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Updated: June 7, 2025
What is it that makes common salt crystallize in the form of cubes, and saltpetre in the shape of six-sided prisms? We see no reason why it should not have been just the other way, salt in prisms and saltpetre in cubes, or why either should take an exact geometrical outline, any more than coagulating albumen.
In the world of living things we cannot be so sure of ourselves. Life introduces something indeterminate and incommensurable. It makes use of both odd and even, though undoubtedly odd numbers generally prevail. Leaves that are in lobes usually have three or five lobes. But the stems of the mints are four-square, and the cells of the honey bee are six-sided.
No less than a thousand different forms of delicate crystals have been found among snowflakes, but though there is such a great variety, yet they are all built on the six-sided and six-pointed plan, and are all rendered dazzlingly white by the reflection of the light from the faces of the crystals and the tiny air-bubbles built up within them.
And, doubtless, it may excusably be deemed supernatural that the insect should adopt off-hand precisely that six-sided figure, and precisely that inclination of the angles of the same figure's pyramidal roof or floor, which, only by very refined and recondite investigation, can be scientifically shown to be those best fitted for the purpose. Mr.
If you make a number of round holes close together in a soft substance, and then squeeze the substance evenly from all sides, the rounds will gradually take a six-sided form, showing that this is the closest shape into which they can be compressed. Although the bee does not know this, yet as gnaws away every bit of wax that can be spared she brings the holes into this shape.
At each side of the front door was a high and cramped bay-window, one of them insanely culminating in a little six-sided tower of slate, and both of them girdled above the basement windows by a narrow porch, which ran across the front of the house and gave access to the shallow vestibule.
One common form is curved inward at the sides like a portion of a cylinder some 4 feet in length by 2½ in width: another is six-sided a diamond pattern, but with the points of the diamond squared away. Sometimes it is oval. In construction it is of wicker-work or wood, covered with leather, and embossed a blazon in metal-work, one particularly well known being that of a thunderbolt.
Such a pencil would be useful, but to sell well it must also be pretty; and therefore it goes through machinery which makes it round or oval or six-sided, as the case may be, rubs it smooth, and varnishes it, and then, with gold leaf or silver leaf or aluminum or ink, stamps upon it the name of the maker, and also a number or letter to show how hard the lead is.
Quartz, dense and milky, also in quartz of nearly every colour and appearance, saccharoidal, crystalline, nay, even in clear glass-like six-sided prismatic crystals, and associated with silver, copper, lead, arsenic, iron as sulphide, oxide, carbonate, and tungstate, antimony, bismuth, nickel, zinc, lead, and other metals in one form or another; in slate, quartzite, mica schist, granite, diorite, porphyry, felsite, calcite, dolomite, common carbonate of iron, siliceous sinter from a hot spring, as at Mount Morgan; as alluvial gold in drifts formed of almost all these materials; and once, perhaps the most curious matrix of all, a small piece of apparently alluvial gold, naturally imbedded in a shaly piece of coal.
In fact, she was disposed to maintain that the trap walls were really human masonry, and the production of Montezuma, or of the Amazons invented by Coronado. "Those four-sided and six-sided stones look altogether too regular to be accidental," was her conclusion.
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