188 THE EARTH MADE READY FOR MAN 



could guess that the plain gray slate had the glit- 

 tering particles in it that have been made into such 

 pretty Uttle golden cubes. And how could the 

 raindrops have helped to make the iron and the 

 sulphur, which they found in the slate and dis- 

 solved out of it, into such perfect cubes? It is very 

 wonderful, is it not? 



Or take a piece of granite. In this piece you have 

 quartz, the transparent particles; feldspar, the 

 white, pink or red ; and mica, the flat scales ; or horn- 

 blende, the black (sometimes you find tourmaline 

 there instead of hornblende). These are all mixed 

 up together. Although you can see them quite 

 readily there in the granite, they do not have here 

 their own particular shape. They have not had 

 room to grow into separate crystals as the single 

 crystals of quartz did. Each one of these minerals 

 has a shape all its own, but when they are all mixed 

 together in a mass of molten rock and the rock cools 

 deep underground they have no room to form into 

 their own separate shapes. They are crowded to- 

 gether and must do the best they can. 



So all together they make the crystalline rock of 

 granite, just as the starry snowflakes join together 

 to make the snowbank. The minerals as we see 

 them in the granite are not so beautiful as the sepa- 

 rate crystals of quartz, feldspar, hornblende, mica 

 or tourmaline would be; but granite is a very use- 

 ful rock. It is as useful as crystals are beautiful. 

 If every time these minerals came together they 

 had all gone about making crystals of themselves 

 without regard to each other, we could have had 



