Ranunculus reptans is abundantly out at mouth of brook

July 8. 

3 P. M. — To Baker Farm by boat. 

River down to lower side of long rock.  When I land on Hosmer flat shore, start a large water adder, apparently running on the bank. It ran at once into the river and was lost under the pads. 

Ranunculus reptans is abundantly out at mouth of brook, Baker shore. Is that small sparganium there, now abundantly out, about eighteen inches high, with leaves narrow and convex below, concave above, the same species with the larger? Some in press. 

Got the downy woodpecker’s nest, some days empty.

Find several large and coarse Potentilla arguta, two and a half feet high and more, at Bittern Cliff, nearly out of bloom. Flowers in crowded corymbs. They are white, not yellow, as Gray calls them. 

In the side hill wood-lot (or spring wood-lot) behind, where the wood was cut last winter, poke-leaved milkweed (Asclepias phytolaccoides), apparently a day or two, and Circaea alpina, some days, a foot high with opaque leaves and bracts (in press). This I find to be the same with the small, also bracted, one at Corner Spring (whose leaves were perhaps more transparent when in shade, but which now grows larger in sun).

Sophia saw this afternoon two great snap-turtles fighting near the new stone bridge, making a great commotion in the river and not regarding the spectators, she and another, and a teamster who stopped his team to observe them. 

Sam Wheeler, who did not know there were snap turtles here, says he saw opposite to his boarding house, on the sidewalk, in New York, the other day, a green turtle which weighed seven hundred and twenty pounds, which in a short time dropped eggs enough to fill a vessel some feet in diameter. He partook of some of the soup made of it, and there were several eggs in it, which were luscious. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  July 8, 1856


Today's entry continues:

After Jules Gérard, the lion-killer, had hunted lions for some time, and run great risk of losing his life, though he struck the lions in the right place with several balls, the lions steadily advancing upon him even though they had got a death-wound, he discovered that it was not enough to be brave and take good aim, — that his balls, which were of lead, lacked penetration and were flattened against the lions’ bones; and accordingly he sent to France and obtained balls which were pointed with steel and went through and through both shoulder blades.

So I should say that the weapons or balls which the Republican Party uses lacked penetration, and their foe steadily advances nevertheless, to tear them in pieces, with their well-aimed balls flattened on his forehead.

In Gérard’s book I find, according to a Mohammedan tradition, “when the lion roars, he says, ‘Ya rabbi, ma tecallot mi a la ed-dabeome,’ which signifies ‘Seignior, deliver to my power the wicked only, and let the good go free.”’