14 January 1861 – 20 January 1861

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 (4slona), which was hawking over a brook, catch and devour some minnows about one inch long, and says it is known that “the larve of the greater water-beetles (Dyticide) 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, 7. 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 ori- ginated 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 differ- ent kind and often repeated raise great oaks, but scarcely a traveller hears these or turns aside to con- verse 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, 7. 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, or the jay when it lets one slip from under its foot, 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, 7. 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 Sternotherus 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.

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 asa 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 abun- dantly 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!