You can only guess about new things, which you have never seen before, by comparing them with old things, which you have seen before; and you had seen flowers, and snakes, and fishes' backbones, and made a very fair guess from them.

After all, some of these stalked star- fish are so like flowers, lilies especially, that they are called Encrinites; and the whole family is called Crinoids, or lily-like creatures, from the Greek work _krinon_, a lily; and as for corals and corallines, learned men, in spite of all their care and shrewdness, made mistake after mistake about them, which they had to correct again and again, till now, I trust, they have got at something very like the truth.
No, I shall only call you silly if you do what some little boys are apt to do--call other boys, and, still worse, servants or poor people, silly for not knowing what they cannot know.
But are not poor people often very silly about animals and plants?
The boys at the village school say that slowworms are poisonous; is not that silly?
Not at all.

They know that adders bite, and so they think that slowworms bite too.

They are wrong; and they must be told that they are wrong, and scolded if they kill a slowworm.

But silly they are not.
But is it not silly to fancy that swallows sleep all the winter at the bottom of the pond?
I do not think so.