PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD:

THE REVEREND PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

CAPE COD: We were now fairly on the Cape, which extends from Sandwich eastward thirty-five miles, and thence north and northwest thirty more, in all sixty-five, and has an average breadth of about five miles. In the interior it rises to the height of two hundred, and sometimes perhaps three hundred, feet above the level of the sea. According to Hitchcock, the geologist of the State, it is composed almost entirely of sand, even to the depth of three hundred feet in some places –though there is probably a concealed core of rock a little beneath the surface– and it is of diluvial origin, excepting a small portion at the extremity and elsewhere along the shores, which is alluvial. For the first half of the Cape large blocks of stone are found, here and there, mixed with the sand, but for the last thirty miles boulders, or even gravel, are rarely met with. Hitchcock conjectures that the ocean has, in the course of time, eaten out Boston harbor and other bays in the main land, and that the minute fragments have been deposited by the currents at a distance from the shore, and formed this sand bank. Above the sand, if the surface is subjected to agricultural tests, there is found to be a thin layer of soil gradually diminishing from Barnstable to Truro, where it ceases; but there are many holes and rents in this weather-beaten garment not likely to be stitched in time, which reveal the naked flesh of the Cape, and its extremity is completely bare. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

CAPE COD: After arranging to lodge at the light-house, we rambled across the Cape to the Bay, over a singularly bleak and barren looking country, consisting of rounded hills and hollows, called by geologists diluvial elevations and depressions, –a kind of scenery which has been compared to a chopped sea, though this suggests too sudden a transition. There is a delineation of this very landscape in Hitchcock’s Report on the Geology of Massachusetts, a work which, by its size at least, reminds one of a diluvial elevation itself. Looking southward from the lighthouse, the Cape appeared like an elevated plateau, sloping very regularly, though slightly, downward from the edge of the bank on the Atlantic side, about one hundred and fifty feet above the ocean, to that on the Bay side. On traversing this we found it to be interrupted by broad valleys or gullies, which become the hollows in the bank when the sea has worn up to them. They are commonly at right angles with the shore, and often extend quite across the Cape. Some of the valleys, however, are circular, a hundred feet deep without any outlet, as if the Cape had sunk in those places, or its sands had run out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

CAPE COD: Having passed the narrowest part of the wrist of the Cape, though still in Truro, for this township is about twelve miles long on the shore, we crossed over to the Bay side, not half a mile distant, in order to spend the noon on the nearest shrubby sand-hill in Provincetown, called Mount Ararat, which rises one hundred feet above the ocean. On our way thither we had occasion to admire the various beautiful forms and colors of the sand, and we noticed an interesting mirage, which I have since found that Hitchcock also observed on the sands of the Cape. We were crossing a shallow valley in the Desert, where the smooth and spotless sand sloped upward by a small angle to the horizon on every side, and at the lowest part was a long chain of clear but shallow pools. As we were approaching these for a drink in a diagonal direction across the valley, they appeared inclined at a slight but decided angle to the horizon, though they were plainly and broadly connected with one another, and there was not the least ripple to suggest a current; so that by the time we had reached a convenient part of one we seemed to have ascended several feet. They appeared to lie by magic on the side of the vale, like a mirror left in a slanting position. It was a very pretty mirage for a Provincetown desert, but not amounting to what, in Sanscrit, is called “the thirst of the gazelle,” as there was real water here for a base, and we were able to quench our thirst after all.

Professor Robert M. Thorson apportions blame liberally, to all the scientists and scientist-wannabees and pseudoscientists of Thoreau’s era, who by their inability to grasp the fact of Ice Ages in this planet’s paleoclimatology, prevented him from understanding the nature of the glacial detritus in the vicinity of Concord, Massachusetts over which our guy was wandering so very open-eyed and tantalized — and yet nevertheless, perhaps, so uncomprehending. One of the types Professor Thorson blames liberally was the natural theologian of that era (so very like the natural theologians of our own era such as Professor E.O. Wilson the entomological natural theologian of “sociobiology” fame). Thorson offers as the “type case” or archetype of such natural theologians of Thoreau’s era and vicinity the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock (state geologist of Massachusetts, then New York, then Vermont, president of Amherst College). Thoreau was being “bracketed” by such catastrophists (“they surrounded Thoreau on all sides during the Walden years”). Since Thoreau had great respect for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thorson reasons, he could have had no trust in the natural theologians — whom Coleridge himself so disrespected! But the Professor is capable of speaking for himself, and so we will begin with what he offers us on pages 291-4 of his book: Thoreau’s nature spirituality of the Walden years emerged during what historian Herbert Hovenkamp –SCIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

AND RELIGION IN AMERICA 1800-1860– called the “watershed decade” of American natural theology. Earlier in the century, colleges began hiring theologians to teach science, and their arguments became “gradually more sophisticated, more responsive to the natural sciences. It was generally acclaimed by Christians of all persuasions as an effective way of demonstrating the existence and attributes of God.” Reverend Edward Hitchcock fit the archetype of this profile. After being ordained as a Congregational (conservative) pastor in 1821, he resigned his pulpit to become a Professor of Chemistry and Natural History at Amherst College in 1825. Two decades later, he was still hard at work at the same job but with a more honest title, Professor of Natural Theology and Geology, apparently in that order. The BOOK OF GENESIS was his academic specialty. Reverend Hitchcock viewed “the environment as the result of a divine analysis of man’s needs,” insisting that “science always supports biblical testimony and often explains spiritual operations only partly described in the BIBLE.” His “greatest work, THE RELIGION OF GEOLOGY AND ITS CONNECTED SCIENCES (1852) [sic],” was published to “‘defend and illustrate’ the truth of the ‘Christian Religion.’” His Amherst students, Emily Dickinson among them, were “treated to Religious Lectures of Peculiar Phenomena in the Four Seasons.” His “ELEMENTARY GEOLOGY” became the New England textbook standard, which is why his son kept it in print after the Reverend’s death. With respect to the diluvium controversy, Hitchcock’s “Hail Mary” plan –against which there could be no counter argument– was deeply buried in the playbook of his FINAL REPORT. That for any true “sacred historian,” the potential glacial origin of diluvium was of “little or no importance, since it does not prove the non-occurrence of the Noachian deluge, even though no traces be now remaining upon the earth’s surface of that great event.” In other words, faith trumps science, even in the face of compelling negative evidence. In spite of this caveat, Hitchcock could not resist citing in his FINAL REPORT a personal letter from a missionary colleague in Turkey who described a meltwater flood at Mount Ararat. This anecdote linked his favorite diluvial mechanism to the very spot where Noah’s ark was alleged to have landed. “Truly there were catastrophists in those days,” wrote George Merrill in his masterful summary THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS OF AMERICAN GEOLOGY, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1904 [as CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN GEOLOGY]. And they surrounded Thoreau on all sides during the Walden years. To the east was Louis Agassiz in Cambridge, the ardent anti-evolutionist who believed that serial mass extinctions were evidence that God was trying to get things right. To the southeast was Northern Baptist Seminary in Providence, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

now Brown University, which still staffs an endowed chair in natural theology. To the southwest was Benjamin Silliman Jr. at Yale, whose textbook on geology contained “a long essay on the ‘Consistency of Geology with Sacred History,’ complete with a chart illustrating the ‘Coincidences between the Order of Events as Described in GENESIS, and that unfolded by Geological Investigation.’” To the west was Reverend Hitchcock whose ideas about icy debacles were widely known. Northerly was Emerson’s brother-in-law, Dr. Stephen Jackson [clearly, Thorson meant to indicate Dr. Charles T. Jackson], who saw the boulders on Mount Katahdin as proof of the greatest flood of all times, inconceivable except by the hand of a caring Christian God.1 Thoreau was so put off by the catastrophist zeitgeist that he invoked the issue of “diluvium” only once in WALDEN, and only then as a sarcastic adjectival prick against William Gilpin’s “diluvian crash” in a Scottish loch. Thoreau reserved his written commentary about diluvium for his other works, especially CAPE COD, in which he lampooned Hitchcock for mapping almost the whole peninsula with the “d” word. English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge –whom Thoreau greatly admired– railed at the absurdity of natural theology, which he aid “confused nature with the supernatural; it confused science with religion and forced clergymen to lose sight of what they should really be doing; helping men to find faith in an unknowable world.” Thoreau railed sympathetically: “There is more religion in men’s science than there is science in their religion,” he complained, wanting no part of their “Mosaic account” of deluge, debacle, diluvium, and drift, whose chronology was so short that the span from “Adam and Eve ... down to the deluge” was “one sheer leap.” Twisting the knife, he added that “without borrowing any years from the geologist, ... the lives of but sixty old women, ... say of a century each, strung together, are sufficient to ... span the interval from Eve to my own mother. A respectable tea-party merely, — whose gossip would be Universal History.” And in a final huff: “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the like ... in all my wanderings, I never came across the least vestige of authority for these things. They have 1. Professor Agassiz at his east, Brown University at his southeast, Professor Silliman at his southwest, the Reverend Professor Hitchcock at his west, Dr. Charles T. Jackson at his north — they had Henry quite surrounded.

“By God, they won’t get away this time!”

(I am here being reminded of my youth and of a joke from the 1st Marines at the “Frozen Chosin”: An aide ran up to Bird Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller and shouted “Look, sir, they’re coming down the slope from the north,” and Chesty looked to the north and there was this line of commie tanks coming over the horizon. Another aide ran up and went “Look, sir, they’re coming at us from the south too,” and Chesty saw formations of men in quilted uniforms approaching. So then aides ran up going “to the east” and “to the west” and finally Chesty had had enough alarmism: “All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us ... they can’t get away this time!”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate.” These specific complaints, and more broadly those of the entire American transcendentalist school, were part of a global, century-scale movement dubbed “detheologization” by German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Thoreau, who resigned from Concord’s Unitarian Church as a matter of public protest, was an ardent radical of this movement.

In America, the “watershed decade” for Christian natural theology began in 1850 when “the University of Virginia invited fifteen distinguished scholars to present lectures on the ‘evidences of Christianity.’” The local, albeit unofficial, response to the Virginia invitation came two years later in 1852, when Hitchcock published THE RELIGION OF GEOLOGY AND ITS CONNECTED SCIENCES, historically his “greatest work.” During that same year, Thoreau was watching his first book, A WEEK, fail in the marketplace, in part because of its strident anti-Christian message. That Hitchcock’s publication coincided with Thoreau’s return to the WALDEN manuscript after a three-year hiatus was no accident, given the spiritual fumes in the air at the time. ... The lingering demise of Christian natural theology was put out of its misery by Darwin’s ORIGIN OF SPECIES in November 1859. Thereafter, concludes Hovencamp [Herbert Hovenkamp], natural science and Christian theology generally went their separate ways, happier for the divorce. Louis Agassiz and Edward Hitchcock, however, never consented. In their respective citadels of Cambridge and Amherst, they remained holdouts to the end, bracketing Thoreau’s Concord with supernatural catastrophism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1793

May 24, Friday: Edward Hitchcock was born in Deerfield, Massachusetts.

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Professor Edward Hitchcock HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1796

March 8, Tuesday: Orra White was born in South Amherst, Massachusetts. Early in her education she would demonstrate herself to be a child prodigy. She would teach at the Deerfield Academy, and get married with its principal Edward Hitchcock. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1814

THE NEW-ENGLAND ALMANACK FOR 1814. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence, Rhode Island: John Carter.

THE NEW-ENGLAND ALMANACK FOR 1814. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence: John Carter. Sold also by George Wanton, Newport.

21-year-old Edward Hitchcock calculated and published a COUNTRY ALMANAC (recalculated and reissued each year to 1818). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1815

Edward Hitchcock became principal of Deerfield Academy, where he had been a student. He published a poem of some 500 lines, “'Emancipation of Europe or, The downfall of Bonaparte. A tragedy” (Denio and Phelps). During his period at this school, Edmund M. Blunt, publisher of the AMERICAN NAUTICAL ALMANAC, offered a reward of $10 for the discovery of an error in the work and so he supplied a list of 57. When the publisher failed to supply the reward or notice this attempt at assistance, he had his list 57 errors published by the American Monthly Magazine (a year later, when the AMERICAN NAUTICAL ALMANAC would be reissued in a somewhat revised form without offering him credit for these corrections, he would repeat the process by producing a list of 35 errors in the new edition).

The Reverend Francis Brown took over as president of Dartmouth College: FRANCIS BROWN (president 1815-1820): Francis Brown, a pastor from North Yarmouth, Maine, presided over Dartmouth College during the famous Supreme Court hearing of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. William H. Woodward or, as it is more commonly called, the Dartmouth College Case. The contest was a pivotal one for Dartmouth and for the newly independent nation. It tested the contract clause of the Constitution and arose from an 1816 controversy involving the legislature of the state of New Hampshire, which amended the 1769 charter granted to Eleazar Wheelock, making Dartmouth a public institution and changing its name to Dartmouth University. Under the leadership of President Brown, the Trustees resisted the effort and the case for Dartmouth was argued by Daniel Webster before the US Supreme Court in 1818. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the historic decision in favor of Dartmouth College, thereby paving the way for all American private institutions to conduct their affairs in accordance with their charters and without interference from the state. In a letter following the proceedings, Justice Joseph Story explained “the vital importance to the well-being of society and the security of private rights of the principles on which the decision rested. Unless I am very much mistaken, these principles will be found to apply with an extensive reach to all the great concerns of the people and will check any undue encroachments on civil rights which the passions or the popular doctrines of the day may stimulate our State Legislatures to adopt.” While the outcome was a tremendous victory for Dartmouth, the turmoil of the four-year legal battle left the College in perilous financial condition and took its toll on the health of President Brown. His condition steadily deteriorating, the Trustees made provisions, in 1819, for “the senior professors ... to perform all the public duties pertaining to the Office of President of the College” in the event of his HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

disability. Francis Brown died in July 1820, at the age of 35.2

2. All the Dartmouth presidential portraits are in the college’s Hood Museum of Art in Hanford, New Hampshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1818

Edward Hitchcock resigned as principal of Deerfield Academy. He discontinued publication of his COUNTRY ALMANAC and entered Yale College’s theological seminary. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1820

Edward Hitchcock graduated from Yale College’s theological seminary.

According to Arthur B. Darling’s “Outline of the History of the State Church, 1691-1848” in POLITICAL CHANGES IN MASSACHUSETTS, 1824-1848 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1925): “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

From 1691 until 1780, Puritans ran the established commonwealth church. This intimate tie between church and state government lasted after Independence from Great Britain. In early post-Revolution years 1780-1799 legal battles were fought over what the rights and duties of religious dissenters were in regards particularly to mandated tithing to the state church. Although the repeated decision was that nonsubscribers to the official state religion DID in law have the duty of paying tithes -in the forms of taxes and penalties- to the state for the maintenance and support of the church, statutory neglect by the government was the norm from 1799 until the new constitution of the state was adopted in 1820. The new constitution did not clear up the issue of state church collections from the state’s revenue, however: all it did substantially was eliminate the test of religious affiliation for office. Unitarians and Universalists were the major sects in power over the state church during the 1820s and 1830s. Both groups took advantage of the system to acquire church buildings and properties for their individual denominations. In reaction, Trinitarians and Congregationalists formed voluntary organizations throughout the state. Reasons for them doing this can be better understood by recognizing the fact that by 1848 -even after the “end” of the state church- the Unitarians had taken over over 120 church sites by means made legal by the state church system. Back to the 1820s and 1830s, however. The Unitarians gained firm control of Harvard College, amidst vicious political combat. Orthodox Congregationalist response was the founding of Andover. In 1833, the state church was disestablished; legally enforced tithing was abolished; and voluntary organization in the state recognized religion was made universal. This entire series of incidents served to sever all intimate ties between the Unitarian and the Congregational churches in Massachusetts, according to Darling. (pages 22-4) (James E. Stout, March 15, 1986)

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1821

Edward Hitchcock, ordained as a pastor, was called by the Congregationalist Church of Conway, Massachusetts.

