nobody knows; not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Owen,
or Professor Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley, or Mr. Darwin, or
Professor Faraday, or Mr. Grove, or any other of the great men whom
good boys are taught to respect. They are very wise men; and you
must listen respectfully to all they say: but even if they should
say, which I am sure they never would, "That cannot exist. That is
contrary to nature," you must wait a little, and see; for perhaps
even they may be wrong. It is only children who read Aunt
Agitate's Arguments, or Cousin Cramchild's Conversations; or lads
who go to popular lectures, and see a man pointing at a few big
ugly pictures on the wall, or making nasty smells with bottles and
squirts, for an hour or two, and calling that anatomy or chemistry-
-who talk about "cannot exist," and "contrary to nature." Wise men
are afraid to say that there is anything contrary to nature, except
what is contrary to mathematical truth; for two and two cannot make
five, and two straight lines cannot join twice, and a part cannot
be as great as the whole, and so on (at least, so it seems at
present): but the wiser men are, the less they talk about
"cannot." That is a very rash, dangerous word, that "cannot"; and
if people use it too often, the Queen of all the Fairies, who makes
the clouds thunder and the fleas bite, and takes just as much
trouble about one as about the other, is apt to astonish them
suddenly by showing them, that though they say she cannot, yet she
can, and what is more, will, whether they approve or not.

And therefore it is, that there are dozens and hundreds of things
in the world which we should certainly have said were contrary to
nature, if we did not see them going on under our eyes all day
long. If people had never seen little seeds grow into great plants
and trees, of quite different shape from themselves, and these