Featured on PDR in the collection Snowflakes: A Chapter From the Book of Nature (1863)

Snowflakes were not always emblematic of the unique. Israel Perkins Warren, a prominent American minister and author of Snowflakes: A Chapter from the Book of Nature (1863), offers a brief history of efforts to typologize frozen water crystals. In 1755, John Nettis published an account of his experiments, begun fifteen years prior, to observe “the wonderful Configurations of the smallest shining Particles of Snow”. He saw ninety-one varieties, many of which this “Oculist to the Republic of Middleburg” illustrated with needles and columns that resemble delicate leaves. In his 1820 Account of the Arctic Regions, Captain William Scoresby arrived on ninety-six varieties, which are diagrammed with lacey opacity on plates bookended by nautical charts and narwhals. Warren copies his own designs from these predecessors as…