During the winter of 1635, René Descartes made the strikingly detailed
illustrations of snow crystals shown below. His observations, published in the 1637 Discours
de la méthode touch on many of the perplexing issues at the heart of contemporary studies
of snow crystals. Here are some of those observations, translated from the French by Charles Frank
in the Journal of Glaciology, volume 13, page 535, 1974:
But what astonished me the most was that among the grains that fell last
night I noticed some which had around them six little teeth, like clock makers' wheels . . .
but so perfectly formed in hexagons, and of which the six sides were so straight, and the six arms
so equal, that it is impossible for man to make anything so exact.
I only had difficulty to imagine what could have formed and made so exactly
symmetrical these six teeth around each grain in the midst of free air and during the agitation of
a very strong wind, until I finally considered that this wind had easily been able to carry some of
these grains to the bottom or to the top of some cloud, and hold them there, because they were rather
small; and that there they were obliged to arrange themselves in such a way that each was surrounded
by six others in the same plane, following the ordinary order of nature.
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