A fossil means what has been dug out of the earth; and numbers
of animals are to be found buried deep in the rocks along the coast of
Yorkshire--huge creatures which lived on the earth long, long ago, of which
the hard parts, such as bones and teeth, have gradually been turned into
stone.
All this is very wonderful to think of, and I am sure the poet, who spoke
of finding "sermons in stones," was wiser than he knew; but what will you
say when I tell you that one kind of rock--the chalk with which you are so
fond of drawing upon the black-board--is made of shells, most of them very
tiny ones, which can be seen only by a microscope? What myriads of living
things once made their homes in those little shells, and what sort of
life they lived, we cannot tell; but there the shells remain in the white
chalk, and the microscope will show them to you, as it shows so many hidden
wonders in this wonderful world, where the very great and the very small
meet on every hand.
Only the other day, May brought me a lovely branch of white coral. "Look,"
she said, "when baby was out for a walk, a lady gave her this." She thought
it very pretty, but she was surprised when I showed it to her through a
magnifying-glass, and told her that it had been made by a very tiny kind
of jelly-fish; a plant-animal some people call it, of the same kind as the
sea-anemone; and she wondered still more when we found in a book a picture
of a coral island, and I told her that such little creatures have been busy
ever since the world began, constantly building up the coral-rocks.
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