THE FORCING POWER OF RAIN. 61 



forces of Nature forces continually in action, but 

 which are too apt to pass unnoticed and unrecognized 

 have taken their due place in scientific inquiry. 

 Strangely enough, the subject has been found to have 

 at once a most practical bearing on business relations, 

 and an aspect more strikingly poetical than any other 

 subject, perhaps, which men of science have ever taken 

 in hand to investigate. "We see the ordinary processes 

 of Nature, as they are termed, taking their place in 

 the workshop of modern wealth, and at the same time 

 exhibited in a hundred striking and interesting physical 

 relations. What, for instance, can be stranger or more 

 poetical than the contrast which Professor Tyndall has 

 instituted between that old friend to the agriculturist 

 the wintry snow-flake and the wild scenery of the 

 Alps ? "I have seen," he says, " the wild stone-ava- 

 lanches of the Alps, which smoke and thunder down 

 the declivities .with a vehemence almost sufficient to 

 stun the observer. I have also seen snow-flakes de- 

 scending so softly as not to hurt the fragile spangles 

 of which they were composed ; yet to produce from 

 aqueous vapor a quantity which a child could carry 

 of that tender material demands an exertion of energy 

 competent to gather up the shattered blocks of the 

 largest stone-avalanche I have ever seen, and pitch 

 them to twice the height from which they fell." 



We may point out in this place the important con- 

 nection which exists between the rainfall of a country 



