The ant-lion is found at Burlington, Vermont,

January 16.

To Cambridge and Boston.

Carried to Harris the worms -- brown, light-striped-and fuzzy black caterpillars (he calls the first also caterpillars); also two black beetles; all which I have found within a week or two on ice and snow; thickest in a thaw.

Showed me, in a German work, plates of the larvæ of dragon-flies and ephemeræ, such as I see or their cases on rushes, etc., over water.

Says the ant-lion is found at Burlington, Vermont, and may be at Concord.

I can buy Indian coats in Milk Street from three and a half to six dollars, depending on the length; also leggins from $1.50 to three or more dollars, also depending on the length.

Saw a Nantucket man, who said that their waters were not so good as the south side of Long Island to steer in by sounding. Off Long Island it deepened a mile every fathom for at least forty miles, as he had proved, — perhaps eighty; but at Barnegat it was not so


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 16, 1855

Harris. See note to January 1, 1853 ("Sibley told me that Agassiz told him that Harris was the greatest entomologist in the world, and gave him permission to repeat his remark")

Caterpillars which I have found within a week or two on ice and snow. . See January 5, 1858 ("I see one of those fuzzy winter caterpillars, black at the two ends and brown-red in middle, crawling on a rock by the Hunt's Bridge causeway. "); January 8, 1857 ("I picked up on the bare ice of the river, opposite the oak in Shattuck's land, on a small space blown bare of snow, a fuzzy caterpillar, black at the two ends and red-brown in the middle, rolled into a ball.”) and note to January 22, 1859 ("Four kinds of caterpillars, and also the glow-worm-like creature so common, grasshoppers, crickets, and many bugs, not to mention the mosquito like insects which the warm weather has called forth (flying feebly just over the ice and snow a foot or two), spiders, and snow-fleas")

January 16  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 16


A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I love you like I love the sky

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2022