Thoreau—who was not, like some very celebrated landscape critics of the present day, an outside spectator of the action and products of natural forces, but, in the old religious sense, an observer of organic nature, living, more than almost any other descriptive writer, among and with her children—has a very eloquent paper on the "Autumnal Tints" of the New England landscape.—See his Excursions, pp. 215 et seqq.
Few men have personally noticed so many facts in natural history accessible to unscientific observation as Thoreau, and yet he had never seen that very common and striking spectacle, the phosphorescence of decaying wood, until, in the latter years of his life, it caught his attention in a bivouac in the forests of Maine. He seems to have been more excited by this phenomenon than by any other described in his works. It must be a capacious eye that takes in all the visible facts in the history of the most familiar natural object.—The Maine Woods, p. 184.
"The luminous appearance of bodies projected against the sky adjacent to the rising" or setting sun, so well described in Professor Necker's Letter to Sir David Brewster, is, as Tyndall observes, "hardly ever seen by either guides or travellers, though it would seem, prima facie, that it must be of frequent occurrence." See Tyndall, Glaciers of the Alps. Part I. Second ascent of Mont Blanc.
Judging from my own observation, however, I should much doubt whether this brilliant phenomenon can be so often seen in perfection as would be expected; for I have frequently sought it in vain at the foot of the Alps, under conditions apparently otherwise identical with those where, in the elevated Alpine valleys, it shows itself in the greatest splendor.
No. 36 ([page 314]). European poets, whose knowledge of the date palm is not founded on personal observation, often describe its trunk as not only slender, but particularly straight. Nothing can be farther from the truth. When the Orientals compare the form of a beautiful girl to the stem of the palm, they do not represent it as rigidly straight, but on the contrary as made up of graceful curves, which seem less like permanent outlines than like flowing motion. In a palm grove, the trunks, so far from standing planted upright like the candles of a chandelier, bend in a vast variety of curves, now leaning towards, now diverging from, now crossing, each other, and among a hundred you will hardly see two whose axes are parallel.
No. 37 ([page 316, first note]). Charles Martin ascribes the power of reproduction by shoots from the stump to the cedar of Mount Atlas, which appears to be identical with the cedar of Lebanon.—Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 July, 1864, p. 315.
No. 38 ([page 332]). In an interesting article on recent internal improvements in England, in the London Quarterly Review for January, 1858, it is related that in a single rock cutting on the Liverpool and Manchester railway, 480,000 cubic yards of stone were removed; that the earth excavated and removed in the construction of English railways up to that date, amounted to a hundred and fifty million cubic yards, and that at the Round Down Cliff, near Dover, a single blast of nineteen thousand pounds of powder blew down a thousand million tons of chalk, and covered fifteen acres of land with the fragments.
No. 39 ([page 339]). According to Reventlov, whose work is one of the best sources of information on the subject of diking-in tide-washed flats, Salicornia herbacea appears as soon as the flat is raised high enough to be dry for three hours at ordinary ebb tide, or, in other words, where the ordinary flood covers it to a depth of not more than two feet. At a flood depth of one foot, the Salicornia dies and is succeeded by various sand plants. These are followed by Poa distans and Poa maritima as the ground is raised by further deposits, and these plants finally by common grasses. The Salicornia is preceded by confervæ, growing in deeper water, which spread over the bottom, and when covered by a fresh deposit of slime reappear above it, and thus vegetable and alluvial strata alternate until the flat is raised sufficiently high for the growth of Salicornia.—Om Marskdannelsen paa Vestkysten af Hertugdömmet Slesvig, pp. 7, 8.
No. 40 ([page 348, note]). The drijftil employed for the ring dike of the Lake of Haarlem, was in part cut in sections fifty feet long by six or seven wide, and these were navigated like rafts to the spot where they were sunk to form the dike.—Emile de Laveleye, Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 Sept., 1863, p. 285.
No. 41 ([page 352, last paragraph]). See on the influence of the improvements in question on tidal and other marine currents, Staring, De Bodem van Nederland, I. p. 279.