Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SKUNK-CABBAGE March 18, 1860. I examine the skunk-cabbage, now generally and abundantly in bloom all along under Clamshell. It is a flower, as it were, without a leaf. All that you see is a stout beaked hood just rising above the dead brown grass in the springy ground now, where it has felt the heat, under some south bank. The single enveloping leaf, or spathe, is all the flower that you see commonly, and those are as variously colored as tulips and of similar color, ? from a very dark almost black mahogany to a light yellow streaked or freckled with mahogany. It is a leaf simply folded around the flower, with its top like a bird's beak bent over it for its further protection, evidently to keep off wind and frost, with a sharp angle down its back. These various colors are seen close together, and their beaks are bent in various directions. Journal, xiii, 199. WINKLE-LIKE FUNGI April 13, 1854. Saw an old log, stripped of bark, either poplar or maple, four feet long, ? its whole upper half covered with that handsome winkle-like fungus. They are steel-colored and of a velvety appearance, somewhat semicircular, with concentric growths of different shades, passing from quite black within through a slaty-blue to (at present) a buff edge. Beneath cream-color. There are many minute ones a tenth of an inch in diameter, the shell-like leaf or ear springing from one side. The full-grown are sometimes united into one leaf for eight or nine inches in one level along the log, tier above tier, with a scalloped edge. They are handsomest when two or more are opposed, meeting at their bases, and make a concentric circle. They remind you of shells, also of butterflies. The great variety and regularity of the shading are very interesting. They spring from a slight base, rising by a n...