THE PHYSICS OF ICE. 



403 



delicacy and fairy-like beauty. Prof. Tyndall, the great classic on 

 this subject, says, with reason, that, " in the estimation of science, ice 

 bears the same relation to glass that an oratorio of Handel does to the 

 cries of a market-place. The ice is order ; the glass is confusion. . . . 

 Nature lays her beams in music." In each complete flower is a little 



Fig. 5. 







^fYo- 



%A 





Flowers op Ice magnified. 



disk. These are vacuous spots, caused by diminution of volume as 

 the ice is converted to water at each point where a flower is produced. 

 Ice-structure is not impaired by the luminous rays of a beam, to 

 which it is transparent, but by the dark or heat rays, to which it is 

 opaque. These, arrested in their transition through it, expend their en- 

 ergy in taking asunder the molecules of which it is constructed. They 

 become " our working anatomist," and reveal the interior and otherwise 

 hidden form of ice architecture, shown in the ice-flowers of the fio-ure. 



