THE FARMER MUST KNOW. 85 



vapor it has liitlierto held suspended, " descends in particles 

 almost infinitely minute," collecting on " every leaflet," and 

 susj)onding themselves from every blade of grass in " drops of 

 pearly dew." But " mark," says a scientific writer, " the adap- 

 tation. . Different substances are endowed with the property of 

 radiating their heat, and of becoming cool with different degrees 

 of rapitlity, and those sul)stances which in the air become cool 

 first, also attract first and most abundantly the particles of 

 falling dew. Thus in the cool of a summer's evening, the grass 

 plot is wet, while the gravel walk is dry ; and the thirsty pas- 

 tures and every green leaf are drinking in the descending 

 moisture, while the naked land and the barren highway are still 

 unconscious of its fall." Tliis is only one of the thousand 

 illustrations which might be offered of the pleasures with which 

 knowledge and an awakened curiosity reward those who live in 

 daily communion with nature and her phenomena, — ever old, 

 yet ever fresh and new. 



So homely a process as digging a ditch for drainage or fuel, 

 may furnish matter of very profound thought. Tlie other day 

 there were thrown up in Charles River meadows perfect cones of 

 the fir or spruce, many feet below the surface, which may have 

 lain there thousands of years, and probably had, — from the 

 time of Abraham perhaps, or before. Above, inviting the eye, 

 was the delicate flower of the arrow head. Here they were the 

 modest white flower blooming above, and the buried relics of 

 the old forests lying beneath, witnesses of the silent revolutions 

 which time effects, while human generations and tribes appear 

 and vanish, and of their labors not a vestige remains. How 

 little is man in the presence of God, with whom " one day is as 

 a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day ! " 



To confine ourselves to the surface of the earth, the history 

 of the grasses, and especially our native grasses, presents some 

 curious phenomena. Jared Eliot, in his " Essays on Field Hus- 

 bandry," published in 1747, republished in the Massachusetts 

 Agricultural Journal in 1811, speaks of a grass with an " odd 

 name," as he expresses it, — " Fowl Meadow Grass," — in con- 

 nection with Dedham. The name undoubtedly originated here. 

 Such has been the constant tradition of the place. I will add 

 two historical references, which I do not find in any of the recent 

 notices of this grass which have fallen under my eye. Hutch- 



