give you back a chicken that you could not find in the egg. No one can
understand the egg, but we all like eggs.

Water is essential to human life, and has been from the beginning, but
it is only a short time ago, relatively speaking, that we learned that
water is composed of gas. Two gases got mixed together and could not get
apart and we call the mixture water, but it was much more important that
man should have had water to drink all these years than it was to find
out that water is composed of gas. And there is one thing about water
that we do not yet understand, viz., why it differs from other things
in this, that other things continue to contract indefinitely under the
influence of cold, while water contracts until it reaches a certain
temperature and then, the rule being reversed, expands under the
influence of more intense cold? It does not make much difference whether
we ever learn _why_ this is true, but it is important to the world to
know that it is so.

Sometimes I go into a community and find a young man who has come in
from the country and obtained a smattering of knowledge; then his head
swells and he begins to swagger around and say that an intelligent man
like himself cannot afford to have anything to do with anything that he
cannot understand. Poor boy, he will be surprised to find out how few
things he will be able to deal with if he adopts that rule. I feel like
suggesting to him that the next time he goes home to show himself off
to his parents on the farm he address himself to the first mystery
that ever came under his observation, and has not yet been solved,
notwithstanding the wonderful progress made by our agricultural
colleges. Let him find out, if he can, why it is that a black cow can
eat green grass and then give white milk with yellow butter in it? Will
the mystery disturb him? No. He will enjoy the milk and the butter