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| June 17 (avesong) |
Go to Blake’s. Indigo-bird on his trees.
A. M. — Ride with him and Brown and Sophia round a part of Quinsigamond Pond into Shrewsbury.
The southerly end of the pond covered for a great distance with pads of yellow and white lily. Measured one of the last: nine and seven eighths inches long by nine and six eighths, with sharp lobes, etc., and a. reddish petiole. Small primrose well out; how long?
The cedar swamp, source of Assabet, must be partly in Grafton, as well as Westboro near railroad, according to a farmer in Shrewsbury.
P. M. —Went to Rev. Horace James’s reptiles (Orthodox). He had, set up, a barred owl, without horns and a little less than the cat owl. Also a large lobe-footed bird which I think must have been a large grebe, killed in Fitchburg.
He distinguished the Rana halecina in the alcohol by more squarish (?) spots. Showed me the horned frog (?), (or toad ?); also alive in bottle, with moss and water, the violet-colored salamander (S. venenosa) with yellow spots (five or six inches long), probably same I found in stump at Walden; and, in spirits, smaller, the S. erythronota, with a conspicuous red back. What looked like mine, or the common one in springs here, was Triton niger. I think he said Holbrook made the water ones tritons and land ones salamanders. Another small one, all red, with spots; another with a line of red spots on each side; and others.
He finds a variety of Emys guttata with striated scales (mentioned by Holbrook and Storer). Saw a common box turtle shell with initials in sternum. One thought that what ever was cut in the scale was renewed in the new scale. Saw, in spirits, the Heterodon platyrhinus from Smithfield, R. I., flat-snouted, somewhat like a striped snake; and a very small brown snake. James gave me some of the spawn of a shellfish from a string of them a foot long.
At Natural History Rooms, a great cone from a southern pine and a monstrous nutshell from the East Indies (?); seed of the Lodoicea Sechellarum, Seychelles Islands.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 17, 1856
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