10 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
water, but that each one is a beautiful six-pointed 
crystal star. How have these crystals been built up ? 
What power has been at work arranging their delicate 
forms ? In the fourth lecture we shall see that up in 
the clouds another of our invisible fairies, which, for 
want of a better name, we call the " force of crystal- 
lization," has caught hold of the tiny particles of 
water before " cohesion " had made them into round 
drops, and there silently but rapidly, has moulded 
them into those delicate crystal stars known as " snow- 
flakes." 
And now, suppose that this snow-shower has fallen 
early in February ; turn aside for a moment from 
examining the flakes, and clear the newly-fallen snow 
from off the flower-bed on the lawn. What is this 
little green tip peeping up out of the ground under 
the snowy covering ? It is a young snowdrop plant. 
Can you tell me why it grows ? where it finds its food ? 
what makes it spread out its leaves and add to its 
stalk day by day ? What fairies are at work here ? 
First there is the hidden fairy " life," and of her 
even our wisest men know but little. But they know 
something of her way of working, and in Lecture VII. 
we shall learn how the invisible fairy sunbeams have 
been busy here also ; how last year's snowdrop plant 
caught them and stored them up in its bulb, and how 
now in the spring, as soon as warmth and moisture 
creep down into the earth, these little imprisoned sun- 
waves begin to be active, stirring up the matter in 
the bulb, and making it swell and burst upwards till 
it sends out a little shoot through the surface of the 
soil. Then the sun-waves above-ground take up the 
