a light crown of tufty scum standing high

A proposition affirms every proposition that follows from it.

Wittgenstein, tr Pears/McGuinness, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus



Now, at the end of the spring runoff, dead creatures were everywhere. Osmotic shock had killed shrimp outnumbering the flies. Corpses, a couple of centimetres each, lay in hydrogen-sulphide decaying stink. Interlayered with the oolites on the bottom of the lake was a kind of galatine of brine shrimp, the greasy black muck of quintillions dead.

John McPhee, Basin and Range



In an enclave of rocks the peaks of the water romped and wandered and a light crown of tufty scum standing high on the surface kept slowly turning round: chips of it blew off and gadded about without weight in the air.

From the diary of Gerard Manly Hopkins, August 16th, 1873