8o The Americmi Geologist. August, i90o 
trees and shrubs, written clearly without a correction, and 
proving unusual care and industry. 
June 24, 1859, near his nineteenth birthday, he wrote a very 
cheery and interesting letter to his cousin, Philip C. Garrett, 
containing remarkable passages, some of which have been al- 
ready quoted in previous biographies. 
"How beautiful were the blossoming laurels wasting in a measure 
their beauty in this lonely spot: there certainly ought to be more pains 
taken to cultivate them. Here they will plant a miserable Ailanthus 
or a bare Pavlonia, and neglect the aristocrat of the wilds — this very 
handsomest shrub in America. The ferns grow here in great lux- 
uriance and beauty, and when they are pretty no plants, I think, can 
excel them; the deep green and leathery Polystichum, with its little 
peltate indusium (the scale that covers the sorus or bunch of sporan- 
gia) of which I found a remarkably cut variety; the light Sitolobium 
as delicate and feathery as if traced by the hand of an embroiderer 
with little cups to hold the sporangia whose lid is a fold of the border 
of the frond; the maiden-hair whose rich beauty thee well knows, the 
noble Osmundas which with certain kin (e. g. the Lygodium or climb- 
ing fern) * * stand aloof from the great assemblage of ferns in 
possessing a peculiar structure the sporangium, and in not bearing 
them upon the back of the frond but in tall fertile spikes (an altered 
frond) * * . The mosses and lichens looked most beautiful too. * 
* * I saw more beauties among the latter than I thought existed; 
and most of them bore numerous little shields often delicately tinted" 
* * * "I stopped at a little stream that ran down from the hill to 
drink, and laying aside my rod, gun, and other encumbrances began 
to follow it up. I soon found it to be a most exquisitely romantic lit- 
tle run. It flowed over large flat shelves of rock, sometimes between 
high banks of the same material overgrown with moss and ferns. At 
one place it made a short turn, at the upper end of which the water 
came dashing over a rock ten feet high, the laurels interlocked over- 
head and still higher the forest trees. Here I sat down. There was no 
sound but the splash of the little fall; not even a bird, and the fitful 
flashes of tempered sunlight gleamed on the dancing water but to gild 
the bright green of the tufts of aquatic moss that waved in the cur- 
rent. What a spot to start up some timid nymph of the fountain, or 
some Dryad who had come to bathe in the liquid crystal! Nor did I 
forget to wish for a mortal Nymph, who should have a mind to ap- 
preciate and a physique to endure this spray sprinkled moss cushioned 
adytum of Sylvanus." 
A short distance further up the little rivulet the embryo 
naturalist dominates the poet, and he captured two salamand- 
ers, of species he had never before seen alive. One, Spelerpes 
