A Book of the Seasons: January 15 (blue shadows, skating, music, a song sparrow, snow fleas, open water, what is in a name?)

 

The year is but a succession of days,

and I see that I could assign some office to each day

which, summed up, would be the history of the year.

January 15

A bright day not cold 

yet my shadow is a most 

celestial blue. 

 January 15, 1856

January 15, 2018

It is a rather warm and moist afternoon, and feels like rain. January 15, 1852

For the first time this winter I notice snow-fleas this afternoon in Walden Wood. Wherever I go they are to be seen, especially in the deepest ruts and foot-tracks. Their number is almost infinite. January 15, 1852

The fog still continues through, and succeeding to, the rain. The third day of fog. The thermometer at 7.30 or 8 A. M. is at 33°. January 15, 1859

The snow appears considerably deeper than the 12th . . . You are sensible that you are walking at a level a foot or more above the usual one. January 15, 1856

It has just been snowing, and this lies in shallow drifts or waves on the Great Meadows, alternate snow and ice. January 15, 1855

Skate into a crack, and slide on my side twenty-five feet. The river-channel dark and rough with fragments of old ice, — polygons of various forms, — cemented together, not strong. January 15, 1855

I cross the river on the crust with some hesitation. January 15, 1856

A bright day, not cold. I can comfortably walk without gloves, yet my shadow is a most celestial blue. This only requires a clear bright day and snow-clad earth, not great cold. January 15, 1856

Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I think it must be the tracks of some creature new to me. January 15, 1856

The tracks of the mice near the head of Well Meadow . . . The snow was so light that only one distinct track was made by all four of the feet, five or six inches apart, but the tail left a very distinct mark. January 15, 1857

So it was so many thousands of years before Gutenberg invented printing with his types, and so it will be so many thousands of years after his types are forgotten, perchance.  The deer mouse will be printing on the snow of Well Meadow to be read by a new race of men. January 15, 1857

Cold as the weather is and has been, almost all the brook is open in the meadow there, an artery of black water in the midst of the snow. January 15, 1857

As I passed the south shed at the depot, observed what I thought a tree sparrow on the wood in the shed, a mere roof open at the side. January 15, 1857

Looking closer, I saw, to my surprise, that it must be a song sparrow, it having the usual marks on its breast and no bright-chestnut crown. January 15, 1857

The snow is nine or ten inches deep, and it appeared to have taken refuge in this shed, where was much bare ground exposed by removing the wood.  January 15, 1857

More snow last night, and still the first that fell remains on the ground. January 15, 1861

Rice thinks that it is two feet deep on a level now. We have had no thaw yet. January 15, 1861

Science suggests the value of mutual intelligence. I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it, and it has suggested less to me and I have made less use of it. I now first feel as if I had got hold of it. January 15, 1853

What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps? . . . let us hear a strain of music, we are at once advertised of a life which no man had told us of, which no preacher preaches. January 15, 1857

January 15, 2018

*****

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Snow Flea

A Book of the Seasons,    by Henry Thoreau, the Song Sparrow (Fringilla melodia)

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Mouse

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Winter of Skating

*****

January 15, 2014

February 12, 1860 ("Whatever aid is to be derived from the use of a scientific term, we can never begin to see anything as it is so long as we remember the scientific term which always our ignorance has imposed on it. Natural objects and phenomena are in this sense forever wild and unnamed by us")

February 16, 1852 ("By the artificial system we learn the names of plants, by the natural their relations to one another; but still it remains to learn their relation to man. The poet does more for us in this department.")

February 18, 1860 ("As soon as I begin to be aware of the life of any creature, I at once forget its name. To know the names of creatures is only a convenience to us at first, but . . . the sooner we forget their names the better, so far as any true appreciation of them is concerned.")

March 1, 1852 ("I can see that there is a certain advantage in these hard and precise terms, such as the lichenist uses, for instance. No one masters them so as to use them in writing on the subject without being far better informed than the rabble about it. . . . No man writes on lichens, using the terms of the science intelligibly, without having something to say. ");

March 5, 1858 ("Our scientific names convey a very partial information only. . . It was a new light when my; guide gave me Indian names for things for which had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view.")

