The next day, Sunday, their father brought a book down from his room. It was a book of photographs of snow crystals taken by a man named W. A. Bentley. Born on a Vermont dairy farm in 1865, Bentley at the age of fifteen was given a microscope by his mother, a former schoolteacher. He became passionately absorbed in looking through it at various tiny objects, eventually focusing on snow crystals. After some years of trying to draw them he managed to buy a camera, again with his mother's help and over the strenuous objections of his father. It was one of the first Kodaks available for amateur use, using paper film.
After months of trial and error he succeeded in connecting his equipment in such a way that he was able to photograph individual snow crystals. He devoted the remaining forty-six years of his life to creating these photomicrographs,...
