Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/78

64 as yet. As I sit under their boughs looking into the sky, I suddenly see the myriad black dots of the expanded buds against the sky. Their sap is flowing. The elm buds, too, I find are expanded, though on earth are no signs of spring. I find myself inspecting little granules, as it were, on the bark of trees, little shields or apothecia springing from a thallus, and I call it studying lichens. That is merely the prospect which is afforded me. It is short commons and innutritious. Surely I might take wider views. The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk. Would it not be noble to study the shield of the sun on the thallus of the sky, cerulean, which scatters its infinite sporules of light through the universe. To the lichenist is not the shield (or rather the apothecium) of a lichen disproportionately large compared with the universe?

March 5, 1853. F. Browne showed me some lesser red polls which he shot yesterday. They turn out to be very falsely called the chestnut frontleted bird of the winter. "Linaria minor. Ray. Lesser Red-poll. Linnet. From Pennsylvania and New Jersey to Maine, in winter; inland to Kentucky. Breeds in Maine, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Labrador, and