Causes still in operation, however slow and unobserved.

January 14. 

Coldest morning yet; 20° (?).

Pliny says, "In minimis Natura praestat” (Nature excels in the least things).

The Wellingtonia gigantea, the famous California tree, is a great thing; the seed from which it sprang, a little thing; and so are all seeds or origins of things.

Richard Porson said:

"We all speak in metaphors. Those who appear not to do it, only use those which are worn out, and are overlooked as metaphors. The original fellow is therefore regarded as only witty; and the dull are consulted as the wise."

He might have said that the former spoke a dead language.

John Horne Tooke is reported in "Recollections” by Samuel Rogers as having said:

 "Read few books well. We forget names and dates; and reproach our memory. They are of little consequence. We feel our limbs enlarge and strengthen; yet cannot tell the dinner or dish that caused the alteration. Our minds improve though we cannot name the author, and have forgotten the particulars."

I think that the opposite would be the truer statement, books differ so immensely in their nutritive qualities, and good ones are so rare.

Gosse, in his "Letters from Alabama,” says that he thinks he saw a large dragon-fly (Æslona), which was hawking over a brook, catch and devour some minnows about one inch long, and says it is known that "the larvæ of the greater water-beetles (Dyticidæ) devour fish."

It is the discovery of science that stupendous changes in the earth's surface, such as are referred to the Deluge, for instance, are the result of causes still in operation, which have been at work for an incalculable period. There has not been a sudden re-formation, or, as it were, new creation of the world, but a steady progress according to existing laws.

The same is true in detail also.

It is a vulgar prejudice that some plants are "spontaneously generated,” but science knows that they come from seeds, i. e. are the result of causes still in operation, however slow and unobserved.

It is a common saying that "little strokes fall great oaks,” and it does not imply much wisdom in him who originated it. The sound of the axe invites our attention to such a catastrophe; we can easily count each stroke as it is given, and all the neighborhood is informed by a loud crash when the deed is consummated.

But such, too, is the rise of the oak; little strokes of a different kind and often repeated raise great oaks, but scarcely a traveller hears these or turns aside to converse with Nature, who is dealing them the while.

Nature is slow but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance; she knows that seeds have many other uses than to reproduce their kind. In raising oaks and pines, she works with a leisureliness and security answering to the age and strength of the trees. If every acorn of this year's crop is destroyed, never fear! she has more years to come. It is not necessary that a pine or an oak should bear fruit every year, as it is that a pea-vine should.

So, botanically, the greatest changes in the landscape are produced more gradually than we expected. If Nature has a pine or an oak wood to produce, she manifests no haste about it.

Thus we should say that oak forests are produced by a kind of accident, i. e. by the failure of animals to reap the fruit of their labors. Yet who shall say that they have not a fair knowledge of the value of their labors — that the squirrel when it plants an acorn, has not a transient thought for its posterity? 

Possibly here, a thousand years hence, every oak will know the human hand that planted it.

How many of the botanist's arts and inventions are thus but the rediscovery of a lost art, i.e. lost to him here or elsewhere! 

Horace Mann told me some days ago that he found, near the shore in that muddy bay by the willows in the rear of Mrs. Ripley's, a great many of the Sternothærus odoratus, assembled, he supposed, at their breeding time, or, rather, about to come out to lay their eggs. He waded in [and] collected — I think he said-about a hundred and fifty of them for Agassiz! 

I see in the Boston Journal an account of robins in numbers on the savin trees in that neighborhood, feeding on their berries. This suggests that they may plant its berries as well as the crows.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 14, 1861

The discovery of science that stupendous changes in the earth's surface, such as are referred to the Deluge, for instance, are the result of causes still in operation, which have been at work for an incalculable period. See Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830–33); Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle,

Nature is slow but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance. See September 7, 1839 ("Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace."); November 8, 1860 ("Consider how persevering Nature is, and how much time she has to work in, though she works slowly.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Nature

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

— Lao Tzu

There has not been a sudden re-formation, or, as it were, new creation of the world, but a steady progress according to existing laws. Compare May 23, 1841 ("All nature is a new impression every instant"); January 20, 1855 (“The world is not only new to the eye, but is still as at creation.”); October 18, 1860 ("The development theory implies a greater vital force in nature, equivalent to a sort of constant new creation. We find ourselves in a world that is already planted, but is also still being planted as at first.")

Porson said: "We all speak in metaphors." See September 1851 (“All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.”); May 10, 1853 ("He is the richest who has most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life. If I am overflowing with life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry,- all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth. The man of science, who is not seeking for expression but for a fact to be expressed merely, studies nature as a dead language. I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant.")

It is a vulgar prejudice that some plants are "spontaneously generated,” but science knows that they come from seeds, i. e. are the result of causes still in operation, however slow and unobserved. See The Succession of Forest Trees  ("As for the heavy seeds and nuts which are not furnished with wings , the notion is still a very common one that , when the trees which bear these spring up where none of their kind were noticed before, they have come from seeds or other principles spontaneously generated there in an unusual manner, or which have lain dormant in the soil for centuries, or perhaps been called into activity by the heat of a burning  I do not believe these assertions, and I will state some of the ways in which, according to my observation, such forests are planted and raised.")

Nature is slow but sure – 

she works no faster 

than need be.

I see at the Aquarium

May 3. 

To Cambridge and Boston. 

I see at the Aquarium many of my little striped or barred breams, now labelled Bryttus esobus. Compared with the common, they have rounded tails, a larger dorsal and anal fins, and are fuller or heavier forward. I observe that they incline to stand on their heads more. 

The proprietor said that some little fishes one and a half to two inches long, with a very distinct black line along the sides, which I should have called brook minnows, Agassiz was confident were young suckers, but Mr. Putnam thought that they were the Leuciscus atronarus, i. e. my brook minnow. 

