The language of the chalk is not hard to learn, not nearly so hard as Latin, if you only want to get at the broad features of the story it has to tell; and I propose that we now set to work to spell that story out together.

We all know that if we “burn” chalk, the result is quicklime.  Chalk, in fact, is a compound of carbonic acid gas and lime; and when you make it very hot, the carbonic acid flies away and the lime is left.

By this method of procedure we see the lime, but we do not see the carbonic acid.  If, on the other hand, you were to powder a little chalk and drop it into a good deal of strong vinegar, there would be a great bubbling and fizzing, and, finally, a clear liquid, in which no sign of chalk would appear.  Here you see the carbonic acid in the bubbles; the lime, dissolved in the vinegar, vanishes from sight.  There are a great many other ways of showing that chalk is essentially nothing but carbonic acid and quicklime.  Chemists enunciate the result of all the experiments which prove this, by stating that chalk is almost wholly composed of “carbonate of lime.”

It is desirable for us to start from the knowledge of this fact, though it may not seem to help us very far toward what we seek.  For carbonate of lime is a widely-spread substance, and is met with under very various conditions.  All sorts of limestones are composed of more or less pure carbonate of lime.  The crust which is often deposited by waters which have drained through limestone rocks, in the form of what are called stalagmites and stalactites, is carbonate of lime.  Or, to take a more familiar example, the fur on the inside of a tea-kettle is carbonate of lime; and, for anything chemistry tells us to the contrary, the chalk might be a kind of gigantic fur upon the bottom of the earth-kettle, which is kept pretty hot below.

Let us try another method of making the chalk tell us its own history.  To the unassisted eye chalk looks simply like a very loose and open kind of stone.  But it is possible to grind a slice of chalk down so thin that you can see through it—­until it is thin enough, in fact, to be examined with any magnifying power that may be thought desirable.  A thin slice of the fur of a kettle might be made in the same way.  If it were examined microscopically, it would show itself to be a more or less distinctly laminated mineral substance, and nothing more.

But the slice of chalk presents a totally different appearance when placed under the microscope.  The general mass of it is made up of very minute granules; but, imbedded in this matrix, are innumerable bodies, some smaller and some larger, but, on a rough average, not more than a hundredth of an inch in diameter, having a well-defined shape and structure.  A cubic inch of some specimens of chalk may contain hundreds of thousands of these bodies, compacted together with incalculable millions of the granules.

[Illustration:  CHALK.