PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
PEOPLE OF A WEEK:
GEORGE BARRELL EMERSON
GEORGE B. EMERSON
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project George B. Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
Mr. George B. Emerson, in his valuable REPORT ON THE T REES AND S HRUBS OF THIS STATE, says of the pines: “The tenacity of life of the seeds is remarkable. They will remain for many years unchanged in the ground, protected by the coolness and deep shade of the forest above them. But when the forest is removed, and the warmth of the sun admitted, they immediately vegetate.” Since he does not tell us on what observation his remark is founded, I must doubt its truth.
1797
September 12, Tuesday: George Barrell Emerson –like Waldo Emerson a descendent of Thomas Emerson of Ipswich and of Thomas’s son Joseph Emerson– was born in Kennebunk. Raised in Wells while this district was still part of Massachusetts, George would spend much of his boyhood roaming the fields, woods, and seaside and working on the family farm. After a few years of preparation at Dummer Academy in Byfield, New Hampshire, he would in 1813 matriculate at Harvard College, where he would concentrate in mathematics and Greek.
Samuel Joseph May was born in Boston:1 In 1864, in a brief life memoir, May began “I was born in Boston, Massachusetts on the twelfth day of September, 1797.”
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
1. Be careful to keep these people unscrambled: sister Abby May Alcott (Mrs. Ernest Niericker) born July 28, 1840 in Concord, mother Abigail May AKA Abba Alcott, Abigail Williams May, Catherine May, Charles May, Charlotte Coffin May, Dorothy May, mother Dorothy “Dolly” Sewall May, Edward May, Elizabeth May, George Emerson May, John May, John Edward May, father Joseph May, son Joseph May, Louisa May, Lucretia Flagge Coffin May, Mary Goddard May, uncle Samuel May, grandson Samuel Joseph May, Thomas May, and Frederic May Holland. The elder Samuel Joseph May (-1841), an entrepreneur and one of the wealthiest men in Boston, the founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, as well as of the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Asylum for the Insane, and the American Unitarian Association, whose portrait was painted by Gilbert Stuart and who bore the honorary title of “Colonel,” who was Abba Alcott’s uncle, is not in any sense either political or theological similar to his younger relative, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, who was the brother closest to Abba in age and was for many years the general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, or to the Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr.. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1811
September 5, Thursday: Isaac Sprague was born in Hingham, Massachusetts. He would be apprenticed to his uncle, a carriage painter, and eventually would become a self-taught landscape, botanical, and ornithological illustrator. He would, for instance, create the illustrations for George B. Emerson’s 1846 REPORT ON THE TREES AND SHRUBS GROWING NATURALLY IN THE FORESTS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 5 of 9 Mo// Our meeting was to me a good one, being favor’d with quiet ability to labor for life — C R expressed a few Words. After Meeting I went to Middletown & dined at Elijah Anthony’s & from thence to John Goulds house to attend his funeral, which was large & the setting was silent. I took tea with cousin George Gould & Wife & then came home Cousin George lives at the late residence of my cousin Alice Gould deceased widow of Thomas, & I hope I may find in visiting him & his family a renewal of the same love which closely united me with those of my late dear Cousins. The Ancients of our family are Swiftly passing to the grave, the house appointed for all living, & that the younger generation may not only equal them but far exceed them in Grace & goodness is the sincere desire of my soul —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project George B. Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1813
Boston boys Samuel Joseph May, Caleb Cushing who would become a Democratic politician, Samuel Atkins Eliot who would become mayor of Boston, 13-year-old George Bancroft who would become a national historian and Secretary of the Navy, George Barrell Emerson who would become an educational reformer, and David Lee Child who would become a radical abolitionist, were matriculants at Harvard College.
Before entering Harvard, George Barrell Emerson had undergone a few weeks of preparation at Dummer Academy in Byfield, New Hampshire. He would concentrate in mathematics and Greek. He had been taught the Linnaean system of classification by his father and it would appear that right after getting settled in his dorm room, he visited the botanic garden in order to ply Professor William Peck there with questions about plants he had noticed during his boyhood in his hometown of Wells that he had been unable to identify.