I observe that a leuciscus  probably pulchellus, if not argenteus), five inches long, also has a broad line along the side, but not nearly so dark. 

He shows me the eudora (water-plant), which he has not seen east of the Connecticut.

May 3, 2020

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 3, 1860

At the Aquarium. See  May 1, 1858 ("I see many minnows from three quarters to two inches long, but mostly about one inch. They have that distinct black line along each side from eye to tail on a somewhat transparent brownish body, dace-like, and a very sharply forked tail. . . . Is it not the brook minnow?"); April 27, 1859 ("Saw at the Aquarium in Bromfield Street apparently brook minnows with the longitudinal dark lines bordered with light"). See also March 29, 1854 ("poised over the sand on invisible fins, the outlines of a shiner. . . distinct longitudinal light-colored line midway along their sides and a darker line below it”); July 17, 1856 (“They have . . . a broad, distinct black band along sides (which methinks marks the shiner)"); December 11, 1858 (“a minnow — apparently a young shiner, but it has a dark longitudinal line along side ”); December 18, 1858 (“They are little shiners with the dark longitudinal stripe”)

I return at last in a rain, and am coated with a glaze, like the fields.

January  1. 

Saturday. 

January 1, 2018

This morning we have something between ice and frost on the trees, etc. The whole earth, as last night, but much more, is encased in ice, which on the plowed fields makes a singular icy coat a quarter of an inch or more in thickness. 

About 9 o'clock a. m., I go to Lee's via Hubbard's Wood and Holden's Swamp and the riverside, for the middle is open. 

The stones and cow-dung, and the walls too, are all cased in ice on the north side. The latter look like alum rocks. This, not frozen mist or frost, but frozen drizzle, collected around the slightest cores, gives prominence to the least withered herbs and grasses. Where yesterday was a plain, smooth field, appears now a teeming crop of fat, icy herbage. The stems of the herbs on their north sides are enlarged from ten to a hundred times. 

The addition is so universally on the north side that a traveller could not lose the points of compass to-day, though it should [be] never so dark, for every blade of grass would serve to guide him, telling from which side the storm came yesterday. 

These straight stems of grasses stand up like white batons or sceptres, and make conspicuous foreground to the landscape, from six inches to three feet high. C. thought that these fat, icy branches on the withered grass and herbs had no nucleus, but looking closer I showed him the fine black wiry threads on which they impinged, which made him laugh with surprise. 

The very cow-dung is incrusted, and the clover and sorrel send up a dull-green gleam through their icy coat, like strange plants. The pebbles in the plowed land are seen as through a transparent coating of gum. 

Some weeds bear the ice in masses, some, like the trumpet-weed and tansy, in balls for each dried flower. What a crash of jewels as you walk! The most careless walker, who never deigned to look at these humble weeds before, cannot help observing them now. This is why the herbage is left to stand dry in the fields all winter. 

Upon a solid foundation of ice stand out, pointing in all directions between northwest and northeast, or within the limits of ninety degrees, little spicula or crystallized points, half an inch or more in length. Upon the dark, glazed plowed ground, where a mere wiry stem rises, its north side is thickly clad with these snow-white spears, like some Indian's head-dress, as if it had attracted all the frost. 

I saw a prinos bush full of large berries by the wall in Hubbard's field. Standing on the west side, the contrast of the red berries with their white incrustation or prolongation on the north was admirable. I thought I had never seen the berries so dazzlingly bright. The whole north side of the bush, berries and stock, was beautifully incrusted. And when I went round to the north side, the redness of the berries came softened through and tingeing the allied snow-white bush, like an evening sky beyond. These adjoined snow or ice berries being beset, within the limits of ninety degrees on the north, with those icy prickles or spicula, between which the red glow and sometimes the clear red itself appeared, gave it the appearance of a raspberry bush full of over-ripe fruit. 

Standing on the north side of a bush or tree, looking against the sky, you see only a white ghost of a tree, without a mote of earthiness, but as you go round it, the dark core comes into view. It makes all the odds imaginable whether you are travelling north or south. 

The drooping birches along the edges of woods are the most feathery, fairy-like ostrich plumes of the trees, and the color of their trunks increases the delusion. 

The weight of the ice gives to the pines the forms which northern trees, like the firs, constantly wear, bending and twisting the branches; for the twigs and plumes of the pines, being frozen, remain as the wind held them, and new portions of the trunk are exposed. Seen from the north, there is no greenness in the pines, and the character of the tree is changed. 

The willows along the edge of the river look like sedge in meadows. The sky is overcast, and a fine snowy hail and rain is falling, and these ghost-like trees make a scenery which reminds you of Spitzbergen. I see now the beauty of the causeway, by the bridge alders below swelling into the road, overtopped by willows and maples. The fine grasses and shrubs in the meadow rise to meet and mingle with the drooping willows, and the whole make an indistinct impression like a mist, and between this the road runs toward those white ice-clad ghostly or fairy trees in the distance, — toward spirit-land. 

The pines are as white as a counterpane, with raised embroidery and white tassels and fringes. Each fascicle of leaves or needles is held apart by an icy club surmounted by a little snowy or icy ball. Finer than the Saxon arch is this path running under the pines, roofed, not with crossing boughs, but drooping ice-covered twigs in irregular confusion. 

See in the midst of this stately pine, towering like the solemn ghost of a tree, the white ice-clad boughs of other trees appearing, of a different character; sometimes oaks with leaves incrusted, or fine-sprayed maples or walnuts. 

But finer than all, this red oak, its leaves incrusted like shields a quarter of an inch thick, and a thousand fine spicula, like long serrations at right angles with their planes, upon their edges. It has an indescribably rich effect, with color of the leaf coming softened through the ice, a delicate fawn-color of many shades. 

Where the plumes of the pitch pine are short and spreading close upon the trunk, sometimes perfect cups or rays are formed. Pitch pines present rough, massy grenadier plumes, with each a darker spot or cavity in the end, where you look in to the buds. 

