waves travel out into space by night and by day.

When our spot of the earth where England lies is turned away from them and they cannot touch us, then it is night for us, but directly England is turned so as to face the sun, then they strike on the land, and the water, and warm it; or upon our eyes, making the nerves quiver so that we see light. Look up at the sun and picture to yourself that instead of one great blow from a fist causing you to see stars for a moment, millions of tiny blows from these sun-waves are striking every instant on your eye; then you will easily understand that this would cause you to see a constant blaze of light.

But when the sun is away, if the night is clear we have light from the stars. Do these then too make waves all across the enormous distance between them and us? Certainly they do, for they too are suns like our own, only they are so far off that the waves they send are more feeble, and so we only notice them when the sun's stronger waves are away. A, Hole in the shutter. B, Wire placed in the beam of light.

S S, Screen on which the dark and light bands are caught. But perhaps you will ask, if no one has ever seen these waves nor the ether in which they are made, what right have we to say they are there? Strange as it may seem, though we cannot see them we have measured them and know how large they are, and how many can go into an inch of space. For as these tiny waves are running on straight forward through the room, if we put something in their way, they will have to run [Pg 37] round it; and if you let in a very narrow ray of light through a shutter and put an upright wire in the sunbeam, you actually make the waves run round the wire just as water runs round a post in a river; and they meet behind the wire, just as the water meets in a V shape behind the post.

Now when they meet, they run up against each other, and here it is we catch them. For if they meet comfortably, both rising up in a good wave, they run on together and make a bright line of light; but if they meet higgledy-piggledy, one up and the other down, all in confusion, they stop each other, and then there is no light, but a line of darkness.

And so behind your piece of wire you can catch the waves on a piece of paper, and you will find they make dark and light lines one side by side with the other, and by means of these bands it is possible to find out how large the waves must be. This question is too difficult for us to work [Pg 38] it out here, but you can see that large waves will make broader light and dark bands than small ones will, and that in this way the size of the waves may be measured. And now how large do you think they turn out to be? So very, very tiny that about fifty thousand waves are contained in a single inch of space!

I have drawn on the board the length of an inch, [5] and now I will measure the same space in the air between my finger and thumb. Within this space at this moment there are fifty thousand tiny waves moving up and down! I promised you we would find in science things as wonderful as in fairy tales. Are not these tiny invisible messengers coming incessantly from the sun as wonderful as any fairies? We must next try to realize how fast these waves travel. You will remember that an express train would take years to reach us from the sun; and even a cannon-ball would take from ten to thirteen years to come that distance.

Well, these tiny waves take only seven minutes and a half to come the whole 91 millions of miles. And remember, this movement is going on incessantly, and these waves are always following one after the other so rapidly that they keep up a perpetual cannonade upon the pupil of your eye. So fast do they come that about billion waves enter your eye in one [Pg 39] single second.

F, Round hole in it. A B C, Glass prism. But we do not yet know all about our sunbeam. See, I have here a piece of glass with three sides, called a prism. If I put it in the sunlight which is streaming through the window, what happens? I can make it long or short, as I turn the prism, but the colours always remain arranged in the same way. Here at my left hand is the red, beyond it orange, then yellow, green, blue, indigo or deep blue, and violet, shading one into the other all along the line.

We have all seen these colours dancing on the wall when the sun has been shining brightly on the cut-glass pendants of the chandelier, and you may see them still more distinctly if you let a ray of light into a darkened room, and pass it through the prism as in the diagram Fig. Do they come from the glass? No; for you will remember to have seen them in the rainbow, and in the soap-bubble, and even in a drop of dew or the scum on the top of a pond.

This beautiful coloured line is only our sunbeam again, which has been split up into many colours by passing through the glass, as it is in the rain-drops of the rainbow and the bubbles of the scum of the pond. Till now we have talked of the sunbeam as if it were made of only one set of waves, but in truth it is made of many sets of waves of different sizes, all travelling along together from the sun. These various waves have been measured, and we know that the waves which make up red light are larger and more lazy than those which make violet light, so that there are only thirty-nine thousand red waves in an inch, while there are fifty-seven thousand violet waves in the same space.

