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276 whatever branch of science. He was among the first naturalists to study the commonplace; with thoroughness characteristic of all his work, the usual and the rare, the beautiful and the bastard growths receive undiscriminating record. If the water-lily and the clintonia borealis thrilled him to poetic terms, he gave no less graphic mention to the clover, bluets, lambkill and convolvulus. He watched the graceful swing of the butterfly but he called attention to the hidden grace of "the yellow-winged grasshopper with blackish eyes." The lark and the robin were his feathered friends of special honor but he never failed to note and portray with enthusiasm the crow, the cat-bird, and the marsh-hawk, venting his "winged energy" in "a split squeal." In commenting on the sonorousness of nature's sounds, he examples most often the tones usually heard with indifference,—the hum of insects, the crowing of the cocks, the booming of the ice, or the telegraph wire with a "melody like Anacreon and Meander." It is significant that in an index of his manuscript journals, and in the volumes edited by Mr. Blake, there are the greatest number of references to the dandelions, chickadees, turtles, and like common and less poetic forms of nature.

While still a young man Thoreau received