ay dispense
with it. Gather a few recently fallen flakes upon a piece of black cloth,
and the lens will reveal jewels more beautiful than any ever fashioned by
the hand of man. Six-pointed crystals, always hexagonal, of a myriad
patterns, leave us lost in wonderment when we look out over the white
landscape and think of the hidden beauty of it all. The largest glacier of
Greenland or Alaska is composed wholly of just such crystals whose points
have melted and which have become ice.

We may draw or photograph scores of these beautiful crystals and never
duplicate a figure. Some are almost solid and tabular, others are simple
stars or fern-branched. Then we may detect compound forms, crystals within
crystals, and, rarest of all, doubles, where two different forms appear as
joined together by a tiny pillar. In all of these we have an epitome of
the crystals of the rocks beneath our feet, only in their case the
pressure has moulded them into straight columns, while the snow, forming
unhindered in midair, resolves itself into these exquisite forms and
floral designs. Flowers and rocks are not so very unlike after all.

Few of us can observe these wonderful forms without feeling the poetry of
it all. Thoreau on the fifth day of January, 1856, writes as follows:...
"The thin snow now driving from the north and lodging on my coat consists
of those beautiful star crystals, not cottony and chubby spokes as on the
13th of December, but thin and partly transparent crystals. They are about
one tenth of an inch in diameter, perfect little wheels with six spokes,
without a tire, or rather with six perfect little leaflets, fern-like,
with a distinct, straight, slender midrib raying from the centre. On each
side of each midrib there is a transparent, thin blade with a crenate
edge. How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are
generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my
coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that not a
snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. Nothing is cheap and coarse,
neither dewdrops nor snowflakes. Soon the storm increases (it was already
very severe to face), and the snow becomes finer, more white and powdery.

"Who knows but this is the original form of all snowflakes, but that, when
I observe these crystal stars falling around me, they are only just
generated in the low mist next the earth. I am nearer to the source of the
snow, its primal auroral,