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