How shall we get it out? You can jar out numberless
minute globules by hand. This metal, be it remembered, is liquid, and
so heavy that solid iron floats in it as cork does in water. Now, to
get it out of the rock we apply fire, and the mercury exhales away in
the smoke. The real task of scientific painstaking is to get that
heavy stuff out of the smoke again. It is changed, volatilized, and it
likes that state so well that it is very difficult to persuade it to
come back to heaviness again.
Take a great mass of marble. It was not always a mountain. It floated
invisibly in the sea. Invisible animals took it up, particle by
particle, to build a testudo, a traveling house, for themselves. The
ephemeral life departing, there was a rain of dead shells to make
limestone masses at the bottom of the sea. It will not always remain
rock. Air and water disintegrate it once more. Little rootlets seize
upon it and it goes coursing in the veins of plants. It becomes fiber
to the tree, color to the rose, and fragrance to the violet. But,
whether floating invisibly in the water, shell of infusoria in the
seas, marble asleep in the Pentelican hills, constituting the sparkle
and fizz of soda water, claiming the world's admiration as the Venus de
Milo, or giving beauty and meaning to the most fitting symbol that goes
between lovers, it is still the same matter.
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