IN England’s variable climate it is difficult to tell whether October speaks more of autumn passing away or winter fast approaching. There may be much mild sunshine at least in midday, or there may be incessant and cold drizzly rain. If your home lies in the country, far from the smoky, busy city, you will find the signs of coming winter as many and as curious as those of spring. If summer friends, who gladdened us with their song are all gone, or going, others take their place. Long trains of wild ducks, snipe, woodcocks, and wild geese, are found about our marshes and rivers, and if they give us no song, they supply us with plenty of food.
At this time look out for the jumping four-winged beetles, usually called the turnip fly, so troublesome to both man and beast. Now, too, the gossamer spider abounds, and his beautiful webs seem to cover every shrub and tree. This is the time for mushrooms, and sallying forth in the early morning you may find, in particular spots, immense quantities, all sprung up in a night.
But perhaps the trees give the surest signs that summer is past, and cold winter near at hand. You will find immense pleasure in noticing the many and beautiful changes in their foliage. Day by day the bright hues get deeper and richer—orange, yellow, and brown; and by the end of this month the change in the woods is as great and wonderful as that in spring, when the bare boughs had become clothed with living green. If harvest work is all over, this month gives the farmer and the gardener plenty to do. Turnips and beetroots, fine winter food for cattle, are to be got in; but chiefly the farmer is busy with his plow, making ready for the next wheat crop, which he soon begins to plant.
As the year has rolled round we have had little talks about birds, bees, and butterflies; only, as it were, glimpses, just to incite you to find out for yourselves the teeming wonders of all the works of God, wonders as marvelous in the least as in the greatest. So far we have not peeped into the dark, deep sea, but the marvels there are even greater than on dry land. The one great wonder of the old creation is the way in which it teems with life. Earth, air, and sea, are full of life. But in its fruitfulness the sea far surpasses the earth. A line 27,600 feet has been let down, heavily weighted, but without touching any bottom, in the south Atlantic Ocean. Some think that as the highest mountains are 30,000 feet above the level of the sea, so the valley of the sea will descend to a like depth of six miles of water! How is the mind lost in wonder at the thought that each and every drop of that inconceivable body of water is in itself a world, teeming with breathing, moving, living things! Life shows itself everywhere; alike in the deep dark abysses of the ocean, or floating as seaweed on its surface, in the bright sunshine of day.
You have all heard of the coral and its tiny insect. I want to give you this month just a peep at some of the wonderful things about it. It is a large subject, and it would fill a volume to tell you all. Some have spent many years in studying the history of this little wonderful thing. More than two thousand years ago it was a theme of wonder with both poets and philosophers; then, as now, the ornaments made from it were largely worn, and formed an important branch of commerce, and yet strange to say for 2000 years the wise men of the world were altogether in the dark as to the true nature of the coral. It is only 150 years since its mysterious nature was unveiled. Till that time it was universally thought to be a submarine shrub; but I cannot stop to tell you how it was discovered to be not a water plant but a truly living insect.
The coral forms a stein of a beautiful red color, as hard as the most compact rocks, and capable of taking a fine polish. In many respects it resembles the stem of a tree. Its branches are covered with a soft rose-colored bark, filled with small holes, in each of which resides one of the builders of the coral. These are called Polypi, and their action consists in expanding and contracting. When expanded, they have the appearance of pretty little flowers of a beautiful white color, with eight divisions spread out like rays, and the borders of which are ornamented with a fringe of minute hairs. Each polyp may be described as a pouch of animated matter, with a few feeders about its mouth. This little creature secretes or extracts from its food calcareous or lime like particles, with which it builds a limestone house. Not only so, but they produce innumerable eggs of a milk-white color, which immediately after leaving the mother, move about actively, and seek for a favorable place on which to plant themselves. When once planted, there they remain, first to be hatched, then to open their mouths, take in their food, build up more little coral cells and so carry on the great work for which God has appointed them.
Let us think of one such egg by some unknown means removed to an immense distance from its native home, and transfixed alone on some rock in the center of the great Pacific Ocean. There alone it begins its solitary but active life; feeds, builds its home, produces its eggs, and dies. In a short time millions upon millions have sprung from that one egg, they stretch out for miles in every direction, each succeeding race building on the graves of those that have gone before; and thus, gradually but surely, they rise to the surface, and their wonderful work is done. To be constantly covered with water seems necessary to their existence. When once they have reached the surface, sand and broken pieces of coral and floating water plants soon raise it still higher: winds and birds bring innumerable seeds, vegetation rich and luxuriant soon follows; after that, perhaps, forests of noble trees, and then comes man to crown the work of nature by raising dwellings on the ruins of myriads of unseen insects.
“Millions of millions thus, from age to age,
With simplest skill and toil unmeasurable,
No moment and no movement unimproved,
Laid line on line, on terrace terrace spread.
So small the heightening, brightening gradual mound,
By marvelous structure climbing towards the day.
Each wrought alone, yet altogether wrought,
Unconscious, not unworthy instruments
By which a hand invisible was rearing,
A new creation in the secret deep,
Omnipotence wrought in them, with them, by them.”
If you have not read as yet the part these tiny insects have played in the construction of the world, you will scarcely believe what wonders they have wrought. Islands of comparatively modern construction abound in every part of the ocean. In the Pacific Ocean, there are 290, covering altogether 20,000 square miles—an enormous work, equal to an eighth part of the surface of all the other Islands of this vast sea; along the shores of New Caledonia they have built up a reef 400 miles in length; and another, and perhaps the largest single one, which runs along the north-east coast of Australia, 1000 miles in extent.
But all this, mighty as it seems, is but a fraction of the grand work they have done. They have been well called builders of the world, for it is now clearly seen that at certain antediluvian periods these almost imperceptible insects have recast and changed the surface of the globe itself. At that time they swarmed the immense seas, which rolled their dashing waters over almost all the lands now covered by our fields and busy homes, and many a modern country rests on a vast graveyard of corals. Some of our loftiest and largest mountain ranges are composed of corals and debris all ground together into one limestone mass, by the tremendous grinding power of the ocean, and after that upheaved by frightful but majestic volcanic action.
One thing I must tell you; it is said one of the most beautiful sights in the whole world is to look down through the deep blue sea on one of these living silent coral beds. Language fails to describe the glorious brilliancy of the colors of these expanding flowery insects—they oven shame the glories of the rainbow on the land; and to complete the scene swarms of fish are seen moving about with all their graceful motions, and feeding on the tips of those very branching corals exactly as flocks of sheep nibble the green verdure of our fields. Oh, how wonderful are the works of God! Truly “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in the deep, these see the wonders of the Lord!”
We make a great boast of the wisdom and strength and perseverance of man. We boast of what he has accomplished in the world’s history. Well, he has done many great things. Railways, steamships, telegraph wires reaching all round the world, deep coal-pits, great buildings, the ancient pyramids of Egypt—these and many other things are wonderful. But after all, compared with the work of these tiny creatures, all man’s work is as nothing. Man will spend years in building a lighthouse, or a great pier, but the storm of a single night will sweep it all away. These little insects build up mountains in the deep sea, and they can bid defiance to the mightiest tempest that ever swept through the ocean. And the pyramids of Egypt, the greatest works that man ever put together, are but as a grain of sand to a mountain, compared with the work of the little coral.