The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children by Jane Andrews (reading diary .TXT) 📕

And now we will go with Lula to the North River pier, where her great steamer lies, and see what she intends to carry to Liverpool. Bales of cotton, barrels of flour, of beef, and of petroleum. All very good, so good-by to her. In a few weeks we will see what she brings back.

Come, Mary, what has Philadelphia for San Francisco? Oh, what a load the “Sea-Gull” must take of machinery, steam-engines, tobacco, and oil; and such a quantity of other things, that the “Sea-Gull” will need to make many voyages before she can take them all. We load her at this busy wharf, where the coal-vessels are passing in and out for New York and Boston, and the steamers are loading for Europe, and the little coasters crowding in one after another; and away we go for the voyage round the “Horn,” where the “Sea-Gull” will meet her namesakes, and perhaps some stormy winds besides.

Meantime Nina’s “Racer” has been stored full of cotton cloths and hardware, and has raced out of Boston Harbor so swiftly that fair winds will take her to Gibraltar in three weeks.

And so you have all engaged in the carrying trade; but as yet you have carried only one way. To complete the game, we must wait for Lottie to bring the “Rosette” safely home with saltpetre and indigo and hides and ginger and seersuckers and gunny-cloth. And the “North Star” must steam her quick way across the Atlantic, and return with salt and hardware, anchors, steel, woolens, and linens. Mary must beat her way round Cape Horn, and home again with wool and gold and silver. And the swift “Racer” must quickly bring the figs and prunes and raisins, and the oranges and lemons, that will spoil if they are too long on the way.

So children may play at the carrying trade, and so their fathers and uncles may work at it in earnest: and so also hundreds of little workers are busy all the world over in another carrying trade, which keeps you and me alive from day to day; and yet we scarcely think; at all how it is going on, or stop to thank the hands that feed us.

England and Italy are kingdoms, and the United States a republic, and they all engage in this business, and are constantly sending goods one to another; but there are other kingdoms, not put down on any map, that are just as busy as they, and in the same sort of work too.

The earth is one kingdom, the water another, and there is the great republic of the gases surrounding us on every side; only we can’t see it, because its inhabitants have the fairy gift of being invisible to us. Each of these kingdoms has products to export, and is all ready to trade with the others, if only some one will supply the means; just as the Frenchmen might stand on their shores, and hold out to us wines and prunes and silks and muslins, and we might stand on our shores, and hold out gold and silver to them, and yet could make no exchange, because there were no ships to carry the goods across. “Ah,” you may say, “that is not at all the case here; for the earth, the air, and the water are all close to each other, and close to us, and there is no need of ships; we can exchange hand to hand.”

But here comes a difficulty. Read carefully, and I think you will understand it. Here is Ruth, a little growing girl, who wants phosphate of lime to build bones with; for as she grows, of course her bones must grow too. Very well, I answer, there is plenty of phosphate of lime in the earth; she can have all she wants. Yes, but does Ruth want to eat earth?—do you?—does anybody? Certainly not: so, although the food she needs is close beside her, even under her feet, she cannot get it any more than we can get the French goods, excepting by means of the carrying trade. Where now are the little ships that shall bring to Ruth the phosphate of lime she needs, and cannot reach, although it lies in her own father’s field? Let me show you how her father can build the ships that will bring it to her. He must go out into that field, and plant wheat-seeds, and as they grow, every little ear and kernel gathers up phosphate of lime, and becomes a tiny ship freighted with what his little daughter needs. When that wheat is ground into flour, and made into bread, Ruth will eat what she couldn’t have been willing to taste, unless the useful little ships of the wheat-field had brought it to her.

Now let us send to the republic of the gases for some supplies, for we cannot live without carbon and oxygen; and although we do breathe in oxygen with every breathe we draw, we also need to receive it in other ways: so the sugar-cane and the maple-trees engage in the carrying trade for us, taking in carbon and oxygen by their leaves, and sending it through their bodies, and when it reaches us it is sugar,—and a very pleasant food to most of you, I dare say.

But we cannot take all we need of these gases in the form of sugar, and there are many other ships that will bring it to us. The corn will gather it up, and offer it in the form of meal, or of cornstarch puddings; or the grass will bring it to the cow, since you and I refuse to take it from the grass ships. But the cow offers it to us again in the form of milk, and we do not think of refusing; or the butcher offers it to us in the form of beef, and we do not say “no.”

