No man writes on lichens without having something to say.

March 1.

March 1, 2019

Linnæus, speaking of the necessity of precise and adequate terms in any science, after naming some which he invented for botany, says, “Termini praeservarunt Anatomiam, Mathesin, Chemiam, ab idiotis; Medicinam autem eorum defectus conculcavit.” (Terms (well defined) have preserved anatomy, mathematics, and chemistry from idiots; but the want of them has ruined medicine.)

But I should say that men generally were not enough interested in the first-mentioned sciences to meddle with and degrade them.

There is no interested motive to induce them to listen to the quack in mathematics, as they have to attend to the quack in medicine; yet chemistry has been converted into alchemy, and astronomy into astrology.

However, 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.

New books are not written on chemistry or cryptogamia of as little worth comparatively as are written on the spiritual phenomena of the day.

No man writes on lichens, using the terms of the science intelligibly, without having something to say, but every one thinks himself competent to write on the relation of the soul to the body, as if that were a phænogamous subject.

After having read various books on various subjects for some months, I take up a report on Farms by a committee of Middlesex Husbandmen, and read of the number of acres of bog that some farmer has redeemed, and the number of rods of stone wall that he has built, and the number of tons of hay he now cuts, or of bushels of corn or potatoes he raises there, and I feel as if I had got my foot down on to the solid and sunny earth, the basis of all philosophy, and poetry, and religion even.

I have faith that the man who re deemed some acres of land the past summer redeemed also some parts of his character. I shall not expect to find him ever in the almshouse or the prison. He is, in fact, so far on his way to heaven.

When he took the farm there was not a grafted tree on it, and now he realizes something handsome from the sale of fruit. These, in the absence of other facts, are evidence of a certain moral worth.

 H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 1, 1852

There is a certain advantage in these hard and precise terms, such as the lichenist uses. See August 20, 1851 ("Botany is worth studying if only for the precision of its terms, — to learn the value of words and of system."); January 15, 1853 ("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.")); March 23, 1853 ("One studies books of science merely to learn the language of naturalists , — to be able to communicate with them."); August 29, 1858 ( "With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of 'the thing."); Compare 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."); 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. "). 

 [On Feb 3 Thoreau had checked out Linnaeus' Philosophia botanica by Carl von Linnaeus from Harvard Library (Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 290).] 

No man writes on lichens without having something to say. See February 7, 1859 ("I expect that the lichenist will have the keenest relish for Nature in her every-day mood and dress.. . . To study lichens is to get a taste of earth and health, to go gnawing the rails and rocks. This product of the bark is the essence of all times. The lichenist extracts nutriment from the very crust of the earth. A taste for this study is an evidence of titanic health, a sane earthiness. It makes not so much blood as soil of life. It fits a man to deal with the barrenest and rockiest experience. . . . — so the lichenist loves the tripe of the rock, — that which eats and digests the rocks. He eats the eater. “Eat-all” may be his name. A lichenist fats where others starve. His provender never fails."),

March 1.  See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,   March 1

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,

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

On the rock this side the Leaning Hemlocks

March 6, 2016

March 6.

P. M. — Up Assabet.

The snow is softening. Methinks the lichens are a little greener for it. 

A thaw comes, and then the birches, which were gray on their white ground before, appear prettily clothed in green. 

I see various kinds of insects out on the snow now. 

On the rock this side the Leaning Hemlocks, is the track of an otter. He has left some scentless jelly-like substance an inch and a half in diameter there, yellowish beneath, maybe part of a fish, or clam(?), or himself. 

The leaves still hanging on some perhaps young swamp white oaks are re markably fresh, almost ochre-colored brown. 

See the snow discolored yellowish under a (probably) gray squirrel’s nest high in a pitch pine, and acorn shells about on it. 

Also a squirrel’s track on the snow over Lee’s Hill. The outside toe on the forefeet is nearly at right angles with the others. This also distinguishes it from a rabbit’s track. It visits each apple tree, digs up frozen apples and sometimes filberts, and when it starts again, aims for an apple tree, though fifteen rods distant. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 6, 1856

Methinks the lichens are a little greener. See March 5, 1852 ("I find myself inspecting little granules, as it were, on the bark of trees, little shields or apothecia springing from a thallus, such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens."); March 6, 1852  ("Old Mr. Joe Hosmer chopping wood at his door. He is full of meat. Had a crack with him. I told him I was studying lichens, pointing to his wood. He thought I meant the wood itself . . . Found three or four parmelias caperata in fruit on a white oak on the high river-bank between Tarbell's and Harrington’s. ") See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Lichens and the lichenst

I see various kinds of insects out on the snow now. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: insects and worms come forth and are active

On the rock this side the Leaning Hemlocks, is the track of an otter. March 6, 1852 ("See the track of an otter near the Clamshell Hill, for it looks too large for a mink, — nearly an inch and a half in diameter and nearly round. Occasionally it looked as if a rail had been drawn along through the thin snow over the ice, with faint footprints at long intervals. I saw where he came out of a hole in the ice, and tracked him forty rods, to where he went into an other. Saw where he appeared to have been sliding. "); See also December 6, 1856 (“Just this side of Bittern Cliff, I see a very remarkable track of an otter . . .The river was all tracked up with otters, from Bittern Cliff upward. Sometimes one had trailed his tail, apparently edge wise, making a mark like the tail of a deer mouse; sometimes they were moving fast, and there was an interval of five feet between the tracks.”); December 31, 1854 (“ On the edge of A. Wheeler’s cranberry meadow I see the track of an otter made since yesterday morning.”); January 21, 1853 (“I think it was January 20th that I saw that which I think an otter track in path under the Cliffs, — a deep trail in the snow, six or seven inches wide and two or three deep in the middle, as if a log had been drawn along, similar to a muskrat's only much larger, and the legs evidently short and the steps short, sinking three or four inches deeper still, as if it had waddled along.”); February 4, 1855 ("See this afternoon a very distinct otter-track by the Rock, at the junction of the two rivers.”); February 8, 1857 (“The otter must roam about a great deal, for I rarely see fresh tracks in the same neighborhood a second time the same winter, though the old tracks may be apparent all the winter through.”);  February 20, 1856 (“See a broad and distinct otter-trail, made last night or yesterday. It came out to the river through the low declivities, making a uniform broad hollow trail there without any mark of its feet. . . .Commonly seven to nine or ten inches wide, and tracks of feet twenty to twenty-four apart; but sometimes there was no track of the feet for twenty-five feet, frequently for six; in the last case swelled in the outline.”); February 22, 1856 (“Just below this bridge begins an otter track, several days old yet very distinct, which I trace half a mile down the river. In the snow less than an inch deep, on the ice, each foot makes a track three inches wide, apparently enlarged in melting. The clear interval, sixteen inches; the length occupied by the four feet, fourteen inches. It looks as if some one had dragged a round timber down the middle of the river a day or two since, which bounced as it went.”). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Otter