HYMNS FOR THE LORD’S SUPPER, ORIGINAL AND SELECTED, BY THADDEUS MASON HARRIS, D.D. (2d ed. Boston: Printed by S. Phelps). Also, his A DICTIONARY OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BIBLE: OR, A DESCRIPTION OF ALL THE QUADRUPEDS, BIRDS, FISHES, REPTILES, AND INSECTS, TREES, PLANTS, FLOWERS, GUMS, AND PRECIOUS STONES, MENTIONED IN THE SACRED SCRIPTURES. COLLECTED FROM THE BEST AUTHORITIES, AND ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED.

May 31, Thursday: Formal dedication of the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Baltimore, the first Roman Catholic cathedral in the USA. The construction, designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, had begun in 1806.

The Reverend Edward Hitchcock got married with Orra White, who had been one of his teachers at the Deerfield Academy (this union would produce six surviving children).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

5th M 31st 1821 5th day / In our Moy [Monthly] Meeting this Day Anne Greene appeared in testimony with much sweetnes - there were two other short testimonys of the Authority for which I can say but little — In the last we had considerable buisness & among it was the weighty appointment of a female Elder which resulted (I trust) to her encouragement & (I hope) & believe to the satisfaction of the Meeting. — Ruth Mitchell, Adam Anthony & Doctor Wadswroth dined with us. — This evening between 7 OClock DIED JONATHON ALM, Town Clerk, Aged 76 years he had been Town Clerk about 20 years RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1823

The Reverend Edward Hitchcock’s GEOLOGY OF THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1825

William John Broderip was elected a member of the Geological Society (he would for some time be a secretary of this society, alongside Roderick Murchison).

In October the Reverend Edward Hitchcock left off being Conway’s Congregationalist minister to become Professor of Chemistry and Natural Science at Amherst College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1829

July 1, Wednesday: Water was let into the Lehigh Valley Canal.

CATALOGUE OF PLANTS GROWING WITHOUT CULTIVATION IN THE VICINITY OF AMHERST COLLEGE. BY PLANTS Edward Hitchcock, PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY AND NATURAL HISTORY IN AMHERST COLLEGE. PUBLISHED BY THE JUNIOR CLASS IN THAT INSTITUTION (Amherst: J.S. and C. Adams, and Company...... printers). CATALOGUE OF PLANTS

In Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7 M 1st 1829 / Today was our week day Meeting at the Institution [the Quaker school in Providence] it was rather a dull time to me but I hope & trust others were benefited by it RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1830

Sir John Frederick William Herschel’s PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE ON THE STUDY OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY.

The Reverend Edward Hitchcock became the state geologist of Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1833

Professor Benjamin Silliman, Sr. added a 76-page supplement entitled “Consistency of Geology with Sacred History” to the 4th London Edition of Bakewell’s INTRODUCTION TO GEOLOGY, in defense of the conceit that HISTORY OF the formation of the earth had occurred essentially as described in the BOOK OF GENESIS. The publications of THE BIBLE Lyell would render this silliness unacceptable among geologists in Europe. Such attitudes would also be relinquished, some decades later, in America, when Professor Silliman’s student Edward Hitchcock, who had become a professor at Amherst College and was head of the geological survey in Massachusetts, finally would adopt the view that GENESIS had not been intended by God to provide an adequate summary for our education, of the particulars and details of His origination of the universe. (The text of Bakewell would be republished with Silliman’s 1833 supplement to it by Arno Press in 1978 in a series on the HISTORY OF GEOLOGY selected by distinguished historians of that science.)

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Professor Edward Hitchcock’s REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY, MINERALOGY, BOTANY, AND ZOOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS. MADE AND PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THAT STATE ... WITH A DESCRIPTIVE LIST OF THE SPECIMENS OF ROCKS AND MINERALS COLLECTED FOR THE GOVERNMENT... (Amherst: Press of J.S. and C. Adams). GEOLOGY, ... OF MASS.

This study, which Henry Thoreau would have in his personal library, would spur the state of New York to begin its own such geological survey under a 4-person team: Lardner Vanuxem (1792-1848), Ebenezer Emmons, William M. Mather (1804-1859), and Timothy Conrad (1803-1877). Conrad would move on, and would be replaced by James Hall (1811-1898). Emmons was assigned the northern district of the state, including the largest part of the wild and then almost unknown Adirondack Mountains — indeed Emmons gave them that name and some of the fringe of settled land around them. Emmons did a thorough piece of work, both on the “Primary” rocks of the mountains and on the almost flat-lying “Transition” strata that lie unconformably above and dip gently away in all directions. With his colleagues, especially Vanuxem and Hall, he established the stratigraphic sequence in these “Transition” strata, which quickly became the standard column for the pre- Carboniferous Paleozoic rocks of North America, definitively Professor Edward Hitchcock “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

replacing the crude Wernerian subdivisions that Eaton had proposed in his Erie Canal traverse (1824). At Emmons’ suggestion, the four geologists named this sequence the “New- York System” or the “New-York Transition System,” and truly it is a better stratigraphic standard than the Cambrian to Devonian systems then being erected in the highly deformed rocks of Britain. Emmons was largely responsible for establishing the units in the lower part of the sequence, the Champlain division (now the Upper Cambrian and Ordovician). Like his mentor Eaton, Emmons must have driven many times (by horse and buggy) from Williamstown to Troy and Albany, and he was evidently deeply impressed by the complicated rocks he saw along the route. They were in strong contrast to the nearly horizontal strata of the New York System, but not as massive and lacking in stratification as the “Primary” rocks. He tells us that at first he taught his students that these rocks were simply (greatly disturbed) “extensions eastward of the lower New York rocks”; i.e., of “Transition” rocks, as Eaton had thought, but, as his knowledge of the flat-lying “Transition” strata in northern New York grew, he abandoned this doctrine and concluded that they formed an independent system intermediate in age between the New York System and the “Primary,” and he called in the Taconic System for the Taconic Range of mountains along the border between Massachusetts and New York, just west of Williamstown and southward as far as the northwestern corner of Connecticut. Apparently, Emmons first told his colleagues about his new system in late 1839 or early 1840, probably when the New York State Survey geologists met to compare their results, and possibly also at the meeting of the Association of American Geologists in Philadelphia in April 1840. PIONEER OF SCIENCE

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Professor Edward Hitchcock “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1835

Henry Peter Brougham’s A DISCOURSE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY, SHOWING THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE AND THE ADVANTAGES OF THE STUDY attempted to produce factual evidence for the existence of design in the world by providing a description of the human mind and how it works. This functioning provides, he averred, evidence “of the most skilful contrivance ... the operations which it performs, all its faculties, are plainly means working to an end.” It is due to the fact that our minds provide us with this clear evidence of our having had an intelligent cause, and to the fact that we are conscious of our will’s ability to cause our movements, that we are able to formulate our notion of power and then to transfer this notion “to the relations between events wholly external to ourselves.” (This would also be published as part of the 6th volume of his WORKS.)

A 2d edition of the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock of Amherst College’s state-subsidized REPORTS ON THE GEOLOGY, MINERALOGY, BOTANY, AND ZOÖLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS, MADE AND PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THAT STATE. SECOND EDITION (Amherst). In this, Part iv, “A Catalogue of the Animals and Plants in Massachusetts, vi, Crustacea, pp. 548-550” was by Dr. Augustus Addison Gould.

Professor Hitchcock became aware of the stone slabs in the valley of the Connecticut River that contained what appeared to be large footprints. (The slabs had been there all along, and had been known to uneducated white people since 1802.) Professor Hitchcock at first called his subject matter “ichnolithology,” and then shortened this to “ichnology.” He would publish a number of articles as he amassed a collection of footprint- bearing slabs for a museum at his college. This chromolithograph depicts the Moody Footmark Quarry in South Hadley: GEOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

We now know that nearly all of the markings that Hitchcock collected had been made by Triassic dinosaurs. In the very year of the publication of Professor Hitchcock’s sumptuous review of the evidences that these were the tracks of humongous birds, entitled ICHNOLOGY OF NEW ENGLAND: A REPORT ON THE SANDSTONE OF THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY, ESPECIALLY ITS FOSSIL FOOTMARKS (Boston MA: William White, 1858), the first conclusive evidence of bipedal dinosaurs was being uncovered in New Jersey by Joseph Leidy.

From this year, here is Gideon Mantell’s suggestion as to what these giant lizards might have looked like when they were leaving behind them these tracks in the mud — they must have looked like humongous iguanas! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1838

The Boston Society of Natural History elected Curators for its various departments of knowledge.

Schoolmaster George Barrell Emerson (above) was offered the Fisher Professorship in Natural History at Harvard College, but elected to remain instead with his Boston school for young ladies (a few years later he would support Asa Gray’s appointment to this professorate). When Professor Gray would donate his herbarium to the university, the schoolmaster would be instrumental in raising funds with which to endow it. After the transfer of this herbarium to the college, the schoolmaster would serve on its visiting committee for the herbarium and Professor Gray would turn to him when funds were needed to advance its work.

A 3d edition of the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s state-subsidized REPORTS ON THE GEOLOGY, MINERALOGY, BOTANY, AND ZOÖLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS, MADE AND PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THAT STATE (the Concord lyceum like every other town lyceum would possess a freebie copy of this — available for the perusal of Henry Thoreau). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1839

No-worry sex and no-worry death had quite a year:

• Robert Dale Owen’s MORAL PHYSIOLOGY, OR A BRIEF AND PLAIN TREATISE ON THE POPULATION QUESTION, originally printed in New-York in 1831, MORAL PHYSIOLOGY

and Dr. Charles Knowlton’s THE FRUITS OF PHILOSOPHY, OR THE PRIVATE COMPANION OF YOUNG MARRIED PEOPLE, originally printed in Boston in 1832, describing the various ways to prevent conception and recommending coitus interruptus and douching after sexual intercourse, had each by this point gone through nine printings, meaning that there were some 20,000-30,000 copies in circulation. PRIVATE COMPANION • The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s A WREATH FOR THE TOMB: OR EXTRACTS FROM EMINENT WRITERS ON DEATH AND ETERNITY: WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY AND SERMON ON THE LESSONS TAUGHT BY SICKNESS (Amherst: J.S. and C. Adams; Boston: Crocker and Brewster; New York: Dayton and Saxton). A WREATH FOR THE TOMB HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1840

1840s, 1850s: In this timeframe several scientists were glimpsing chromosomes under the microscope, but not having the slightest clue what it was that they were looking at.

Laura Dassow Walls has pointed out in SEEING NEW WORLDS: THOREAU AND HUMBOLDTIAN SCIENCE that to enact the agenda of exploration and investigation being recommended by Alexander von Humboldt would require an army of workers — which on the continent of North America was indeed created, in the form of the tax-funded Corps of Topographical Engineers established by the federal government of the United States of America.

There were in the first half of the 19th Century a multitude of Congress-sponsored scientific expeditions and the control of our new federal government was extended in this manner over much of North America. Geological or natural history surveys funded by state governments had begun in North Carolina in 1823, and by the end of the 1830s such surveys had been initiated by 13 states. In addition the federal government had been funding or assisting with exploration since the expedition of Lewis and Clark, but throughout the 1840s and 1850s the great reconnaissance of the American West was being conducted by Army officers. Lieutenant John Charles Frémont led only three of these numerous expeditions across the western regions of the North

American continent. Between 1840 and 1860, the US government published 60 enormously expensive multi- volume double-folio or oversize treatises on the American West, in addition to 15 treatises on global naval expeditions and uncounted reports of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Very little of our incessant contemporary dialog about the “free enterprise system” dates back to that era, and the cost of all this seems to have amounted 1 1 to from /4th to /3d of the annual federal budget without having in any way set off alarm bells in the minds of the ideologues of the right of the political spectrum!3 Since Humboldt was very much in touch with these activities, a number of the explorers, scientists, and artists of the period may safely be characterized as “Humboldt’s Children”:4 personages such as Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Frederic Edwin Church, John Charles Frémont, and Professor Thomas Nuttall. However, Louis Agassiz would also need to be characterized 3. NASA, eat your heart out. 4. Goetzmann, William H. NEW LANDS, NEW MEN, AMERICA AND THE SECOND GREAT AGE OF DISCOVERY. NY: Viking, 1986 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

as having been a protégé of Humboldt, and Charles Darwin, Professor Asa Gray, and Arnold Henri Guyot. Humboldt corresponded with and was visited by American scientists such as vice-president of the Boston Society of Natural History Charles T. Jackson, academic scholars such as Harvard professor George Ticknor, and popular writers such as Washington Irving (to whom in this year we were offering the position of Secretary of the Navy).

Dr. Augustus Addison Gould of Massachusetts General Hospital became a corresponding member of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia, of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, of the National Institute in Washington DC, and of the American Statistical Association. He published a pioneering work in the United States on the geographical distribution of species, “Results of an Examination of the Shells of Massachusetts and their Geographical Distribution,” in the Boston Journal of Natural History (Volume 3, Art. xviii, pp. 483-494).

James Ellsworth De Kay became First Vice-President of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York. His CATALOGUE OF THE ANIMALS BELONGING TO THE STATE OF N.Y. AS FAR AS THEY HAVE BEEN FIGURED AND DESCRIBED (made May 7, 1839) appeared on pages 7-14 of the FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE STATE MADE JANUARY 24, 1840 (484 pages, New York Assembly Document #50) and was reviewed in the American Journal of Science (Volume 40:73-85). (His “Report of the zoological dept” appeared on pages 15-36 of that same document.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock was awarded the degree of LL.D. by Harvard University. His DYSPEPSY FORESTALLED AND RESISTED, OR, LECTURES ON DIET, REGIMEN, AND EMPLOYMENT. Also, his textbook ELEMENTARY GEOLOGY (of which there would be 31 editions):

ELEMENTARY GEOLOGY (You may be forgiven, I suppose, as modern types, for initially presuming that the above colorized paleontological chart, revealing as it does the branchings of genera and species over immense eras of time, had something or other to do with “evolution of species” — in fact, however, it did not have anything at all to do with anything of that sort! Looking backward to the 1840s through our eyes, it is easy for us to be guilty of “presentism” — of, that is to say, supposing that the sorts of scientific understanding we now take for granted HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

were being somehow prefigured or anticipated in the minds of yesteryear when they most definitely were not.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1841

Caleb G. Forshey was hired to take part in a geological survey ordered by the Louisiana legislature. His paper “Observations upon the Meteors of August” appeared in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. He would become one of the initial members of the New Orleans Academy of Sciences.

