White on White

By Peter Stoler

SNOW by Ruth Kirk

Morrow; 320 pages; $12.50

"But where," asked the 15th century French poet Franc,ois Villon, "are the snows of yesteryear?" Ruth Kirk knows, and in her newly published Snow, she answers not only Villon's question but any others the reader--be he skier, scientist or snowbound suburbanite--may have about the stuff that delights children, often annoys and inconveniences adults, and, to a greater extent than most people are aware, has influenced the course of history and will continue to do so. As Kirk describes, the snows of yesteryear--and the years before that--have been compressed for thousands of years into the hard ice of the glaciers that hold three-quarters of the world's fresh water. The snows of today are falling on our fields and mountains, where, it is hoped, they will provide the world with the waters of tomorrow.

A prolific writer of books and articles about nature, Kirk has already won awards for her studies of such subjects as deserts and whales. She deserves another for Snow. With her forest-ranger husband, she spent five winters on a part of Mount Rainier, where snow depths regularly reach to the third-story window. Each flake, she explains, is in fact clusters of crystals that become stuck together as they fall. She tells how the crystals themselves form, and how snow changes once it falls. It is useful information, especially for skiers, who should wax their boards differently for different types of snow. Small wonder, she notes, that the Eskimos have more than two dozen words in their language to describe various kinds of snow. Yet the substance, which slowed

Hannibal and nearly defeated Russia in its "winter war" with Finland, is much misunderstood. Thought of as sterile, it .eems with microorganisms, from single-celled creatures to the ice worms immortalized in Robert Service's poem The Bal lad of Blasphemous Bill:

You know what it 's like in the

Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below;

When the ice-worms wriggle their

purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow;

The only thing snow may not be is in finitely variable. One would like to be lieve that no two snowflakes are identical. But, notes Ruth Kirk, there are no physical rules that should prevent nature from duplicating itself, and there are more than half a million snowflakes in each cubic foot of snow. Scientists may not have found two flakes that are exactly alike. But then, they really haven't looked at that many.

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