The Fairyland of Science

The Fairyland of Science, by Arabella Buck, was published in 1882. You can find free versions of it here.
An excerpt:

From the cold garden, you run into the house, and find the fire
laid indeed in the grate, but the wood dead and the coals black,
waiting to be lighted.  You strike a match, and soon there is a
blazing fire.  Where does the heat come from?  Why do the coals
burn and give out a glowing light?  Have you not read of gnomes
buried down deep in the earth, in mines, and held fast there till
some fairy wand has released them, and allowed them to come to
earth again?  Well, thousands and millions of years ago, those
coals were plants; and like the snowdrop in the garden of to-day,
they caught the sunbeams and worked them into their leaves.  Then
the plants died and were buried deep in the earth and the
sunbeams with them; and like the gnomes they lay imprisoned till
the coals were dug out by the miners, and brought to your grate;
and just now you yourself took hold of the fairy wand which was
to release them.  You struck a match, and its atoms clashing with
atoms of oxygen in the air, set the invisible fairies "heat" and
"chemical attraction" to work, and they were soon busy within the
wood and the coals causing their atoms too to clash; and the
sunbeams, so long imprisoned, leapt into flame.  Then you spread
out your hands and cried, "Oh, how nice and warm!" and little
thought that you were warming yourself with the sunbeams of ages
and ages ago.