A 4th and final edition of the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s REPORTS ON THE GEOLOGY, MINERALOGY, BOTANY, AND ZOÖLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS, MADE AND PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THAT STATE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1842

January 1, Saturday: A 2d edition of the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s 1839 A WREATH FOR THE TOMB: OR EXTRACTS FROM EMINENT WRITERS ON DEATH AND ETERNITY: WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY AND SERMON ON THE LESSONS TAUGHT BY SICKNESS (Amherst: J.S. and C. Adams; Boston: Crocker and Brewster; New York: Dayton and Saxton). A WREATH FOR THE TOMB

The Athenæum Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts (London) contained a “Review of Paul Émile Botta’s Travels in Arabia [RELATION D’UN VOYAGE DANS L’YÉMEN, ENTREPRIS ON 1837, POUR LE MUSÉUM D’HISTOIRE NATURELLE DE PARIS].”

[refer to following screen for Thoreau’s comment in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

A WEEK: The ready writer seizes the pen, and shouts, Forward! Alamo and Fanning! and after rolls the tide of war. The very walls and fences seem to travel. But the most rapid trot is no flow after all; and thither, reader, you and I, at least, will not follow. A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken firmly and conclusively, as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned. Sir Walter Raleigh might well be studied if only for the excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the midst of so many masters. There is a natural emphasis in his style, like a man’s tread, and a breathing space between the sentences, which the best of modern writing does not furnish. His chapters are like English parks, or say rather like a Western forest, where the larger growth keeps down the underwood, and one may ride on horseback through the openings. All the distinguished writers of that period possess a greater vigor and naturalness than the more modern, — for it is allowed to slander our own time, — and when we read a quotation from one of them in the midst of a modern author, we seem to have come suddenly upon a greener ground, a greater depth and strength of soil. It is as if a green bough were laid across the page, and we are refreshed as by the sight of fresh grass in midwinter or early spring. You have constantly the warrant of life and experience in what you read. The little that is said is eked out by implication of the much that was done. The sentences are verdurous and blooming as evergreen and flowers, because they are rooted in fact and experience, but our false and florid sentences have only the tints of flowers without their sap or roots. All men are really most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write in a florid style in imitation of this. They prefer to be misunderstood rather than to come short of its exuberance. Hussein Effendi praised the epistolary style of Ibrahim Pasha to the French traveller Botta, because of “the difficulty of understanding it; there was,” he said, “but one person at Jidda, who was capable of understanding and explaining the Pasha’s correspondence.” A man’s whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. It is its net result. Every sentence is the result of a long probation. Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man? The word which is best said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have better done. Nay, almost it must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight, after all. And perhaps the fates had such a design, when, having stored Raleigh so richly with the substance of life and experience, they made him a fast prisoner, and compelled him to make his words his deeds, and transfer to his expression the emphasis and sincerity of his action. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

Although no-one thought anything of it at the time, Henry’s brother John Thoreau, Jr., age 27, while hurrying to strop his straight razor and shave before going off to a party, nicked the end of the ring finger of his left hand.

January 8: One music seems to differ from another chiefly in its more perfect time– In the steadiness and equanimity of music lies its divinity. It is the only assured tone When men attain to speak with as settled a faith –and as firm assurance their voices will sing and march as do the feet of the soldier. Because of the perfect time of this music box –its harmony with itself– is its greater dignity and stateliness. This music is more nobly related for its more exact measure — so simple a difference as this more even pace raises it to the higher dignity.

Man’s progress in nature Shall I not sometime should have an accompaniment of have an opportunity to thank him music It relieves the scenery – who made music? I feel very which is seen through it as a when I hear these lofty strains subtler element– like a very clear because there must be something morning air in autumn. Music in me as lofty that hears– Does it wafts me through the clear sultry not rather hear me? If my blood valleys — with only a light grey were clogged in my veins I am vapor against the hills. sure it would run more freely– Of what manner of stuff is the web God must be very rich who for the of time wove — when these turning of a pivot can pour out consecutive sounds called a strain such melody on me.– It is a little of music can be wafted down prophet — it tells me the secrets through the centuries from Homer of futurity where are its to me– And Homer have been secrets wound up but in this box? conversant with that same So much hope has slumbered.– unfathomable mystery and charm, There are in music such strains as which so newly tingles my ears.– far surpass any faith in the These single strains –these loftiness of man’s destiny– He melodious cadences which plainly must be very sad before he can proceed out of a very deep comprehend them– The clear meaning– and a sustained soul are liquid note, from the morning the interjections of God. fields beyond seems to come through a vale of sadness to man Am I so like thee my brother that which gives all music a plaintive the cadences of two notes affects air– It hath caught a higher pace us alike? than any virtue I know.

It is the arch reformer. It hastens the sun to his setting It invites him to his rising. It is the sweetest reproach, a measured satire. I know there is a people somewhere this heroism has place Or else things are to be learned which it will be sweet to learn. This cannot be all rumor. When I hear this I think of that everlasting and stable something which is not sound but to be a thrilling reality and can consent to go about the meanest work for as many years of time as it pleases even the Hindo penance — for a year of the gods were as nothing to that which shall come after What then can I do to hasten that other time or that space where there shall be no time and these things be a more living part of my life. Where there will be no discords in my life? TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1844

The Reverend William Daniel Conybeare was awarded the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society of London.

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock resigned as state geologist of Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1845

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock became Professor of Natural Theology and Geology, and President, at Amherst College. During his presidency he would personally conduct the worship in the college church.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Professor Edward Hitch HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1846

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock was awarded the degree of D.D. by Middlebury College.

“one of the DDs”

A translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s ANSICHTEN DER NATUR began to appear, as ASPECTS OF NATURE IN DIFFERENT LANDS AND DIFFERENT CLIMATES, WITH SCIENTIFIC ELUCIDATIONS, translated by Mrs. Sabine in London (Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman’s, and John Murray), although publication in English would not be complete until 1849. (Mrs. Sabine’s translation would be republished in Philadelphia by Lea and Blanchard in 1850.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

Two ethnographic maps of North America by Humboldt were published, one showing the original distribution of native languages such as Cherokee (Tschirokies), the other indicating the current distribution of European languages. ETHNOGRAPHISCHE KARTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1849

September 1, Saturday: A California Constitutional Convention was held in Monterey.

The 1st surviving astronomical photograph, several images of the full moon made without the assistance of a telescope, was made by S.D. Humphrey at Canandaigua, New York. The multiple exposures were made at 1/ HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

2, 1, 2, 3 (the best), 5, 15, 30, and 60 seconds, and the elongated image at the top is an exposure of 2 minutes. ASTRONOMY

(Earlier images, the one made by Daguerre on the night of January 2, 1839, and the one made by Dr. John Draper during March 1840, have been lost to fire.)

RELIGIOUS LECTURES ON PECULIAR PHENOMENA IN THE FOUR SEASONS: I. THE RESURRECTIONS OF SPRING: II. THE TRIUMPHAL ARCH OF SUMMER; III. THE EUTHANASIA OF AUTUMN: IV. THE CORONATION OF WINTER: DELIVERED TO THE STUDENTS IN AMHERST COLLEGE, IN 1845, 1847, 1848 AND 1849. BY EDWARD HITCHCOCK, D.D., LL.D., PRESIDENT OF THE COLLEGE, AND PROFESSOR OF NATURAL THEOLOGY AND HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

GEOLOGY (Amherst: J.S. & C. Adams, 1850).5

RELIGION IN THE 4 SEASONS

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

5. President Hitchcock’s spouse Orra White Hitchcock served as a remarkably adept illustrator for all his pub- lications. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1850

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s HISTORY OF A ZOOLOGICAL TEMPERANCE CONVENTION, HELD IN CENTRAL AFRICA IN 1847 (Northampton).

E. Du Bois-Reymond invented a galvanometer that could measure the electric impulses in nerves. H. von Helmholtz measured the speed of nervous impulses in frogs.

The mechanization of agriculture began. Mechanical reapers, and later the internal combustion engine (and consequently the tractor) altered the face of the world — and the growth and increasing urbanization of the world population. Between 1860 and 1920, about 1,000,000,000 acres of new land were brought under cultivation, with another 1,000,000,000 acres coming into production during the following six decades. Improvements in shipping, refrigeration, and processing further industrialized this process. Today’s American farmer receives 4% of the price of chicken in the store and 12% of the price of a can of corn.

During this decade Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, exploiting the popularity of the writings of Humboldt in an utterly typical and enviably wrongheaded manner, would be espousing a novel and dangerous notion: in this best of all possible worlds, rain follows the plow. All we need to do, therefore, in this best of all possible worlds, to transform the arid high grasslands of the center of the North American continent into an edenic paradise, is determinedly to turn that arid sod and till that arid soil. As in baseball’s field of dreams, if you build it they will come! “They,” in this case, would turn out to be the vast black clouds of dust and despair of the 1930s: the Dustbowl. Ecology will not be mocked. By this point fully half of the native-born Vermonters had abandoned its rocky soil for points west. Sometimes entire towns moved as groups. Herman Melville would comment after a tour during the 1850s, that “Some of these mountain townships … look like countries depopulated by plague and war. Every mile or two a house is passed untenanted.” Horace Greeley would embrace this wish-fulfilment fantasy: “Go West, Young Man!” The rolling plains of Illinois would turn out to possess singular advantages not only in terms of a more fertile soil but also in terms of a scale more appropriate to the emergence of labor-saving farm machinery. The dry plateaus of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and the Texas panhandle would prove to be another, no less rocky, disappointment. And when they did turn the land into an ecological disaster, where would be Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian to say that “he was sure sorry”; where would be the federal government to make up for its poor imperial advice by the rendering of assistance to the distressed? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

Spencer Fullerton Baird became junior assistant secretary at the Smithsonian Institution. The next fifteen years would be made difficult not only for him but for the others there, because of the character of the first secretary of that institution, Joseph Henry. It was perfectly legitimate, Henry felt, since he was the boss and since the reputation of that establishment was upon his shoulders, that he should be able at any time to riffle through the desks, opening and reading any and all correspondence. Woe would be the lot of any person there who had a locked desk, if the first secretary found that the key he had been given was not a working key! When Baird arrived at the new Smithsonian Castle, there were still slave pens behind the structure. On the bright side, Congress had just agreed to the Compromise of 1850 — so these pens were not as jam packed full of human chattel as they had been in previous years. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1851

May 1, Thursday: The opening day for the Crystal Palace, with all 13,000 of its exhibits in place with the exception of those from Russia. There would be some 6,000,000 visitors. A best seller among the tourist throngs would be Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.”

The nude white marble of the statue “The Greek Slave” by Hiram Powers was used as the revolving centerpiece of the very extensive exhibits of the United States of America at the exhibition in London (see following screen). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

There’s statues bright Of marble white … And some I think That isn’t overproper.

The white plaster model from which Powers had worked as he carved this statue in Italy became the template for a mechanical copying device for the manufacture of many small imitations of the statue, for sale to the general public. Of course there were people who wanted to have a small copy of this statue in their living room, perhaps to make a lamp out of. On one of his models you can still see tiny black dots that had been used as registration marks for this mechanical copying device.

The Powers statue was intended to depict a virginal white female in chains, after she has been forcibly stripped by her greedy Moslem captors, while she is involuntarily displaying all her charms to lecherous Moslem bidders in the slave mart of Constantinople. Bondage! Innocence at risk! Satan triumphant! If there were any Victorian hot buttons Hiram Powers neglected to stroke, it’s not clear what hot buttons those would have been. People stood for hours as this work of art slowly revolved on its pedestal, overwhelmed by the art of this exhibit. The self-righteousness of all this impelled Punch to tweak our tail with a comment on American liberty. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

Exceedingly popular at this English exhibition were the American mass-manufactured square grand pianos, which the visitors were encouraged to play, and American mass-manufactured “six-shooters,” which the visitors were encouraged to fire. And over in that corner over there was a rather diminutive American salesman of American artificial legs, standing in front of his display booth all day, day after day, on his own pair of artificial legs, the left one starting below the knee and the right one starting above the knee, not seeming to be bothered by this at all. Colonel Samuel Colt was in London as visiting American royalty, and had his fifteen minutes of fame before the Parliament, during which he informed the Peers that:

“There is nothing that can not be produced by machinery.”

Oh, Mr. Colt, please pull out your equalizer and squeeze off six rounds of decency! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

At the Crystal Palace Exposition in London, the mass-produced Colt revolver was quite the crowd pleaser. Also, Jacob Sweppes distributed soda water drinks out of metal-capped individual bottles (soda water had been invented by the Reverend Joseph Priestley several decades earlier, with the idea that fizz-water was going to cure the yellow fever

In Boston, the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s THE RELIGION OF GEOLOGY AND ITS CONNECTED SCIENCES (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company). How come Jews don’t have a problem with the creation of the world the way Christians have a problem with the creation of the world, huh? Hey, it’s a story, you have HISTORY OF to know how to read a story. A particle in the text of GENESIS (“v” meaning “afterward”) reveals that all this THE BIBLE hoo-hah our theologians had been going on about for so many centuries –God’s Creation having gone down during precisely one week of seven-count-’em-seven days just a few thousand years ago, that sort of Archbishop Ussher thingie– had never been anything more than a great bog misunderstanding due to a minor translation error out of the Hebrew. Duh. We just need to learn how to read the OLD TESTAMENT. Actually there is no discord between the lengthy time-series of the modern science of geology and theology properly understood, none whatever: In the English Bible this particle is usually rendered by the copulative conjunction and; in the Septuagint, and in Josephus, however, it sometimes has the sense of but. And some able commentators are of opinion that it admits of a similar translation in the passage under consideration. The elder Rosenmuller says we might read it thus: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Afterwards the earth was desolate,” &c. Or the particle afterwards may be placed at the beginning of any of the succeeding verses. Thus, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was desolate, and darkness was upon the face of the waters. Afterwards the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.... And if such an interval be allowed, it is all that geology requires to reconcile its facts to revelation. HOW TO READ THE BIBLE

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Professor Edward Hitchcock HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1852

The Reverend John Lauris Blake’s EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY, and his FAMILY TEXTBOOK FOR THE COUNTRY: A CYCLOPEDIA OF AGRICULTURE AND DOMESTIC ECONOMY.

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s THE POWER OF CHRISTIAN BENEVOLENCE ILLUSTRATED IN THE LIFE AND LABORS OF MARY LYON (Northampton).

February 3, Tuesday: Queen Victoria opened Parliament, officially inaugurating the completed houses at Westminster that had been designed by Sir Charles Barry.

In Argentina, insurgents supported by Brazil and Uruguay fought at Caseros and brought about the overthrow of Governor Juan Manuel de Rosas.

In the Sophiensaal of Vienna, Fünf Paragraphe aus dem Walzer-Codex op.105 by Johann Baptist Strauss was performed for the initial time.