I listen to the booming of the pond as if it were a reasonable creature. 

I return at last in a rain, and am coated with a glaze, like the fields. 

Being at Cambridge day before yesterday, Sibley told me that Agassiz told him that Harris was the greatest entomologist in the world, and gave him permission to repeat his remark. 

As I stood on the top of a ladder, he came along with his hand full of papers and inquired, "Do you value autographs ?" "No, I do not," I answered slowly and gravely. "Oh, I didn't know but you did. I had some of Governor Dunlap," said he, retreating. 

After talking with Uncle Charles the other night about the worthies of this country, Webster and the rest, as usual, considering who were geniuses and who not, I showed him up to bed, and when I had got into bed myself, I heard his chamber door opened, after eleven o'clock, and he called out, in an earnest, stentorian voice, loud enough to wake the whole house, 

"Henry! was John Quincy Adams a genius?"

      "No, I think not," was my reply.

     "Well, I didn't think he was," answered he.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 1, 1853

I listen to the booming of the pond as if it were a reasonable creature. See February 12, 1854 (“The pond does not thunder every night, and I do not know its law exactly. I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering”);  Walden (“Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should.”)

Agassiz told him that Harris was the greatest entomologist in the world. Harris ( the librarian of Harvard University, and one of Thoreau's professors).had commented that “Thoreau would be a splendid entomologist if he had not been spoiled by Emerson.” Clark A. Elliott, Thaddeus William Harris 1795-1856: Nature, Science, and Society in the Life of an American Naturalist 175. See e.g.July 26, 1852 ("Went to Cambridge and Boston to-day. Dr. Harris says that my great moth is the Attacus luna"); November 11, 1852 (" Did Harris call the water-bug Gyrinus to-day ?");    February 9, 1853 ("Dr. Harris thinks the Indians had no real hemp but their apocynum, and, he thinks, a kind of nettle, and an asclepias, etc.He doubts if the dog was indigenous among them."); April 11, 1853 ("Dr. Harris says that that early black-winged, buff-edged butterfly is the Vanessa Antiopa, and is introduced from Europe, and is sometimes found in this state alive in winter.”); January 19, 1854 ("[Dr, Harris] thinks that small beetle, slightly metallic, which I saw with grubs, etc., on the yellow lily roots last fall was a Donax or one of the Donasia (?)"); January 22, 1854 (“Harris told me on the 19th that he had never found the snow-flea. ”); May 9, 1854 ("That early narrow curved-winged insect on ice and river which I thought an ephemera he [ Harris ] says is a Sialis, or maybe rather a Perla. . . . Says the shad-flies (with streamers and erect wings ) are ephemeræ"); January 16, 1855 ([Harris] says the ant-lion is found at Burlington, Vermont, and may be at Concord"); October 19, 1857 ("Harris says the crickets produce their shrilling by shuffling their wing-covers together lengthwise.")

Uncle Chrarles. See March 28, 1856 ("Uncle Charles buried. He was born in February, 1780, the winter of the Great Snow, and he dies in the winter of another great snow,—a life bounded by great snows.")

I sometimes remember something which I have told another as worth telling to myself.

August 23. 

Cooler than ever. Some must have fires, and I close my window. 

P. M. —Britton’s camp via Hubbard’s Close. 

The rhexia in the field west of Clintonia Swamp makes a great show now, though a little past prime. 

I go through the swamp, wading through the luxuriant cinnamon fern, which has complete possession of the swamp floor. Its great fronds, curving this way and that, remind me [of] a tropical vegetation. They are as high as my head and about a foot wide; may stand higher than my head without being stretched out. They grow in tufts of a dozen, so close that their fronds interlace and form one green waving mass. There in the swamp cellar under the maples. A forest of maples rises from a forest of ferns. My clothes are covered with the pale-brown wool which I have rubbed off their stems.

See an abundance of pine-sap on the right of Pine-sap Path. It is almost all erect, some eight to nine inches high, and all effete there. Some stems are reddish. It lifts the leaves with it like the Indian-pipe, but is not so delicate as that. The Indian-pipe is still pushing up.

Everywhere in woods and swamps I am already reminded of the fall. 

I see the spotted sarsaparilla leaves and brakes, and, in swamps, the withering and blackened skunk-cabbage and hellebore, and, by the river, the already blackening pontederias and pipes. 

There is no plateau on which Nature rests at midsummer, but she instantly commences the descent to winter.

I see a golden-crowned thrush, but it is silent except a chip; sitting low on a twig near the main stem of a tree, in these deep woods.

High blackberries now in their prime, their great racemes of shining black fruit, mixed with red and green, bent over amid the sweet-fern and sumach on sunny hill sides, or growing more rankly with larger fruit by rich roadsides and in lower ground. 

The chewink note of a chewink (not common), also a cuckoo’s note.

Smooth sumach berries all turned crimson. This fruit is now erect spear-heads, rising from the ample dark-green, unspotted leaves, pointing in various directions. 

I see dense patches of the pearly everlasting, maintaining their ground in the midst of dense green sweet-fern, a striking contrast of snow-white and green. 

Viburnum nudum berries, apparently but a day or two. 

Epilobium angustifolium is abundantly shedding its downy seed, — wands of white and pink. 

Emerson says that he and Agassiz and Company broke some dozens of ale-bottles, one after another, with their bullets, in the Adirondack country, using them for marks! It sounds rather Cockneyish. He says that he shot a peetweet for Agassiz, and this, I think he said, was the first game he ever bagged. He carried a double-barrelled gun, —rifle and shotgun, — which he bought for the purpose, which he says received much commendation, — all parties thought it a very pretty piece. 

Think of Emerson shooting a peetweet (with shot) for Agassiz, and cracking an ale-bottle (after emptying it) with his rifle at six rods! They cut several pounds of lead out of the tree. It is just what Mike Saunders, the merchant’s clerk, did when he was there.  

