Then do you think me silly for fancying that a fossil star-fish was a flower?
I should be silly if I did. There is no silliness in not knowing what you cannot know. You can only guess about new things, which you have never seen before, by comparing them with old things, which you have seen before; and you had seen flowers, and snakes, and fishes' backbones, and made a very fair guess from them.
After all, some of these stalked star-fish are so like flowers, lilies especially, that they are called Encrinites; and the whole family is called Crinoids, or lily-like creatures, from the Greek work KRINON, a lily; and as for corals and corallines, learned men, in spite of all their care and shrewdness, made mistake after mistake about them, which they had to correct again and again, till now, I trust, they have got at something very like the truth.
No, I shall only call you silly if you do what some little boys are apt to do--call other boys, and, still worse, servants or poor people, silly for not knowing what they cannot know.
But are not poor people often very silly about animals and plants?
The boys at the village school say that slowworms are poisonous; is not that silly?
Not at all. They know that adders bite, and so they think that slowworms bite too. They are wrong; and they must be told that they are wrong, and scolded if they kill a slowworm. But silly they are not.
But is it not silly to fancy that swallows sleep all the winter at the bottom of the pond?
I do not think so. The boys cannot know where the swallows go; and if you told them--what is true--that the swallows find their way every autumn through France, through Spain, over the Straits of Gibraltar, into Morocco, and some, I believe, over the great desert of Zahara into Negroland: and if you told them--what is true also--that the young swallows actually find their way into Africa without having been along the road before; because the old swallows go south a week or two first, and leave the young ones to guess out the way for themselves: if you told them that, then they would have a right to say, "Do you expect us to believe that?
That is much more wonderful than that the swallows should sleep in the pond."
But is it?
Yes; to them. They know that bats and dormice and other things sleep all the winter; so why should not swallows sleep? They see the swallows about the water, and often dipping almost into it.
They know that fishes live under water, and that many insects-- like May-flies and caddis-flies and water-beetles--live sometimes in the water, sometimes in the open air; and they cannot know--you do not know--what it is which prevents a bird's living under water. So their guess is really a very fair one; no more silly than that of the savages, who when they first saw the white men's ships, with their huge sails, fancied they were enormous sea- birds; and when they heard the cannons fire, said that the ships spoke in thunder and lightning. Their guess was wrong, but not silly; for it was the best guess they could make.
But I do know of one old woman who was silly. She was a boy's nurse, and she gave the boy a thing which she said was one of the snakes which St. Hilda turned into stone; and told him that they found plenty of them at Whitby, where she was born, all coiled up; but what was very odd, their heads had always been broken of. And when he took it, to his father, he told him it was only a fossil shell--an Ammonite. And he went back and laughed at his nurse, and teased her till she was quite angry.
Then he was very lucky that she did not box his ears, for that was what he deserved. I dare say that, though his nurse had never heard of Ammonites, she was a wise old dame enough, and knew a hundred things which he did not know, and which were far more important than Ammonites, even to him.
How?
Because if she had not known how to nurse him well, he would perhaps have never grown up alive and strong. And if she had not known how to make him obey and speak the truth, he might have grown up a naughty boy.
But was she not silly?
No. She only believed what the Whitby folk, I understand, have some of them believed for many hundred years. And no one can be blamed for thinking as his forefathers did, unless he has cause to know better.
Surely she might have known better?
How? What reason could she have to believe the Ammonite was a shell? It is not the least like cockles, or whelks, or any shell she ever saw.
What reason either could she have to guess that Whitby cliff had once been coral-mud, at the bottom of the sea? No more reason, my dear child, than you would have to guess that this stone had been coral-mud likewise, if I did not teach you so,--or rather, try to make you teach yourself so.
No. I say it again. If you wish to learn, I will only teach you on condition that you do not laugh at, or despise, those good and honest and able people who do not know or care about these things, because they have other things to think of: like old John out there ploughing. He would not believe you--he would hardly believe me--if we told him that this stone had been once a swarm of living things, of exquisite shapes and glorious colours. And yet he can plough and sow, and reap and mow, and fell and strip, and hedge and ditch, and give his neighbours sound advice, and take the measure of a man's worth from ten minutes' talk, and say his prayers, and keep his temper, and pay his debts,--which last three things are more than a good many folks can do who fancy themselves a whole world wiser than John in the smock-frock.
Oh, but I want to hear about the exquisite shapes and glorious colours.