Botanizing Marblehead and Salem

September 21. 

September 21, 2019

Go to Cape Ann. 

A very warm day. A. M.—Go with Russell to the rooms of the Essex Institute, — if that is the name. 

See some Indian pottery from the Cayuga Reservation, fragments, very pale brick-color three eighths of an inch thick, with a rude ornament (apparently made with the end of a stick) of this form and size: - the lines re presenting slight hollows in a row around it. Saw a stone, apparently slate, shaped like small “sinkers,” but six inches by three and a half with a small handle, found near here. Was it a sinker or pestle? 

(On the 24th, at the East India Marine Hall, saw a circular stone mortar about six inches in diameter, and a stone exactly like the above in it, described as pestle and mortar found in making Salem Turnpike. Were they together? Also, at the last place, what was called the blade of an Indian knife found on Governor Endicott’s farm, broken, three or four inches long, of a light colored kind of slate, quite thin, with a back. It might have been for skinning.) 

At the Essex Institute (?),—if that ’s the name, — the eggs of the Rallus Virginianus, labelled by Brewer, but much smaller than those I have seen, and nearly white, with dull-brown spots! Can mine be the egg of the R. crepitons, though larger than mine? 

Their eggs of the Sterna hirundo look like mine which I have so called; also do those of the black-headed gull, which do not perceive in Peabody. 

Looked over the asters. goldenrods, and willows in their herbarium, collected and named by Oakes, Lapham, Russell, and Cassi —— something. Oakes’s Salix sericea, also Marshall’s, and what O. calls grisea of Willdenow, is the same I so call,, by the white maple at Assabet. What O. calls S. phyllicifolia from White Mountains, having only sterile catkins, ——his specimen, ——is apparently the one I have from there together with the repent. 

P. M. — Walked with Russell to Marblehead above railroad. 

Saw, in Salem, Solidago Canadensis, considerably past prime; our three-ribbed one done; Spartina cynosuroides; (was that the S. juncea, seven feet high, with a broad leaf, which I mistook for the above? Very common on edge of marshes); apparently Scirpus pungens, two to four feet high; Polygonum aviculare, appearently peculiar; swamp thistle, still abundant; Trifolium procumbens, still abundant; Aster Nova-Anglia, dark violet or lilac-purple, in prime or a little past, three quarters of a mile down railroad; also by shore in Manchester, the 22d; Ruppia maritima, in a ditch. 

In Marblehead, Aster cordifolius, abundant, railroad; Woodsia Ivensis. R. pointed out Juncus bufonius (? ?) (but did not know it); it was tenuis-like and probably that. Juncus Green (?) (tenuis-like), dense-flowered, on high sea-bank, sea side of Marblehead. Herb robert, near shore, done. Datura Stramonium var. Tatula, done there, but out at Rockport; got seeds. Also various lichens. Got Parmelia parietina, elegans, and rubina on the rocks. Saw, but did not get, P. murorum. Cetraria Islandica. 

R. said that that I saw at the White Mountains was bitter. Endocarpon miniatum (which we have) on rocks. Peltigera polydactyla. Umbilicaria Muhlenbergii, rocks by sea. That common crustaceous lichen on rdcks, —black fruit prettily scattered on a white ground, —— which reminds me of maps, is Lecidea atroalba. 

R. thought that my small umbilicaria on Monadnock and Lafayette was Uerosa or hyperborea. He knew a Carex lupulina because the beaks were recurved.

Called Marblehead coast greenstone generally with dykes in sienite. Saw artichokes out in several places, at some time. Have a sort of Spouting Horn by shore. Returned by some very deep hollows in Salem (like the Truro ones) called the Dungeons ! ! as our Dunge Hole. 

R. gave me from his garden corns of the true [?] squirrel-corn corydalis, which I plant, and what Tracy gave him for Utricularia intermedia from —-—, not in flower, though he says that T. has examined the flowers. It looks like mine. 

What I have called the clustered blackberry he has raised from the seed he got here, and this second year (or third) it has run as long as the common, but, perhaps because in rich soil and the shade, no flowers or fruit. 

Saw no Aster Tradescanti in this walk, but an abundance of A. multiflorus in its prime, in Salem and Marblehead.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal , September 21, 1858