May 12, 1857 ("As the bay-wing sang many a thousand years ago, so sang he to-night. . . .If you would have the song of the sparrow inspire you a thousand years hence, let your life be in harmony with its strain to-day.”)

August 29, 1858 ("With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of the thing. . . . My knowledge now becomes communicable and grows by communication. I can now learn what others know about the same thing.")

December 27, 1857 ("Mice have been abroad in the night. We are almost ready to believe that they have been shut up in the earth all the rest of the year because we have not seen their tracks.”)

December 31, 1853 ("The contact of sound with a human ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy.")
December 31, 1854 ("A beautiful, clear, not very cold day. The shadows on the snow are indigo-blue.")
January 4, 1856 ("I think it is only such a day as this, when the fields on all sides are well clad with snow, over which the sun shines brightly, that you observe the blue shadows on the snow.")
January 5, 1854 ("It being warm and thawing, though fair, the snow is covered with snow-fleas. Especially they are sprinkled like pepper for half a mile in the tracks of a woodchopper in deep snow. These are the first since the snow came")
January 6, 1856 ("Now, at 4.15, the blue shadows are very distinct on the snow-banks.”)
January 7, 1860 (" As soon as I reach the neighborhood of the woods I begin to see the snow-fleas . . . Last night there was not one to be seen")
January 7, 1857 ("Though the rest of the broad path is else perfectly unspotted white, each track of the fox has proved a trap which has caught from three or four to eight or ten leaves each, snugly packed; and thus it is reprinted.")
January 7, 1857 ("In the wood-path [the snow] is all scored with the tracks of leaves that have scurried over it. Some might not suspect the cause of these fine and delicate traces, for the cause is no longer obvious")

January 8, 1852 (" I notice that almost every track which I made yesterday. . . has got a dead leaf in it.")
January 13, 1857 ("I hear one thrumming a guitar below stairs. It reminds me of moments that I have lived")

January 14, 1852 ("There is no blueness in the ruts and crevices in the snow to-day. What kind of atmosphere does this require? . . . It is one of the most interesting phenomena of the winter.")

January 14, 1855 ("Skate to Baker Farm with a rapidity which astonished myself.")

January 18, 1852 ("Perhaps the snow in the air, as well as on the ground, takes up the white rays and reflects the blue.”)

January 18, 1856 ("Clear and bright, yet I see the blue shadows on the snow at Walden. . . .I am in raptures at my own shadow . . . Our very shadows are no longer black, but a celestial blue. This has nothing to do with cold, methinks, but the sun must not be too low.")
January 22, 1854 ("Last night was very windy, and to-day I see the dry oak leaves collected in thick beds.")
January 26, 1852 ("To-day I see a few snow-fleas on the Walden road and a slight blueness in the chinks, it being cloudy and melting.")
January 27, 1857 ("Hear music below. It washes the dust off my life and everything I look at.")
January 27, 1857 ("A song sparrow took up its quarters in his grist-mill and stayed there all winter.")
 January 28, 1857  ("Am again surprised to see a song sparrow sitting for hours on our wood-pile in the yard.") 
January 30, 1860 (" The snow-flea seems to be a creature whose summer and prime of life is a thaw in the winter. It seems not merely to enjoy this interval like other animals, but then chiefly to exist. It is the creature of the thaw. Moist snow is its element. ")
January 30, 1856 ("crossing Walden Pond, a spotless field of snow surrounded by woods, whose intensely blue shadows and your own are the only objects. What a solemn silence reigns here!")

January 31, 1856 (“The tracks of the mice suggest extensive hopping in the night and going a-gadding.”) 
January 31, 1856 ("The fall of these withered leaves after each rude blast, so clean and dry that they do not soil the snow, is a phenomenon quite in harmony with the winter.")
February 6, 1854 ("Crossing Walden where the snow has fallen quite level, I perceive that my shadow is a delicate or transparent blue rather than black.")
February 10, 1855 (“My shadow is blue. It is especially blue when there is a bright sunlight on pure white snow.”)

