thought that you were warming yourself with the sunbeams of ages
and ages ago.

This is no fancy tale; it is literally true, as we shall see in
Lecture VIII, that the warmth of a coal fire could not exist if
the plants of long ago had not used the sunbeams to make their
leaves, holding them ready to give up their warmth again whenever
those crushed leaves are consumed.

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: or fairy
'Gravitation' dragging rain-drops down to the earth: or the fairy
of 'Crystallization' building up the snow-flakes in the clouds?
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

How are you to enter the fairy-land of science?

There is but one way. Like the knight or peasant in the fairy
tales, you must open you eyes. There is no lack of objects,
everything around you will tell some history if touched with the