George Ticknor was admitted to the Massachusetts bar, and opened a law office in Boston.
Professor Sylvestre François Lacroix’s TRAITÉ ÉLÉMENTAIRE D’ARITHMÉTIQUE, A L’USAGE DE L’ÉCOLE me CENTRALE DES QUATRE-NATIONS (A Paris: Chez M veuve Courcier, Imprimeur-Libraire pour les Mathématiques, quai des Augustins, no 57).
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
George B. Emerson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1817
Upon graduating from Harvard College, George Barrell Emerson became master of a private boys’ school that had been recently established in Lancaster, Massachusetts.
This year’s graduating class would become notorious for its abolitionist sympathies: this was the year in which the abolitionist poet John Pierpont graduated, as well as the Reverend Robert F. Wallcut (1797-1884). NEW “HARVARD MEN”
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
George B. Emerson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1819
Edward Tyrrell Channing succeeded Joseph McKean as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard College.
George Barrell Emerson became a tutor in natural philosophy and mathematics.
A food fight broke out between the Freshmen and the Sophomores in the dining hall at the college, and as punishments several of the identified participants were “rusticated.” The Sophomore class met beneath “Rebellion Elm” to issue a series of demands and then resigned en masse — but within two weeks the students had individually straggled back without having succeeded in getting these banishments rescinded. You can read about this if you have the stomach for it, in a poem of four atrocious cantos entitled “Rebelliad; Or Terrible Transactions at the Seat of the Muses.” [SOMEBODY OUGHT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE WILLIAM FURNESS SERIES OF CONTEMPORARY DRAWINGS OF THIS FOOD FIGHT, FROM THE HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
HARVARD ARCHIVES, AND SEE WHETHER THIS DRAWING IS ONE OF THEM]
REBELLIAD; OR TERR...
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
George B. Emerson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1821
The English Classical School (which would become the English High School, as opposed to the Boston Latin School for well-to-do boys destined for the ministry and other such exalted professions) was founded on Derne Street at the rear of the Massachusetts Statehouse. For the first century of its existence it would prepare white boys in working class families for gainful lives by the teaching of English, logic, civics, surveying, navigation, and geography with a strong emphasis on the development of mathematical prowess. Renouncing an opportunity to become a professor of mathematics at Harvard College, the first headmaster would be George Barrell Emerson.
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
George B. Emerson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1823
George Barrell Emerson planned a private school for young women in Boston.
Ebenezer Bailey was appointed master of the Franklin grammar school. He would be at various times a member of the city council of Boston, director of the home of reform, president of the city lyceum, and director of the Boston mechanics’ institute.
June 11, Wednesday: When King Fernando VII of Spain refused to quit Madrid before the invading French, the Cortes deposed him and set up a Council of Regency.
George Barrell Emerson got married with Olivia Buckminster, who in addition to bearing a child every other year would be his assistant in his new private school for young women.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project George B. Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1824
With the help of his bride Olivia Buckminster Emerson, Dr. George Barrell Emerson established Boston’s 1st public high school for girls. PUBLIC EDUCATION
Washington Street in downtown Boston extended at this point all the way southwest to the Rhode Island state line, although the bulk of the road traveled under the rubric “Norfold and Bristol Turnpike.” This was the only road transiting the narrow point of Boston Neck. A traffic count on this Massachusetts throughway indicated that for every mounted horsemen, there were four persons traveling in chaises. The bulk of these travelers must have been city folk, for at the time only about one rural family in seven owned such a conveyance.
A 22 inch square map of Boston first engraved in this year by William B. Annin and George G. Smith would be reissued every few years with additions by Smith, for the City Government’s Municipal Register, 1 and for School Documents. In this year, also, Abel Bowen engraved a 6 /2 inch by 4 inch map of the HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
municipality, for Snow’s HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Anthony Finley’s and Joseph Perkins’s A NEW GENERAL ATLAS: COMPRISING A COMPLETE SET OF MAPS, REPRESENTING THE GRAND DIVISIONS OF THE GLOBE, TOGETHER WITH THE SEVERAL EMPIRES, KINGDOMS AND STATES OF THE WORLD; COMPILED FROM THE BEST AUTHORITIES, AND CORRECTED BY THE MOST RECENT DISCOVERIES (60 pages). A copy of this would be in the personal library of Henry Thoreau.
