uce crystalline forms of exquisite beauty. They are now
before you, sprouting like ferns from the wire, appearing indeed like
vegetable growths rendered so rapid as to be plainly visible to the
naked eye. On reversing the current, these wonderful lead-fronds will
dissolve, while from the other wire filaments of lead dart through the
liquid. In a moment or two the growth of the lead-trees recommences,
but they now cover the other wire.

In the process of crystallization, Nature first reveals herself as a
builder. Where do her operations stop? Does she continue by the play
of the same forces to form the vegetable, and afterwards the animal?
Whatever the answer to these questions may be, trust me that the
notions of the coming generations regarding this mysterious thing,
which some have called 'brute matter,' will be very different from
those of the generations past.

There is hardly a more beautiful and instructive example of this play
of molecular force than that furnished by water. You have seen the
exquisite fern-like forms produced by the crystallization of a film of
water on a cold window-pane.[15] You have also probably noticed the
beautiful rosettes tied together by the crystallizing force during the
descent of a snow-shower on a very calm day. The slopes and summits of
the Alps are loaded in winter with these blossoms of the frost. They
vary infinitely in detail of beauty, but the same angular magnitude is
preserved throughout: an inflexible power binding spears and spiculae
to the angle of 60 degrees.

The common ice of our lakes is also ruled in its formation by the same
angle. You may sometimes see in freezing water small crystals of
stellar shapes, each star consisting of six rays, with this angle of
60 deg. between every two of them. This structure may be revealed in
ordinary ice. In a sunbeam, or, failing that, in our electric beam, we
have an instrument delicate enough to unlock the frozen molecules,
without disturbing the order of their architecture. Cutting from
clear, sound, regularly frozen ice, a slab parallel to the planes of
freezing, and sending a sunbeam through such a slab, it liquefies
internally at special points, round each point a six-petalled liquid
flower of exquisite beauty being formed. Crowds of such flowers are
thus produced. From an ice-house we sometimes take blocks of ice
presenting misty spaces in the otherwise continuous mass; and when we
inquire into the cause of this mistiness,