How is it then, that if all these different waves, making different colours, hit on our eye, they do not always make us see coloured light? Because, unless they are interfered with, they all travel along together, and you know that all colours, mixed together in proper proportion, make white. I have here a round piece of cardboard, painted with the seven colours in succession several times over. When it is still you can distinguish them all apart, but when I whirl it quickly round—see!

In the same way light looks white to you, because all the different [Pg 41] coloured waves strike on your eye at once. You can easily make one of these cards for yourselves, only the white will always look dirty, because you cannot get the colours pure.

A, Cardboard painted with the seven colours in succession. B, Same cardboard spun quickly round. Now, when the light passes through the three-sided glass or prism, the waves are spread out, and the slow, heavy, red waves lag behind and remain at the lower end R of the coloured line on the wall Fig.

Sharone Stevenson

And now you are very likely eager to ask why the quick waves should make us see one colour, and the slow waves another. This is a very difficult question, for we have a great deal still to learn about the effect of light on the eye. But you can easily imagine that colour is to our eye much the same as music is to our ear. You know we can distinguish different notes when the air-waves play slowly or quickly upon the drum of the ear as we shall see in Lecture VI. Do you think we have now rightly answered the question—What is a sunbeam? We have seen that it is really a succession of tiny rapid waves, travelling from the sun to us across the invisible substance we call "ether," and keeping up a constant cannonade upon everything which comes in their way.

We have also seen that, tiny as these waves are, they can still vary in size, so that one single sunbeam is made up of myriads of different-sized waves, which travel all together and make us see white light; unless for some reason they are scattered apart, so that we see them separately as red, green, blue, or yellow. How they are scattered, and many other secrets of the sun-waves, we cannot stop to consider now, but must pass on to ask—. They do two things—they give us light and heat.

It is by means of them alone that we see anything. When the room was dark you could not distinguish the table, the chairs, or even the walls of the room. Because they had no light-waves to send to your eye. But as the sunbeams began to pour in at the window, the waves played upon the things in the room, and when they hit them they bounded off them back to your eye, as a wave of the sea bounds back from a rock and strikes against a passing boat.

Then, when they fell upon your eye, they entered it and excited the retina, and the nerves, and the image of the chair or the table was carried to your brain. Look around at all the things in this room. Is it not strange to think [Pg 43] that each one of them is sending these invisible messengers straight to your eye as you look at it; and that you see me, and distinguish me from the table, entirely by the kind of waves we each send to you?

Some substances send back hardly any waves of light, but let them all pass through them, and thus we cannot see them. A pane of clear glass, for instance, lets nearly all the light-waves pass through it, and therefore you often cannot see that the glass is there, because no light-messengers come back to you from it. Thus people have sometimes walked up against a glass door and broken it, not seeing it was there. Those substances are transparent which, for some reason unknown to us, allow the ether waves to pass through them without shaking the atoms of which the substance is made.

In clear glass, for example, all the light-waves pass through without affecting the substance of the glass; while in a white wall the larger part of the rays are reflected back to your eye, and those which pass into the wall, by giving motion to its atoms lose their own vibrations. Into polished shining metal the waves hardly enter at all, but are thrown back from the surface; and so a steel knife or a silver spoon are very bright, and are clearly seen. Quicksilver is put at the back of looking-glasses because it reflects so many waves.

It not only sends back those which come from the sun, but those, too, which come from your face. So, when you see yourself in a looking-glass, the sun-waves have first played on your face and bounded off from it to the looking-glass; then, when they strike the looking-glass, they are thrown back again on to the retina of your eye, and [Pg 44] you see your own face by means of the very waves you threw off from it an instant before.

