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sures with which knowledge and an awakened curi- 

 osity reward those who Hve 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. 

 The 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 thou- 

 sands 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 hu- 

 man 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 Husbandry," 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 connection 

 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 I will add two historical references, which I do 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. Hutchinson, in his History 

 of Massachusetts, published in 1760, says: — "There 

 is a tradition that the grass called fowl meadow grass, 

 which is superior to any other grass of the fresh water 

 meadows, was first brought to the meadows in Ded- 



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