February 16, 1852 ("By the artificial system we learn the names of plants, by the natural their relations to one another; but still it remains to learn their relation to man. The poet does more for us in this department.")
February 18, 1860 ("As soon as I begin to be aware of the life of any creature, I at once forget its name. To know the names of creatures is only a convenience to us at first, but . . . the sooner we forget their names the better, so far as any true appreciation of them is concerned.")
March 10, 1856 ("The blue shadows on snow are as fine as ever.")
March 30, 1856 ("There are as intense blue shadows on the snow as I ever saw.")

January 15, 2014

If you make the least correct 

observation of nature this year,

 you will have occasion to repeat it

 with illustrations the next, 

and the season and life itself is prolonged.

  April 7, 1853 

January 14 <<<<<<<<    January 15  >>>>>>>>  January 16

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 15

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 ©  2009-2023

tinyurl.com/HDT15Jan

We have had no thaw yet

January 15 .

More snow last night, and still the first that fell remains on the ground.

Rice thinks that it is two feet deep on a level now.

We have had no thaw yet.

Rice tells me that he baits the "seedees" and the jays and crows to his door nowadays with corn.

He thinks he has seen one of these jays stow away some where, without swallowing, as many as a dozen grains of corn, for, after picking it up, it will fly up into a tree near by and deposit so many successively in different crevices before it descends.

Speaking of Roman wormwood springing up abundantly when a field which has been in grass for twenty years or more is plowed, Rice says that, if you carefully examine such a field before it is plowed, you will find very short and stinted specimens of wormwood and pigweed there, and remarkably full of seed too!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1861

The third day of fog

January 15.

[A fine rain in the night produces a glaze, which this morning] is quite handsome. Instead of that soft, white, faery-like mantle of down with which the trees were thickly powdered, they are now cased in a coat of mail, of icy mail, built out in many cases about as far from the twig with icy prominences. 

Birches, tree-tops, and especially slender-twigged willows or osiers are bent over by it, as they were not by the snow-white and light frost of yesterday and the day before, so that the character or expression of many trees and shrubs is wholly altered. 

I might not guess what the pollard willow row at Merrick’s shore,  with twigs one or two years old, was. 

The fog still continues through, and succeeding to, the rain. The third day of fog. The thermometer at 7.30 or 8 A. M. is at 33°.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1859

At Natural History Rooms, Boston.

January 15.

January 15, 2018

At Natural History Rooms, Boston. 

Looked at the little grebe. Its feet are not webbed with lobes on the side like the coot, and it is quite white beneath. 

Saw the good-sized duck—velvet duck, with white spot on wing — which is commonly called “coot” on salt water. 

They have a living young bald eagle in the cellar. 

Talked with Dr. Kneeland. They have a golden eagle from Lexington, which K. obtained two or three years since, the first Dr. Cabot has heard of in Massachusetts. 

Speaking to him of my night warbler, he asked if it uttered such a note, making the note of the myrtle-bird, ah, te-te-te te-te-te te-te-te, exactly, and said that that was the note of the white throated sparrow, which he heard at Lake Superior, at night as well as by day. Vide his report, July 15, 1857. 

Same afternoon, saw Dr. Durkee in Howard Street. He has not seen the common glow-worm, and called his a variety of Lampyris noctiluca. Showed to Agassiz, Gould, and Jackson, and it was new to them. They thought it a variety of the above. His were luminous throughout, mine only in part of each segment. 