But the reflected light-waves do more for us than this. They not only make us see things, but they make us see them in different colours. What, you will ask, is this too the work of the sunbeams? Certainly; for if the colour we see depends on the size of the waves which come back to us, then we must see things coloured differently according to the waves they send back. For instance, imagine a sunbeam playing on a leaf: The red, orange, yellow, blue, and violet waves are all useful to the leaf, and it does not let them go again.

But it cannot absorb the green waves, and so it throws them back, and they travel to your eye and make you see a green colour. So when you say a leaf is green, you mean that the leaf does not want the green waves of the sunbeam, but sends them back to you. In the same way the scarlet geranium rejects the red waves; this table sends back brown waves; a white tablecloth sends back nearly the whole of the waves, and a black coat scarcely any.

This is why, when there is very little light in the room, you can see a white tablecloth while you would not be able to distinguish a black object, because the few faint rays that are there, are all sent back to you from a white surface. Is it not curious to think that there is really no such thing as colour in the leaf, the table, the coat, or the geranium flower, but we see them of different [Pg 45] colours because, for some reason, they send back only certain coloured waves to our eye? Wherever you look, then, and whatever you see, all the beautiful tints, colours, lights, and shades around you are the work of the tiny sun-waves.

Again, light does a great deal of work when it falls upon plants. Those rays of light which are caught by the leaf are by no means idle; we shall see in Lecture VII.

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We all know that a plant becomes pale and sickly if it has not sunlight, and the reason is, that without these light-waves it cannot get food out of the air, nor make the sap and juices which it needs. When you look at plants and trees growing in the beautiful meadows; at the fields of corn, and at the lovely landscape, you are looking on the work of the tiny waves of light, which never rest all through the day in helping to give life to every green thing that grows.

So far we have spoken only of light; but hold your hand in the sun and feel the heat of the sunbeams, and then consider if the waves of heat do not do work also. There are many waves in a sunbeam which move too slowly to make us see light when they hit our eye, but we can feel them as heat, though we cannot see them as light.

The simplest way of feeling heat-waves is to hold a warm iron near your face. You know that no light comes from it, yet you can feel the heat-waves beating violently against your face and scorching it. Now there are many of these dark heat-rays in a sunbeam, and it is they which do most of the work in the world. In the first place, as they come quivering to the earth, it is they which shake the water-drops apart, so that these are carried up in the air, as we shall see in the next lecture.

And then remember, it is these drops, falling again as rain, which make the rivers and all the moving water on the earth. So also it is the heat-waves which make the air hot and light, and so cause it to rise and make winds and air-currents, and these again give rise to ocean-currents. It is these dark rays, again, which strike upon the land and give it the warmth which enables plants to grow. It is they also which keep up the warmth in our own bodies, both by coming to us directly from the sun, and also in a very roundabout way through plants.

You will remember that plants use up rays of light and heat in growing; then either we eat the plants, or animals eat the plants and we eat the animals; and when we digest the food, that heat comes back in our bodies, which the plants first took from the sunbeam. Breathe upon your hand, and feel how hot your breath is; well, that heat which you feel, was once in a sunbeam, and has travelled from it through the food you have eaten, and has now been at work keeping up the heat of your body.

But there is still another way in which these plants may give out the heat-waves they have imprisoned. You will remember how we learnt in the first lecture that coal is made of plants, and that the heat they give out is the heat these plants once took in. Think how much work is done by burning coals.

Not only are our houses warmed by coal fires and lighted by coal gas, but our steam-engines and machinery work [Pg 47] entirely by water which has been turned into steam by the heat of coal and coke fires; and our steamboats travel all over the world by means of the same power.

In the same way the oil of our lamps comes either from olives, which grow on trees; or from coal and the remains of plants and animals in the earth. Even our tallow candles are made of mutton fat, and sheep eat grass; and so, turn which way we will, we find that the light and heat on our earth, whether they come from fires, or candles, or lamps, or gas, and whether they move machinery, or drive a train, or propel a ship, are equally the work of the invisible waves of ether coming from the sun, which make what we call a sunbeam.