The writer needs the suggestion and correction that a correspondent or companion is. I sometimes remember something which I have told another as worth telling to myself, i.e. writing in my Journal. 

Channing, thinking of walks and life in the country, says, “You don’t want to discover anything new, but to discover something old,” i.e. be reminded that such things still are.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 23, 1858

There is no plateau on which Nature rests at midsummer, but she instantly commences the descent to winter. See August 5, 1854 ("It is one long acclivity from winter to midsummer and another long declivity from midsummer to winter."); August 19, 1851("Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it.”); August 23. 1853 ("Observing the blackness of the foliage, especially between me and the light, I am reminded that it begins in the spring, the dewy dawn of the year, with a silvery hoary downiness, changing to a yellowish or light green, — the saffron-robed morn, — then to a pure, spotless, glossy green with light under sides reflecting the light, — the forenoon, — and now the dark green, or early afternoon, when shadows begin to increase, and next it will turn yellow or red, — the sunset sky, — and finally sere brown and black, when the night of the year sets in.")

High blackberries now in their prime. See August 23, 1856 ("Now for high blackberries"); and note to August 31, 1857 ("An abundance of fine high blackberries behind Britton's old camp on the Lincoln road, now in their prime there, which have been overlooked. Is it not our richest fruit?")

I see dense patches of the pearly everlasting, maintaining their ground in the midst of dense green sweet-fern, a striking contrast of snow-white and green. See August 23, 1856 ("I see a bed of Antennaria margaritacea, now in its prime, by the railroad, and very handsome. . . . dense pearly masses of flowers covered with bees and butterflies")

Everywhere in woods 

and swamps I am already 

reminded of fall. 

Botanizing Monadnock

June 3. 

June 3, 1858

At length, by 3 o'clock, the signs of dawn appear, and soon we hear the robin and the Fringilla hyemalis, -its prolonged jingle, -sitting on the top of a spruce, the chewink, and the wood thrush. 

Whether you have slept soundly or not, it is not easy to lie abed under these circumstances, and we rose at 3.30, in order to see the sun rise from the top and get our breakfast there. Concealing our blankets under a shelving rock near the camp, we set out. 

It was still hazy, and we did not see the shadow of the mountain until it was comparatively short. We did not get the most distant views, as of the Green and White Mountains, while we were there. We carried up fuel for the last quarter of a mile. 

A Fringilla hyemalis seemed to be attracted by the smoke of our fire, and flew quite near to us. They are the prevailing bird of the summit, and perhaps are baited by the crumbs left by visitors. It was flitting about there, and it would sit and sing, on the top of a dwarf spruce, the strain I have often heard. I saw just beneath the summit, and commencing some fifteen or twenty rods from it, dwarfish Rhodora Canadensis, not yet anywhere quite out, much later than in the valley, very common; lambkill; and checkerberry; and, in slightly boggy places, quite dwarfish specimens of Eriophorum vaginatum, quite common in similar localities all over the rocky part, six inches high or more. 

A little water andromeda with it, scarcely out, and Labrador tea, scarcely suggesting flowers. (This I observed only in two or three places on the northerly side.) A viburnum (probably nudum or a form of it) was quite common, just begun to leaf, and with nemopanthes, showing its transparent leafets not yet expanded, a little behind the other, was quite sizable, especially the latter. These two, with the spruce, the largest shrubs at this height. 

In the little thickets made by these bushes, grew the two-leaved Solomon’s-seal, not nearly out, and Clintonia borealis, not budded, though out in the valley. Within the folded leaves of the last, was considerable water, as within the leaves of the seaside goldenrod on the sands of the Cape. 

Cornus Canadensis, along the base of the rocks, not out. Diervilla. And, on the moist ground or in the small bogs, Lycopodium annotinum, resembling at first sight the L. lucidulum, but running, was very common in boggy places, sometimes forming quite conspicuous green patches. 

The above plants of the mountain-top, except perhaps the mountain cranberry, extended downward over the whole top or rocky part of the mountain and were there mingled with a little Polypodium vulgare; a peculiar Amelanchier Canadensis, apparently variety oligocarpa, just begun to bloom, with few flowers, short roundish petals, and finely serrate leaves; red cherry, not out; Populus tremuliformis, not common and quite small; small willows, apparently discolor, etc., also rostrata, and maybe humilis; canoe birch and yellow birch, for the most part scrubby, largest in swampy places; meadow-sweet; Lycopodium clavatum; Amelanchier Canadensis var. oblongifolia, not quite out, a little of it; and also a little very dwarfish hemlock and white pine (two or three feet high); a little mayflower and Chiogenes hispidula.

We concluded to explore the whole rocky part of the mountain in this wise, to saunter slowly about it, about the height and distance from the summit of our camp, or say half a mile, more or less, first going north from the summit and returning by the western semicircle, and then exploring the east side, completing the circle, and return over the summit at night. To sum up, these were the Plants of the Summit, i. e. within a dozen rods of it: Potentilla tridentata (and lower); Vaccinium Vitis-Idoea, fine grass; sericocar pus-like radical leaves; Arenaria Granlandica; dwarf black spruce; a little dry moss; the two kinds of cladonia, white and green, and the small leather-colored lichen of rocks, mingled with the larger Umbilicaria postulate. 

All these but the V. Vitis-Idoea generally dispersed over the rocky part. Within fifteen or twenty rods of it, or scarcely, if at all, lower than the last: Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum and perhaps the variety augustifolium (?); Pyrus arbutifolia; mountain-ash. Generally distributed. Commencing fifteen or twenty rods below it: Rhodora; lambkill; checkerberry; Eriophorum vaginatum; water andromeda; Labrador tea; Viburnum (nudum?); nemopanthes; two-leaved Solomon’s-seal; clintonia; Cornus Canadensis; Lycopodium annotinum; diervilla. 

