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THE BIRDS AND THE

PRIMROSE.

WO birds, heretofore good friends, were gossiping about their haunts, and the flowers they had

seen.

"Ah!" said one, "I saw last evening such a beautiful white primrose near the woodbine we have so often visited together." "Yes," said the other, "beautiful indeed, but you are mistaken in the colour. I think you said white. I saw it this morning, and it was a most delicate pink."

"Indeed," said the first, his ruby throat glistening, and his black eyes sparkling as he jerked out the angry words "Indeed, I am not so blind as to make an error in colour! The flower was white."

a robin redbreast, happening to fly that way, was appealed to as arbitrator in the dispute. When they had made their statements, he spoke:

"My friends," said he, "I slept under the primrose last night, and its flower was white at first, but pink this morning. Its blossom lasts but a few hours, and changes colour as it dies."

He who thinks himself always right is often quite wrong. The little birds apologized to each other, became good friends again, and agreed not to be too positive in the future.

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TRUST IN CHRIST.

W

HAT do you do without a mother to tell all your troubles to?" asked a child who had a mother of one who had not.

"Mother told me who to go to before she died," answered the little orphan. "I go to the Lord Jesus; He was my mother's Friend, and He is mine."

"Jesus Christ is up in the sky; He is a long way off, and has a great many things to attend to in heaven. It is not likely He can stop to mind you."

"And I suppose,' " said the other, 66 none but you can tell colours! I know what I say to be the truth. The flower was a delicate pink this very morning.' From words they had nearly come to a downright fight, when VOL. XIV. SECOND SERIES.-March, 1874.

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SNOW-CRYSTALS AND

HAIL-STONES.

Out of the bosom of the air, Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,

Paleth beside that Form of light Over the woodlands brown and bare,

divine;

And all supernal glories richly

there

Assembled shine.

Immortal grace

Sits on the Brow that wore the

thorny crown;

Over the harvest-fields forsaken, Silent, and soft, and slow Descends the snow.

NOW is formed by the

freezing of vapour, when the temperature of the

Before the peerless beauty of that atmosphere sinks below a certain

Face

All heaven bows down.

degree of cold. A cloud of va

pours is first formed into drops:

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these drops immediately begin to fall; but, meeting with freezing air as they fall, each is formed into an icicle, shooting itself out into several points. Continuing their descent, the tiny icicles pass through some streams of warmer air; or, being continually wafted to and fro, and thus coming into frequent contact with each other, are a little thawed. In their further progress downwards, they become entangled, or form themselves into clusters or flakes, and in this

shape alight on the earth. Upon examining the flakes closely, they are found to be chiefly composed of stars of six points, though these are intermixed with various other irregular figures, which for the most part are fragments of the regular ones. Others seem to be collected together, and then frozen again into irregular clusters;

so that the mantle of snow that

dazzles the eye on a winter morning is a mass of icicles of an endless variety of forms.

Nothing can be more beautiful than many of the snow-crystals when looked at through a microscope. The Woodcut represents drawings of some that were observed by Dr. Netlis, of Middleburg, more than a hundred years ago; and of others that were first described by Dr. Scoresby, the well-known navigator of the Polar regions. The latter gentleman collected no less than ninety-six varieties of snow as the result of his own observations.

Like ice, snow would be transparent but for the air which it contains. The regular crystals, such as are shown on the foregoing page, are formed only when the air is calm, and the cold intense, and are not found, therefore, in temperate climates. Snow has been seen, in regions about the Pole, of red, orange, and salmon colour. This occurs both on the fixed and floating ice; and seems, in some cases, to result from vegetable, and in others from animal matter, in the water of the sea, and deposited upon the ice around. Snow-storms sometimes present a luminous appearance, covering all objects with a sheet of fire,-an effect due, probably, to electricity.

Snow has many valuable

uses. When it is gathered together in lofty parts of the earth, it serves to feed, by its gradual melting, streams of running water; and in some countries it tempers the burning heats of summer, by cooling the breezes which pass over it. In very cold climates, on the contrary, it serves as a defence against the rigours of winter, by the protection which it affords to vegetation against frost, and the shelter which it gives to animals, which bury themselves under it. Even in more temperate regions, plants and shrubs suffer in a winter in which little or no snow falls. For want of their usual snowy covering, Alpine plants have sometimes perished in the comparatively mild climate of England.

As we ascend through the air, the temperature gradually becomes less, until we arrive at a region of perpetual snow. The height at which the snowline, as it is called, is reached is different in different countries. On the northern side of the Himálaya mountains, in Asia, it is about seventeen thousand feet; on Chimborazo, in South America, it is fifteen thousand; on the Alps it is nearly nine thousand; and on

the Pyrenées eight thousand eight hundred and sixty. As we go from the equator to the poles, the elevation at which snow always exists is of course less. At North Cape, the extreme northerly point of Europe, it is two thousand four hundred and forty feet.

In North America, snow has sometimes been found rolled into the form of cylinders and balls. The cylinders were produced by the snow deposited in a second shower upon some which had before fallen, and the surface of which had been covered with a thin coating of ice. A violent wind then caused the particles of snow to roll on the ice, and the masses thus produced assumed perfectly cylindrical forms of various sizes, the greatest being about three feet in diameter; they were hollow at each end. The

balls were from one to fifteen inches round, and were also formed by rolling; though some were seen in enclosures into which they could not have rolled, and therefore are supposed to have been formed in the atmosphere itself. They were very light, and were made up of crystals irregularly united. Similar balls have been observed in Scotland; and one person states that they were composed only of snow; for one of them, being cut through by him, was found to have no hard body fo its nucleus or centre.

Hail appears to be a kind of snow, or snowy rain, which has undergone several freezings and partial meltings, in its passage through different portions of the atmosphere, some temperate and others very cold. Its formation is not as yet clearly understood, but it seems

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to be connected with electricity, since a hail-storm is very frequently preceded or accompanied by thunder and lightning. The

structure and form of hailstones are various. The righthand figure in the Cut represents one that fell at Bonn, in

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