THE FINLEY ATLAS
David Thompson conducted surveys to locate the “most northwest point of the Lake of the Woods.” Under Article Seven of the Treaty of Ghent, the international boundary ran through the Great Lakes to this point, thence due south to the 49th parallel. Thompson decided that this ill-defined point should be either at the present position of Kenora or at the northern point of an inlet now known as Northwest Angle Inlet. CARTOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX
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THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1830
George Barrell Emerson helped to organize a Boston Society of Natural History on the basis of what remained of the Linnaean Society, which had flourished from 1813 to 1823. He would be a very active member, holding several offices, curating one of the collections, and regularly attending meetings. Initially its function would be to offer a series of lectures on natural history to the general public in the hall of the Boston Athenaeum (which at that time was being housed in a mansion donated by James Perkins on Pearl Street). Doctor Walter Channing would be among those who would join the new society.
Six men interested in natural history established the Boston Society of Natural History, an organization through which they could pursue their common scientific interests. Devoted to collecting and studying natural history specimens, the society displayed its collections in numerous temporary facilities until 1864, when it opened the New England Museum of Natural History at the corner of Berkeley and Boyleston Streets in Boston’s Back Bay. That Museum is now known world-wide as the Museum of Science. The Museum has remained on the cutting edge of science education by developing innovative and interactive exhibits and programs that both entertain and educate. Two of the Museum’s more recent additions, the Hall Wing housing the Roger L. Nichols Gallery for temporary exhibits, and the Mugar Omni Theater, exemplify the Museum of Science’s commitment to making science fun and accessible to all. The Mugar Omni Theater, opened in 1987, utilizes state-of-the-art film technology to project larger-than-life images onto a five-story high, domed screen, creating a “you are there” experience for viewers. More than 1.6 million people visit the Museum and its more than 600 interactive exhibits each year. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
August 19, Thursday: George B. Emerson helped to found the American Institute of Instruction and became its first secretary.
By a vote of 6 over 2, the Prix de Rome went to Hector Berlioz.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 19th of 8th M 1830 / I have been so unwell this Morning that I did not feel able to attend Meeting in Town, it being preparative Meeting, the Schollars & Superintendents attend. — My wife went, & with others, report well of the Services of Wm Almy in the first & Moses Brown in the last Meeting. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 20, Friday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 20 of 8 M / Towards night Yesterday Sister Ruth returned from Foster & Scituate where she had been with Gilbert Congdon to attend Meetings with our friends Elizabeth Wing. She has had an agreeable travel of many Miles which I hope will be of use to her health - She left us by the Steam Boat at 12 OC & I trust at the time I am writing this (3 OC PM) she is safely landed in Newport My health has been so poor & I have suffered so much pain in my head & some other distress of body that I have not had the enjoyment of her visit which I might otherwise have done. — I know it is a hard lesson to learn “In whatever state we are in therewith to be content.” but I trust I have laboured for patience & been favourd with a good degree of it - & now feel thankful - tho a pretty large bleeding, active Physic, & a large blister on my Arm has not yet removed the pain from my head & eye. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1831
The Boston Society of Natural History received a charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. George B. Emerson assisted in the organization of this new society. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1832
In this year George Barrell Emerson’s wife Olivia Buckminster Emerson, who had been assisting him at his school for young women in Boston, died leaving three children ages seven, five, and three. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1834
November 12, Wednesday: George Barrell Emerson remarried with Mary Rotch Fleming, a widowed sister of Sarah Rotch Arnold, wife of James Arnold, and began to integrate himself into the extended Rotch/Arnold family.
