No More Learning

In the winter, the botanist need not confine himself to his books and
herbarium, and give over his outdoor pursuits, but may study a new
department of vegetable physiology, what may be called crystalline
botany, then. The winter of 1837 was unusually favorable for this. In
December of that year, the Genius of vegetation seemed to hover by
night over its summer haunts with unusual persistency. Such a
hoar-frost as is very uncommon here or anywhere, and whose full
effects can never be witnessed after sunrise, occurred several times.
As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked
like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled
together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which
the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along
some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies
of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow. The
river, viewed from the high bank, appeared of a yellowish-green color,
though all the landscape was white. Every tree, shrub, and spire of
grass, that could raise its head above the snow, was covered with a
dense ice-foliage, answering, as it were, leaf for leaf to its summer
dress. Even the fences had put forth leaves in the night. The centre,
diverging, and more minute fibres were perfectly distinct, and the
edges regularly indented. These leaves were on the side of the twig or
stubble opposite to the sun, meeting it for the most part at right
angles, and there were others standing out at all possible angles upon
these and upon one another, with no twig or stubble supporting them.
When the first rays of the sun slanted over the scene, the grasses
seemed hung with innumerable jewels, which jingled merrily as they
were brushed by the foot of the traveler, and reflected all the hues
of the rainbow, as he moved from side to side. It struck me that these
ghost leaves, and the green ones whose forms they assume, were the
creatures of but one law; that in obedience to the same law the
vegetable juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf, on the one
hand, and the crystalline particles troop to their standard in the
same order, on the other. As if the material were indifferent, but the
law one and invariable, and every plant in the spring but pushed up
into and filled a permanent and eternal mould, which, summer and
winter forever, is waiting to be filled.

This foliate structure is common to the coral and the plumage of
birds, and to how large a part of animate and inanimate nature. The
same independence of law on matter is observable in many other
instances, as in the natural rhymes, when some animal form, color, or
odor has its counterpart in some vegetable.
As, indeed, all rhymes
imply an eternal melody, independent of any particular sense.

As confirmation of the fact that vegetation is but a kind of
crystallization, every one may observe how, upon the edge of the
melting frost on the window, the needle-shaped particles are bundled
together so as to resemble fields waving with grain, or shocks rising
here and there from the stubble; on one side the vegetation of the
torrid zone, high-towering palms and wide-spread banyans, such as are
seen in pictures of oriental scenery; on the other, arctic pines stiff
frozen, with downcast branches.

Vegetation has been made the type of all growth; but as in crystals
the law is more obvious, their material being more simple, and for the
most part more transient and fleeting, would it not be as
philosophical as convenient to consider all growth, all filling up
within the limits of nature, but a crystallization more or less rapid?

On this occasion, in the side of the high bank of the river, wherever
the water or other cause had formed a cavity, its throat and outer
edge, like the entrance to a citadel, bristled with a glistening
ice-armor. In one place you might see minute ostrich-feathers, which
seemed the waving plumes of the warriors filing into the fortress; in
another, the glancing, fan-shaped banners of the Lilliputian host; and
in another, the needle-shaped particles collected into bundles,
resembling the plumes of the pine, might pass for a phalanx of spears.
From the under side of the ice in the brooks, where there was a
thicker ice below, depended a mass of crystallization, four or five
inches deep, in the form of prisms, with their lower ends open, which,
when the ice was laid on its smooth side, resembled the roofs and
steeples of a Gothic city, or the vessels of a crowded haven under a
press of canvas. The very mud in the road, where the ice had melted,
was crystallized with deep rectilinear fissures, and the crystalline
masses in the sides of the ruts resembled exactly asbestos in the
disposition of their needles. Around the roots of the stubble and
flower-stalks, the frost was gathered into the form of irregular
conical shells, or fairy rings. In some places the ice-crystals were
lying upon granite rocks, directly over crystals of quartz, the
frostwork of a longer night, crystals of a longer period, but, to some
eye unprejudiced by the short term of human life, melting as fast as
the former.

In the Report on the Invertebrate Animals, this singular fact is
recorded, which teaches us to put a new value on time and space: "The
distribution of the marine shells is well worthy of notice as a
geological fact. Cape Cod, the right arm of the Commonwealth, reaches
out into the ocean, some fifty or sixty miles. It is nowhere many
miles wide; but this narrow point of land has hitherto proved a
barrier to the migrations of many species of Mollusca. Several genera
and numerous species, which are separated by the intervention of only
a few miles of land, are effectually prevented from mingling by the
Cape, and do not pass from one side to the other. . . .