Professor Robert M. Thorson points up the remarkable fact that in his journal entry for this day “Thoreau narrated an astonishingly accurate vision for the ice-sheet glaciation of Concord”: “Who can believe that this is the habitable globe. The scenery is wholly arctic. Fair Haven Pond is a Baffin’s Bay. Man must have ascertained the limits of the winter before he ventured to withstand it & not migrate with the birds. No cultivated field – no house – no candle. All is as dreary as the shores of the Frozen Ocean. I can tell where there is wood & where open land for many miles in the horizon by the darkness of the former & whiteness of the latter. The trees especially the young oaks covered with leaves stand out distinctly in this bright light from contrast with the snow – It looks as if the snow & ice of the arctic world. travelling like a glacier had crept down southward and overwhelmed & buried New England.” He wonders what Henry might have been able to accomplish for the new science of Paleoclimatology, if the naturalists of his generation had not been so entirely misled by the likes of Lidian Jackson Emerson’s brother the “I-discovered-this-and-discovered-that-as-well” pretender Charles T. Jackson, and the natural theologian the Reverend Edward Hitchcock (whose fantasies are described in CAPE COD). THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

February 3, Tuesday: When I review the list of my acquaintances from the most impartial point of HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

view, and consider each ones excesses & defects of character – which are the subject of mutual ridicule astonishment and pity –, and I class myself among them – I cannot help asking myself if this is the sane world, what must a mad-house be? It is only by a certain flattery, and an ignoring of their faults that even the best are made available for society. I have been to the Libraries (yesterday) at Cambridge & Boston. It would seem as if all things compelled us to originality. How happens it that I find not in the country, in the field & woods the works even of like minded naturalists & poets – Those who have expressed the purest & deepest love of nature – have not recorded it on the bark of the trees with the lichens – they have left no memento of it there – but if I would read their books I must go to the city – so strange & repulsive both to them & to me – & deal with men & institutions with whom I have no sympathy. When I have just been there on this errand, it seems too great a price to pay, for access even to the works of Homer or Chaucer – or Linnaeus. Greece & Asia Minor should henceforth bear Iliads & Odysseys as their trees lichens. But no! If the works of nature are in any sense collected in the forest – the works of man are to a still greater extent collected in the city. I have sometimes imagined a library i.e. a collection of the works of true poets philosophers naturalists &c deposited not in a brick or marble edifice in a crowded & dusty city – guarded by cold-blooded & methodical officials – & preyed on by bookworms – In which you own no share, and are not likely to – but rather far away in the depths of a primitive forest – like the ruins of central America – where you can trace a series of crumbling alcoves – the older books protecting the more modern from the elements – partially buried by the luxuriance of nature – which the heroic student could reach only after adventures in the wilderness, amid wild beasts & wild men – That to my imagination seems a fitter place for these interesting relics, which owe no small part of their interest to their antiquity – and whose occasion is nature – than the well preserved edifice – with its well preserved officials on the side of a city’s square – More terrible than lions & tigers these Cerberuses. Access to nature for original observation is secured by one ticket – by one kind of expense – but access to the works of your predecessors by a very different kind of expense – All things tend to cherish the originality of the original. Nature at least takes no pains to introduce him to the works of his predecessors – but only presents him with her own Opera Omnia. Is it the lover of nature who has access to all that has been written on the subject of his favorite studies? No; he lives far away from this. It is the lover of books & systems – who know nature chiefly at 2nd hand. The botanists have a phrase – Mantissa – as Mantissa Plantarum (Lin.) which I suppose means an over-measure or additional matter about. A convenient term. – Also Prodromus – as a forerunner or preparer of the way. Suent is an expressive word applied to machinery whose joints are worn – which has got into working order – apparently from sueo – to be accustomed. So of the writers faculties. About 6 Pm walked to Cliffs via RR. The sun had set without a cloud in the sky – a rare occurence – but I missed the clouds – which make the glory of evening – The sky must have a few clouds – as the mind a few moods – nor is the evening the less serene for them. There is only a tinge of red along the horizon. The moon is nearly full tonight6 – and the moment is passed when the light in the east (i.e. of the moon) balances the light in the west. With the Latins apparently there was afternoon – tempus pomeridianum or post meridien – then perhaps sunset sole occidente when sol inclinat vel decedit then perhaps evening – when the evening star reigns vespera  ? (spelling) vesperascit the evening approaches. (By the way a studying (or working) by candlelight is a lucubratio a luce – study all night is elucubratio also labor vespertinus. Serotinus also means in the evening – & more than that for Pliny says Praecocibus brevior [vita] quam serotinis. which cannot be expressed so elegantly in English) After sundown I should have put twilight – crepusculum (crepera lux or doubtful light) Then comes decided night or Nox – multa nox – Staying up all night pervigilium or pervigilatio The night far spent – Nox adulta – Midnight Nox silens vel profunda – Meridies noctis – A starlight night Nox sideria – Night- shining noctulucens – Night tripping noctu cursitans I would not be a mere tenebrio or lucifugus – shunning the day-light & delighting to skulk in darkness – but simply I am a noctivagus – My walk may be pernox but not perniciosus. They are Vigiliae Nocturnae. That little bird that I hear & call the night-warbler – may be trans. Noctu suave canens When the moon does not shine all night it is not a pernox luna Selenites “is a stone (as is said) in Arabia, wherein is a white, which decreases & increases with the moon” Dict. My summer journal was selenitic in this sense. It had this white spot in it. VENUS Venus is now like a little moon in the west – & the lights in the village twinkle like stars. It is perfectly still – & not very cold. The shadows of the trees on the snow are more minutely distinct than at any other season – not dark masses merely – but finely reticulated each limb & twig represented – as cannot be in summer, both from the leaves & the inequality & darkness of the ground. The heavens appear less thickly starred & less habitable than in summer. rather a few bright stars – brought nearer by this splendid twinkling – than countless points in the warm deeps. I hear my old acquaintance the owl [Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus] from the Causeway. The reflector of the cars as I stand over the deep cut – makes a large & dazzling light in this air – 6. It would be full on the night of the 4th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

The cars do not make much noise – or else I am used to it and now whizzes the boiling sizzling kettle by me – in which the passengers make me think of potatoes – which a fork would show to be done by this time. The steam is denser for the cold & more white – like the purest downy clouds in the summer sky its volumes roll up between me & the moon. And far behind when the cars are a mile off it still goes shading the fields with its wreathes. The breath of the panting traveller. I now cross from the RR to the road. This snow, which fell day before yesterday is nearly 2 feet deep – pure & powdery – there is but little on the trees except the Pitch pines. From a myriad little crystal mirrors the moon is reflected which is the untarnished sparkle of its surface – I hear a gentle rustling of the oak leaves as I go through the woods. – but this snow has yet no troops of leaves on its surface – The snow evidently by its smooth crust assists in the more equal dispersion & distribution of the leaves which course over it blown by the & perchance for this reason the oak leaves & some others hang on. Now through the Spring woods & up Fair Haven Hill – Here in the midst of a clearing where the choppers have been leaving the woods in pieces today – and the tops of the pine trees are strewn about half buried in snow, only the saw logs being carried off – it is stiller & milder than by day & I think the chopper might work here more comfortably in some respects now – but he is at home in the village getting rest or recreation. Instead of the sound of his axe, I hear the hooting of an owl – nocturnus ululatus – whose haunts he is laying waste. The ground is all pure white powdery snow which his sled &c has stirred up – except the scattered twigs & pine plumes – I can see every track distinctly where the teamster drove his oxen to the chopper’s piles & loaded his sled, & even the tracks of his dog in the moonlight – & plainly to write this. The moonlight now is very splendid in the untouched pine woods above the Cliffs – alternate patches of shade & light – the light has almost the brightness of sunlight – the fulgor – The stems of the trees are more obvious than by day being simple black against the moonlight & the snow. The sough of the breeze in the pine tops sounds far away like the surf on a distant shore – & for all sound beside there is only the rattling or chafing of little dry twigs – perchance a little snow falling on them – or they are so brittle that they break & fall with the motion of the trees. My owl [Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus] soundshoo hoo hoo—hoo The landscape covered with snow seen by moonlight from these Cliffs – encased in snowy armor two feet thick – gleaming in the moon & of spotless white. Who can believe that this is the habitable globe. The scenery is wholly arctic. Fair Haven Pond is a Baffin’s Bay. Man must have ascertained the limits of the winter before he ventured to withstand it & not migrate with the birds. No cultivated field – no house – no candle. All is as dreary as the shores of the Frozen Ocean. I can tell where there is wood & where open land for many miles in the horizon by the darkness of the former & whiteness of the latter. The trees especially the young oaks covered with leaves stand out distinctly in this bright light from contrast with the snow – It looks as if the snow & ice of the arctic world. travelling like a glacier had crept down southward and overwhelmed & buried New England – And see if a man can think his summer thoughts now – But the evening star is preparing to set – & I will return – Flowndering through snow sometimes up to my middle. Is not the sky unusually blue tonight? dark blue? Is it not always bluer when the ground is covered with snow in the winter – than in summer? The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience – He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person. Head calls the “sough” an aeolian murmur” That is a good mythological incident told of the wounded farmer – who his foot being lacerated & held fast between his plough & a fallen tree in a forest clearing – drew his oxen to him – with difficulty smeared their horns with blood which the mosquitoes had sucked from his bare arms – & cutting the reins sent them home as an advertisement to his family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

(George Edwards’s A NATURAL HISTORY OF UNCOMMON BIRDS, 1745)

Professor Thorson explains the harmful influence of Dr. Charles Jackson and the Reverend Edward Hitchcock on naturalists of Thoreau’s generation as follows: Lamentably, his career as a nature writer coincided with one of the greatest goofs in the history of American science: the official rejection of the glacial theory between 1842 and 1862 ... [u]nder the leadership of Dr. Charles T. Jackson (Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother in law) and Reverend Edward Hitchcock (New England’s leading natural theologian).... So, instead of adopting the now obvious concept of ice-sheet glaciation, these self-appointed New England “Men of Science” clung steadfast to [the] idea that the salient features of New England’s physical landscape were created by debris-laden icebergs.

April 11, Easter Sunday: Lieutenant William Lewis Herndon arrived at the port of Pará, Brazil, on the Atlantic seaboard south of the mouths of the Amazon River.

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked to Second Division Brook at the West corner of the town.

Professor Robert M. Thorson points up the remarkable fact that in h is journal entry for this day Thoreau “revealed his genius for river-channel hydraulics, something readers of WALDEN would never suspect. In that passage, he described the three-dimensional helicoidal flow responsible for shaping the meandering channel of Nut Meadow Brook, putting him ahead of the state geologist [Edward Hitchcock] in his understanding”: “The sight of Nut Meadow Brook in Brown’s land – reminds me that the attractiveness of a brook depends much on the character of its bottom. I love just now to see one flowing through soft sand like this where it wears a deep but irregular channel – now wider & shallower with distinct ripple marks – now shelving off suddenly to indistinct depths. meandering as much up & down as from side to side.– deepest where narrowest – & ever gullying under this bank or that – its bottom lifted up to one side or the other – the current inclining to one side.” THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

1 April 11, Sunday: 2 /2 Pm to 2nd Div. Brook. The ground is now for the most part bare – though I went through drifts 3 feet deep in some places. I hear that Simmonds had planted his potatoes!! before the snow a week ago. As I go over the RR. Bridge I hear the Pewee HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

singing Pewet Pewee – Pe-e-wet Pe-e-we-e. The last time rising on the last syllable some times repeating it thus many times Pe-we-e The maple beyond the RR Bridge is not yet in blossom. though that at the Red Bridge is. The sight of Nut Meadow Brook in Brown’s land – reminds me that the attractiveness of a brook depends much on the character of its bottom. I love just now to see one flowing through soft sand like this where it wears a deep but irregular channel – now wider & shallower with distinct ripple marks – now shelving off suddenly to indistinct depths. meandering as much up & down as from side to side.– deepest where narrowest – & ever gullying under this bank or that – its bottom lifted up to one side or the other – the current inclining to one side. I stop to look at the circular shadows of the dimples over the yellow sand–& the dark brown clams on their edges in the sand at the bottom. I hear the sound of the piano below as I write this and feel as if the winter in me were at length beginning to thaw – for my spring has been even more backward than nature’s. For a month past life has been a thing incredible to me. None but the kind gods can make me sane– If only they will let their south winds blow on me. I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the fire that melts them. To nought else can they be tender. The sweet flags are now starting up under water 2 inches high–& minnows dart. A pure brook is a very beautiful object to study minutely – it will bear the closest inspection – even to the fine air bubbles like minute globules of quicksilver that lie on its bottom. The minute particles or spangles of golden mica in these sands when the sun shines on them reminds one of the golden sands we read of.– Everything is washed clean & bright & the water is the best glass through which to see it– I asked W.E.C. yesterday if he had acquired fame. He answered that giving his name at some place the bystanders said– ‘Yes sir, We have heard of you– We know you here sir– Your name is mentioned in Mr. ___’s book.’ That’s all the fame I have had to be made known by another man. Great flocks of slate colored snow-birds still about–& uttering their jingling note in the sun. In the brook behind Jenny Dugans I was pleased to find the Alnus incana (?) in bloom in the water its long sterile aments – yellowish brown hanging in panacles or clusters at the ends of the drooping branchlets – while all the twigs else are bare & the well-cased & handsome leaf buds are not yet expanded at all – it is a kind of resurrection of the year these pliant & pendulous blossoms on this apparently dead bush while all is sere & tawny around, withered & bleached grass. A sort of harbinger of spring – this & the maple blossoms especially & also the early willow catkins. Even these humble & inconspicuous aments are as grateful now as the most beautiful flowers will be 1 a month hence– They are 2 /2 inches long & more. This appears to be more forward and the aments larger than what I take to be the common alder hereabouts. This & the maple & the earliest willow are the most flowerlike now– The skunk cabbage is not yet fairly in blossom nor the may flower– In all the brooks I see the spotted tortoise emys guttata now– –& in some fields & on some hill sides have seen holes apparently dug by turtles– but I have not yet noticed their tracks over the sand. The neat compact catkins of the hazel – fawn-colored? The birches still rather hard.

If I am too cold for human friendship – I trust I shall not soon be too cold for natural influences. It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man & nature. Those qualities which bring you near HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

to the one estrange you from the other. 2nd Div. Brook– This is of similar character, but deeper than Nut Meadow Brook. It is pleasant that there be on a brook the remains of an old flume or dam or causeway as here – overgrown with trees – & whose rocks make stepping stones– Large skaters & small black water bugs are out now on the surface– Now then migrating fishes may come up the streams– The expanding may-flower buds show a little pinkish tint under the snow– The cress is apparently all last years– The cowslip does not yet spring– Very little change in anything since I was last here. Is that the viburnum lentago with the spear shaped buds?

