cover.

Imagine a snow-covered field glistening in the sun on a clear, quiet
winter's day. As far as we can see, there is no sign of life, no
movement. Here water, which is normally fluid and, in its liquid state,
serves the ever-changing life-processes, covers the earth in the form
of millions of separate crystals shaped with mathematical exactitude,
each of which breaks and reflects in a million rays the light from the
sun (Plate V). A contrast, indeed, between this quiet emergence of
forms from levity into gravity, and the form-denying volcanism surging
up out of gravity into levity, as shown by the ever-restless activity
of the Solfatara. As we found volcanism to be a macrotelluric
manifestation of functional sulphur, we find in the process of
snow-formation a corresponding manifestation of functional phosphorus.

In the formation of snow, nature shows us in statu agendi a process
which we otherwise meet in the earth only in its finished results,
crystallization. We may, therefore, rightly look upon snow-formation as
an ur-phenomenon in this sphere of nature's activities. As such it
allows us to learn something concerning the origin in general of the
crystalline realm of the earth; and, vice versa, our insight into the
'becoming' of this realm will enable us to see more clearly the
universal function of which phosphorus is the main representative among
the physical substances of the earth.

It has puzzled many an observer that crystals occur in the earth with
directions of their main axes entirely independent of the direction of
the earthly pull of gravity. Plate VI shows the photograph of a cluster
of Calcite crystals as an example of this phenomenon. It tells us that
gravity can have no effect on the formation of the crystal itself. This