But is it not strange and wonderful?

Of course it is:  but so is everything when you begin to look into it; and if I were to go on, and tell you what sort of young ones these coral-polypes have, and what becomes of them, you would hear such wonders, that you would be ready to suspect that I was inventing nonsense, or talking in my dreams.  But all that belongs to Madam How’s deepest book of all, which is called the BOOK OF KIND:  the book which children cannot understand, and in which only the very wisest men are able to spell out a few words, not knowing, and of course not daring to guess, what wonder may come next.

Now we will go back to our stone, and talk about how it was made, and how the stalked star-fish, which you mistook for a flower, ever got into the stone.

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.”