Yet even now we have not mentioned many of the beauties of our atmosphere.  It is the tiny particles floating in the air which scatter the light of the sun so that it spreads over the whole country and into shady places.  The sun’s rays always travel straight forward; and in the moon, where there is no atmosphere, there is no light anywhere except just where the rays fall.  But on our earth the sun-waves hit against the myriads of particles in the air and glide off them into the corners of the room or the recesses of a shady lane, and so we have light spread before us wherever we walk in the daytime, instead of those deep black shadows which we can see through a telescope on the face of the moon.

Again, it is electricity playing in the air-atoms which gives us the beautiful lightning and the grand aurora borealis, and even the twinkling of the starts is produced entirely by minute changes in the air.  If it were not for our aerial ocean, the stars would stare at us sternly, instead of smiling with the pleasant twinkle-twinkle which we have all learned to love as little children.

All these questions, however, we must leave for the present; only I hope you will be eager to read about them wherever you can, and open your eyes to learn their secrets.  For the present we must be content if we can even picture this wonderful ocean of gas spread round our earth, and some of the work it does for us.

We said in the last lecture that without the sunbeams the earth would be cold, dark, and frost-ridden.  With sunbeams, but without air, it would indeed have burning heat, side by side with darkness and ice, but it could have no soft light. our planet might look beautiful to others, as the moon does to us, but it could have comparatively few beauties of its own.  With the sunbeams and the air, we see it has much to make it beautiful.  But a third worker is wanted before our planet can revel in activity and life.  This worker is water; and in the next lecture we shall learn something of the beauty and the usefulness of the “drops of water” on their travels.

Week 10

LECTURE IV.  A DROP OF WATER ON ITS TRAVELS

We are going to spend an hour to-day in following a drop of water on its travels.  If I dip my finger in this basin of water and lift it up again, I bring with it a small glistening drop out of the body of water below, and hold it before you.  Tell me, have you any idea where this drop has been? what changes it has undergone, and what work it has been doing during all the long ages that water has lain on the face of the earth?  It is a drop now, but it was not so before I lifted it out of the basin; then it was part of a sheet of water, and will be so again if I let it fall.  Again, if I were to put this basin on the stove till all the water had boiled away, where would my drop be then?  Where would it go?  What forms will it take before it reappears in the rain-cloud, the river, or the sparkling dew?