It is a strange one. Metals are shiny, and this one certainly is, in a dark-grey, silvery way. It is so shiny that it can even be used as a telescope mirror. Metals tend to be hard, but this one certainly is not. It isn’t even a solid. Mercury is one of only two elements…
It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. (From Rachel Carson: Silent Spring) The history of life on earth…