I know people were sailing today, I just don't know where.

Lake LaBelle is 98.7 percent frozen but clearly treacherous.

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Reading Andrea Wulf's, The Invention of Nature; Alexander Von Humboldt's New World . I know of Humboldt, but not much else. An aristocratic, well-off German who devoted his life to exploration and observation. Born in 1769, seven years before the American Revolution, he canoed jungles, climbed volcanoes, waked across Russia. His hundredth birthday (which he barely missed) was celebrated from New York to Bombay by hundreds 0f thousands of people.

His two major works were his multi-volume Personal Narratives, and his multi-volume Cosmos. Through these he had a major influlrence on Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Kind of important, I would say.

Here's the chronology:

Thos. Jefferson: 1743
Humboldt: 1769
J.J. Audubon: 1785
Charles Darwin: 1809
Henry David Thoreau: 1817
Walt Whitman: 1819

I do not remember hearing a word of Humboldt in the Audubon biography, and now I don't know why.

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Humboldt wrote in Personal Narrative: 'The beasts of the forest retire to the thickets; the birds hide themselves beneath the foliage of the trees, or in the crevices of the rocks. Yet, amid this apparent silence, when we lend an attentive ear to the most feeble sounds transmitted by the air, we hear a dull vibration, a continual murmur, a hum of insects, that fill, if we may use the expression, all the lower strata of the air. Nothing is better fitted to make man feel the extent and power of organic life. Myriads of insects creep upon the soil, and flutter round the plants parched by the ardour of the Sun. A confused noise issues from every bush, from the decayed trunks of trees, from the clefts of the rock, and from the ground undermined by the lizards, millepedes, and cecilias. There are so many voices proclaiming to us, that all nature breathes; and that, under a thousand different forms, life is diffused throughout the cracked and dusty soil, as well as in the bosom of the waters, and in the air that circulates around us.