They have cut down the black aspens that used to stand on the white Pond road – the Dantean trees. 1 1 Thought I heard a snipe or an owl. White Pond about /4 or /5 open at the north end. NB A man who passed Walden today says it is melted 2 rods wide on N. side Here are large flocks of fringilla hiemalis in the stubble. Every man will be a poet if he can – otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet. It is hard for a man to take money from his friends for any service– This suggests how all men should be related. –Ah! when a man has travelled, and robbed the horizon of his native fields of its mystery & poetry – its indefinite promise – tarnished the blue of distant Mts with his feet!! When he has done this he may begin to think of another world – what is this longer to him? I see now the mosses now in pastures bearing their light colored capsules on the top of red filaments. When I reach the bridge – it is become a serene evening – the broad waters are more & more smooth–& everything is more beautiful in the still light. The view toward Fair Haven whose woods are now cut off is beautiful. No obvious sign of spring– The hill now dimly reflected – the air not yet quite still– The wood on conantum abuts handsomely on the water–& can ill be spared– The ground on which it stands is not level as seen from this point but pleasantly varied & swelling – which is important. (Before my neighbors pig is cold his boys have made a football of his bladder!) So goes the world. No matter how much the boy snivles at first – he kicks the bladder with extacy.) This is the still evening hour – insects in the air The black birds whistle & sing “conqueree” the robin peeps & sings – the blue bird [Eastern Bluebird Sialia sialus] warbles.– The light of the setting sun on the pitch pines on Fair Haven & Bear Hill lights them up warmly – for the rays fall horizontally on them through the mellow evening atmosphere– They do not appear so bright to us at noon. nor do they now to the hawk that comes soaring sluggishly over them – (the brown & dusky bird seen even from beneath) Of course the pines seen from above have now more of the evening shades in them than seen from the earth on one side. The catkins of the willow are silvery. The shadow of the wood named above at the river end is indispensable in this scene – and what is remarkable I see where it has reached across the river and is creeping up the hill with dark pointed spears – though the intermediate river is all sunny– The reflection of the sunny hill covered with withered grass being seen through the invisible shadow. A river is best seen breaking through highlands – issuing from some narrow pass– It imparts a sense of power. The shadow at the end of the wood makes it appear grander in this case. The serenity & warmth are the main thing after the windy & cool days we have had. You may even hear a fish leap in the water now. The lowing of a cow advances me many weeks towards summer. The reflections grow more distinct every moment.– At last the outline of the hill is as distinct below as above. And every object appears rhymed by reflection By partly closing my eyes & looking through my eyelashes – the wood end appears thus HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

Now the shadow reaching across the river has crept so far up the hill that I see its reflection on the hill side in the water–& in this way it may at length connect itself with its source. Clouds are now distinctly seen in the water. The bridge is now a station for walkers. I parted with my companion here, told him not to wait for me. Maple in the swamp answers to maple birch to birch. There is one clump of 3 birches particularly picturesque

In a few minutes the wind has thus gone down. At this season the reflections of deciduous trees are more picturesque and remarkable than when they are in leaf – because the branches being seen they make with their reflections a more wonderful rhyme– It is not mere mass or outline corresponding to outline but a kind of geometrical figure. The maples look thus &c

The twilight must to the extent above mentioned – be earlier to birds soaring in the sky, i.e. they see more decided shades of evening than a man looking east. The Frogs peep thinly. My nature may be as still as this water – but it is not so pure & its reflections are not so distinct. The snow has turned yellow the opening leaves of the Nuphar. The song of a robin on an oak in Hubbard’s Grove sounds far off – so I have heard a robin within 3 feet in a cage in a dark bar room (how unstained by all the filth of that place!) with a kind of ventriloquism so singing that his song sounded far off on the elms. It was more pathetic still for this. The robins are singing now on all hands while the sun is setting. At what an expense any valuable work is performed – at the expense of a life. If you do one thing well what else are you good for in the meanwhile?

1853

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s OUTLINE OF THE GEOLOGY OF THE GLOBE AND OF THE UNITED STATES IN PARTICULAR WITH SKETCHES OF CHARACTERISTIC AMERICAN FOSSILS.

Professor Asa Gray issued a 4th edition of his THE BOTANICAL TEXT-BOOK, AND INTRODUCTION TO SCIENTIFIC BOTANY, BOTH STRUCTURAL AND SYSTEMATIC. FOR COLLEGES, SCHOOLS, AND PRIVATE STUDENTS, complete with 1,200 engravings on wood (NY: George P. Putnam & Co.) BOTANICAL TEXT-BOOK

This would find its way into Henry Thoreau’s personal library.

Gregor Mendel returned to Brno, and published the first of two short papers in the journal of the Zoologisch- botanischer Verein in Vienna, where he is a member. The papers each concerned crop damage by insects, and one dealt specifically with the Bruchus pisi species of beetle that a few years later would undermine some of Mendel’s Pisum experiments.

In this year the physicist Christian Johann Doppler, whose lectures on experimental physics Mendel had HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

attended at the University of Vienna, died in Venice.

Eucalyptus was introduced into California from Australia.

Albert Kellogg (a South Carolinan who had studied at Kentucky’s Transylvania College, and then gone to San Francisco and opened a pharmacy) and six colleagues established the California Academy of Sciences. He brought to a meeting of the group some specimens and stories he had heard from A.T. Dowd about a giant new conifer in the foothills of the Sierra range, southeast of Sacramento. William Lobb, who was at the meeting, left immediately for the area, collecting seed, mature cones, vegetative shoots, and two seedlings. He returned to San Francisco and quickly left for England. The two saplings were planted at the Veitch nursery in Exeter. John Lindley described the new species that December in Gardener’s Chronicles as Wellingtonia gigantea. The name eventually accepted for this tree was Sequoiadendron giganteum. PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1854

Arnold Henri Guyot was appointed Professor of Geology and Physical Geography at the College of New Jersey. You can see, in Guyot Hall at Princeton University, the field toilet kit he used to carry on his mountain explorations.

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock, likewise a geologist, left off being President of Amherst College, retaining his teaching role. During his presidency he had personally conducted the worship in the college church.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Professor Edward Hitchcock “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

January 2, Monday: Henry Thoreau took an afternoon walk up the Union Turnpike.

Jan. 2. The trees are white with a hoar frost this morning, small leafets, a tenth of an inch long, on every side of the twigs. They look like ghosts of trees. Took a walk on snow-shoes at 9 n. v<. to Hubbard’s Grove. A flock of snow buntings flew over the fields with a _rippling whistle, accompanied sometimes by a tender peep and a ricochet motion.

P. M. — Up Union Turnpike. The tints of the sunset sky are never purer and more ethereal than in the coldest winter days. This evening, though the colors are not brilliant, the sky is crystalline and the pale fawn-tinged clouds are very beautiful. I wish to get on to a hill to look down on the winter landscape. We go about these days as if we had fetters on our feet. We walk in the stocks, stepping into the holes made by our predecessors. I noticed yesterday that the damp snow, falling gently without wind on the top of front-yard posts, had quite changed the style of their architecture, -to the (ionic style of the East, a four-sided base becoming a dome at top. I observe other revelations made by the snow. The team and driver have long Ace gone by, but I see the marks of his whip-lash on the snow, - its recoil,- but alas! these are not a complete tally of the strokes which fell upon the oxen’s back. The unmerciful driver thought perchance that no one saw him, but unwittingly he recorded each blow on the unspotted snow behind his back as in the book of life. To more searching eyes the marks of his lash are in the air. I paced partly through the pitch pine wood and partly the open field from the Turnpike by the Lee place to the railroad, from north to south, more than a quarter of a mile, measuring at every tenth pace. The average of sixty- five measurements, up hill and down, was nineteen inches; this after increasing those in the woods by one inch each (little enough) on account of the snow on the pines. So that, apparently, it has settled about as much as the two last snows amount to. I think there has been but little over two feet at any one time. I think that one would have to pace a mile on a north and south line, up and clown hill, through woods and fields, to get a quite reliable result. The snow will drift sometimes the whole width of a field, and fill a road or valley beyond. So that it would be well that your measuring included several such driftings. There is very little reliance to [be] put on the usual estimates of the depth of snow. I have heard different men set this snow at six, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-four, thirty-six, and forty-eight inches. My snow-shoes sank about four inches into the snow this morning, but more than twice as much the 29th. On north side the railroad, above the red house crossing, the cars have cut through a drift. about a quarter of a mile long and seven to nine feet high, straight up and down. It reminds me of the Highlands, the Pictured Rocks, the side of an iceberg, etc. Now that the sun has just sunk below the horizon, it is wonderful what an amount of soft light [it] appears to be absorbing. There appears to be more day just here by its side than anywhere. I can almost see into [it] six inches. It is made translucent, it is so saturated with light. I have heard of one precious stone found in Concord, the cinnamon stone. A geologist7 has spoken of it as found in this town, and a farmer has described to me one which he once found, perhaps the same referred to by the other. He said it was as large as a brick, and as thick, and yet you could distinguish a pin through it, it was so transparent. If not a mountain of light, it was a brickbatful, at any rate.

7. According to Professor of Geology Robert M. Thorson, this geologist must have been the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock, who along among Thoreau’s sources described the cinnamon stone as essonite. By referring to the rock as a “brickbat,” Thorson speculates, Thoreau must have been meaning to suggest something to throw at someone, “almost certainly the Reverend Edward Hitchcock, who irked Thoreau for being a wolf in sheep’s clothing: in this case, a ‘sacred historian’ posing as a ‘Man of Science.’ The wolf was a Christian divine who used his presidency of Amherst College as a bully pulpit to evangelize ‘natural theology’ across the region, a program Thoreau wanted no part of. The sheep’s clothing was Hitchcock’s otherwise excellent Final Report on the Geology of Massachusetts in Four Parts [Northampton: J. Butler], complete with six hundred hand-tinted copies of a beautiful foldout map of the state. When published in 1841, five hundred copies of the full report were delivered by government order to various institutions, including ‘one copy each to each incorporated Athenaeum, Lyceum, and Academy.’ This gave Thoreau free and convenient public access to the best such work in the nation at a time when geology was the most fashionable science of the day, and when Hitchcock was one of its leading fashionistas. Seizing his historic moment nearly a decade earlier, Hitchcock had persuaded the Commonwealth to appoint him as ‘geologist of the state,’ fund a long-term mapping project, and publish its massive report at taxpayer expense. Thus it was that Thoreau’s most valuable scientific reference for the most exciting new field of science had been written by someone whose lifelong purpose was to ‘defend and illustrate’ he truth of ‘Christian religion’ by aligning the facts of geology to it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock became the state geologist of Vermont. His ILLUSTRATIONS OF SURFACE GEOLOGY. SURFACE GEOLOGY

The Reverend James McCosh issued a Calvinist guide to the interpretation of nature, TYPICAL FORMS AND SPECIAL ENDS IN CREATION, to help people distance themselves from the paganism of Alexander von Humboldt’s PERSONAL NARRATIVES and COSMOS. Rightly understood, the facts of the natural world which Humboldt had collected in his travels were compatible with an understanding whereby two Bibles had been left to us by God, one on sheets of paper and one on layers of stone. The physical world is a record of its Creation, wherein each geological era prepared the way for the next according to a divine plan of development leading up to this point at which “man appears as the final and foreseen product of one mighty plan — the last in time, but the first in the contemplation of Him who called them all into being.” Predictable, huh? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1857

Dr. Augustus Addison Gould’s “Remarks on Geographical Distribution of Shells,” Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History (vi, pp. 123-124).

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s RELIGIOUS TRUTH, ILLUSTRATED FROM SCIENCE, IN ADDRESSES AND SERMONS ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company). THE RELIGIOUS TRUTH

Philip Henry Gosse’s OMPHALOS: AN ATTEMPT TO UNTIE THE GEOLOGICAL KNOT argued that God created a young earth that merely looks really old because all life “moves in a circle,” and thus creating living organisms requires creating fossils inside mountains of rock (such an imaginative argument may or may not hold water, but the book, later titled CREATION in hopes of improving sales, would be a decided flop). THE GEOLOGICAL KNOT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1860

In about this timeframe Henry Thoreau copied from Dr. Josiah Clark Nott’s and George Robins Gliddon’s TYPES OF MANKIND: OR, ETHNOLOGICAL RESEARCHES, BASED UPON THE ANCIENT MONUMENTS, PAINTINGS, SCULPTURES, AND CRANIA OF RACES, AND UPON THEIR NATURAL, GEOGRAPHICAL, PHILOLOGICAL, AND BIBLICAL HISTORY: ILLUSTRATED BY SELECTIONS FROM THE INEDITED PAPERS OF SAMUEL GEORGE MORTON, M.D., AND BY ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS FROM PROF. L. AGASSIZ, LL.D., W. USHER, M.D.; AND PROF. H.S. PATTERSON, M.D. (London: Trübner; Philadelphia) into his Indian Notebook #12 and his 2d Commonplace Book. Since he had just read and been impressed with the theory of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and chosen to credit Charles Darwin rather than Professor Louis Agassiz, it is doubtful that he would have been very much impressed with this proslavery political scientism. ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES TYPES OF MANKIND

Dr. Nott obtained money and a charter from the Alabama State Legislature for his Medical College of Alabama in Mobile. The College moved into its own quarters on St. Anthony Street.

Dr. Nott, an ardent secessionist, would during the years of civil war, with the college’s students serving in the military, enable these new facilities to be utilized as a military hospital. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

In a new edition of the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s ELEMENTARY GEOLOGY,1st published in 1840, the paleontological chart known as the “tree of life” (displayed below) was omitted because it made it seem as if he were agreeing with Darwin when this was not at all the case. The branchings of his diagram had definitively not been evolutions, but rather had been points at which God had stepped in, just-at-the-right-time, to introduce a needed new species. ELEMENTARY GEOLOGY

NO NO THIS IS MOST DEFINITELY NOT EVOLUTION! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

August 9, Thursday: The headline used in Madison, Wisconsin’s Argus & Democrat was “The Ripon Riot”: About the most disgraceful chapter in Wisconsin history are those given by us yesterday and to-day, of the riot at Ripon. This, it will be recollected, is the old site of Ceresco, the head quarters of the “Phalanx,” and the hot bed, a few years since, of free love. This stain was being rapidly wiped out, and, perhaps, the memory of it would not have been now revived but for the announcement in the papers there that while “Brudder” Sherman M. Booth was speaking, “the ladies threw bouquets on the stage.” Beautiful! The long haired seducer of Caroline Cook, greeted by the fragrant offerings of the ladies of Ripon! It would seem that the free love movement had not entirely subsided in that delectable locality, and that its votaries deemed a welcome of unusual cordiality due to its most notorious adherent who had carried its doctrines into practice. Delightful Ripon! The demand upon the officers of the law to leave the town was another modest proposition. Booth was merely an escaped convict. He had no other title to public sympathy — except of that sort showed by the ladies who threw bouquets at him. It has arrived at a pretty pass when a warrant cannot be served upon a runaway prisoner in a town in the State; and the officers of the law, with the warrants in their pockets, are assailed with threats of violence, if they do not leave the place. Ripon has gained for itself a beautiful reputation. The News printed another inflammatory editorial: A Bad H’egg Hans Hegg, State Prison Commissioner, repeats in yesterday’s Sentinel his denial of our charge that he received Booth within the walls of the Prison yard at Waupun, and extended to him the protection of his guards. In order to satisfy the public on this point, we submit the following facts, related to us by eye witnesses. I. Mr. Hegg was advised of the escape of Booth soon after it occurred, and expected him to seek refuge within the walls of the State Prison. Two of the Prison guards were in this city at the time of the rescue and accompanied Booth to Waupun, where he was met by some of the other guards and escorted at once to Mr. Hegg’s house, which is within the walls of the Prison yard. II. In the evening, Booth, under escort of Hegg and his Prison guards, proceeded to the platform of one of the warehouses, where he addressed a crowd of people. During his entire speech, Mr. Hegg and his guards stood on the platform with him, and when Booth displayed his revolver and threatened to shoot anyone who should attempt to arrest him, Mr. Hegg took off his hat, swung it wildly in the air, and cheered vociferously. On the adjournment of the meeting, Hegg and his guards escorted Booth back to the Prison. III. While at Waupun, Booth was uniformly attended by the Prison guards, whenever he went out of the Prison yard into the public streets. IV. Cromwell Laithe, of Waupun, remarked in a careless manner, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

that if the reward offered for Booth’s re arrest [sic] had been $1000 instead of $100, he would have taken him. Booth heard of his saying this and immediately went to Laithe’s house, accompanied by some of the prison guards, and defied Laithe to attempt to arrest him. V. Booth, when he left the prison, was accompanied by some of the prison guards to Ripon. These are the facts as related to us by citizens of Waupun, and the sneaking manner in which Mr. Hegg tries to evade the responsibility of his own acts, is even more discreditable to him than the acts themselves. Booth will corroborate his statements; but who will corroborate Booth? His reputation for truth and veracity was never very good, and since the developments made public on his late trial, it is as bad as his reputation for chastity. If Mr. Hegg conceives his conduct justifiable, it would be manly in him to admit his complicity with the affair. There are three high public functionaries, Randall, Hegg and Daniels, whose names have been used in connection with the “Booth question,” but the greatest of these three is Daniels. He plays the desperado to the end of the chapter, while the other two act like sneaks.

