96 SIGNS AND SEASONS 



of what I have read and been told of the Florida 

 formation. This white and brittle limestone is 

 undermined by water. Here are the dimples and 

 depressions, the sinks and the wells, the springs 

 and the lakes. Some places a mouse might break 

 through the surface and reveal the water far be- 

 neath, or the snow gives way of its own weight, 

 and you have a minute Florida well, with the trun- 

 cated cone-shape and all. The arched and subter- 

 ranean pools and passages are there likewise. 



But there is a more beautiful and fundamental 

 geology than this in the snow-storm: we are admit- 

 ted into Nature's oldest laboratory, and see the 

 working of the law by which the foundations of the 

 material universe were laid, the law or mystery 

 of crystallization. The earth is built upon crystals ; 

 the granite rock is only a denser and more compact 

 snow, or a kind of ice that was vapor once and may 

 be vapor again. "Every stone is nothing else but 

 a congealed lump of frozen earth," says Plutarch. 

 By cold and pressure air can be liquefied, perhaps 

 solidified. A little more time, a little more heat, 

 and the hills are but April snow-banks. Nature has 

 but two forms, the cell and the crystal, the crys- 

 tal first, the cell last. All organic nature is built 

 up of the cell; all inorganic, of the crystal. Cell 

 upon cell rises the vegetable, rises the animal; crys- 

 tal wedded to and compacted with crystal stretches 

 the earth beneath them. See in the falling snow 

 the old cooling and precipitation, and the shooting, 

 radiating forms that are the architects of planet and 

 globe. 



