Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/419

Rh delicacy and fairy-like beauty. Prof. Tyndall, the great classic on this subject, says, with reason, that, "in the estimation of science, ice bears the same relation to glass that an oratorio of Handel does to the cries of a market-place. The ice is order; the glass is confusion.... Nature lays her beams in music." In each complete flower is a little



disk. These are vacuous spots, caused by diminution of volume as the ice is converted to water at each point where a flower is produced.

Ice-structure is not impaired by the luminous rays of a beam, to which it is transparent, but by the dark or heat rays, to which it is opaque. These, arrested in their transition through it, expend their energy in taking asunder the molecules of which it is constructed. They become "our working anatomist," and reveal the interior and otherwise hidden form of ice architecture, shown in the ice-flowers of the figure.