Lastly, there are still some hidden waves which we have not yet mentioned, which are not useful to us either as light or heat, and yet they are not idle. Before I began this lecture, I put a piece of paper, which had been dipped in nitrate of silver, under a piece of glass; and between it and the glass I put a piece of lace. Look what the sun has been doing while I have been speaking.

It has been breaking up the nitrate of silver on the paper and turning it into a deep brown substance; only where the threads of the lace were, and the sun could not touch the nitrate of silver, there the paper has remained light-coloured, and by this means I have a beautiful impression of the lace on the paper.

I will now dip the impression into water in which some hyposulphite of soda is dissolved, and this-will "fix" the picture, that is, prevent the sun acting upon it any more; then the picture will remain distinct, and I can pass it round to you all. In any toyshop you can buy this prepared paper, and set the chemical waves at work to make pictures.

Only you must remember to fix it in the solution afterwards, otherwise the chemical rays will go on working after you have taken the lace away, and all the paper will become brown and your picture will disappear. And now, tell me, may we not honestly say, that the invisible waves which make our sunbeams, are wonderful fairy messengers as they travel eternally and unceasingly across space, never resting, never tiring in doing the work of our world? Little as we have been able to learn about them in one short hour, do they not seem to you worth studying and worth thinking about, as we look at the beautiful results of [Pg 49] their work?

The ancient Greeks worshipped the sun, and condemned to death one of their greatest philosophers, named Anaxagoras, because he denied that it was a god. We can scarcely wonder at this when we see what the sun does for our world; but we know that it is a huge globe made of gases and fiery matter, and not a god.

We are grateful for the sun instead of to him, and surely we shall look at him with new interest, now that we can picture his tiny messengers, the sunbeams, flitting over all space, falling upon our earth, giving us light to see with, and beautiful colours to enjoy, warming the air and the earth, making the refreshing rain, and, in a word, filling the world with life and gladness. D id you ever sit on the bank of a river in some quiet spot where the water was deep and clear, and watch the fishes swimming lazily along? When I was a child this was one of my favourite occupations in the summer [Pg 51] -time on the banks of the Thames, and there was one question which often puzzled me greatly, as I watched the minnows and gudgeon gliding along through the water.

Why should fishes live in something and be often buffeted about by waves and currents, while I and others lived on the top of the earth and not in anything? I do not remember ever asking anyone about this; and if I had, in those days people did not pay much attention to children's questions, and probably nobody would have told me, what I now tell you, that we do live in something quite as real and often quite as rough and stormy as the water in which the fishes swim.

The something in which we live is air, and the reason that we do not perceive it, is that we are in it, and that it is a gas and invisible to us; while we are above the water in which the fishes live, and it is a liquid which our eyes can perceive. But let us suppose for a moment that a being, whose eyes were so made that he could see gases as we see liquids, was looking down from a distance upon our earth. He would see an ocean of air, or aerial ocean, all round the globe, with birds floating about in it, and people walking along the bottom, just as we see fish gliding along the bottom of a river.

It is true, he would never see even the birds come near to the surface, for the highest-flying bird, the condor, never soars more than five miles from the ground, and our atmosphere, as we shall see, is at least miles high. So he would call us all deep-air creatures, just as we talk of deep-sea animals; and if we can imagine that he fished in this air-ocean, and could pull one of us out of it into space, he would find that we should [Pg 52] gasp and die just as fishes do when pulled out of the water. Definitely an interesting and compelling piece of science fiction, though.

Fat Englishman meme hacker riding a tiny mammoth saves a race of korean bio engineered blue sex slaves from a little girl that gave them consciousness and then turned itself into a construct living in the vastness of the Net. Les romans de McAuley sont toujours assez indescriptibles. Celui-ci, toutefois, est assez clair. Enfin, assez clair, assz clair, faut voir De la drogue autrement dit.

Cela dit, il ne faut pas se leurrer, un roman ne tient que si son intrigue vaut le coup. Remember, this book was first published in The first third of the book is great fun, full of a compelling and frightening near-future London. Given this was written in , it's an amazingly accurate dystopian conception. Alex is an interesting quasi-hero, and the accelerated divide between rich and poor is clearly shown. A global climate disaster has already occurred as the story begins, horrific in its implications.