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. described the weather of Cape Horn (you can tell that he so wanted for this to be over):
“Wednesday. The same.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1836
Under the presidency of George Barrell Emerson, the Boston Society of Natural History began a mammal collection when Dr. Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff, the Society’s 1st Curator of Comparative Anatomy assembled the bleached bones of an Asiatic elephant acquired from James Blake, that had died in a menagerie. Although there is an entry in the records that mentions an elephant named “Columbus,” the date on that entry is March 23/24, 1829 indicating that if these two records have to do with the same animal, then those bleached bones must have been in storage for awhile before their eventual assembly and display. On the other hand, a book published by Peck & Wood in 1834, A SYSTEM OF NATURAL HISTORY: CONTAINING SCIENTIFIC AND POPULAR DESCRIPTIONS OF VARIOUS ANIMALS; CHIEFLY COMPILED FROM THE WORKS OF CUVIER; GRIFFITH, RICHARDSON, GEOFFREY [GEOFFREY ST-HILAIRE] LACEPEDE [LACEPÈDE], BUFFON, GOLDSMITH, SHAW, MONTAGUE, WILSON, LEWIS AND CLARKE, AUDUBON, AND OTHER WRITERS ON NATURAL HISTORY ... stated that an elephant on display at the Society had arrived “recently” by ship but had died in Boston Harbor. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1837
Seeing that there had recently been a state-funded geological survey, the Boston Society of Natural History propositioned the Massachusetts legislature to fund also a similar botanical and zoological survey. The new president of the society he had helped form in 1831, George B. Emerson, would not only be appointed by Governor Everett as commissioner of the survey but would himself over the following nine summers, in conjunction with the botanist Dr. Dewey, perform its investigation of trees and shrubs. A circular with twenty questions was posted to some fifty landowners in the state. During his summers the schoolmaster would be visiting shipyards in Boston and New Bedford and elsewhere along the coast, along with sawmills, machine shops, and woodworking shops fashioning furniture, agricultural implements, etc.
The American Institute of Instruction, with which George B. Emerson was heavily involved, secured the appointment of Massachusetts Representative Horace Mann, Sr. as Secretary of a newly formed State Board of Education. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
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 A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1841
George B. Emerson’s MASSACHUSETTS COMMON SCHOOL SYSTEM. He became the president of the American Institute of Instruction, that he had helped to form on August 19, 1830 and for which he had at first served as Secretary — this was the association that had been instrumental in securing in 1837 the appointment of Massachusetts Representative Horace Mann, Sr. as Secretary of a newly formed State Board of Education. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1842
The Reverend Alonzo Potter, D.D., Bishop of Pennsylvania, wrote the initial part and George Barrell Emerson the final part of THE SCHOOL AND THE SCHOOLMASTER, published in this year in New-York. There would soon, by donation, be a copy of this available in each and every public school in the state of New York, and in the state of Massachusetts. SCHOOL AND SCHOOLMASTER
Isaac Sprague illustrated Professor Asa Gray’s BOTANICAL TEXT-BOOK. BOTANICAL TEXT-BOOK
Augustus Addison Gould became a corresponding member of Kongelige Norske Videnskabers Selskab of Copenhagen, Denmark, and of the Imperial Mineralogical Society of St. Petersburg, Russia. He became a HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
regular contributor to the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History. PROC. BOST. SOC. NAT. HIST. PROCEEDINGS, FOR 1842 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1843
George Barrell Emerson’s and F.W.P. Greenwood’s THE CLASSICAL READER.
Nicholas Marcellus Hentz’s “Descriptions and Figures of the Araneides of the United States,” a series, began to appear in the Boston Journal of Natural History. This material on spiders would be accessed by Henry Thoreau. Dr. and Mrs. Hentz relocated from Florence, Alabama to Tuscaloosa, where they would conduct an academy for young white ladies. In this year, Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz’s DE LARA, OR, THE MOORISH BRIDE.
Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, the Boston Society of Natural History’s Curator of Entomology, reported that the society’s insect collection was being destroyed by an Anthreni infestation. To contain this infestation, the mammalian collections would be subjected to steam heat and the bird collection would be baked. PROCEEDINGS, FOR 1843 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1844
George B. Emerson and Professor Asa Gray of Harvard College measured the great elm (Ulmus americana) on Boston Common, to which popular tradition had assigned a great and significant antiquity, establishing its circumference at 16 feet 1 inch. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
Isaac Sprague met Professor Asa Gray of Harvard College. Over the years he would illustrate a number of the
professor’s works, such as, in 1856, the 2d edition of his MANUAL OF THE BOTANY OF THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES, in 1848-1849, 186 plates for his GENERA FLORAE AMERICAE BOREALI-ORIENTALIS, and in 1857, the atlas for his “Botany. Phanerogamia” in Charles Wilkes’s UNITED STATES EXPLORING EXPEDITION DURING THE YEARS 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, AND 1842. He would also illustrate Professor Asa Gray’s and John Torrey’s various volumes of the US War Department’s REPORTS OF EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS, TO ASCERTAIN THE MOST PRACTICABLE AND ECONOMICAL ROUTE FOR A RAILROAD ROUTE FROM THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER TO THE PACIFIC OCEAN (1855-1860). HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1846
In addition to his studies at the Theological College, with the approval and encouragement of the abbot of the monastery at Brünn, Franz Cyrill Napp (1792-1867), Gregor Mendel attended lectures on fruit-growing and viticulture. Napp, who had written a manual on plant breeding, was also chairman of the Pomological Association, and served on the committee of the local Agricultural Society. The lectures were delivered at the Brünn Philosophical Institute by Professor Franz Diebl (1770-1859), who was well-known for his articles and books about plant breeding.
From this year until 1864, the 5 volumes of Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker’s SPECIES FILICUM (THE SPECIES OF FERNS).
Some of the conservationist insights which would be presented in the following year by George Perkins Marsh before the Agricultural Society of Rutland County, Vermont were elaborated in George B. Emerson’s A REPORT ON THE TREES AND SHRUBS GROWING NATURALLY IN THE FORESTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. PUBLISHED AGREEABLY TO AN ORDER OF THE LEGISLATURE, BY THE COMMISSIONERS ON THE ZOOLOGICAL AND BOTANICAL SURVEY OF THE STATE was published in Boston HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
(Dutton and Wentworth, State Printers, No. 37, Congress Street) with illustrations by Isaac Sprague.
EMERSON’S TREES/SHRUBS
A copy of this would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library and a snippet from page 511 about the “flexibility, lightness, and resiliency” of the wood of the Tilia Americana, also called the basswood, or lime, or linden tree, would find its way into A WEEK. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
A WEEK: (September 2, Monday, 1839) The bass, Tilia Americana, also called the lime or linden, which was a new tree to us, overhung the water with its broad and rounded leaf, interspersed with clusters of small hard berries now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade for us sailors. The inner bark of this genus is the bast, the material of the fisherman’s matting, and the ropes and peasant’s shoes of which the Russians make so much use, and also of nets and a coarse cloth in some places. According to poets, this was once Philyra, one of the Oceanides. The ancients are said to have used its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and for a kind of paper called Philyra. They also made bucklers of its wood, “on account of its flexibility, lightness, and resiliency.” It was once much used for carving, and is still in demand for sounding-boards of piano-fortes and panels of carriages, and for various uses for which toughness and flexibility are required. Baskets and cradles are made of the twigs. Its sap affords sugar, and the honey made from its flowers is said to be preferred to any other. Its leaves are in some countries given to cattle, a kind of chocolate has been made of its fruit, a medicine has been prepared from an infusion of its flowers, and finally, the charcoal made of its wood is greatly valued for gunpowder.
CHOCOLATE LINDEN TREE HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1847
Schoolmaster George Barrell Emerson purchased 30 nearly barren sandy acres on a promontory that stretched into Boston Bay on the northeastern side of Chelsea harbor, where he would conduct a long-term experiment in the cultivation of pleasant trees. Many European varieties of oak, beech, birch, linden, maple, elm, ash, mountain ash, and pine would be planted, in order to discover whether these imports might prove hardier than the American species that had so far failed to colonize this spot along the coast.
The Boston Society of Natural History purchased a building on Mason Street known as the Massachusetts Medical College. PROCEEDINGS, FOR 1847 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1848
Nicholas Marcellus Hentz relocated from Tuskegee, Alabama to Columbus, Georgia.
Gregor Mendel, in his 4th year of studies at the Theological College, attended additional lectures on agriculture at the Brünn Philosophical Institute. The teacher was Professor Franz Diebl (1770-1859). In June, Mendel received a certificate of completion from the College, and in early August he became a parish priest in the collegiate church at Altbrünn.
