Explore "Town Geology" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I shall presume in all my readers some slight knowledge about lime. I shall take for granted, for instance, that all are better informed than a certain party of Australian black fellows were a few years since.
In prowling on the track of a party of English settlers, to see what they could pick up, they came -- oh joy! -- on a sack of flour, dropped and left behind in the bush at a certain creek. The poor savages had not had such a prospect of a good meal for many a day. With endless jabbering and dancing, the whole tribe gathered round the precious flour-bag with all the pannikins, gourds, and other hollow articles it could muster, each of course with a due quantity of water from the creek therein, and the chief began dealing out the flour by handfuls, beginning of course with the boldest warriors. But, horror of horrors, each man's porridge swelled before his eyes, grew hot, smoked, boiled over. They turned and fled, man, woman, and child, from before that supernatural prodigy; and the settlers coming back to look for the dropped sack, saw a sight which told the whole tale.