The war between rich and poor, corporations and workers, is nicely i Remember, this book was first published in The war between rich and poor, corporations and workers, is nicely imagined. And the gene engineering and nano-bots are firmly founded in hard science.

However, after the first third of the book, the narrative shifts to a very confusing perspective of all new, mostly non-human characters. The cruelty here is depressing, and the plot wanders around and around. The last third of the book or so, some plot direction is restored, but quickly deteriorates into a repetitive random walk around war zones, concluding in a 30 page yawn sequence, and ending the book with a big "who cares".

Given this is one of McAuley's first books, much can be forgiven, and the hard science attempts and good beginning pull this up to three stars. I suggest you read my "updates" below. There are some fine quotes, and one exposition is very fine. For the last century saw the deposition of the paternal God who was set on the throne of Zeus, which was once her throne. The Age of Theocracy in the West was already in decline when in our country Cromwell forcefully rejected the ceremonies that obscured the godhead from the common man.

The god of science and reason, Apollo, was raised up in His place, and at either side of Apollo were Pluto and Mercury. I worshipped Apollo and Mercury when I was young, but it is Pluto who is in the ascendant now. I really liked this book when I first started it but there were a few things that I struggled with later on. Initially it came across as a less extreme form of cyberpunk than William Gibson's but then the description of the futuristic nanobotery became a little too complex. Some of these concepts were interesting but I got lost in the details.

I realise that it's supposed to be like this to a certain extent but it was a little too much, like showing off. I was ok with the present tense narration I really liked this book when I first started it but there were a few things that I struggled with later on. I was ok with the present tense narration for the first section, that only followed one character as far as I can remember , but then there was a strange section that pushed the narrative forward in time and the present tense didn't sit properly there.

From then on in the novel there would be moments where the present tense worked fine followed by sections where it didn't quite work. I also felt, as the novel progressed more and more characters were introduced and I couldn't quite get to grips with what their motivations were, who's side they were on and why they were doing what they were doing.

On top of that I found Alex's the main protagonist explanation that he was driven to act by some vague nanobot infection rather weak. So overall I felt there were some good ideas in there and interesting concepts and characters but it was all too dense leaving me feeling like there were some unnecessary parts but I wasn't sure which ones they were. Apr 30, Steve Grandpre rated it it was amazing. By far, the best cyberpunk book I've ever read. It explores the deep implications of the technology of its world, as every good sci fi book should. The tone is dark and a tad noir, and every mystery reveals deeper forces at work.

The main character starts of creating drugs out of custom crafted viruses that deliver tailored psychoactive effects. As time passes, customized viruses are obsoleted by programmed nanobots that interact with the brain on a molecular level. The technology is so accessib By far, the best cyberpunk book I've ever read.

The technology is so accessible that script kiddies create rampant nanobot breeds, causing infected people to act out memes. A cult religion springs up, born of people infected by a particular strain of nanobots. A new species emerges from an enslaved genetically modified sub-race, freed by carefully crafted nanobots. They become the fairies of Fairyland, every bit as dark, enticing, and capricious as the fairies of folklore. The main character follows the rabbit hole deeper and deeper into the heart of their world in his quest to find the girl he is obsessed with.

Dec 01, Alissa Thorne rated it it was ok Shelves: The dyspepsia world of Fairyland is vivid in its filth and brutality. The technology introduced makes for compelling mechanics, and they build upon and play off of one another. Sound like a great albeit, unpleasant book? Well, it was for the first two thirds. The book was broken up into three independent stories.

The switch from "book" one to two felt like it added a lot of depth to the world, and that the main character grew and changed a lot. By contrast, the switch from two to three felt fr The dyspepsia world of Fairyland is vivid in its filth and brutality. By contrast, the switch from two to three felt frustrating that things still weren't resolved, and the main character seemed pathetic to still be on this quest.