The Boston Society of Natural History, which had been organized in 1830 out of what remained of the Linnaean Society that had flourished from 1813 to 1823, moved into its new quarters on Mason Street in the building known as the Massachusetts Medical College. PROCEEDINGS, FOR 1848
Dr. Henry Jacob Bigelow got married with Susan Sturgis (1825-1853), a daughter of William Sturgis and Elizabeth Davis Sturgis of Boston.
Up to this point Professor Jacob Bigelow’s FLORULA BOSTONIENSIS, A COLLECTION OF PLANTS OF BOSTON AND ITS VICINITY had been the standard flora for the New England region. With the publication of Fisher Professor of Natural History in Harvard College Asa Gray, M.D.’s A MANUAL OF THE BOTANY OF THE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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NORTHERN UNITED STATES, FROM NEW ENGLAND TO WISCONSIN AND SOUTH TO OHIO AND PENNSYLVANIA INCLUSIVE, (THE MOSSES AND LIVERWORTS BY WM. S. SULLIVANT,) ARRANGED ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL SYSTEM; WITH AN INTRODUCTION, CONTAINING A REDUCTION OF THE GENERA TO THE LINNÆAN ARTIFICIAL CLASSES AND ORDERS, OUTLINES OF THE ELEMENTS OF BOTANY, A GLOSSARY, ETC. (Boston & Cambridge:
James Munroe and Company, London: John Chapman),2 Professor Bigelow’s contribution had been made
2. This volume would be owned by Henry Thoreau and by Ellery Channing, and Channing’s copy, with his typical scrawling all over it, is now at the Concord Free Public Library. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
obsolete.
MANUAL OF THE BOTANY
In this year Professor Gray also put out the 1st volume of his GENERA OF THE PLANTS OF THE UNITED STATES (you can now purchase a polyester necktie, guaranteed not to eat you alive, printed with Isaac Sprague’s illustration of the Venus Flytrap Dionæa muscipula from this volume). HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1851
July 27, Sunday: Henry Thoreau visited the famous Nyssa multiflora Tupelo tree at Cohasset that George B. Emerson had famously gone 25 miles to see, that Isaac Sprague had illustrated in 1846 in A REPORT ON THE TREES AND SHRUBS GROWING NATURALLY IN THE FORESTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. PUBLISHED AGREEABLY TO AN ORDER OF THE LEGISLATURE, BY THE COMMISSIONERS ON THE ZOOLOGICAL AND BOTANICAL SURVEY OF THE STATE:
EMERSON’S BOOK IN FULL
July 27, Sunday: walked from Cohasset to Duxbury & sailed thence to Clark’s Island. Visited the large Tupelo Tree Nyssa multiflora in Scituate whose rounded & open top like some umbelliferous plants I could see from Mr Sewal’s3 –the tree which Geo Emerson went 25 miles to see– Called sometimes Snag tree & swamp Hornbeam also Pepperidge & Gumtree. Hard to split– We have it in Concord.4 Cardinal 3. This Mr. Sewal of Scituate –be it remembered– was Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr., the reverend daddy of the young lady to whom Henry Thoreau had in 1840 proposed, Miss Ellen Devereux Sewall. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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flower in bloom. Scit. meeting houses on very high ground –the principal one a landmark for sailors saw the buckthorn which is naturalized. one of Marshfield meet. houses on the height of land on my road– The country generally descends westerly toward the sources of Taunton river.–
After taking the road by Webster’s beyond South Marshfield I walked a long way at noon hot & thirsty before I could find a suitable place to sit & eat my dinner –a place where the shade & the sward pleased me. At length I was obliged to put up with a small shade close to the ruts where the only stream I had seen for some time crossed the road. Here also numerous robins [American Robin Turdus migratorius] came to cool & wash themselves & to drink. They stood in the water up to their bellies from time to time wetting their wings & tails & also ducking their heads & sprinkling the water over themselves –then they sat on a fence near by to dry. Then a goldfinch [American Goldfinch Carduleis tristis] came & did the same accompanied by the less brilliant
4. They did have it in Concord, and Thoreau visited this tree in Cohasset in 1851 — however, the specimen that is now preserved at the Harvard herbarium as Specimen #20 in Folder #4 happens to be one collected by Thoreau in New Bedford on June 17, 1857. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
female. These birds evidently enjoyed their bath greatly.– & it seemed indispensable to them.
