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.

Wikipedia

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")

[Harris] 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. See  May 9, 1854 ("That early narrow curved-winged insect on ice and river which I thought an ephemera he  [Professor Harris ] says is a Sialis, or maybe rather a Perla. . . .  Says the shad-flies (with streamers and erect wings ) are ephemeræ."); See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Insect Hatches in Spring (millers, perla, shad-flies or ephemera)

Caterpillars which I have found within a week or two on ice and snow. See January 8, 1855 ("I see various caterpillars and grubs on the snow and in one place a reddish ant about a third of an inch long walking off."); January 11, 1855 ("There were many of those grubs and caterpillars on the ice half a dozen rods from shore, some sunk deep into it. ") See also  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.”); 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 24, 1858 (" I see two of those black and red-brown fuzzy caterpillars");  January 24, 1859 ("I see an abundance of caterpillars of various kinds on the ice of the meadows . . . Many of them are frozen in yet, some for two thirds their length, yet all are alive.")  and  A Book of the Seasons,   by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: insects and worms come forth and are active

Saw a Nantucket man, who said that their waters were not so good . . . to steer in by sounding. See December 29, 1854 ("Nantucket . . . The fog was so thick that we were lost on the water; stopped and sounded many times. The clerk said the depth varied from three to eight fathoms between the island and Cape.")

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

Cambridge and Boston –

The ant-lion is found at

Burlington, Vermont.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The ant-lion is found at Burlington

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 ©  2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-550116