Henry David Thoreau visits Newburyport MA

                                    From Mapping Thoreau Country Newburyport

In Newburyport Dec 1850 Dr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson invited Henry David Thoreau to his home to meet Dr. C.H. Perkins, a local naturalist. From University of Massachusetts site Click on Mapping Thoreau Country

From Journals of Thoreau 

Being at Newburyport this evening, Dr. Perkins showed me the circulations in the nitella, which is slightly different from the chara, under a microscope. I saw plainly the circulation, looking like bubbles going round in each joint, up one side and down the other of a sort of white line, and sometimes a dark-colored mote appeared to be carried along with them. He said that the circulation could be well seen in the common celandine, and moreover that when a shade was cast on it by a knife-blade the circulation was reversed. Ether would stop it, or the death of the plant. He showed me a green clamshell, --anodon fluviatilis, --which he said was a female with young, found in a pond near by.
Also the head of a Chinook or Flathead. Also the humerus of a mylodon (of Owen) from Oregon. Some more remains have been found in Missouri, and a whole skeleton in Buenos Ayres. A digging animal. He could not catch his frogs asleep.

Photo Thomas W Higginson and daughter Yale University Collection Read more about Higginson on Emily Dickinson Museum site click on Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), correspondent

 A reference to Thoreau on Plum Island