course.

And what is healing but growing again? And how could the atoms of your
fingers grow, and make fresh skin, if they were not each of them alive?
There, I will not puzzle you with too much at once; you will know more
about all that some day. Only remember now, that there is nothing
wonderful in the world outside you but has its counterpart of something
just as wonderful, and perhaps more wonderful, inside you. Man is the
microcosm, the little world, said the philosophers of old; and
philosophers nowadays are beginning to see that their old guess is actual
fact and true.

But what are these curious sea-creatures called, which are animals, yet
grow like plants?

They have more names than I can tell you, or you remember. Those which
helped to make this bit of stone are called coral-insects: but they are
not really insects, and are no more like insects than you are.
Coral-polypes is the best name for them, because they have arms round
their mouths, something like a cuttlefish, which the ancients called
Polypus. But the animal which you have seen likest to most of them is a
sea-anemone.

Look now at this piece of fresh coral--for coral it is, though not like
the coral which your sister wears in her necklace. You see it is full of
pipes; in each of those pipes has lived what we will call, for the time
being, a tiny sea-anemone, joined on to his brothers by some sort of
flesh and skin; and all of them together have built up, out of the lime
in the sea-water, this common house, or rather town, of lime.

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