The most inattentive walker can see how the science of geology took its rise. The inland hills and promontories betray the action of water on their rounded sides as plainly as if the work were completed yesterday. He sees it with but half an eye as he walks, and forgets his thought again. Also the level plains and more recent meadows and marine shells found on the tops of hills. The geologist painfully and elaborately follows out these suggestions, and hence his fine-spun theories. The goldfinch, though solitary, is now one of the commonest birds in the air. What if a man were earnestly and wisely to set about recollecting and preserving the thoughts which he has had! How many perchance are now irrecoverable! Calling in his neighbors to aid him. I do not like to hear the name of particular States given to birds and flowers which are found in all equally,—as Maryland yellow-throat, etc., etc. The _Canadenses_ and _Virginicas_ may be suffered to pass for the most part, for there is historical as well as natural reason at least for them. Canada is the peculiar country of some and the northern limit of many more plants. And Virginia, which was originally the name for all the Atlantic shore, has some right to stand for the South. The fruit of the sweet-gale by Nut Meadow Brook is of a yellowish green now and has not yet its greasy feel. The little red-streaked and dotted excrescences on the shrub oaks I find as yet no name for. Now for the pretty red capsules or pods of the _Hypericum Canadense_. White goldenrod is budded along the Marlborough road. Chickadees and jays never fail. The cricket’s is a note which does not attract you to itself. It is not easy to find one. I fear that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct and scientific; that, in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope. I see details, not wholes nor the shadow of the whole. I count some parts, and say, “I know.” The cricket’s chirp now fills the air in dry fields near pine woods. Gathered our first watermelon to-day. By the Marlborough road I notice the richly veined leaves of the _Neottia pubescens_, or veined neottia, rattlesnake-plantain. I like this last name very well, though it might not be easy to convince a quibbler or proser of its fitness. We want some name to express the mystic wildness of its rich leaves. Such work as men imitate in their embroidery, unaccountably agreeable to the eye, as if it answered its end only when it met the eye of man; a reticulated leaf, visible only on one side; little things which make one pause in the woods, take captive the eye. Here is a bees’ or wasps’ nest in the sandy, mouldering bank by the roadside, four inches in diameter, as if made of scales of striped brown paper. It is singular if indeed man first made paper and then discovered its resemblance to the work of the wasps, and did not derive the hint from them.