Snow-flakes clusters of crystals.
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.
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.
Why ice is made lighter than water.