The pace of my reading slowed to such a comical crawl towards the end. It took me weeks to force myself through the last five pages. I'm stunned, and more than a little bit relieved that it's finally done with. Thrilling dystopian exploration of possibilities of technology and genetic engineering, lush with myth and metaphor, and with a humane heart. Tough going, without much reward. A dark, dystopian future of genetic engineering gone mad. Sone great sequences in occasional bursts, but overall leaves too much unexplained.

Alex Sharkey lives by his wits as he develops drugs only just inside the law, drugs based on genetics. When he falls in with Milena, a girl who seems to know too much, they hatch a plan to liberate the genetically engineered 'dolls' that do so much manual labour in the early 21st century. This book follows the consequences of that fateful decision.

I must confess that I'm not really that fond of cyberpunk, so didn't hugely get into this book. It was that sort of tarnished chrome near-future stuff Alex Sharkey lives by his wits as he develops drugs only just inside the law, drugs based on genetics. It was that sort of tarnished chrome near-future stuff to start with, at least that's not fully dystopic but well on its way there.

And the first segment was set in London as well, so a society that I'm familiar with, and I was much more interested in the untold story of why the welfare state and NHS had collapsed than the dolls storyline, which didn't help my engagement with the story. The three parts of the story take us progressively further forward in time, although all within a single lifetime, as Alex tries to come to terms with what he's done, and find Milena again, which is what drives much of the second and third parts of the book.

There's a lot of good imagery here and some very interesting ideas I'm still not entirely sure if all the animals are actually dead or not, although I'm pretty sure it was heavily implied [yet another untold story that I would have liked to read more about] but I wasn't hugely invested in Alex or any of the other viewpoint characters and, really wasn't sure where we were by the end of the story. So not really my cup of tea, but in no way am I saying that this is a bad book, it's just one that I didn't enjoy.

Sep 24, Daniel Lawson rated it liked it. So in the near future, nanotechnology allows the manipulation of biology to create new forms of life. Humans naturally use them for their own purpose but the fairies become free, and they want a very different world. Its a very interesting idea, and well told on some level. There is a complex story arc that combines the history of the fairies with the tale the author wants to tell. The fairies are definitely interesting and how they can fulfil the fairytale version of themselves is clever.

Unfor So in the near future, nanotechnology allows the manipulation of biology to create new forms of life. Unfortunately it's all a bit.. I had no sense of caring for the characters or the world. Things that turned out important in the story didn't seem important when introduced, and I never saw why they were in the story. It was more of a world building exercise than a proper narrative. I struggled to finish the book and honesty the good stuff was done with by one third through.

Nov 22, Josie rated it liked it. This was not an easy read. The protagonist, Alex Sharkey, is not that likeable a character. He is a bio-chemical hacker, a creator of future drugs delivered in virus form. The future has blue dolls, fembots, lots of grit, dirt and disease. Well worth a read - Maybe my rating is a little harsh. Honestly, at times it was a slog. This was written in , and now over 20 years later, some parts are pretty near the mark This was not an easy read. This was written in , and now over 20 years later, some parts are pretty near the mark migrant caravans of people, changing climate.

A definite read for the genre. Aug 10, Alex rated it liked it. The ideas in this book are pretty amazing, of a future where genetically engineered "dolls" used as slaves acquire consciousness and become "fairies". Many of the themes have relevance to our modern culture, with connectivity with others through the internet having the highest value.

McAuley preempts this theme with the existence of a "web", and how large sectors of the population have withdrawn from their real lives to reside within it. Fairydust A sprawling wonderful scary read. McAuley spins a deep web with really great characters and drags you into a weirdly recognizable future. There is a theme running through McAuleys books. Gaia, environment, AI, biology, Genentech, evolution. He us one smart, complicated author.

It's a pleasure to read his book even if it is a frightening futurethat he looks into.

Stiff and crude writing with impersonal and distant characters; couldn't force myself to like any of them.

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