Evening.—Went to Nawshawtuct by North Branch.
Overtaken by a slight shower. The same increased fragrance from the ground—sweet-fern, etc.—as in the night, and for the like reason probably. The houstonias still blossom freshly, as I believe they continue to do all summer. The fever-root in blossom; pictured in Bigelow’s “Medical Botany.” Triosteum perfoliatum, near the top of Hill, under the wall, looks somewhat like a milkweed. The Viburnum dentatum, very regularly toothed, just ready to blossom; sometimes called arrow-wood.
Nature seems not [to] have designed that man should be much abroad by night, and in the moon proportioned the light fitly. By the faintness and rareness of the light compared with that of the sun, she expresses her intention with regard to him.
June 15. Sunday. Darwin still:—
Finds runaway sailors on the Chonos Archipelago, who he thought “had kept a very good reckoning of time,” having lost only four days in fifteen months.
Near same place, on the islands of the archipelago, he found wild potato, the tallest four feet high, tubers generally small but one two inches in diameter; “resembled in every respect, and had the same smell as English potatoes; but when boiled they shrunk much, and were watery and insipid, without any bitter taste.”
Speaking of the surf on the coast of Chiloe, “I was assured that, after a heavy gale, the roar can be heard at night even at Castro, a distance of no less than twenty-one sea-miles, across a hilly and wooded country.”
Subsidence and elevation of the west coast of South America and of the Cordilleras. “Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.”
Would like to see Sir Francis Head’s travels in South America,—Pampas perhaps.[210] Also Chambers’ “Sea Levels.” Also travels of Spix and Von Martius.
It is said that hydrophobia was first known in South America in 1803.