Saw some beautiful painted leaves in a shop window, - maple and oak.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1858

Looked at the little grebe. Its feet are not webbed with lobes on the side like the coot, and it is quite white beneath. See note to December 26, 1857 ("The little dipper must, therefore, be different from a coot. Is it not a grebe?”) Also November 27, 1857 (“Mr. Wesson . . . appears not to know a coot, and did not recognize the lobed feet when I drew them.”); April 24, 1856 (“Goodwin shot, about 6 P. M., and brought to me a cinereous coot . . .Lobes chiefly on the inner side of the toes.”); June 17, 1856 (“Went to Rev. Horace James’s reptiles (Orthodox). He had, set up, . . .a large lobe-footed bird which I think must have been a large grebe, killed in Fitchburg. ”);  December 26, 1853 ("Saw in it a small diver, probably a grebe or dobchick, dipper, or what-not, with the markings, as far as I saw, of the crested grebe, but smaller. It had a black head, a white ring about its neck, a white breast, black back, and apparently no tail.”)


Speaking to him of my night warbler. According to Emerson,  the night warbler is "a bird he had never identified, had been in search of twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down into a tree or bush.” See May 9, 1852 “Heard the night warbler.”); May 9, 1853 ("Again I think I heard the night-warbler.”); May 10, 1854("Heard the night-warbler. “); May 28, 1854 ("The night-warbler, after his strain, drops down almost perpendicularly into a tree-top and is lost.”); May 19, 1858 ("Heard the night-warbler begin his strain just like an oven-bird! I have noticed that when it drops down into the woods it darts suddenly one side to a perch when low.” See also May 12, 1855 (“We sit about half an hour, and it is surprising what various distinct sounds we hear there deep in the wood, as if the aisles of the wood were so many ear trumpets,-- the cawing of crows, the peeping of hylas in the swamp and perhaps the croaking of a tree-toad, the oven-bird, the yorrick of Wilson’s thrush, a distant stake-driver, the night-warbler and black and white creeper, the lowing of cows, the late supper horn, the voices of boys, the singing of girls, -- not all together but separately, distinctly, and musically, from where the partridge and the red-tailed hawk and the screech owl sit on their nests.”)

His glowworms were luminous throughout, mine only in part of each segment. See September 16, 1857 (“Watson gave me three glow-worms which he found by the roadside in Lincoln last night. They exhibit a greenish light, only under the caudal extremity, and intermittingly, or at will. As often as I touch one in a dark morning, it stretches and shows its light for a moment, only under the last segment.”) Also August 8, 1857 (“B. M. Watson sent me from Plymouth, July 20th, six glow-worms, . . . Knapp, in “Journal of a Naturalist,” speaks of “the luminous caudal spot” of the Lampyris noctiluca")

In a shop window

some beautiful painted leaves

 - maple and oak.

What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps? / The deer mouse will be printing on the snow of Well Meadow.

January 15. 

January 15, 2017

P. M. — To Fair Haven Pond and across to railroad. 

As I passed the south shed at the depot, observed what I thought a tree sparrow on the wood in the shed, a mere roof open at the side, under which several men were at that time employed sawing wood with a horse power. Looking closer, I saw, to my surprise, that it must be a song sparrow, it having the usual marks on its breast and no bright-chestnut crown. The snow is nine or ten inches deep, and it appeared to have taken refuge in this shed, where was much bare ground exposed by removing the wood. When I advanced, instead of flying away, it concealed itself in the wood, just as it often dodges behind a wall.

What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps? We are all ordinarily in a state of desperation; such is our life; ofttimes it drives us to suicide. To how many, perhaps to most, life is barely tolerable, and if it were not for the fear of death or of dying, what a multitude would immediately commit suicide! But let us hear a strain of music, we are at once advertised of a life which no man had told us of, which no preacher preaches. 

Suppose I try to describe faithfully the prospect which a strain of music exhibits to me. 

The field of my life becomes a boundless plain, glorious to tread, with no death nor disappointment at the end of it. All meanness and trivialness disappear. I become adequate to any deed. No particulars survive this expansion; persons do not survive it. In the light of this strain there is no thou nor I. We are actually lifted above ourselves.

The tracks of the mice near the head of Well Meadow were particularly interesting. There was a level surface of pure snow there, unbroken by bushes or grass, about four rods across, and here were nine tracks of mice running across it from the bushes on this side to those on the other, the tracks quite near together but repeatedly crossing each other at very acute angles, but each particular course was generally quite direct. The snow was so light that only one distinct track was made by all four of the feet, five or six inches apart, but the tail left a very distinct mark. 

