The recent post about bad snow (see new emblem at bottom) reminded me of an old image that often pops up in historical descriptions about snow. The date was 1555 and Olaus Magnus, an archbishop in Sweden, just published "Description of the Northern Peoples", a long multi-chapter, multi-volume text with the interesting chapter for us being titled "The Shapes of Snow" with the following illustration.

I am not sure what the sections on the left half represent, but the right half shows a fanciful variety of "snow shapes", including a bell, a hand, an arrow, a crescent moon, and one at least in the form of a six-pointed star. Perhaps the author gave incomplete instructions to his illustrator.

At any rate, scholars have suggested that this illustration is actually the first to show the form of snow. Though the Chinese had many centuries before correctly described snow's "six-fold" nature, no illustration has yet been unearthed before Olaus Magnus's above. Luckily, it wasn't so many centuries later that we got much more accurate illustrations from the likes of Descartes and Hooke.

Finally, as promised, the proposed "No bad snow" emblem.

--JN