Aug. 9. At 6 A.M., leave camp for Troy, where we arrive, after long pauses, by 9 A.M., and take the cars at 10.5.

I observed these plants on the rocky summit of the mountain, above the forest: –

Raspberry, not common. Low blueberries of two or three varieties. Bunchberry. Solidago thyrsoidea. Fetid currant, common; leaves beginning to be scarlet; grows amid loose fallen rocks. Red cherry, some ripe, and handsome. Black choke-berry. Potentilla tridentata, still lingering in bloom. Aralia hispida, still lingering in bloom. Cow-wheat, common, still in bloom. Mountain cranberry, not generally abundant; full grown earlier than lowland ditto. Black spruce. Lambkill, lingering in flower in cool and moist places. Aster acuminatus, abundant; not generally open, but fairly begun to bloom. Red elder, ripe, apparently in prime, not uncommon. Arenaria Groenlandica, still pretty common in flower. Solidago lanceolata, not uncommon; just fairly begun. Epilobium angustifolium, in bloom; not common, however. Epilobium palustre, some time, common in mosses, small and slender. Wild holly, common; berries not quite ripe. Viburnum nudum, common; berries green. White pine; saw three or four only, mostly very small. Mountain-ash, abundant; berries not ripe; generally very small, largest in swamps. Diervilla, not uncommon, still. Rhodora, abundant; low, i. e. short. Meadow-sweet, abundant, apparently in prime. Hemlocks; two little ones with rounded tops. Chelone glabra, not yet; at northeast swamp-side. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

Yarrow. Canoe birch, very small. Clintonia borealis, with fruit. Checkerberry. Gold-thread. One three-ribbed goldenrod, northwest side (not Canadense). Tall rough goldenrod, not yet; not uncommon. Populus tremuliformis, not very common. Polygonum cilinode, in bloom. Yellow birch, small. Fir, a little; four or five trees noticed. Willows, not uncommon, four or five feet high. Red maple, a very little, small. Water andromeda, common about the bogs. Trientalis. Pearly everlasting, out. Diplopappus umbellatus, in bloom, not common (?); northeast swamp-side, also northwest side of mountain. Juncus trifidus. Some Juncus paradoxus? Some Juncus acuminatus?}about edge of marshes.

CYPERACEÆ Eriophorum gracile, abundant, whitening the little swamps. Eriophorum vaginatum, abundant, little swamps, long done, (this the coarse grass in tufts, in marshes). Wool-grass, not uncommon, (common kind). Carex trisperma (?) or Deweyana, with large seeds, slender and drooping, by side of northeast swamp. Vide press. Carex scoparia? or straminea? a little. C. debilis. Carex, small, rather close-spiked, C. canescens-like (?), common. A fine grass-like plant very common, perhaps Eleocharis tenuis; now without heads, but marks of them.

GRASSES Aira flexuosa. Glyceria elongata, with appressed branches (some purplish), in swamp. Blue-joint, apparently in prime, one place. Festuca ovina, one place. Cinna arundinacea, one place. Agrostis scabra (?), at our spring, q.v.

FERNS AND LICHENS, ETC. A large greenish lichen flat on rocks, of a peculiarly concentric growth, q.v.

Some common sulphur lichen. The very bright handsome crustaceous yellow lichen, as on White Mts., q.v. Two or three umbilicaria lichens, q.v., giving the dark brown to the rocks. A little, in one place, of the old hat umbilicaria, as at Flint’s Pond Rock. Green moss and sphagnum in the marshes. Two common cladonias, white and greenish. Stereocaulon. Lycopodium complanatum, one place. Lycopodium annotinum, not very common. Common polypody. Dicksonia fern, q.v. Sensitive fern, and various other common ones.

I see that in my last visit, in June, ’58, I also saw here Labrador tea (on the north side), two-leaved Solomon’s- seal, Amelanchier Canadensis var. oligocarpa and var. oblongifolia, one or two or three kinds of willows, a little mayflower, and chiogenes, and Lycopodium clavatum. The prevailing trees and shrubs of the mountain-top are, in order of commonness, etc., low blueberry, black HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

spruce, lambkill, black choke-berry, wild holly, Viburnum nudum, mountain-ash, meadow-sweet, rhodora, red cherry, canoe birch, water andromeda, fetid currant. The prevailing and characteristic smaller plants, excepting grasses, cryptogamic, etc.: Potentilla tridentata, Solidago thyrsoidea, bunchberry, cow-wheat, Aster acuminatus, Arenaria Grœnlandica, mountain cranberry, Juncus trifidus, Clintonia borealis, Epilobium palustre, Aralia hispida. Of Cyperaceœ the most common and noticeable now were Eriophorum gracile and vaginatum, a few sedges, and perhaps the grass-like Eleocharis tenuis. The grass of the mountain now was the Aira flexuosa, large and abundant, now somewhat dry and withered, on all shelves and along the seams, quite to the top; a pinkish tawny now. Most would not have noticed or detected any other. The other kinds named were not common. You would say it was a true mountain grass. The only grass that a careless observer would notice. There was nothing like a sod on the mountain-top. The tufts of J. trifidus, perhaps, came the nearest to it. The black spruce is the prevailing tree, commonly six or eight feet high; but very few, and those only in the most sheltered places, as hollows and swamps, are of regular outline, on account of the strong and cold winds with which they have to contend. Fifteen feet high would be unusually large. They cannot grow here without some kind of lee to start with. They commonly consist of numerous flat branches close, above one another for the first foot or two, spreading close over the surface and filling and concealing the hollows between the rocks; but exactly at a level with the top of the rock which shelters them they cease to have any limbs on the north side, but all their limbs now are included within a quadrant between southeast and southwest, while the stem, which is always perfectly perpendicular, is bare and smooth on the north side; yet it is led onward at the top by a tuft of tender branches a foot in length and spreading every way as usual, but the northern part of these successively die and disappear. They thus remind you often of masts of vessels with sails set on one side, and sometimes one of these almost bare masts is seen to have been broken short off at ten feet from the ground, such is the violence of the wind there. I saw a spruce, healthy and straight, full sixteen feet without a limb or the trace of a limb on the north side. When building my camp, in order to get rafters six feet long and an inch and a half in diameter at the small end, I was obliged to cut down spruce at least five inches in diameter at one foot from the ground. So stout and tapering do they grow. They spread so close to the rocks that the lower branches are often half worn away for a foot in length by their rubbing on the rocks in the wind, and I sometimes mistook the creaking of such a limb for the note of a bird, for it is just such a note as you would expect to hear there. The two spruce which formed the sides of my second camp had their lower branches behind the rock so thick and close, and, on the outsides of the quadrant, so directly above one another perpendicularly, that they made two upright side walls, as it were, very convenient to interlace and make weather-tight. I selected a spruce growing on the highest part of the plateau east of the summit, on its north slope, about as high as any tree of its size, to cut and count its rings. It was five feet five inches high. AS usual, all its limbs except some of the leading twigs extended toward the south. One of the lowermost limbs, so close to the ground that I thought its green extremity was a distinct tree, was ten feet long. There were ten similar limbs (though not so long) almost directly above one another, within two feet of the ground, the largest two inches thick at the butt. I cut off this tree at one foot from the ground. It was there five inches in diameter and had forty-four rings, but four inches of its growth was on the south side the centre and only one inch on the north side. I cut it off again nineteen inches higher and there were thirty-five rings. Our fuel was the dead spruce – apparently that which escaped the fire some forty years ago!! – which lies spread over the rocks in considerable quantity still, especially at the northeast spur. It makes very good dry fuel, and some of it is quite fat and sound. The spruce twigs were our bed. I observed that, being laid bottom upward in a hot sun, as at the foot of our bed, the leaves turned pale-brown, as if boiled, and fell off very soon. The black spruce is certainly a very wild tree, and loves a primitive soil just made out of disintegrated granite.

After the low blueberry I should say that the lamb-kill was the commonest shrub. The black choke-berry also was very common, but this and the rhodora were both dwarfish. Though the meadow-sweet was very common, I did not notice any hardhack; yet it was exceedingly prevalent in the pastures below. The Solidago thyrsoidea was the goldenrod of the mountain-top, from the woods quite to the summit. Any other goldenrod was comparatively scarce. It was from two inches to two feet high. It grew both in small swamps and in the seams of the rocks everywhere, and was now in its prime. The bunchberry strikes one from these parts as much as any, – about a dozen berries in a dense cluster, a lively scarlet on a green ground. Spruce was the prevailing tree; blueberry, the berry; S. thyrsoidea, the goldenrod; A. acuminatus, the aster (the only one I saw, and very common); Juncus trifidus, the juncus; and Aira flexuosa, the grass, of the mountain-top. The two cotton-grasses named were very common and conspicuous in and about the little meadows. The Juncus trifidus was the common grass (or grass-like plant) of the very highest part of the mountain, – the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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peak and for thirty rods downward, – growing on the shelves and especially on the edges of the scars rankly, and on this part of the mountain almost alone had it fruited, – for I think that I saw it occasionally lower and elsewhere on the rocky portion without fruit. The apparently common green and white cladonias, together with yet whiter stereocaulon, grew all over the flat rocks in profusion, and the apparently common greenish rock lichen (q.v. in box) grew concentric-wise in large circles on the slopes of rocks also, not to mention the common small umbilicaria (q. v.) of one or two kinds which covered the brows and angles of the rocks.

The berries now ripe were: blueberries, bunchberries, fetid currant, red cherry, black choke-berry (some of them), mountain cranberry (red-cheeked and good cooked), red elder (quite showy), Clintonia borealis, raspberry (not common). And berries yet green were: Aralia hispida (ripe in Concord, much of it), wild holly (turning), Viburnum nudum (green), mountain-ash.

The birds which I noticed were: robins [American Robin Turdus migratorius], chewinks [Rufous-sided Towhee Pipilo erythrophthalmus], F. hyemalis [Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis], song sparrow [Song Sparrow Melospiza melodia], nighthawk [Common Nighthawk Chordeiles minor], swallow [Sparrow Fringillidae] (a fen-, probably barn swallow, one flying over the extreme summit), crows [Crow, American Corvus brachyrhynchos] (sometimes flew over, though mostly heard in the woods below), wood thrush [Wood Thrush Hylocichla mustelina] (heard from woods below); and saw a warbler [Yellow Warbler Dendroica petechia?] with a dark-marked breast and yellowish angle to wing and white throat, and heard a note once like a very large and powerful nuthatch [White-breasted Nuthatch Sitta carolinensis]. Some small hawks . The bird peculiar to the mountain was the F. hyemalis [Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis], and perhaps the most common, flitting over the rocks, unless the robin [American Robin Turdus migratorius] and chewink [Rufous-sided Towhee Pipilo erythrophthalmus] were as common. These, with the song sparrow [Song Sparrow Melospiza melodia] and wood thrush [Wood Thrush Hylocichla mustelina], were heard regularly each morning. I saw a robin’s [American Robin Turdus migratorius] nest in one of the little swamps. The wood thrush [Wood Thrush Hylocichla mustelina] was regularly heard late in the afternoon, its strain coming up from the woods below as the shadows were lengthening. But, above all, this was an excellent place to observe the habits of the nighthawks [Common Nighthawk Chordeiles minor]. They were heard and seen regularly at sunset, –one night it was at 7.10, or exactly at sunset,– coming upward from the lower and more shaded portion of the rocky surface below our camp, with their spark spark, soon answered by a companion, for they seemed always to hunt in pairs, – yet both would dive and boom and, according to Wilson, only the male utters this sound. They pursued their game thus a short distance apart and some sixty or one hundred feet above the gray rocky surface, in the twilight, and the constant spark spark seemed to be a sort of call-note to advertise each other of their neighborhood. Suddenly one would hover and flutter more stationarily for a moment, somewhat like a kingfisher [Kingfisher, Belted Ceryle alcyon], and then dive almost perpendicularly downward with a rush, for fifty feet, frequently within three or four rods of us, and the loud booming sound or rip was made just at the curve, as it ceased to fall, but whether voluntarily or involuntarily I know not. They appeared to be diving for their insect prey. What eyes they must have to be able to discern it beneath them against the rocks in the twilight! As I was walking about the camp, one flew low, within two feet of the surface, about me, and lit on the rock within three rods of me, and uttered a harsh note like c-o-w, c-o-w, – hard and gritty and allied to their common notes, – which I thought expressive of anxiety, or to alarm me, or for its mate. I suspect that their booming on a distant part of the mountain was the sound which I heard the first night which was like very distant thunder, or the fall of a pile of lumber. They did not fly or boom when there was a cloud or fog, and ceased pretty early in the night. They came up from the same quarter –the shaded rocks below– each night, two of them, and left off booming about 8 o’clock. Whether they then ceased hunting or withdrew to another part of the mountain, I know not. Yet I heard one the first night at 11.30 P.M., but, as it had been a rainy day and did not clear up here till some time late in the night, it may have been compelled to do its hunting then. They began to boom again at 4 A.M. (other birds about 4.30) and ceased about 4.20. By their color they are related to the gray rocks over which they flit and circle.

As for quadrupeds, we saw none on the summit and only one small gray rabbit at the base of the mountain, but we saw the droppings of rabbits all over the mountain, and they must be the prevailing large animal, and we heard the motions probably of a mouse about our camp at night. We also found the skull of a rodent larger than HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a woodchuck or gray rabbit, and the tail-bones (maybe of the same) some half-dozen inches long, and saw a large quantity of dark-brown oval droppings (q.v., preserved). I think that this was a porcupine, and I hear that they are found on the mountain. Mr. Wild saw one recently dead near the spring some sixteen years ago. I saw the ordure of some large quadruped, probably this, on the rocks in the pastures beneath the wood, composed chiefly of raspberry seeds.

As for insects: There were countless ants, large and middle-sized, which ran over our bed and inside our clothes. They swarmed all over the mountain. Had young in the dead spruce which we burned. Saw but half a dozen mosquitoes. Saw two or three common yellow butterflies and some larger red-brown ones, and moths. There were great flies, as big as horse-flies, with shining black abdomens and buff-colored bases to their wings. Disturbed a swarm of bees in a dead spruce on the ground, but they disappeared before I ascertained what kind they were. On the summit one noon, i.e. on the very apex, I was pestered by great swarms of small black wasps or winged ants about a quarter of an inch long, which fluttered about and settled on my head and face. Heard a fine (in the sod) cricket, a dog-day locust once or twice, and a creaking grasshopper.

Saw two or three frogs, – one large Rana fontinalis in that rocky pool on the southwest side, where I saw the large spawn which I supposed to be bullfrog spawn two years ago, but now think must have been R. fontinalis spawn; and there was a dark pollywog one inch long. This frog had a raised line on each side of back and was as large as a common bullfrog. I also heard the note once of some familiar large frog. The one or two smaller frogs which I saw elsewhere were perhaps the same.

