If, however, the day is cold and frosty, the water
does not fall in a shower of rain; it comes down in
the shape of noiseless snow. Go out after such
a snow-shower, on a calm day, and look at some of
the flakes which have fallen; you will see, if you
choose good specimens, that they are not mere masses
of frozen 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 crystallization,” 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 starts know as “snowflakes”.
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 buy here also; how last year’s
snowdrop plant caught them and stored them up in it’s
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 work, and form green granules
in the tiny leaves, helping them to take food out
of the air, while the little rootlets below are drinking
water out of the ground. The invisible life and
invisible sunbeams are busy here, setting actively
to work another fairy, the force of “chemical
attraction,” and so the little snowdrop plant
grows and blossoms, without any help from you or me.
Week 2
One picture more, and then I hope you will believe
in my fairies. From the cold garden, you run
into the house, and find the fire laid indeed in the
grate, but the wood dead and the coals black, waiting
to be lighted. You strike a match, and soon there
is a blazing fire. Where does the heat come
from? Why do the coals burn and give out a glowing
light? Have you not read of gnomes buried down
deep in the earth, in mines, and held fast there till
some fairy wand has released them, and allowed them
to come to earth again? Well, thousands and
millions of years ago, those coals were plants; and
