might distil them into sap, and bud, and leaf, and
wood. But it has to take in another element, without which the
distillation and the shaping could never have taken place. It had to
drink in the sunbeams--that mysterious and complex force which is for
ever pouring from the sun, and making itself partly palpable to our
senses as heat and light. So the life of the plant seized the
sunbeams, and absorbed them, buried them in itself--no longer as
light and heat, but as invisible chemical force, locked up for ages
in that woody fibre.

So it is. Lord Lytton told us long ago, in a beautiful song, how

The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose.

But Nature's poetry was more beautiful than man's. The wind and the
beam loved the rose so well that they made the rose--or rather, the
rose took the wind and the beam, and built up out of them, by her own
inner life, her exquisite texture, hue, and fragrance.

What next? The rose dies; the timber tree dies; decays down into
vegetable fibre, is buried, and turned to coal: but the plant cannot
altogether undo its own work. Even in death and decay it cannot set
free the sunbeams imprisoned in its tissue. The sun-force must stay,
shut up age after age, invisible, but strong; working at its own
prison-cells; transmuting them, or making them capable of being
transmuted by man, into the manifold products of coal--coke,
petroleum, mineral pitch, gases, coal-tar, benzole, delicate aniline
dyes, and what not, till its day of deliverance comes.

Man digs it, throws it on the fire, a black, dead-seeming lump. A
corner, an atom of it, warms till it reaches the igniting point; the
temperature at which it is able to combine with oxygen.

And then, like a dormant live thing, awaking after ages to the sense
of its own powers, its own needs, the whole lump is seized, atom
after atom, with an infectious hunger for that oxygen which it lost
centuries since in the bottom of the earth. It drinks the oxygen in
at every pore; and burns.

And so the spell of ages is broken. The sun-force bursts its prison-
cells, and blazes into the free atmosphere, as light and heat once
more; returning in a moment into the same forms in which it entered
the growing leaf a thousand centuries since.

Strange it all is, yet true. But of nature, as of the heart of man,
the old saying stands--that truth is stranger than fiction.

V. THE LIME IN THE MORTAR

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