There were a great many visitors to the summit, both by the south and north, i.e. the Jaffrey and Dublin paths, but they did not turn off from the beaten track. One noon, when I was on the top, I counted forty men, women, and children around me, and more were constantly arriving while others were going. Certainly more than one hundred ascended in a day. When you got within thirty rods you saw them seated in a row along the gray parapets, like the inhabitants of a castle on a gala-day; and when you behold Monadnock’s blue summit fifty miles off in the horizon, you may imagine it covered with men, women, and children in dresses of all colors, like an observatory on a muster-field. They appeared to be chiefly mechanics and farmers’ boys and girls from the neighboring towns. The young men sat in rows with their legs dangling over the precipice, squinting through spy-glasses and shouting and hallooing to each new party that issued from the woods below. Some were playing cards; others were trying to see their house or their neighbor’s. Children were running about and playing as usual. Indeed, this peak in pleasant weather is the most trivial place in New England. There are probably more arrivals daily than at any of the White Mountain houses. Several were busily engraving their names on the rocks with cold-chisels, whose incessant clink you heard, and they had but little leisure to look off. The mountain was not free of them from sunrise to sunset, though most of them left about 5 P.M. At almost any hour of the day they were seen wending their way single file in various garb up or down the shelving rocks of the peak. These figures on the summit, seen in relief against the sky (from our camp), looked taller than life. I saw some that camped there, by moonlight, one night. On Sunday, twenty or thirty, at least, in addition to the visitors to the peak, came up to pick blueberries, and we heard on all sides the rattling of dishes and their frequent calls to each HDT WHAT? INDEX

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other.

Scale of six rods to an inch

The rocky area – or summit of the mountain above the forest – which I am describing is of an irregular form from a mile and a half to two miles long, north and south, by three quarters to a mile wide at the widest part, in proportion as you descend lower on the rocks. There are three main spurs, viz. the northeast, or chief, one, toward Monadnock Pond and the village of Dublin; the southerly, to Swan’s [?]; and the northerly, over which the Dublin path runs. These afford the three longest walks. The first is the longest, wildest, and least-frequented, and rises to the greatest height at a distance from the central peak. The second affords the broadest and smoothest walk. The third is the highest of all at first, but falls off directly. There are also two lesser and lower spurs, on the westerly side, – one quite short, toward Troy, by which you might come up from that side, the other yet lower, but longer, from north 75 west. But above all, for walking, there is an elevated rocky plateau, so to call it, extending to half a mile east of the summit, or about a hundred rods east of the ravine. This slopes gently toward the south and east by successive terraces of rock, and affords the most amusing walking of any part of the mountain. The most interesting precipices are on the south side of the peak. The greatest abruptness of descent (from top to bottom) is on the west side between the two lesser ravines. The northeast spur (of two principal summits beyond the swamp) has the most dead spruce on it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The handsome ponds near the mountain are a long pond chiefly in Jaffrey, close under the mountain on the east, with a greatly swelling knoll extending into it on the east side; Monadnock Pond in Dublin, said to be very deep, about north-northeast (between the north-east spur and Dublin village); a large pond with a very white beach much further off in Nelson, about north (one called it Breed’s?); Stone Pond, northwesterly, about as near as Monadnock Pond. Also large ponds in Jaffrey, Rindge, Troy; and many more further off. The basis of my map was the distance from the summit to the second camp, measured very rudely by casting a stone before. Pacing the distance of an easy cast, I found it about ten rods, and thirteen such stone’s throws, or one hundred and thirty rods, carried me to the camp. As I had the course, from the summit and from the camp, of the principal points, I could tell the rest nearly enough. It was about fifty rods from the summit to the ravine and eighty more to the camp. It was undoubtedly Saddleback Mountain which I saw about S. 85 W. What was that elevated part of the Green Mountains about N. 50 W., which one called falsely Camel’s Hump? – the next elevated summit north of Saddleback. It would evidently be a noble walk from Watatic to Goffstown perchance, over the Peterboro mountains, along the very backbone of this part of New Hampshire. – the most novel and interesting walk that I can think of in these parts. They who simply climb to the peak of Monadnock have seen but little of the mountain. I came not to look off from it, but to look at it. The view of the pinnacle itself from the plateau below surpasses any view which you get from the summit. It is indispensable to see the top itself and the sierra of its outline from one side. The great charm is not to look off from a height but to walk over this novel and wonderful rocky surface. Moreover, if you would enjoy the prospect, it is, methinks, most interesting when you look from the edge of the plateau immediately down into the valleys, or where the edge of the lichen-clad rocks, only two or three rods from you, is seen as the lower frame of a picture of green fields, lakes, and woods, suggesting a more stupendous precipice than exists. There are much more surprising effects of this nature along the edge of the plateau than on the summit. It is remarkable what haste the visitors make to get to the top of the mountain and then look away from it. Northward you see Ascutney and Kearsarge Mountains, and faintly the White Mountains, and others more northeast; but above all, toward night, the Green Mountains. But what a study for rocks does this mountain-top afford! The rocks of the pinnacle have many regular nearly right-angled slants to the southeast,

covered with the dark-brown (or olivaceous) umbilicaria. The rocks which you walk over are often not only worn smooth and slippery, but grooved out, as if with some huge rounded tool,

or they are much oftener convex:

You see huge buttresses or walls put up by Titans, with true joints, only recently loosened by an earthquake as if ready to topple down. Some of the lichen-clad rocks are of a rude brick-loaf form or small cottage form:

You see large boulders, left just on the edge of the steep descent of the plateau, commonly resting on a few small stones, as if the Titans were in the very act of transporting them when they were interrupted; some left standing on their ends, and almost the only convenient rocks in whose shade you can sit sometimes. Often you come to a long, thin rock, two or three rods long, which has the appearance of having just been split into underpinning- stone, – perfectly straight-edged and parallel pieces, and lying as it fell, ready for use, just as the mason leaves it. Post-stones, door-stones, etc. There were evidences of recent motion as well as ancient. I saw on the flat sloping surface of rock a fresher white space exactly the size and form of a rock which was lying by it and which had lately covered it. What had upset it? There were many of these whitish marks where the dead spruce had lain but was now decayed or gone. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

The rocks were not only coarsely grooved but finely scratched from northwest to southeast, commonly about S. 10 E. (but between 5 and 20 east, or, by the true meridian, more yet). [Hitchcock, p. 387, calls the rock of Monadnock granite, and says the scratches are north and south, nearly, and very striking. Vide three pages forward.] I could have steered myself in a fog by them. Piles of stones left as they were split ready for the builder. I saw one perfect triangular hog-trough –except that it wanted one end– and which would have been quite portable and convenient in a farmer’s yard.

The core, four or five feet long, lay one side. The rocks are very commonly in terraces with a smooth rounded edge to each. The most remarkable of these terraces that I noticed was between the second camp and the summit, say some forty rods from the camp. These terraces were some six rods long and six to ten feet wide, but the top slanting considerably back into the mountain, and they were about four or five feet high each.

There were four such in succession here, running S. 30 E. The edges of these terraces, here and commonly, were rounded and grooved like the rocks at a waterfall, as if water and gravel had long washed over them. Some rocks were shaped like huge doughnuts:

The edges of cliffs were frequently lumpishly rounded, covered with lichens, so that you could not stand near the edge. The extreme east and northeast parts of the plateau, especially near the little meadow, are the most interesting for the forms of rocks. Sometimes you see where a huge oblong square stone has been taken out from the edge of a terrace, leaving a space which looks like u giant’s grave unoccupied. On the west side the summit the strata ran north and south and dipped to east about 60 with the horizon. There were broad veins of white quartz (sometimes one foot wide) running directly many rods.

Near the camp there was a succession of great rocks, their corners rounded semi-circularly and grooved at the same time like the capital of a column reversed. The most rugged walking is on the steep westerly slope.

We had a grand view, especially after sunset, as it grew dark, of the sierra of the summit’s outline west of us, – the teeth of the sierra often turned back toward the summit, – when the rocks were uniformly black in the shade and seen against the twilight. In Morse’s Gazetteer (1797) it is said, “Its base is five miles in diameter north to south, and three from east to west.… Its summit is a bald rock.” By the summit he meant the very topmost part, which, it seems, was always a “bald rock.” There were all over the rocky summit peculiar yellowish gravelly spots which I called scars, commonly of an oval form, not in low but elevated places, and looking as if a little mound had been cut off there.

The edges of these, on the very pinnacle of the mountain, were formed of the Juncus trifidus, now gone to seed. If they had been in hollows, you would have said that they were the bottom of little pools, now dried up, where the gravel and stones had been washed bare. I am not certain about their origin. They suggested some force HDT WHAT? INDEX

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which had suddenly cut off and washed or blown away the surface there, like a thunder-spout [sic], or lightning, or a hurricane. Such spots were very numerous, and had the appearance of fresh scar. Much, if not most, of the rock appears to be what Hitchcock describes and represents as graphic granite (vide his book, page 681). Hitchcock says (page 389) that he learns from his assistant, Abraham Jenkins, Jr., that “on the sides of and around this mountain [Monadnock] diluvial grooves and scratches are common; having a direction about N. 10 W. and S. 10 E. The summit of the mountain, which rises in an insulated manner to the height of 3250 feet, is a naked rock of gneiss of several acres in extent, and this is thoroughly grooved and scored. One groove measured fourteen feet in width, and two feet deep; and others are scarcely of less size. Their direction at the summit, by a mean of nearly thirty measurements with a compass, is nearly north and south.” According to Heywood’s Gazetteer, the mountain is “talc, mica, slate, distinctly stratified,” and is 3718 feet high. Though there is little or no soil upon the rocks, owing apparently to the coolness, if not moisture, you have rather the vegetation of a swamp than that of sterile rocky ground below. For example, of the six prevailing trees and shrubs – low blueberry, black spruce, lamb-kill, black choke-berry, wild holly, and Viburnum nudum – all but the first are characteristic of swampy and low ground, to say nothing of the commonness of wet mosses, the two species of cotton-grass, and some other plants of the swamp and meadow. Little meadows and swamps are scattered all over the mountain upon and amid the rocks. You are continually struck with the proximity of gray and lichen-clad rock and mossy bog. You tread alternately on wet moss, into which you sink, and dry, lichen- covered rocks. You will be surprised to see the vegetation of a swamp on a little shelf only a foot or two over, – a bog a foot wide with cotton-grass waving over it in the midst of cladonia lichens so dry as to burn like tinder. The edges of the little swamps – if not their middle – are commonly white with cotton-grass. The Arenaria Groenlandica often belies its name here, growing in wet places as often as in dry ones, together with eriophorum. One of the grandest views of the summit is from the east side of the central meadow of the plateau, which I called the Gulf, just beneath the pinnacle on the east, with the meadow in the foreground. Water stands in shallow pools on almost every rocky shelf. The largest pool of open water which I found was on the southwest side of the summit, and was four rods long by fifteen to twenty feet in width and a foot deep. Wool- and cotton-grass grew around it, and there was a dark green moss and some mud at the bottom. There was a smoother similar pool on the next shelf above it. These were about the same size in June and in August, and apparently never dry up. There was also the one in which I bathed, near the northeast little meadow. I had a delicious bath there, though the water was warm, but there was a pleasant strong and drying wind blowing over the ridge, and when I had bathed, the rock felt like plush to my feet. The cladonia lichens were so dry at midday, even the day after rain, that they served as tinder to kindle our fire, – indeed, we were somewhat troubled to prevent the fire from spreading amid them, – yet at night, even before sundown, and morning, when we got our supper and breakfast, they would not bum thus, having absorbed moisture. They had then a cool and slightly damp feeling. Every evening, excepting, perhaps, the Sunday evening after the rain of the day before, we saw not long after sundown a slight scud or mist begin to strike the summit above us, though it was perfectly fair weather generally and there were no clouds over the lower country. First, perhaps, looking up, we would see a small scud not more than a rod in diameter drifting just over the apex of the mountain. In a few minutes more a somewhat larger one would suddenly make its appearance, and perhaps strike the topmost rocks and invest them for a moment, but as rapidly drift off northeast and disappear. Looking into the southwest sky, which was clear, we would see all at once a small cloud or scud a rod in diameter beginning to form half a mile from the summit, and as it came on it rapidly grew in a mysterious manner, till it was fifty rods or more in diameter, and draped and concealed for a few moments all the summit above us, and then passed off and disappeared northeastward just as it had come on. So that it appeared as if the clouds had been attracted by the summit. They also seemed to rise a little as they approached it, and endeavor to go over without striking. I gave this account of it to myself. They were not attracted to the summit, but simply generated there and not elsewhere. There would be a warm southwest wind blowing which was full of moisture, alike over the mountain and all the rest of the country. The summit of the mountain being cool, this warm air began to feel its influence at half a mile distance, and its moisture was rapidly condensed into a small cloud, which expanded as it advanced, and evaporated again as it left the summit. This would go on, apparently, as the coolness of the mountain increased, and generally the cloud or mist reached down as low as our camp from time to time, in the night. One evening, as I was watching these small clouds forming and dissolving about the summit of our mountain, the sun having just set, I cast my eyes toward the dim bluish outline of the Green Mountains in the clear red evening sky, and, to my delight, I detected exactly over the summit of Saddleback Mountain, some sixty miles distant, its own little cloud, shaped like a parasol and answering to that which capped our mountain, though in HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

this case it did not rest on the mountain, but was considerably above it, and all the rest of the west horizon for forty miles was cloudless.