Generally lower than the above, on the rest of the bare rocky part, with all of the above: Ribes prostratum; Polypodium vulgaris; Amelanchier Canadensis var. oligocarpa (?); red cherry; Populus tremuliformis; Salix apparently discolor, perhaps also humilis, certainly rostrata; meadow-sweet; canoe birch; yellow birch; Lycopodium clavatum; Amelanchier oblongifolia; a little red elder; hemlock; white pine; mayflower; chiogenes. 

Did not examine particularly the larger growth of the swamps, but think it was chiefly spruce, white and yellow birch, mountain-ash, etc. 

The Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum and the Abies nigra are among the most prevailing conspicuous plants. 

We first descended somewhat toward the north this forenoon, then turned west over a ridge by which some ascend from the north. There are several large ponds not far from the mountain on the north, and I thought there was less forest to be seen on this side than on the south. We crossed one or two now dry watercourses, where, however, judging from the collections of rubbish or drift, much water must have flown at some other season. 

Jackson in his map in the Report on the Geology of Massachusetts calls this mountain “mica slate and porphyritic granite,” and that the rocks on the summit are “a hard variety of gneiss filled with small crystals of garnets.” 

We observed that the rocks were remarkably smoothed, almost polished and rounded, and also scratched. The scratches run from about north-northwest to south-south east. The sides of the rocks often straight, upright walls, several rods long from north to south and five to ten feet high, with a very smooth, rounded edge. There were many of these long, straight, rounded walls of rock, especially on the northwest and west. Some smaller or lower ones were so rounded and smooth as to resemble at a little distance long-fallen trunks of trees. The rocks were, indeed, singularly worn on a great scale. Often a vertical cross-section would show some such profile as if they had been grooved with a tool of a corresponding edge. 

There were occasionally conspicuous masses and also veins of white quartz, and very common were bright-purple or wine colored garnets imbedded in the rock, looking like berries in a pudding. 

In many parts, as on the southeast plateau especially, the rocks were regularly stratified, and split into regular horizontal slabs about a foot in thickness, projecting one beyond another like steps. 

The little bogs or mosses, sometimes only a rod in diameter, are a singular feature. Ordinarily the cladonia and other lichens are crackling under your feet, when suddenly you step into a miniature bog filling the space between two rocks and you are at a loss to tell where the moisture comes from. The amount of it seems to be that some spongy moss is enabled to grow there and retain some of the clouds which rest on it. Moisture and aridity are singularly near neighbors to each other up there. 

The surface is made up of masses of rock more or less smoothed and rounded, or else jagged, and the little soil between is a coarse, gravelly kind, the ruins of the rocks and the decayed vegetation that has grown there. You step unexpectedly from Arabia Petraea, where the dry lichens crackle under your feet, into a miniature bog, say Dismal Swamp, where you suddenly sink a foot in wet moss, and the next step carries you into Arabia Petraea again. 

In more extensive swamps I slumped through moss to water some times, though the bottom was of rock, while a fire would rapidly spread in the arid lichens around. Perhaps the mosses grow in the wettest season chiefly, and so are enabled to retain some moisture through the driest. 

Plants of the bogs and of the rocks grow close to each other. You are surprised to see a great many plants of bogs growing close to the most barren and driest spots, where only cladonias cover the rocks. Often your first notice of a bog in the midst of the arid waste, where the lichens crackle under your feet, is your slumping a foot into wet moss. 

Methinks there cannot be so much evaporation going on up there,—witness the water in the clintonia leaves, as in the solidago by the sandy sea shore, — and this (which is owing to the coolness), rather than the prevalence of mist, may account for the presence of this moisture forming bogs. 

In a shallow rain-water pool, or rock cistern, about three rods long by one or one and a half wide, several hundred feet below the summit, on the west side, but still on the bare rocky top and on the steepest side of the summit, I saw toad-spawn (black with white bellies), also some very large spawn new to me. There were four or five masses of it, each three or four inches in diameter and of a peculiar light misty bluish white as it lay in the water near the surface, attached to some weed or stick, as usual. Each mass consisted of but few large ova, more than a quarter of an inch in diameter, in which were pale-brown tadpoles flattened out. The outside of the mass when taken up was found to consist of large spherical or rounded gelatinous projections three quarters of an inch wide, and blue in the light and air, while the ova within were greenish. 

This rain-water pool was generally less than a foot deep, with scarcely a weed in it, but considerable mud concealing its rocky bottom. The spawn was unusually clean and clear. I suspect it to be that of bullfrogs, though not a frog was to be seen; they were probably lurking beneath the rocks in the water at that hour. 

This pool was bounded on one or two sides by those rounded walls of rock five or six feet high. My companion had said that he heard a bullfrog the evening before. Is it likely that these toads and frogs ever hopped up there? The hylodes peeped regularly toward night each day in a similar pool much nearer the summit. 

Agassiz might say that they originated on the top. Perhaps they fell from the clouds in the form of spawn or tadpoles or young frogs. I think it more likely that they fell down than that they hopped up. 

Yet how can they escape the frosts of winter? The mud is hardly deep enough to protect them. 

Having reached the neighborhood of our camp again and explored the wooded portion lower down along the path up the mountain, we set out northeast along the east side of the mountain. The southeast part of the mountain-top is an extended broad rocky almost plateau, consisting of large flat rocks with small bogs and rain-water pools and easy ascents to different levels. The black spruce tree which is scattered here and there over it, the prevailing tree or shrub of the mountain top, evidently has many difficulties to contend with. It is generally of a yellowish green, its foliage. 

The most exposed trees are very stout and spreading close to the rock, often much wider close to the rock than they are high, and these lower, almost their only, limbs com pletely filling and covering openings between the rocks. I saw one which grew out of a narrow crack in the rock, which was three feet high, five inches in diameter at the ground, and six feet wide on the rock. It was shaped like a bodkin, — the main stem. 


