Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts 2.djvu/72

 Gray's Manual of 1848,—the same textbook which Thoreau used in 1861: &quot;Desor, who has been among the Indians at Lake Superior this summer, told me the other day that they had a particular name for each species of tree (as the maple), but they had but one word for flowers. They did not distinguish the species of the last.&quot; In the lack of such specific distinctions they were like the peasants of Attica, when I rambled about Greece in 1890 and 1893. Show them a common wildflower and ask them its name in Greek, these compatriots of Theophrastus could only reply, &quot;Oh, Loulouthia,&quot;—Posies.

June 24, at Red Wing. Went in the forenoon to the bluffs south and southwest of the town. Found a larger species of Tradescantia on the sharp-ridged bluff; also azure larkspur, and especially a kind of Acerates or hornless milkweed, on the same. Potentilla anserina in a marsh by the Mississippi. A coriander-like plant in fruit on the sharp-ridged bluff; and on the same the grass with the long beard and hard, sharp point, Stipa spartea (porcupine grass); the side of the same