SNOW, FROST, AND ICE.
How different snow is from water! How white it is as it lies upon the
earth like a winding-sheet, covering up the dead leaves and plants! How
the wind that makes waves in the water heaps up the snow in drifts! The
water slips from your hand as you grasp it, but the snow you can make
into hard balls, or roll it up on the ground into larger ones to build
snow forts. The snow lies quietly on the sides of hills and mountains,
from which, the moment that it melts, it runs down into the valley
below.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The different forms of the crystals of snow.]
But, different as the snow is from water, it is nothing but frozen
water. It is water made solid; and, as the water becomes solid up in
the air before it falls, it forms itself into many different shapes.
The snow seems to be all alike as you look at it as it falls. But it is
not so. There is variety even here. The snow-flakes have various forms.
We can see how different their shapes are if we look at them with a
microscope, as they are here represented.
Snow-flakes are beautiful things to look at even with the naked eye.
How light, and delicate, and feathery they are! When they are very
large and the air is still, how slowly and steadily they fall! Let a
few of them light upon your coat sleeve, where you can look at them,
and you will admire their beauty; and when we look at them through a
microscope, we see that there is not only beauty, but a great variety
of beauty in them, as there is in all the other works of God.
[Sidenote: Snow-flakes clusters of crystals.]
[Sidenote: The power of God seen in them.]
Perhaps you have sometimes seen large crystals of quartz or other
minerals, and you have admired them because they are so smooth, and
regular, and clear. Now every snow-flake is a bundle of little crystals
as regular and beautiful as the crystals of quartz. There are millions
of these crystals in the snow that you take up in your hand, and in the
falling snow they are put together in all the varied forms that you see
in the figures above. As I told you about the leaves and the flowers
in Part First, so we see, when we examine the snow-flakes, the more we
look into the works of God, the more beauty we shall find in them.
How easy it is for God to fill the air with falling crystals, and to
pile them up thick on the ground! With a free hand he thus scatters
beautiful things in the desolate winter as well as in the blooming
summer, and his power is as much seen in the pure crystals of the
snow-flake as in the delicate and beautiful structures of the leaf and
the flower.
How beautiful is the scene when the snow has fallen gently without
wind, and has covered the branches of trees and bushes! Look up into
a tree thus covered. There the crystals lie, piled up, like tufts of
cotton, out to the very tips of all the branches. Millions and millions
of them are on every twig. How many must there be on the whole tree!
And how many on all the trees and bushes, and over the whole surface of
the ground!
How easily now can God destroy all these crystals! He can send a warm
sun, the wind, or a rain, and they are dissolved and changed into water
again. The earth’s winter robe, all made of pure white gems, is gone.
But God can, whenever he will, turn the clouds above us again into
crystals, and strew the earth with them as before.
[Sidenote: Variety in the figures of frostwork.]
The great variety of forms which water takes when it becomes solid is
often seen on our windows in winter. The figures of the frostwork on
them are, you know, almost endless in their variety. These figures are
made up of little fine crystals, and these crystals are made out of the
water as the cold turns it from a fluid into a solid. How it is that
the little particles of water arrange themselves in these clusters of
crystals, branching out on the glass in all sorts of shapes, we do not
know. God makes them do so in a way that we can not understand. How
little do most people think of the wonderful things he is doing before
them continually! If they are told that God, with his cold, makes the
moisture from their breath into beautiful crystals, they can hardly
believe it, and yet they have seen these crystals in the delicate
frostwork on their windows winter after winter all their lives.
The figures of this crystal frostwork are often like leaves and
flowers, such as we sometimes see on vessels of silver, only much more
delicate and beautiful. It is as if God would smile on us in the very
frosts of winter as he does in the flowers of summer. In these figures,
made of the clustered crystals of the water from our breath, he teaches
us, just as he does in the flowers, that he loves to make things
beautiful for us to enjoy looking upon them.
[Sidenote: Why ice is made lighter than water.]
The ice, often so very thick, is all crystal. And how beautiful it
is when it is formed from clear water in a still place! There is one
thing very singular about ice which I must mention. You know that it is
lighter than water, for it swims on the top of it instead of sinking in
it. This is rather strange. One would suppose that when the fluid water
changed into a solid, it would be heavier, because the particles stick
tighter together then; but somehow, although they stick together much
more tightly, they are farther apart than they were before. It is this
that makes the ice lighter. If they were closer together, of course it
would be heavier.
We do not understand how God has made this to be so, but we can
understand what reason he had for it. It would be very bad to have ice
heavier than water. If it were heavier, there would be a great deal of
ice on the bottom of our rivers, and ponds, and lakes in the winter.
Then it would take a long time for the warm weather to melt this
covered-up ice, and in some places it would not all be melted before
another winter came. This would make bad work, and every year it would
become worse, for there would be additions from year to year to the ice
that is not melted. As it is now, the ice is all cleared out of the way
in most parts of the world in the early spring, because the sun and the
warm rains get at it, and thus the earth becomes ready in a very short
time for the summer.
[Sidenote: Regions of perpetual ice and snow.]
With us the ice and the snow bear rule but a part of the year, but
there are regions in the far north where they are always present. No
summer comes there to melt them. You have heard of the icebergs in the
seas of those regions. These piles of ice often rise like mountains,
and many a noble ship has been crushed by them.
There are mountains, too, in some parts of the world so high that
winter ever rules on their summits. The ice and the snow are ever there
glistening in the sun, even while in the valleys below the golden
harvests are ripening in all their beauty.
_Questions._--What is said about the difference between snow and
water? What is snow? Is the snow all alike? What is said about the
beauty of snow-flakes? What are snow-flakes? Give the comparison
between them and other crystals. What is true of the flakes of snow
just as it is of leaves and flowers? What is said about the abundance
of the crystals of snow? Tell about the tree covered with snow. What
is said about God’s destroying the crystals of the snow? What is the
frostwork on the windows in winter? What is said about the figures
in it? What is ice? What is there very singular about it? What would
happen if ice were heavier than water? Tell about the regions where
there are always ice and snow. What is true of some mountains?