The spruce commonly grows in clefts of the rocks; has many large limbs, and longer than the tree is high, perhaps, spreading close and flat over the rock in every direction, sometimes eight or ten within a foot of the rock; then, higher up the stem, or midway for three or six feet, though perfectly perpendicular, is quite bare on the north side and commonly smooth, showing no trace of a limb, no stubs, but the limbs at this height all ray out southward, and the top is crowned with a tuft of tender twigs. This proves the violence of the storms which they have to contend with. Its branches love to run along flat on the rocks, filling the openings between the rocks. It forms dense coverts and forms, apparently, for the rabbits, etc. A single spruce tree of this habit would sometimes make a pretty good shelter, while the rocks on each side were your walls. 

As I walked over this plateau, I first observed, looking toward the summit, that the steep angular projections of the summit and elsewhere and the brows of the rocks were the parts chiefly covered with dark- brown lichens, – umbilicaria, etc., – as if they were to grow on the ridge and slopes of a man's nose only. 

It was the  steepest and most exposed parts of the high rocks alone on which they grew, where you would think it most difficult for them to cling. They also covered the more rounded brows on the sides of the mountain, especially the east side, where they were very dense, fine, crisp, and firm, like a sort of shagreen, giving a firm footing or hold to the feet where it was needed. 

It was these that gave that Ararat-brown color of antiquity to these portions of the mountain, which a few miles distant could not be accounted for compared with the more prevalent gray. From the sky-blue you pass through the misty gray of the rocks, to this darker and more terrene color. The temples of the mountain are covered with lichens, which color the mountain for miles. 

The west side descends steeply from the summit, but there is a broad almost plateau on the southeast and east, not much beneath the summit, with a precipitous termination on the east, and the rounded brows of the last are covered with the above-named lichens. 

A spur of moderate length runs off northerly; another, but lower, southwesterly; another, much longer, a little higher than the last, southerly; and one longer and higher than these, one or two miles long, northeasterly. As you creep down over those eastern brows to look off the precipice, these rough and rigid lichens, forming a rigid crust, as it were baked, done brown, in the sun of centuries, afford a desirable hand and foot hold. 

They seemed to me wild robins that placed their nests in the spruce up there. I noticed one nest. William Emerson, senior, says they do not breed on Staten Island. They do breed at least at Hudson’s Bay. They are certainly a hardy bird, and are at home on this cool mountain-top. 

We boiled some rice for our dinner, close by the edge of a rain-water pool and bog, on the plateau southeast from the summit. 

Though there was so little vegetation, our fire spread rapidly through the dry cladonia lichens on the rocks, and, the wind being pretty high, threatened to give us trouble, but we put it out with a spruce bough dipped in the pool. I thought that if it had spread further, it must soon have come to a bog. Though you could hardly tell what was moist and what dry till the fire came to it. Nothing could be drier than the cladonia, which was often adjacent to a mass of moss saturated with moisture. And wet the ground with it. 

You cook beside such a moss for the sake of water. These rain-water pools or cisterns are a remarkable feature. There is a scarcity of bubbling springs, but this water was commonly cool enough in that atmosphere and warm as the day was. I do not know why they were not warmer, for they were shallow and the nights were not cold. Can there be some concealed snow or ice about? Hardly. They are quite shallow, but sometimes four or five rods over and with considerable mud at the bottom at first, decayed lichens, and disintegrated rock. 

Apparently these were the origin of the bogs, Eriophorum vaginatum, moss, and a few other boggy plants springing up in them and gradually filling them; yet, though sometimes filled with sedge (?) or fine grass, and generally the dwarfish Eriophorum vaginatum in the moss, they were singularly barren, and, unless they were fairly converted into swamps, contained very little variety. 

You never have to go far to find water of some kind. On the top, perhaps, of a square half-acre of almost bare rock, as in what we called our wash-room by our camp, you find a disintegrated bog, wet moss alternating with dry cladonia (sign and emblem of dryness in our neighborhood), and water stands in little holes, or if you look under the edges of a boulder there, you find standing water, yet cool to drink. 

After dinner we kept on northeast over a high ridge east of the summit, whence was a good view of that part of Dublin and Jaffrey immediately under the mountain. There is a fine, large lake extending north and south, apparently in Dublin, which it would be worth the while to sail on. 

When on the summit of this, I heard the ring of toads from a rain-pool a little lower and northeasterly. It carried me back nearly a month into spring (though they are still ringing and copulating in Concord), it sounded so springlike in that clear, fresh air. Descending to that pool we found toads copulating at the bottom of the water. 

In one or two places on this side of the mountain, which, as I have said, terminated in an abrupt precipice, I saw bogs or meadows four or six rods wide or more, but with only grass and moss and eriophorum, without bushes, in them, close to the edge of the mountain or precipice, where, if you stood between the meadow and the summit, looking east, there would appear to be a notch in the rim of the cup or saucer on the east and the meadow ready to spill over and run down the mountain on that side; but when you stood on this notched edge, the descent was seen to be much less precipitous than you had expected. 

Such spongy mountain bogs, how ever, are evidently the sources of rivers. Lakes of the clouds when they are clear water. Between this and the northeast spur or ridge was the largest swamp or bog that I saw, consisting, perhaps, of between one and two acres, as I remember. It was a grassy and mossy bog without large bushes, in which you sank a foot, with a great many fallen trees in it, showing their bleached upper side here and there but almost completely buried in the moss. 

This must once have been a dense swamp, full of pretty large trees. The trees buried in the moss were much larger than any now standing at this height. The outlet of this, if it had any, must have been north westerly. This was a wild place enough. 

Having ascended the highest part of the northeastern ridge north of this bog, we returned to the summit, first to the ridge of the plateau, and west on it to the summit, crossing a ravine between. I noticed, in many places upon the mountain, sandy or gravelly spaces from a few feet to a rod in diameter, where the thin sward and loam appeared to have been recently removed or swept away. I was inclined to call them scars, and thought of very violent winds and tempests of rain as the cause, perhaps, but do not know how to account for them. 

