n growing, that is, making itself;
and making, as it grew, its shell to live in. Synthesis has not found
out yet the first step towards doing that; and, as I believe, he never
will.

But there would be no harm in his trying?

Of course not. Let everybody try to do everything they fancy. Even if
they fail, they will have learnt at least that they cannot do it.

But now--and this is a secret which you would never find out for
yourself, at least without the help of a microscope--the greater part of
this lump of chalk is made up of things which neither Analysis can
perfectly take to pieces, nor Synthesis put together again. It is made
of dead organisms, that is, things which have been made by living
creatures. If you washed and brushed that chalk into powder, you would
find it full of little things like the Dentalina in this drawing, and
many other curious forms. I will show you some under the microscope one
day.

They are the shells of animals called Foraminifera, because the shells of
some of them are full of holes, through which they put out tiny arms. So
small they are and so many, that there may be, it is said, forty thousand
of them in a bit of chalk an inch every way. In numbers past counting,
some whole, some broken, some ground to the finest powder, they make up
vast masses of England, which are now chalk downs; and in some foreign
countries they make up whole mountains. Part of the building stone of
the Great Pyramid in Egypt is composed, I am told, entirely of them.

And how did they get into the chalk?

Ah! How indeed? Let us think. The chalk must have been laid down at
the bottom of a sea, because there are sea-shells in it. Besides, we
find little atomies exactly like these alive now in many seas; and
therefore it is fair to suppose these lived in the sea also.

Besides, they were not washed into the chalk by any sudden flood. The
water in which they settled must have been quite still, or these little
delicate creatures would have been ground into powder--or rather into
paste. Therefore learned men soon made up their minds that these things
were laid down at the bottom of a deep sea, so deep that neither wind,
nor tide, nor currents could stir the everlasting calm.

Ah! it is worth thinking over, for it shows how shrewd a giant Analysis
is, and how fast he works in these days, now that he has got free and
well fed;--worth thinking over, I say, how our notions about these little
atomies