248 SPRING. 



temperature come, it will freeze, and tear rocks and 

 mountains in pieces, in order that its primary atoms 

 may assume their proper order ; and yet those primary 

 atoms are not, to our powers and means of measuring, 

 extended things at all. When, also, the proper tem- 

 perature comes, this power of arrangement and crystal- 

 lization, which, when it acted, was infinite in energy, is 

 silently destroyed : that which was in winter too 

 mighty for the resistance of the firmest rock, yields to 

 the gentle breath of spring, as completely as if it were 

 gossamer. And if we have those powers and changes 

 displayed in one of the substances which to us is the 

 most common and familiar, and not displayed casually 

 and at long intervals, but every season, and sometimes 

 every day, we may be prepared for those curious ap- 

 pearances that we meet with in the animal and the 

 vegetable kingdoms. The beauty of the whole is, that 

 the principles the germs, so to speak, of those phe- 

 nomena which we know not whether the most to ad- 

 mire in their succession in time, or in their arrangement 

 in space cannot be lost ; for in the animal, and even 

 in the mineral kingdom, we uniformly find that the 

 power of endurance and the active force increase, as the 

 volume in which they are contained diminishes. Atom 

 cleaves to atom with much more force than mass 

 cleaves to mass ; and while we can split the tables of 

 a diamond by the stroke of a hammer, the cohesion 

 of the primary crystals is so great, that they will grind, 

 and polish the mass of another diamond ; nay, the 

 very papillae of the human hand, or the hair or down 

 of an animal will grind and polish hardened steel. In 

 every case too, which has been examined (and when 