We had thus made a pretty complete survey of the top of the mountain. It is a very unique walk, and would be almost equally interesting to take though it were not elevated above the surrounding valleys. It often reminded me of my walks on the beach, and suggested how much both depend for their sublimity on solitude and dreariness. In both cases we feel the presence of some vast, titanic power. 

The rocks and valleys and bogs and rain-pools of the mountain are so wild and unfamiliar still that you do not recognize the one you left fifteen minutes before. This rocky region, forming what you may call the top of the mountain, must be more than two miles long by one wide in the middle, and you would need to ramble about it many times before it would be gin to be familiar. There may be twenty little swamps so much alike in the main that [you] would not know whether you had seen a particular one before, and the rocks are trackless and do not present the same point. So that it has the effect of the most intricate labyrinth and artificially extended walk. 

This mountain is said in the Gazetteer to extend north east [and] southwest five miles, by three wide, and the streams on the east to empty into the Contoocook and Merrimack, on the west into the Ashuelotand Connecti cut; is 3718 feet high; and, judging from its account, the top was wooded fifty years ago. 

We proceeded to get our tea on the summit, in the very place where I had made my bed for a night some fifteen years before. There were a great many insects of various kinds on the topmost rocks at this hour, and among them I noticed a yellow butterfly and several large brownish ones fluttering over the apex. 

It was interesting to watch from that height the shadows of fair-weather clouds passing over the land scape. You could hardly distinguish them from forests. It reminded me of the similar shadows seen on the sea from the high bank of Cape Cod beach. There the perfect equality of the sea atoned for the comparatively slight elevation of the bank. 

We do not commonly realize how constant and amusing a phenomenon this is in a summer day to one standing on a sufficiently elevated point. In the valley or on the plain you do not commonly notice the shadow of a cloud unless you are in it, but on a mountain-top, or on a lower elevation in a plain country or by the seaside, the shadows of clouds flitting over the landscape are a never-failing source of amusement. 

It is commonly easy to refer a shadow to its cloud, since in one direction its form is preserved with suficient accuracy. Yet I was surprised to observe that a long, straggling downy cumulus extending north and south a few miles east of us, when the sun was perhaps an hour high, cast its shadow along the base of the Peterboro Hills, and did not fall on the other side, as I should have expected. It proved the clouds not so high as I supposed. 

It suggested how with tolerable accuracy you might easily calculate the height of a cloud with a quadrant and a good map of the country; e. g., observe at what distance the shadow of a cloud directly over head strikes the earth, and then take the altitude of the sun, and you may presume that you have the base and two angles of a right-angled triangle, from which the rest may be calculated; or you may allow for the angle of elevation of the mountain as seen from the place where the shadow falls. Also you might determine the breadth of a cloud by observing the breadth of the shadow at a given distance, etc., etc. Many such calculations would be easy in such a locality. 

It was pleasant enough to see one man’s farm in the shadow of a cloud, — which perhaps he thought covered all the Northern States, — while his neighbor’s farm was in sunshine. 

It was still too hazy to allow of our seeing the shadowof the mountain, so we descended a little before the sun set, but already the hylodes had been peeping for some time. Again the wood thrush, chewink, etc., sang at eve. I had also heard the song sparrow. 

As the sky was more cloudy this evening, we looked out a shelving rock near our camp, where we might take shelter from the rain in the night if necessary, i.e., if our roof did not prove tight enough. There were plenty of clefts and small caverns where you might be warm and dry. The mosquitoes troubled us a little this night. 

Lying up there at this season, when the nighthawk is most musical, reminded me of what I had noticed before, that this bird is crepuscular in its habits. It was heard by night only up to nine or ten o’clock and again just before dawn, and marked those periods or seasons like a clock. Its note very conveniently indicated the time of night. It was sufficient to hear the nighthawk booming when you awoke to know how the night got on, though you had no other evidence of the hour. 

I did not hear the sound of any beast. There are no longer any wolves to howl or panthers to scream. One man told me that many foxes took refuge from dogs and sportsmen on this mountain. 

The plants of cold northern bogs grow on this mountain-top, and even they have a boreal habit here, more dwarfish than such of them as grow in our swamps. The more memorable and peculiar plants of the mountain top were the mountain cranberry and the Potentilla tridentata, the dwarfish spruce, Arenaria Graenlandica (not now conspicuous). 

The Ribes prostratum, or fetid currant, was very abundant from quite near the summit to near the base, and its currant-acid fragrance was quite agreeable to me, partly, perhaps, from its relation to the currant of the gardens. 

You also notice many small weed-like mountain-ashes, six or eight inches high, which, on trying to pull up, you find to be very firmly rooted, having an old and large root out of proportion to  their top. 

I might also name in this connection not only the blueberry but the very common but dwarfish Eriophorum vaginatum and the Lycopodium annotinum, also the amelanchier, variety oligocarpa. 

I was not prepared to find vegetation so much later there than below or with us, since I once found blueberries ripe on Wachusett unexpectedly early. However, it was a pleasing lateness, and gives one a chance to review some of his lessons in natural history. 

On the rocky part, the only plants, as I noticed, which were or had been in bloom were the salix, now generally done; Ribes prostratum, in prime; Eriophorum vaginatum ; Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum, just begun; Amelanchier oligocarpa, little, not long; water andromeda, ditto, ditto; and probably (?) the populus, birches (?), mayflower, and spruce.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 3, 1858

 

On a mountain-top  . . .

the shadows of clouds flitting

over the landscape.

By boat to Holden Swamp.

May 4. 

Camel’s Hump

May 4, 2015

The Salix pedicellaris by railroad, apparently not for two or three days. 

The Missouri currant, probably to-day. 

