t to be able to get through at all unless forced,
because at each hole the skin would have to be stretched to allow the
water to get to the other side. This you understand is only true if the
water does not wet or really touch the wire. Now to prevent the water
that I am going to pour in from striking the bottom with so much force
as to drive it through, I have laid a small piece of paper in the sieve,
and am pouring the water on to the paper, which breaks the fall (Fig.
5). I have now poured in about half a tumbler of water, and I might put
in more. I take away the paper but not a drop runs through. If I give
the sieve a jolt then the water is driven to the other side, and in a
moment it has all escaped. Perhaps this will remind you of one of the
exploits of our old friend Simple Simon,

"Who went for water in a sieve,
But soon it all ran through."

But you see if you only manage the sieve properly, this is not quite so
absurd as people generally suppose.

[Illustration: Fig. 5.]

If now I shake the water off the sieve, I can, for the same reason, set
it to float on water, because its weight is not sufficient to stretch
the skin of the water through all the holes. The water, therefore,
remains on the other side, and it floats even though, as I have already
said, there are eleven thousand holes in the bottom, any one of which is
large enough to allow an ordinary pin to pass through. This experiment
also illustrates how difficult it is to write real and perfect nonsense.

You may remember one of the stories in Lear's book of Nonsense Songs.

"They went to sea in a sieve, they did,
In a sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a sieve they went to sea.

* * *

"They sailed away in a sieve, they did,
In a sieve they sailed so fast,
With only a beautiful pea-green veil,
Tied with a riband by way of a sail,
To a small tobacco-pipe mast;"

And so on. You see that it is quite possible to go to sea in a
sieve--that is, if the sieve is large enough and the water is not too
rough--and that the above lines are now realized in every particular
(Fig. 6).

[Illustration: Fig. 6.]

I may give one more example of the power of this elastic skin of water.
If you wish to pour water from a tumbler into a narrow-necked bottle,
you know how if you pour slowly it nearly all runs down the