Nature disguised as mind.

February 19.

I incline to walk now in swamps and on the river and ponds, where I cannot walk in summer. 

The large moths apparently love the neighborhood of water, and are wont to suspend their cocoons over the edge of the meadow and river, places more or less inaccessible, to men at least.

I see a button-bush with what at first sight looks like the open pods of the locust attached. They are the light ash-colored cocoons of the A. Promethea, with the withered and faded leaves wrapped around them so artfully and admirably secured by fine silk wound round the leaf-stalk and the twig they are taken at a little distance for a few curled and withered leaves left on.

Though the particular twigs on which you find some cocoons may never or very rarely retain any leaves, — the maple, for instance, — there are enough leaves left on other shrubs and trees to warrant their adopting this disguise. Yet it is startling to think that the inference has in this case been drawn by some mind that, as most other plants retain some leaves, the walker will suspect these also to.

Each and all such disguises and other resources remind us that not some poor worm's instinct merely, as we call it, but the mind of the universe rather, which we share, has been intended upon each particular object. All the wit in the world was brought to bear on each case to secure its end. It was long ago, in a full senate of all intellects, determined how cocoons had best be suspended, — kindred mind with mine that admires and approves decided it so.

Who placed us with eyes between a microscopic and a telescopic world?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  February 19, 1854

The light ash-colored cocoons of the A. Promethea, with the withered and faded leaves wrapped around them so artfully and admirably secured by fine silk wound round the leaf-stalk and the twig. See January 19, 1854 ("The A. Promethea is the only moth whose cocoon has a fastening wound round the petiole of the leaf, and round the shoot, the leaf partly folded round it"); June 2, 1855 (“that cocoon of the Attacus cecropia”); ;May 17, 1857 ("Two cocoons of apparently the Attacus Promethea on a small black birch, the silk wound round the leaf stalk.

Not some poor worm's instinct merely, as we call it, but the mind of the universe rather, which we share, has been intended upon each particular object. All the wit in the world was brought to bear on each case to secure its end. See December 17, 1853 ("a hundred — silvery-brown cocoons,. .with dry alder and fragments of fern leaves attached to and partially concealing them”); December 24, 1853 ("I am not ready to refer it to an intelligence which the creature does not share, as much as we do the prerogatives of reason. This radiation of the brain. The bare silvery cocoons would otherwise be too obvious. The worm has evidently said to itself: "Man or some other creature may come by and see my casket. I will disguise it, will hang a screen before it.”); January 14, 1857 ("What kind of understanding was there between the mind that determined that these leaves should hang on during the winter, and that of the worm that fastened a few of these leaves to its cocoon in order to disguise it?”)

Who placed us? See  February 19, 1857 ("Why do water and snow take just this form?"); April 18, 1852 ("Why should just these sights and sounds accompany our life? Why should I hear the chattering of black-birds, why smell the skunk each year? .. why just this circle of creatures completes the world?”); Walden ("Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?”Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors.?"); December 5, 1856 ("I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too.")