SNOW 183 
and may be found pictured in the encyclope- 
dias and elsewhere, ranging from the simplest 
stellar shapes to the most complicated ramifi- 
cations. Professor Tyndall, in his delightful 
book on “The Glaciers of the Alps,” gives 
drawings of a few of these snow blossoms, 
which he watched falling for hours, the whole 
air being filled with them, and drifts of several 
inches being accumulated while he watched. 
“Let us imagine the eye gifted with micro- 
scopic power sufficient to enable it to see the 
molecules which composed these starry crys- 
tals; to observe the solid nucleus formed and 
floating in the air; to see it drawing towards it 
its allied atoms, and these arranging themselves 
as if they moved to music, and ended with ren- 
dering that music concrete.” Thus do the 
Alpine winds, like Orpheus, build their walls 
by harmony. 
In some of these frost flowers the rare and 
delicate blossom of our wild A/ttella diphylia is 
beautifully figured. Snowflakes have been also 
found in the form of regular hexagons and 
other plane figures, as well as in cylinders and 
spheres. As a general rule, the intenser the 
cold the more perfect the formation, and the 
most perfect specimens are Arctic or Alpine in 
their locality. In this climate the snow seldom 
falls when the mercury is much below zero; 