A neighbor of Websters told me that he had hard onto 1600 acres & was still buying more –a farm & factory within the year –cultivated 150 acres– I saw 12 acres of potatoes together –the same of rye & wheat & more methinks of buck wheat. 15 or 16 men Irish mostly at 10 dollars a month doing the work of 50 with a yankee overseer long a resident of Marshfield named Wright. Would eat only the produce of his farm during the few weeks he was at home –brown bread & butter –& milk –& sent out for a pig’s cheek to eat with his greens – ate only what grew on his farm but drank more than ran on his farm Took refuge from the rain at a Mr Stetsons in Duxbury –told me an anecdote which he heard Charles Emerson tell of meeting Webster at a splendid house of ill fame in Washington where he (Emerson) had gone unwittingly to call on a lady whose acquaintance he had formed in the stage. Mr Webster coming into the room unexpectedly –& patting him on the shoulder remarks “This is no place for young men like you”5 I forgot to say that I passed the Winslow House now belonging to Webster– This land was granted to the family in 1637. Sailed with tavern keeper Windsor who was going out mackreling. 7 men stripping up their clothes each bearing an arm full of wood & one some new potatoes walked to the boats then shoved them out a dozen rods over the mud –then rowed half a mile to the schooner of 43 tons. They expected be gone about a week & to begin to fish perhaps the next morning –fresh mackerel which they carried to Boston. Had 4 dories & commonly fished from them. Else they fished on the starboard side aft where their lines hung ready with the old baits on 5. The entirety of Charles Chauncy Emerson’s anecdote about Senator Daniel Webster at the Washington DC whorehouse would for some undisclosed reason (certainly not to save the reputation of our nation’s capitol city, since it was during this period widely renowned for its many whorehouses) be silently elided by the editors of the 1906 edition of Thoreau’s journal. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2 to a man I had the experience of going on a mackerel cruise.
They went aboard their schooner in a leisurely way this Sunday evening with a fair but very slight wind– The sun now setting clear & shining on the vessel after several thunder showers. I was struck by the small quantity of supplies which they appeared to take. We climbed aboard and there we were in a mackerel schooner– The baits were not dry on the hooks. Windsor cast overboard the foul juice of mackerels mixed with rain water which remained in his trough. There was the mill in which to grind up the mackerel for bait –& the trough to hold it & the long handled dipper to cast it overboard with. and already in the harbor we saw the surface rippled with schools of small mackerel. They proceeded leisurely to weigh anchor –& then to raise their two sails– There was one passenger going for health or amusement –who had been to California. I had the experience of going a mackereling –though I was landed on an island before we got out of the harbor. They expected to commence fishing the next morning. It had been a very warm day with frequent thunder showers– I had walked from Cohasset to Duxbury –& had walked about the latter town to find a passage to Clarks Island about 3 miles distant. But no boat could stir they said at that state of the tide.6 The tide was down & boats were left high & dry At length I was directed to Windsors tavern where perchance I might find some mackerel fishers who were going to sail that night to be ready for fishing in the morning –& as they would pass near the island they would take me. I found it so Windsor himself was going– I told him he was the very man for me –but I must wait an hour– So I ate supper with them– Then one after another of his crew was seen straggling to the shore –for the most part in high boots –some made of India rubber –some with their pants stripped up –there were 7 for this schooner beside a passenger & myself The leisurely manner in which they proceeded struck me. I had taken off my shoes & stockings & prepared to wade. Each of the 7 took an armful of pine wood & walked with it to the 2 boats which lay at high water mark in the mud –then they resolved that each should bring one more armful & that would be enough. They had already got a barrel of water and had some more in the schooner –also a 6. Here Thoreau begins to tell the same story all over again in a different form, and the editors of the 1906 edition of the journal would inform us that the reason for this repetition is clear to them — that this repetition indicated that Thoreau was preparing the account, to make use of it later in CAPE COD. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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CHARLES CHAUNCY EMERSON HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX
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bucket of new potatoes. Then dividing into two parties we pulled & shoved the boats a dozen rods over the mud & water till they floated –then rowed half a mile or more over the shallow water to the little schooner & climbed aboard– many seals had their heads out– We gathered about the helmsman and talked about the compass which was affected by the iron in the vessel, &c &c
