^ Descartes announced that he had discovered ninety- three various forms or patterns of snowflakes. The words had scarcely fallen from his lips before another declared that he had found nine hundred. Indeed there is no limit to their diversity ; it is fair to say that no two of them are precisely alike, just as no two leaves in Vallombrosa are alike, just as no two human faces are alike on all the earth. This infinite variety is also a distinguishing feature of the work of God.^
^ I do not see how one can consider without a feeling of reverence and awe what Kuskin would call such " ethics of the dust " — this grand mathematical legislation of the universe carried down to and governing even invisible atoms. For we must remember that, if the atomic theory be true, the sliape of each tiny crystal depends in its turn upon the obedient march and movement of millions of infinitesimal atoms. How small these are it is almost impossible to realize ; but it is estimated that, if a drop of water were swollen to the size of the earth, each constituent atom would still be less than the size of a cricket- ball. You would, therefore, get into billions and trillions, in order to take the atomic census of a snowflake. Now, each one of those individual atoms acts in accordance with regular laws, 1 D. J. Burrell, The Sjnrii of the Age, 205.
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and the beauty and symmetry of every snowflake depend upon the exact manipulation of these atoms by the Divine energy — their exact obedience to the Divine method of the universe. Surely men need not go to tales of ancient miracles to satisfy their craving for the wonderful. Why, here is a miracle that you can hold in your hand ! You tread on a thousand miracles at every step you take.^
^ Supposing you were to go to school during the dinner-hour, when no one was about, and saw lying on the desk an exercise book. If, on opening it, you saw on one page a blot of red ink and another of black, and turning over another leaf saw the imprint of four dirty fingers and a thumb, you would say at once, " These came by accident ; and the boy who made these marks did not intend to make them." But if, turning over more leaves, you came upon a well-drawn square, and then a perfect circle, and then upon groups of figures drawn and combined, just as in your Euclid, you would say, " Ah ! that did not come by chance. The boy that drew that circle meant to do it ; the boy that drew that figure has passed the ' pons asinorum,' he can do such-and-such a proposition." If another boy were to come in and look over your shoulder, and say, " Oh no, they all came by chance," you would open your eyes in amazement, or see at once that he was trying to make a fool of you. We all, by the very law of our minds, at once conclude that that which is full of intelligence and appeals to intelligence comes from intelligence. And so when I enter into " the treasuries of the snow," and see the
tiny spherule traced with lines Of nature's geometric signs,
I see in it a revelation of the personality, the intelligence, the wisdom of God.^
^ It may be argued, as it has been argued by the Eev. Aubrey Moore, in Lux Mundi, that " the counterpart of the theological belief in the unity and omnipresence of God is the scientific belief in the unity of nature and the reign of law " ; that " the evolution which was at first supposed to have destroyed teleology is found to be more saturated with teleology than the view which it super- seded " ; that " it is a great gain to have eliminated chance, to find science declaring that there must be a reason for everything, even when we cannot hazard a conjecture as to what the reason is " ; that " it seems as if in the providence of God the mission of modern science was to bring home to our unmetaphysical ways of ' C. J. Perry. - T. Hind, The Treastores 0/ the Snow, 15.
135 THE TREASURIES OF THE SNOW
thinking the great truth of the Divine immanence in creation, which is not less essential to the Christian idea of God than to the philosophical view of nature." But on the opposite side it may be represented — as, indeed, Mr. Aubrey Moore himself expressly allows — that all these deductions are valid only on the preformed supposition, or belief, " that God is, and that he is the rewarder of such as diligently seek him." ^
3. The perfection of the snow crystals assures us that God cares for little things. The simplest creatures of the Divine Hand and the minutest details of their structures are not un- worthy of infinite power. Who could have thought these crystals of the snowstorm worthy of such care ? Only a snowflake ! Is it not a waste of beauty ? What unnumbered myriads of them are floating there through the skies ! How they blanket the fields ; drift in great banks along the fences and railway tracks ; fill the ravines in the hills ; pack the gorges of the mountain ; and lie heaps on heaps upon the highest summits ! Surely, as we think of the seeming waste of beauty, we may sing over these flowers of the snow, these crystal gems of the winter storm, as Gray sang in his Elegy :