To Flint's Pond

June 19.

June 19, 2020

Ripple Lake northeast shore is lined with a pale-yellowish pine pollen, though there are no pines within a dozen rods, and those (white pines) on the east. Half of the pool is gray with the dust, as with meal. Is not this paler yellow that of the white pine? So of Goose Pond. Thus these ponds and pools in the woods catch the pine pollen that may be floating in the atmosphere and it is washed up to one side (the northeast side). At Flint's also. They are pollen-ometers. 

The devil's-needles now abound in wood-paths and about the Ripple Lakes. Even if your eyes were shut you would know they were there, hearing the rustling of their wings as they flit by in pursuit of one another.


I follow a distinct fox-path amid the grass and bushes for some forty rods beyond Britton's Hollow, leading from the great fox-hole. It branches on reaching the peach-orchard. 


No doubt by these routes they oftenest go and return to their hole. As broad as a cart-wheel, and at last best seen when you do not look too hard for it.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 19, 1860

These ponds and pools in the woods catch the pine pollen that may be floating in the atmosphere . . . They are pollen-ometers. See note to June 21, 1860 ("As chemists detect the presence of ozone in the atmosphere by exposing to it a delicately prepared paper , so the lakes detect for us thus the presence of the pine pollen in the atmosphere . They are our pollinometers . How much of this invisible dust must be floating in the atmos- phere , and be inhaled and drunk by us at this season !! Who knows but the pollen of some plants may be un- wholesome to inhale , and produce the diseases of the season?");  May 4, 1853 ("Humboldt speaks of its having been proved that pine pollen falls from the atmosphere.");; June 20, 1858 ("Walking in the white pine wood there, I find that my shoes and, indeed, my hat are covered with the greenish-yellow pollen of the white pines, which is now being shed abundantly and covers like a fine meal all the plants and shrubs of the forest floor.");  June 22, 1858 ("I notice, after tipping the water out of my boat under the willows, much evidently pine pollen adhering to the inside of the boat along the water-line. Did it fall into it during my excursion to Holden’s Swamp the 20th, or has it floated through the air thus far?")

A fox-path beyond Britton's Hollow, leading from the great fox-hole. See April 9, 1859 ("A large fox-hole in Britton's hollow, lately dug; an ox-cartload of sand, or more, thrown up on the hill side.")