elp reproducing the pyramid and the prism.
There is a six-sidedness, as it were, in the very nature of this
substance which will infallibly manifest itself if the crystallizing
substance only be allowed fair play. This six-sided tendency is its Law
of Crystallization--a law of its nature which it cannot resist. But in
the crystal there is nothing at all corresponding to Life. There is
simply an inherent force which can be called into action at any moment,
and which cannot be separated from the particles in which it resides.
The crystal may be ground to pieces, but this force remains intact. And
even after being reduced to powder, and running the gauntlet of every
process in the chemical laboratory, the moment the substance is left to
itself under possible conditions it will proceed to recrystallize anew.
But if the Polycystine urn be broken, no inorganic agency can build it
up again. So far as any inherent urn-building power, analogous to the
crystalline force, is concerned, it might lie there in a shapeless mass
forever. That which modeled it at first is gone from it. It was Vital;
while the force which built the crystal was only Molecular.

From an artistic point of view this distinction is of small importance.
AEsthetically, the Law of Crystallization is probably as useful in
ministering to natural beauty as Vitality. What are more beautiful than
the crystals of a snowflake? Or what frond of fern or feather of bird
can vie with the tracery of the frost upon a window-pane? Can it be said
that the lichen is more lovely than the striated crystals of the granite
on which it grows, or the moss on the mountain side more satisfying than
the hidden amethyst and cairngorm in the rock beneath? Or is the
botanist more astonished when his microscope reveals the architecture of
spiral tissue in the stem of a plant, or the mineralogist who beholds
for the first time the chaos of beauty in the sliced specimen of some
common stone? So far as beauty goes the organic world and the inorganic
are one.

To the man of science, however, this identity of beauty signifies
nothing. His concern, in the first instance, is not with the forms but
with the natures of things. It is no valid answer to him, when he asks
the difference between the moss and the cairngorm, the frost-work and
the fern, to be assured that both are beautiful. For no fundamental
distinction in Science depends upon beauty. He wants an answer in terms
of chemistry, are they