328 
WALDEN. 
are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here 
its prototype. Internally , whether in the globe or ani¬ 
mal body, it is a moist thick lohe, a word especially ap¬ 
plicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat, 
labor, lapsus , to flow or slip downward, a laps¬ 
ing ; lofiog, globus , lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and 
many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as 
the f and v are a pressed and dried b . The radicals of 
lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, 
double lobed,) with a liquid l behind it pressing it for¬ 
ward. In globe, gib, the guttural g adds to the mean¬ 
ing the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings 
of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, 
you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy 
and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually 
transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in 
its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, 
as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water 
plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The 
whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still 
vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns 
and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. 
When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but 
in the morning the streams will start once more and 
branch and branch again into a myriad of others. You 
here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. If 
you look closely you observe that first there pushes for¬ 
ward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand 
with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling 
its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with 
more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most 
fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the 
most inert also yields, separates from the latter and 