I was convinced that it was the local cloud of that mountain because it was directly over the summit, was of small size and of umbrella form answering to the summit, and there was no other cloud to be seen in that horizon. It was a beautiful and serene object, a sort of fortunate isle, – like any other cloud in the sunset sky. That the summit of this mountain is cool appears from the fact that the days which we spent there were remarkably warm ones in the country below, and were the common subject of conversation when we came down, yet we had known nothing about it, and went warmly clad with comfort all the while, as we had not done immediately before and did not after we descended. We immediately perceived the difference as we descended. It was warm enough for us on the summit, and often, in the sheltered southeast hollows, too warm, as we happened to be clad, but on the summits and ridges it chanced that there was always wind, and in this wind it was commonly cooler than we liked. Also our water, which was evidently rain-water caught in the rocks and retained by the moss, was cool enough if it were only in a little crevice under the shelter of a rock, i.e. out of the sun. Yet, though it was thus cool, and there was this scud or mist on the top more or less every night, there was, as we should say, no dew on the summit any morning. The lichens, blueberry bushes, etc., did not feel wet, nor did they wet you in the least, however early you walked in them. I rose [?] to observe the sunrise and picked blueberries every morning before sunrise, and saw no dew, only once some minute dewdrops on some low grass-tips, and that was amid the wet moss of a little bog, but the lambkill and blueberry bushes above it were not wet. Yet the Thursday when we left, we found that though there was no dew on the summit there was a very heavy dew in the pastures below, and our feet and clothes were completely wet with it, as much as if we had stood in water. I should say that there were no true springs (?) on the summit, but simply rain-water caught in the hollows of the rocks or retained by the moss. I observed that the well which we made for washing – by digging up the moss with our hands – half dried up in the sun by day, but filled up again at night. The principal stream on the summit, – if not the only one, – in the rocky portion described, was on the south- east side, between our two camps, though it did not distinctly show itself at present except a little below our elevation. For the most part you could only see that water had flowed there between and under the rocks. I fancied once or twice that it was warmer at 10 P.M. than it was immediately after sunset. The voices of those climbing the summit were heard remarkably far. We heard much of the ordinary conversation of those climbing the peak above us a hundred rods off, and we could hear those on the summit, or a hundred and thirty rods off, when they shouted. I heard a party of ladies and gentlemen laughing and talking there in the night (they were camping there), though I did not hear what they said. We heard, or imagined that we heard, from time to time, as we lay in our camp by day, an occasional chinking or clinking sound as if made by one stone on another. In clear weather, in going from one part of the summit to another it would be most convenient to steer by distant objects, as towns or mountains or lakes, rather than by features of the summit itself, since the former are most easily recognized and almost always in sight. I saw what I took to be a thistle-down going low over the summit, and might have caught it, though I saw no thistle on the mountain-top nor any other plant from which this could have come. (I have no doubt it was a thistle by its appearance and its season.) It had evidently come up from the country below. This shows that it may carry its seeds to higher regions than it inhabits, and it suggests how the seeds of some mountain plants, as the Solidago thyrsoidea, may be conveyed from mountain to mountain, also other solidagos, asters, epilobiums, willows, etc. The descent through the woods from our first camp to the site of the shanty is from a third to half a mile. You then come to the raspberry and fern scented region. There were some raspberries still left, but they were fast dropping off. There was a good view of the mountain from just above the pond, some two miles from Troy. The varying outline of a mountain is due to the crest of different spurs, as seen from different sides. Even a small spur, if you are near, may conceal a much larger one and give its own outline to the mountain, and at the same time one which extends directly toward you is not noticed at all, however important, though, as you travel round the mountain, this may gradually come into view and finally its crest may be one half or more of the outline presented. It may partly account for the peaked or pyramidal form of mountains that one crest may be seen through the gaps of another and so fill up the line. Think I saw leersia or cut-grass in bloom in Troy. I carried on this excursion the following articles (beside what I wore), viz.: – HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

One shirt. One pair socks. Two pocket-handkerchiefs. One thick waistcoat. One flannel shirt (had no occasion to use it). India-rubber coat. Three bosoms. Towel and soap. Pins, needles, thread. A blanket (would have been more convenient if stitched up in the form of a bag). Cap for the night. Map and compass. Spy-glass and microscope and tape. Saw and hatchet. Plant-book and blotting-paper. Paper and stamps. Botany. Insect and lichen boxes. Jack-knife. Matches. Waste paper and twine. Iron spoon and pint dipper with handle. All in a knapsack. Umbrella.

N.B. – Add to the above next time a small bag, which may be stuffed with moss or the like for a pillow.

For provision for one, six days, carried: –

2 1/2 lbs. of salt beef and tongue. Take only salt beef next time, 2 to 3 lbs. 18 hard-boiled eggs. Omit eggs. 2 1/2 lbs. sugar and a little salt. 2 lbs. of sugar would have done. About 1/4 lb. of tea. 2/3 as much would have done. 2 lbs. hard-bread. The right amount of bread. 1/2 loaf home-made bread and a piece of cake. but might have taken more home-made and more solid sweet cake.

N. B. – Carry salt (or some of it) in a wafer-box. Also some sugar in a small box.

N. B. – Observe next time: the source of the stream which crosses the path; what species of swallow flies over mountain; what the grass which gives the pastures a yellowish color seen from the summit.

The morning would probably never be ushered in there by the chipping of the chip-bird [Chipping Sparrow Spizella passerina], but that of the F. hyemalis [Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis] instead, – a dry, hard occasional chirp, more in harmony with the rocks. There you do not hear the link of the bobolink [Bobolink Dolichonyx oryzivorus], the chatter of red-wings [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus] and crow blackbirds [Common Grackle Quiscalus quiscula], the wood pewee [Eastern Wood-Pewee Contopus virens], the twitter of the kingbird [Eastern Kingbird Tyrannus tyrannus], the half [sic] strains of the vireo [Red-eyed Vireo Vireo olivaceus], the passing goldfinch [American Goldfinch Carduelis tristis], or the occasional plaintive note of the blue-bird [Eastern Bluebird Sialia sialis], all which are now commonly heard in the lowlands. That area is literally a chaos, an example of what the earth was before it was finished.

Do I not hear the mole cricket at night? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1861

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock resigned as state geologist of Vermont. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1863

The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s REMINISCENCES OF AMHERST COLLEGE. He was made a charter member of the National Academy of Sciences.

May 25, Monday: Waldo Emerson’s 61st birthday.

Orra White Hitchcock died.

July: In Bibliotheca Sacra (BSAC 020:79) the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock, emeritus geologist of Amherst College, used the spectre of an absence of miraculous interruptions and corrections of the natural order –and thus the absence of divine Providence and protection over our existence as humans– to quite refute Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. His “The Law of Nature’s Constancy Subordinate to the Higher Law of Change” described a cold and indifferent godless Darwinian world in which nobody cared what happened to us as being simply too much for a human scientist to contemplate. BIBLIOTHECA SACRA

The scientific history of our globe shows us that nature’s constancy has been several times interrupted by special miraculous intervention. We of course refer to the numerous new species of animals and plants that have been introduced upon the earth, either singly or by groups, since life was first manifested. In the proper place we have given a detail of the facts, perhaps sufficiently prolix, and also an account of the various modes by which some have endeavored to avoid the conclusion just stated. A summary of the points discussed will be all that we shall introduce in this place. One method by which it has been attempted to throw doubt over the miraculous origin of species, has been to maintain that the new ones have never been introduced by large groups, but singly from time to time, to replace old species, and probably by some unknown law of nature. The reply is, that such a mode of introducing the new species, that is singly at intervals, is admitted only occasionally by the ablest paleontologists. But if it were true, the creation of a single species would demand special divine intervention as really as that of a group. It is something above and beyond nature, and though the result of an unknown law, it must be a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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law of miracles, and not of nature; for her whole record shows no analogous power. Not satisfied with such views, not a few at the present day of philosophic mind, if they do not adopt the hypothesis of organic development, yet look with great respect upon it, and hope that it may prove true. Perhaps they pass over, as a delicate and difficult point, the origination of the first monad or primordial form. But assuming its existence, they think they can trace out the steps by which all the new species have been derived, one from another, in upward series, and all by natural law. The force of circumstances and natural selection are supposed capable of working out the most marvelous transmutations and adaptations, and there is no longer need of special divine intervention. Indeed it is not necessary that the Deity, if there be one, should have anything to do with the process except, as some would say, originally to ordain the law. And when a man has once brought himself to believe that all the wonderful diversity and mutual adaptation of organic nature has been the result of natural law, independent of any special acts of creative power, he will not long hesitate to adopt the dogma, no more improbable, that the primordial form might have been albumen, vitalized by electricity of some other natural force. But in spite of the great array of learning which has been adduced of late to sustain this hypothesis, very many who unite good common sense to strong reasoning powers, even though not unwilling to see religion undermined, cannot adopt as truth such dreamy speculations. Others, also, who by the study of the mathematical laws of the universe, have come to the conclusion that special interference with these laws, such as miracles suppose, is impossible, and yet feel the need of something more substantial than the transmutation hypothesis, have tried hard to devise some other mode of explaining the geological creations than by special intervention. At last they have made an appeal to our ignorance of the hidden powers of nature. True, we know of no natural law that can create new species, if we set aside the Development Hypothesis; but there may be some such law among nature’s arcana. The fact that these new creations are repeated at intervals, and seem to form a part of a series of operations, which we know to be natural, makes it quite probable that they also are natural. Perhaps this unknown law will by and by be discovered, as many new laws have been to explain phenomena once supposed to be miraculous because anomalous and inexplicable. We have gone into a somewhat extended examination of this new mode of setting aside the miraculous character of the geological creations. For though put forth hypothetically by most of its advocates, it is obvious that they rest upon it, and that it will undoubtedly become the resort of all who do not like to admit the miracles of successive creations, and cannot adopt the Development Hypothesis. Moreover, some sincere friends of revelation, and perhaps some theologians, have seemed favorable to such views, not aware, we apprehend, that they were thus yielding up the main argument for every kind of miracles. In discussing this subject we have endeavored to show that the advocates of this hypothesis labor under certain false notions HDT WHAT? INDEX

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as to miraculous intervention. In the first place, while they admit all that is essential to a miracle in the geological creations, viz. that they cannot be explained by the laws of nature, which indeed they contravene, they think their recurrence at the commencement of the different formations shows them to be subject to law, and that this idea destroys the notion of a miracle. We have replied by maintaining, first, that there is a law of miracles as well as of natural events, and that indeed the Deity never acts without law. But secondly, the geological creations are not exactly alike at different epochs; indeed no creation of this sort has ever been a repetition of one before it. The interval between them has probably never been twice the same, and since the organisms have always been wisely adapted to the changing conditions of the world, they never could have been the same at any two demiurgic periods. As the physical character of the world has been constantly improving, so have the animals and plants introduced been advancing from the simple to the complex, and the progress has always been at such a rate as to connect all the minor successive systems of life into one general system, harmoniously correlated in all its parts. On these several accounts, each creation must have been unlike and independent of all the rest, and therefore corresponding to the most common idea of a miracle, which regards it as an event different from everything that has preceded it. The vast intervals between these creations should also be taken into account. They occurred only at the commencement of the geological periods, as most geologists suppose; and who that is familiar with the subject will undertake to tell us their length as measured by years? They must heap myriads of years upon myriads to satisfy the conditions of the problem. If we suppose rational beings to have existed during each life-period, they could have witnessed no repetition of the miracle with which each of these periods was begun, not have had any evidence, unless revealed by the rocky strata, that it had been manifested in a previous period. Each successive creation must have appeared to such intelligences as an insulated interposition of almighty power, inexplicable by any natural law, and disconnected with anything anterior save divine energy, and therefore miraculous in the strictest sense. And even to a superior being, say an archangel, whose eye could run over the whole range of the successive creations, each interposition, for the reasons that have been given, must appear unlike every other, and therefore in reality an independent miracle. But is it contended that the connection of these creatures with so many series of natural operations affords a presumption that they also are natural. But on what ground is such an inference made? With what else but natural operations can any miracles be connected in this world? Such a connection alone enables us to prove that they are miracles, and that they were intended to subserve some benevolent purpose, and to meet exigencies which special divine intervention could alone supply. All the miracles of sacred history are connected in the same manner with natural operations, precisely as are the geological creations, so that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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if the latter are on this ground to be denied a miraculous character, the former must share the same fate. This is doubtless just what some who advocate these views are aiming at, but we cannot believe it of all. But why is it not as reasonable to suppose that some natural law will hereafter be discovered that will explain the geological creations, as it was a half century or a century since, to presume that eclipses, comets, the aurora borealis, and meteoric showers would be found to be the result of some undiscovered natural law? The difference is just here. The geological creations are not merely inexplicable by natural laws, but they contravene or modify those laws, and therefore must be the result of some force coming in to interfere with those laws, or at least to modify their power; whereas the phenomena alluded to show no such interference and want of harmony with nature, and therefore it was reasonable to wait to see if a more thorough acquaintance with the phenomena, and a better knowledge of the more hidden forces, of nature, such as electricity, galvanism, and affinity, would not furnish a rational explanation on natural principles, and the result has in a good measure justified such an anticipation. But what approach has been made, by all the discoveries of modern science, towards solving the phenomena of life and intellect by any natural law? Surely none unless we adopt in full the hypothesis of natural development. Let us illustrate this subject by an example. The most striking object in the last geological creation was man, with an organization somewhat superior to that of any other animal, and with mental powers far above all others, to which is superadded a moral nature, of which all others are entirely destitute. Geology shows us that man did not exist till a very late period in the world’s history; for his remains are found only in Alluvium, and though there is some diversity of views as to the exact part of Alluvium where he is first found, scarcely any one contends that he existed anterior to the alluvial period. All scientific men would agree in saying that he was among the very latest of the animals created, and that none nearer to him in character than the monkey preceded him. He was introduced suddenly in the full perfection of all his powers. Yet man was intimately connected with all the series of organisms that went before him, of whom he was the antitype, and with all the series that have followed. By one of the hypotheses we have been considering, therefore, man’s creation should not be regarded as a miracle, but as the result of some unknown natural law. His appearance, although inexplicable by any known law, should be regarded as the first appearance of a comet or a meteoric shower, and we should wait patiently for the physiologists to discover the hidden law of nature by which he was produced. Now, without saying anything of the biblical history of man’s creation, which represents it as the grandest of miracles, is there any man acquainted with the facts of science and the laws of philosophising, who would seriously teach or believe that the creation of such a being might be the result of some unknown natural law? Even though one might imagine some of the lowest forms on the scale of life to have such an origin, yet the case HDT WHAT? INDEX

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is altered when we have before us a being not only at the head of animal organization, but endowed with lofty intellectual and moral powers. Yet if the other geological creations were not miracles, man’s introduction must be placed in the same category. How much more consonant with philosophy and common sense the conclusion that they were all miracles! This we believe will be the ultimate version of science; and certainly that would be a strange theology which should reject the miraculous character of man’s creation. For a time, indeed, men of sceptical tendencies, who would gladly see all the miracles of revelation rejected, will strain their ingenuity to wipe them all out from the records of nature. For they know very well that if the latter are admitted, so must the former be, and if the one be rejected, so must the other be. The point in religion which is most vigorously assailed at the present day is, perhaps, the doctrine of miracles. Scientific sceptics are becoming fully aware of the necessity of making out the geological creations to be only natural events. Hence they resort to the absurd hypotheses that have been described, and which would really be subjects of ridicule were they not seriously propounded by learned men. But somehow or other they must silence the guns which their own labors have helped to place upon the ramparts and to supply with ammunition. We have little fear, however, that anything more than partial and temporary success will attend this crusade against religion. So far as Christianity is concerned, the doctrine of miracles is indeed articulus stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiae. But the geological record is too full and decided to be long obscured and mystified by physiological or transcendental speculations. Miracles! Why all the great chapters of nature’s history begin with them, and if the Christian dispensation were destitute of them, it would be out of harmony with the course of things in the natural world. Geology has, indeed, been supposed to lay open a fruitful magazine of weapons for the gladiatorship and tournaments of scepticism. But it is no longer easy to suborn or silence the testimony of that science. Not now throttled in the pillory of false philosophy, nor ventriloquized by a superficial scepticism, its free natural voice is found to blend in wonderful harmony with that of revelation.... Now, does the analogy of nature allow us to suppose that a principle which has hitherto been mightier than any other in the government and preservation of the universe and in promoting its happiness, will be dropped out from the economy of the new earth? We know, on the testimony of revelation, that this principle will make some of its most wonderful manifestations in bringing forth a new and a spiritual body from the grave, in changing the corruptible into the incorruptible, the mortal into the immortal, and in developing from the ruins of the present world a new heavens and a new earth wherein dwell righteousness. Will God, then, introduce everlasting monotony and permit no changes in heaven? Rather would analogy lead us to conclude that it may be a succession of higher and higher economies of life and enjoyment, into which the law of change shall introduce us. We conjecture not what these new developments may be, nor would we HDT WHAT? INDEX

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form so low an estimate of that world as to fancy them a repetition of the most beautiful flowers and fruits and gems and landscapes which earth now contains; but rather objects far more attractive and glorious; such as could not be understood and appreciated by our present powers, but such as an infinite God knows how to produce, and such an infinite benevolence will delight to scatter in rich profusion all along the upward pathway of our immortal existence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

1864

February 27, Saturday: Edward Hitchcock died at the age of 70 in Amherst, Massachusetts.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FABULATION, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

Prepared: February 4, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: PROFESSOR EDWARD HITCHCOCK

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.