P. M. — By boat to Holden Swamp. 

To go among the willows now and hear the bees hum is equal to going some hundreds of miles southward toward summer. 

I see along the sides of the river, i. e., where the bottom is permanently covered, what I have heretofore called the oat spawn, attached to old pontederia stems, etc., now some foot or eighteen inches under the surface. It is not black and white, like that of the Rana halecina, sylvaltica, and palustris, which I cannot distinguish from one another, but a pale brown or fawn-color. Some is pretty fresh or recently laid, others already flatted out. Hence, from comparison with my earlier sylvatica and halecina spawn, I judge that it may have been laid ten days. [Is it not that of the R. fontinalis?]

At Clamshell Shore, I see a clam lying up with open valves. 

Salix pedicellaris at Holden's Swamp, staminate, out apparently two days. - 

It is still warmer than May 1st, yet I hear the stertorous tut tut tut of hardly so many frogs (R. palustris chiefly, I suppose) as then. As with the halecina, it is the first sudden heats that excite them most, me thinks. 

I find hopping in the meadow a Rana halecina, much brighter than any I have seen this year. There is not only a vivid green halo about each spot, but the back is vivid light-green between the spots. I think this was not the case with any of the hundreds I saw a month ago!! Why?? The brassy lines along the sides of the back are narrower (only about one sixteenth of an inch) and more prominent than the more fawn-colored lines of the R. palustris. In this one, which I carry home and compare with the palustris, there is a large spot on each orbit, but none on the top of the head in front. It is all white beneath, except a tinge of greenish yellow on the abdomen. 

Witherell speaks of the R. palustris as the yellow legged frog, very properly. 

See several bullfrogs along the river, but silent. 

I go into Holden Swamp to hear warblers. See a little blue butterfly (or moth) — saw one yesterday — fluttering about over the dry brown leaves in a warm place by the swamp-side, making a pleasant contrast. From time to time have seen the large Vanessa Antiopa resting on the black willows, like a leaf still adhering.

As I sit there by the swamp-side this warm summery afternoon, I hear the crows cawing hoarsely, and from time to time see one flying toward the  top of a tall white pine. At length I distinguish a hen-hawk perched on the top. The crow repeatedly stoops toward him, now from this side, now from that, passing near his head each time, but he pays not the least attention to it. 

I hear the weese wese wese of the creeper continually from the swamp. It is the prevailing note there. And methought I heard a redstart's note (?), but oftener than the last I heard the tweezer note, or screeper note, of the particolored warbler, bluish above, yellow or orange throat and breast, white vent, and white on wings, neck above yellowish, going restlessly over the trees — maples, etc. — by the swamp, in creeper fashion, and as you may hear at the same time the true creeper's note without seeing it, you might think it uttered the creeper's note also. 

The red-wings, though here and there in flocks, are apparently beginning to build. I judge by their shyness and alarm in the bushes along the river and their richer, solitary warbling. 

Coming back, I talk with Witherell at William Wheeler's landing. He comes pushing Wheeler's square ended boat down-stream with a fish-spear. Says he caught a snapping turtle in the river May 1st. He sits on the side of my boat by the shore a little while, talking with me. There is a hole in the knee of his pants as big as your hand, and he keeps passing his hand over this slowly, to hide his bare skin, which is sun burnt and the color of his face, though the latter is reddened by rum, of which his breath smells. But how intimate he is with mud and its inhabitants. 

He says he caught a large pickerel the other night with spawn in it yet; that Henry Bigelow put many little trout into that round pond (Green Pond he calls it) on the Marlborough road, which Elbridge Haynes caught a few years after, weighing two or three pounds apiece. A man told him that he saw a trout weighing about a pound and a half darting at a pickerel, and every time he darted he took a bit off a fin, and at last the man walked in and caught the pickerel, and it weighed five pounds. This was in Spectacle Pond in Littleton. 

A fisherman told him once that the common eel “gendered” into the river clam, and the young fed on the clam till they were big enough to get other food, and hence you found so many dead clams in the river. 

I asked him if he knew what fish made the stone-heaps in the river. He said the lamprey eel. He saw one making one last spring about this time, as he was going across the fields by the river near Tarbell's to get seed corn. It was a single lamprey piling up the stones. He used to see thousands of them where he lived a boy, where the lead pipe factory was. 

Agassiz says in his Introduction (page 175), “I have known it [the Chelonara serpentina] snapping in the same fierce manner [which somebody else had described at a later period when it was very young] as it does when full grown, at a time it was still a pale almost colorless embryo, wrapped up in its foetal envelopes, with a yolk larger than itself hanging from its sternum, three months before hatching.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 4, 1858

The crow repeatedly stoops toward him, now from this side, now from that, passing near his head each time, but he pays not the least attention to it. See May 13, 1860 ("See two crows pursuing and diving at a hen-hawk very high in the air over the river. [H]e merely winks, as it were, bends or jerks his wings slightly as if a little startled. but never ceases soaring. nor once turns to pursue or shake them off.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Crow

I heard the tweezer note, or screeper note, of the particolored warbler. See  May 13, 1860 ("At Holden Swamp, hear plenty of parti-colored warblers (tweezer-birds) and redstarts."); May 18, 1856 ("A Sylvia Americana, — parti-colored warbler, — in the Holden Wood, sings a, tshrea tshrea tshrea, tshre’ tshritty tshrit’.”)  See note to May 13, 1856 (“At the swamp, hear the yorrick of Wilson’s thrush; the tweezer-bird or Sylvia Americana. Also the oven-bird sings.”) See also A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the parti-colored warbler (Sylvia Americana)

See a little blue butterfly (or moth) — saw one yesterday — fluttering about over the dry brown leaves in a warm place. See April 30, 1859 ("That interesting small blue butterfly (size of small red) is apparently just out, fluttering over the warm dry oak leaves within the wood in the sun.");See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The  Blue Butterfly in Spring