A single track, thus stretching away almost straight, sometimes half a dozen rods, over unspotted snow, is very handsome, like a chain of a new pattern; and then they suggest an airy lightness in the body that impressed them. Though there may have been but one or two here, the tracks suggesting quite a little company that had gone gadding over to their neighbors under the opposite bush. 

Such is the delicacy of the impression on the surface of the lightest snow, where other creatures sink, and night, too, being the season when these tracks are made, they remind me of a fairy revel. It is almost as good as if the actors were here. I can easily imagine all the rest. Hopping is expressed by the tracks themselves. 

Yet I should like much to see by broad daylight a company of these revellers hopping over the snow. There is a still life in America that is little observed or dreamed of. Here were possible auditors and critics which the lecturer at the Lyceum last night did not think of. How snug they are somewhere under the snow now, not to be thought of, if it were not for these pretty tracks! 

And for a week, or fortnight even, of pretty still weather the tracks will remain, to tell of the nocturnal adventures of a tiny mouse who was not beneath the notice of the Lord. 

So it was so many thousands of years before Gutenberg invented printing with his types, and so it will be so many thousands of years after his types are forgotten, perchance.  The deer mouse will be printing on the snow of Well Meadow to be read by a new race of men. 

Cold as the weather is and has been, almost all the brook is open in the meadow there, an artery of black water in the midst of the snow, and there are many sink-holes, where the water is exposed at the bottom of a dimple in the snow. Indeed, in some places these little black spots are distributed very thickly, the snow in swells covering the intervening tussocks.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1857



Looking closer, I saw, to my surprise, that it must be a song sparrow, taken refuge in this shed. January 22, 1857 ("Minott tells me that Sam Barrett told him once when he went to mill that a song sparrow took up its quarters in his grist-mill and stayed there all winter."); January 28, 1857 (“Am again surprised to see a song sparrow sitting for hours on our wood-pile in the yard, in the midst of snow in the yard.”)

What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps? See  January 13, 1857 ("one thrumming a guitar . . . reminds me of moments that I have lived. . . .”); May 19, 1856 ("I am always thus affected when I hear in the fields any singing or instrumental music at the end of the day. “);April19, 1856 ("Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, — passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. “); May 23, 1854("There was a time when the beauty and the music were all within, and I sat and listened to my thoughts, and there was a song in them. I sat for hours on rocks and wrestled with the melody which possessed me. I sat and listened by the hour to a positive though faint and distant music . . .. When I walked with a joy which knew not its own origin.”); December 31, 1853 ("I hear very distinctly from the railroad causeway the whistle of the locomotive on the Lowell road. I hear it, and I realize and see clearly what at other times I only dimly remember. . . . It, as it were, takes me out of my body and gives me the freedom of all bodies and all nature. . . . The contact of sound with a human ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy.”); August 3, 1852 (" At the east window. — A temperate noon. I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano. . . . At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree.”); June 22, 1851 ("The world is a musical instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure. I awake to its music with the calmness of a lake when there is not a breath of wind. . . .And without effort our depths are revealed to ourselves.”);  July 16, 1851("This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To have such sweet impressions made on us, such ecstasies begotten of the breezes ! I can remember how I was astonished. I said to myself, — I said to others, — " There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers.1 This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself.”)

The tracks suggesting quite a little company that had gone gadding over to their neighbors under the opposite bush. See January 31, 1856 (“The tracks of the mice suggest extensive hopping in the night and going a-gadding.”); December 27, 1857 ("Mice have been abroad in the night. We are almost ready to believe that they have been shut up in the earth all the rest of the year because we have not seen their tracks.”)

A Book of the Seasons: January 15.

January 15

Infinite snow-fleas

in deepest ruts and foot-tracks.

First time this winter.

