ttle man! that does not follow at all, as you will see
before the end of the story.

"But a water-baby is contrary to nature."

Well, but, my dear little man, you must learn to talk about such things,
when you grow older, in a very different way from that. You must not
talk about "ain't" and "can't" when you speak of this great wonderful
world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest
corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking
up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.

You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to
nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody
knows; not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Owen, or Professor
Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley, or Mr. Darwin, or Professor Faraday, or
Mr. Grove, or any other of the great men whom good boys are taught to
respect. They are very wise men; and you must listen respectfully to all
they say: but even if they should say, which I am sure they never would,
"That cannot exist. That is contrary to nature," you must wait a little,
and see; for perhaps even they may be wrong. It is only children who
read Aunt Agitate's Arguments, or Cousin Cramchild's Conversations; or
lads who go to popular lectures, and see a man pointing at a few big
ugly pictures on the wall, or making nasty smells with bottles and
squirts, for an hour or two, and calling that anatomy or chemistry--who
talk about "cannot exist," and "contrary to nature." Wise men are afraid
to say that there is anything contrary to nature, except what is
contrary to mathematical truth; for two and two cannot make five, and
two straight lines cannot join twice, and a part cannot be as great as
the whole, and so on (at least, so it seems at present): but the wiser
men are, the less they talk about "cannot." That is a very rash,
dangerous word, that "cannot"; and if people use it too often, the Queen
of all the Fairies, who makes the clouds thunder and the fleas bite, and
takes just as much trouble about one as about the other, is apt to
astonish them suddenly by showing them, that though they say she cannot,
yet she can, and what is more, will, whether they approve or not.

And therefore it is, that there are dozens and hundreds of things in the
world which we should certainly have said were contrary to nature, if we
did not see them going on under our eyes all day long. If people had
never seen little seeds grow i