4 March 1861 – 10 March 1861

I just heard peculiar faint sounds made by the air escaping from a stick which I had just put into my stove. It sounded to my ear exactly like the peeping of the hylodes in a distant pool, a cool and breezy spring evening, — as if it were designed to remind me of that season. Saw the F. hyemalis March 4th. To continue subject of March 3d, — It is remarkable that, though in ordinary winters, when the ground is alternately bare and covered with snow several times, or is not covered till after it is frozen, it may be frozen a foot or more in depth gen- erally, yet, if it is kept covered with snow, though only a thin coating, from first to last, it will not be frozen at all. For example, the ground was half bare on the 27th, the walk under the Boston road hills pretty fair on the 28th, and the 3d, after rain, the earth was bare, the ways were about settled, the melted snow and rain having been soaked up at once by the thirsty and open ground. There was probably no frost on level ground except where the earth had of late been partly exposed in the middle of the road. The recent rain and melting accord- ingly raised the river less than it otherwise would. There has been no breaking up of the frost on roads, — no bad travelling as usual, — but as soon as the snow is gone, the ways are settled. In short, Nature uses all sorts of conveyances, from the rudest drag to a balloon, but she will get her seeds along in due season. Is it not possible that Loudon is right as it respects the primitive distribution of the birch? Are not the dense patches always such as have sprung up in open land (commonly old fields cleared by man), as is the case with the pitch pine? It disappears at length from a dense oak or pine wood. Perhaps originally it formed dense woods only where a space had been cleared for it by a burning, as now at the eastward. Perhaps only the oaks and white pines could (originally) possess the soil here against all comers, maple succeeding because it does not mind a wet foot. Suppose one were to take such a boxful of birch seed as I have described into the meeting-house belfry in the fall, and let some of it drop in every wind, but always more in proportion as the wind was stronger, and yet so husband it that there should be some left for every gale even till far into spring; so that this seed might be blown toward every point of the compass and to vari- ous distances in each direction. Would not this repre- sent a single birch tree on a hill? Of which trees (though only a part on hills) we have perhaps a million. And yet some feel compelled to suppose that the birch trees which spring up after a burning are spontaneously generated — for want of seed! It is true [it] does not come up in great quantities at the distance I have spoken of, but, if only one comes up there this year, you may have a million seeds matured there a few years hence. It is true that the greater part of these seeds fall near the trees which bore them, and comparatively few germinate; yet, when the surface is in a favorable condi- tion, they may spring up in very unexpected places. A lady tells me that she met Deacon S. of Lincoln with a load of hay, and she, noticing that as he drove under the apple trees by the side of the road a consider- able part of the hay was raked off by their boughs, informed him of it. But he answered, “It is not mine yet. I am going to the scales with it and intend to come back this way.”