January 15, 1852

January 15, 2018

 

January 15, 2014

A bright day not cold 

yet my shadow is a most 

celestial blue. 

 January 15, 1856

Week of January 15

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 © 2009-2016

Walking without gloves

January 15

A fine, clear winter day. 

P. M. —To Hemlocks on the crust, slumping in every now and then. 

A bright day, not cold. I can comfortably walk without gloves, yet my shadow is a most celestial blue. This only requires a clear bright day and snow-clad earth, not great cold. 

I cross the river on the crust with some hesitation. The snow appears considerably deeper than the 12th, maybe four or five inches deeper, and the river is indicated by a mere depression in it.

In the street not only fences but trees are obviously shortened, as by a flood. You are sensible that you are walking at a level a foot or more above the usual one. 

Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I think it must be the tracks of some creature new to me. 

I find under the hemlocks, in and upon the snow, apparently brought down by the storm, an abundance of those little dead hemlock twigs described on the 13th. They are remarkably slender, and without stiffness like the fir (and I think spruce) twigs, and this gives the hemlock its peculiar grace. These are not yet curved much, and perhaps they got that form from being placed in the nest.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1856

A bright day, not cold. I can comfortably walk without gloves. See  January 25, 1855 ("It is a rare day for winter, clear and bright, yet warm . . . You dispense with gloves.")  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Walking without Gloves

My shadow is a most celestial blue. This only requires a clear bright day and snow-clad earth, not great cold. See February 10, 1855 (“My shadow is blue. It is especially blue when there is a bright sunlight on pure white snow. It suggests that there may be some thing divine, something celestial, in me.”); January 18, 1856 ("I am in raptures at my own shadow.")   Also see note to January 6, 1856 ("The blue shadows are very distinct on the snow-banks.”)

Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I think it must be the tracks of some creature new to me. See January 7, 1857 ("Some might not suspect the cause of these fine and delicate traces, for the cause is no longer obvious.”)

January 15. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 15

A bright day, not cold.

Celestial blue shadow,

walking without gloves.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Walking without gloves.

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 ©  2009-2026

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-560115

Skating to Bedford.

January 15

January 15, 2014

P. M. - Skated to Bedford

It has just been snowing, and this lies in shallow drifts or waves on the Great Meadows, alternate snow and ice. 

Skate into a crack, and slide on my side twenty-five feet. 

The river-channel dark and rough with fragments of old ice, — polygons of various forms, — cemented together, not strong.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1855

Shallow drifts or waves on the Great Meadows, alternate snow and ice. See January 26, 1860

("Pretty good skating on the Great Meadows, slightly raised and smoothed by the thaw . . . Skating, crusted snow, slosh, etc., are wont to take you by surprise.")

Skated to Bedford. See January 14, 1855 ("Skate to Baker Farm with a rapidity which astonished myself, before the wind . . . in a quarter of an hour I was three and a half miles from home without having made any particular exertion."); January 31, 1855 ("At 10 A. M., skated up the river to explore further than I had been."); February 3, 1855 ("This will deserve to be called the winter of skating.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Winter of Skating and January 21, 1853 ("In this stillness and at this distance, I hear the nine-o'clock bell in Bedford five miles off, which I might never hear in the village"); April 3, 1858 ("We paddle along all day, down to the Bedford line.")

January 15. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 15

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Skating to Bedford

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-550115

Naming a lichen (The value of mutual intelligence)

January 15.

January 15, 2017

Mrs. Ripley told me this afternoon that Russell* had decided that that green (and sometimes yellow) dust on the under side of stones in walls was a decaying state of Lepraria chlorina, a lichen, -- the yellow another species of Lepraria. 

Science suggests the value of mutual intelligence. I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it, and it has suggested less to me and I have made less use of it. I now first feel as if I had got hold of it.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1853

* John Lewis Russell, botanist. See Botanizing with Russell; Botanizing Marblehead and Salem; Botanizing the grasses and sedges; Russell is not sure but Eaton has described my rare polygonum.

