e; when you got
seated in those orderly rows, each in her proper place, you became
crystalline. That is just what the atoms of a mineral do, if they can,
whenever they get disordered: they get into order again as soon as may
be.

I hope you feel inclined to interrupt me, and say, 'But we know our
places; how do the atoms know theirs? And sometimes we dispute about
our places; do the atoms--(and, besides, we don't like being compared to
atoms at all)--never dispute about theirs?' Two wise questions these, if
you had a mind to put them! it was long before I asked them myself, of
myself. And I will not call you atoms any more. May I call you--let me
see--'primary molecules?' (_General dissent, indicated in subdued but
decisive murmurs._) No! not even, in familiar Saxon, 'dust?'

(_Pause, with expression on faces of sorrowful doubt_; LILY
_gives voice to the general sentiment in a timid 'Please
don't._')

No, children, I won't call you that; and mind, as you grow up, that you
do not get into an idle and wicked habit of calling yourselves that. You
are something better than dust, and have other duties to do than ever
dust can do; and the bonds of affection you will enter into are better
than merely 'getting into order.' But see to it, on the other hand, that
you always behave at least as well as 'dust;' remember, it is only on
compulsion, and while it has no free permission to do as it likes, that
_it_ ever gets out of order; but sometimes, with some of us, the
compulsion has to be the other way--hasn't it? (_Remonstratory whispers,
expressive of opinion that the_ LECTURER _is becoming too personal._)
I'm not looking at anybody in particular--indeed I am not. Nay, if you
blush so, Kathleen, how can one help looking? We'll go back to the
atoms.

'How do they know their places?' you asked, or should have asked. Yes,
and they have to do much more than know them: they have to find their
way to them, and that quietly and at once, without running against each
other.

We may, indeed, state it briefly thus:--Suppose you have to build a
castle, with towers and roofs and buttresses, out of bricks of a given
shape, and that these bricks are all lying in a huge heap at the bottom,
in utter confusion, upset out of carts at random. You would have to draw
a great many plans, and count all your bricks, and be sure you had
enough for this and that tower, before you began, and then you would
have to lay your foundation,