Alice wants some india-rubber shoes. Do you think the kingdoms of air and water can send her a pair? The india-rubber tree in South America will take up water, and separate from it hydrogen, of which it is partly composed, and adding to this carbon from the air, will make a gum which we can work into shoes and balls, buttons, tubes, cups, cloth, and a hundred other useful articles.

Then, again, you and I, all of us, must go to the world of gases for nitrogen to help build our bodies, to make muscle and blood and skin and hair; and so the peas and beans load their boat-shaped seeds full, and bring it to us so fresh and excellent that we enjoy eating it.

This useful carrying trade has also another branch well worth looking at.

You remember hearing how many soldiers were sick in war-time at the South; but perhaps you do not know that their best medicine was brought to them by a South-American tree, that gathered up from the earth and air bitter juices to make what we call quinine. Then there is camphor, which I am sure you have all seen, sent by the East-Indian camphor-tree to cure you when you are sick; and gum-arabic and all the other gums; and castor-oil and most of the other medicines that you don’t at all like,—all brought to us by the plants.

I might tell you a great deal more of this, but I will only stop to show a little what we give back in payment for all that is brought.

When England sends us hardware and woollen goods, she expects us to repay her with cotton and sugar, that are just as valuable to us as hardware and woolens to her; but see how differently we treat the kingdoms from which the plant-ships are all the time bringing us food and clothes and medicines, etc. All we return is just so much as we don’t want to use. We take in good fresh air, and breathe out impure and bad. We throw back to the earth whatever will not nourish and strengthen us; and yet no complaint comes from the faithful plants. Do you wonder? I will let you into the secret of this. The truth is, that what is worthless to us is really just the food they need; and they don’t at all know how little we value it ourselves. It is like the Chinese, of whom we might buy rice or silk or tea, and pay them in rats which we are glad to be rid of, while they consider them good food.

Now, I have given you only a peep into this carrying trade, but it is enough to show you how to use your own eyes to learn more about it. Look about you, and see if you can’t tell as good a story as I have done, or a better one if you please.

CHAPTER I. THE STAR-FISH TAKES A SUMMER JOURNEY.

Once there was a little star-fish, and he had five fingers and five eyes, one at the end of each finger,—so that he might be said to have at least one power at his fingers’ ends. And he had I can’t tell you how many little feet; but being without legs, you see, he couldn’t be expected to walk very fast The feet couldn’t move one before the other as yours do. they could only cling like little suckers, by which he pulled himself slowly along from place to place. Nevertheless, he was very proud of this accomplishment; and sometimes this pride led him to an unjust contempt for his neighbors, as you will see by and by. He was very particular about his eating; and besides his mouth, which lay in the centre of his body, he had a little scarlet-colored sieve through which he strained the water he drank. For he couldn’t think of taking in common seawater with every thing that might be floating in it,—that would do for crabs and lobsters and other common people; but anybody who wears such a lovely purple coat, and has brothers and sisters dressed in crimson, feels a little above such living.

Now, one day this star-fish set out on a summer journey,—not to the seaside where you and I went last year: of course not, for he was there already. No; he thought he would go to the mountains. He could not go to the Rocky Mountains, nor to the Catskill Mountains, nor the White Mountains; for, with all his accomplishments, he had not yet learned to live in any drier place than a pool among the rocks, or the very wettest sand at low tide: so, if he travelled to the mountains, it must be to the mountains of the sea.

Perhaps you didn’t know that there are mountains in the sea. I have seen them, however, and I think you have, too,—at least their tops, if nothing more. What is that little rocky ledge, where the lighthouse stands, but the stony top of a hill rising from the bottom of the sea? And what are the pretty green islands, with their clusters of trees and grassy slopes, but the summits of hills lifted out of the water?

In many parts of the sea, where the water is deep, are hills and even high mountains, whose tops do not reach the surface; and we should not know where they are, were it not that the sailors, in measuring the depth of the sea, sometimes sail right over these mountain-tops, and touch them with their sounding-lines.

The star fish set out one day, about five hundred years ago, to visit some of these mountains of the sea. If he had depended upon his own feet for getting