Mrs. Ripley told ne this afternnoon. See May 17, 1856 ("Mrs. Ripley showed me, from her son Gore in Minnesota, a few days ago, the first spring flower of the prairie there, a hairy-stemmed, slender-divisioned, and hairy-involucred, six-petalled blue flower, probably a species of hepatica. No leaves with it. Not described in Gray.")

Science suggests the value of mutual intelligence. I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it. See March 1, 1852 ("I can see that there is a certain advantage in these hard and precise terms, such as the lichenist uses, for instance. No one masters them so as to use them in writing on the subject without being far better informed than the rabble about it. . . . No man writes on lichens, using the terms of the science intelligibly, without having something to say. "); August 29, 1858 ("With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of the thing. . . . My knowledge now becomes communicable and grows by communication. I can now learn what others know about the same thing."); See also February 16, 1852 ("By the artificial system we learn the names of plants, by the natural their relations to one another; but still it remains to learn their relation to man. The poet does more for us in this department."); March 1,1852 ("Linnæus, speaking of the necessity of precise and adequate terms in any science"); March 5, 1858 ("Our scientific names convey a very partial information only; they suggest certain thoughts only. It does not occur to me that there are other names for most of these objects, given by a people who stood between me and them, who had better senses than our race."); March 12, 1852 ("I have learned in a shorter time and more accurately the meaning of the scientific terms used in botany."); March 16, 1858 ("No doubt he had names accordingly for many things for which we have no popular names."); March 5, 1858 ("It was a new light when my; guide gave me Indian names for things for which had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view."); February 12, 1860 ("Whatever aid is to be derived from the use of a scientific term, we can never begin to see anything as it is so long as we remember the scientific term which always our ignorance has imposed on it. Natural objects and phenomena are in this sense forever wild and unnamed by us"); February 18, 1860 ("As soon as I begin to be aware of the life of any creature, I at once forget its name. To know the names of creatures is only a convenience to us at first, but . . . the sooner we forget their names the better, so far as any true appreciation of them is concerned."); February 28, 1860 ("As it is important to consider Nature from the point of view of science, remembering the nomenclature and system of men, and so, if possible, go a step further in that direction, so it is equally important often to ignore or forget all that men presume that they know, and take an original and unprejudiced view of Nature, letting her make what impression she will on you, as the first men, and all children and natural men still do.") And see also November 15, 1851 ( Linnæus['s]. . . father, being the first learned man of his family, changed his family name and borrowed that of Linnæus (Linden-tree-man ) from a lofty linden tree which stood near his native place. . .What more fit than that the advent of a new man into a family should acquire for it, and transmit to his posterity, a new patronymic? Such a custom suggests, if it does not argue, an unabated vigor in the race, relating it to those primitive times when men did, indeed, acquire a name, as memorable and distinct as their characters."); May 21, 1851 ("You have a wild savage in you, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as yours."); See also Walking (1861 ("Travelers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit.. . .So every man has an original wild name")

January 15. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 15

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 ©  2009-2024

tinyurl.com/hdt530115

Infinite snow-fleas

January 15

For the first time this winter I notice snow-fleas this afternoon in Walden Wood. Wherever I go they are to be seen, especially in the deepest ruts and foot-tracks. Their number is almost infinite.

It is a rather warm and moist afternoon, and feels like rain. I suppose that some peculiarity in the weather has called them forth from the bark of the trees.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1852

For the first time this winter I notice snow-fleas. See January 5, 1854 (“This afternoon . . . being warm and thawing, though fair, the snow is covered with snow-fleas.”); January 7, 1860 ("A thaw begins, with a southerly wind. As soon as I reach the neighborhood of the woods I begin to see the snow-fleas  . . . Last night there was not one to be seen.”); January 30, 1860 ("The snow-flea seems to be a creature whose summer and prime of life is a thaw in the winter . . . it is the creature of the thaw. Moist snow is its element.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Snow Flea

January 15. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 15

First time this winter

in deepest ruts and foot-tracks

infinite snow-fleas.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Infinite snow-fleas

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-520115