Clark’s Island Sunday night On Friday night Dec 8th o.s. the Pilgrims exploring in the shallop landed on Clark’s Island (so called from the Master’s mate of the May Flower) where they spent 3 nights & kept their first sabbath. On Monday or the 11th o.s. they landed on the rock. This island contains about 86 acres and was once covered with red cedars which were sold at Boston for gate posts– I saw a few left –one 2 ft in diameter at the ground –which was probably standing when the pilgrims came. Ed. Watson who could remember them nearly fifty years –had observed but little change in them. Hutchinson calls this one of the best islands in Mass. Bay. The Town kept it at first as a sacred place –but finally sold it in 1690 to Sam. Lucas, Elkanah Watson, & Geo. Morton. Saw a Stag’s horn Sumach 5 or 6 inches in diameter and 18 ft high– Here was the Marsh golden rod Solidago laevigata –not yet in blossom –a small bluish flower in the marshes which they called rosemary –a kind of Chenopodium which appeared distinct from the common –and a short oval leaved set looking plant which I suppose is Glaux Maritima sea milkwort or Saltwort.
Scates-eggs called in England Scate-barrows from their form on the sand. The old cedars were flat-topped spreading the stratum of the wind drawn out– HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1852
May 13, Thursday: Henry Thoreau made an entry in his journal that he was later to copy into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:
[Paragraph 72] To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene — a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, like crabs in cockle-shells rushing to the door to see who is there. They flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. The very lights of the world are frequently such hard cases with a crabbed inhabitant — and you must bore them in order to get at them. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth — the lowest primitive rock.1 Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of2 who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtlest truth? I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity — for while there are manners and compliments we do not meet. We do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brute beasts do — or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do.
1.Compare LUKE 6:47/8. 2.An allusion to The Tempest, 4.1.156-57.
May 13. The best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. They dwell in form. They flatter and study effect, only more finely than the rest. The world to me appears uninhabited. My neighbors select granite for the underpinning of their houses and barns; they build their fences of stone; but they do not themselves rest on an underpinning of granite. Their sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in your thought with the purest and subtlest truth? While there are manners and compliments we do not meet. I accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity. They do not teach me the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brute beasts do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. I cannot associate with those: who do not understand me. Rain to-day and yesterday, with fires in house. The birds –sparrows and yellowbirds– seeking shelter in the wood-pile. Where are the men who dwell in thought? Talk, — that is palaver! at which men hurrah and clap! The manners of the bear are so far good that he does not pay you any compliments.
P. M. — To Walden in rain. A May storm, yesterday and to-day; rather cold. The fields are green now, and the cows find good feed. The female Populus grandidentata, whose long catkins are now growing old, is now leafing out. The flowerless (male?) ones show half-unfolded silvery leaves. Both these and the aspens are quite green (the bark) in the rain. A young, slender maple-like bush from four to ten feet high just leafing out and in blossom, their few scarlet or crimson blossoms in the rain very handsome. It answers to the description of the red maple, but is it not different? I see an oak against the pines, apparently a red oak, now decidedly in the gray, — a light breaking through mist. All these expanding leaves and flower-buds are much more beautiful in the rain, — covered with clear drops. They have lost some of their beauty when I have shaken the drops off. They who do not walk in the woods in the rain never behold them in their freshest, most radiant and blooming beauty. The white birch is a very handsome object, with its golden tassels three inches long, hanging directly down, amid the just expanding yellowish-green leaves, their perpendicularity contrasting with the direction of the branches, geometry mixed with nature. The catkins, beaten down by the rain, also strew the ground. The shrub oaks, covered with rain- drops, are very handsome, masses of variegated red-budded tassels and opening leaves, some redder, some HDT WHAT? INDEX
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lighter green or yellowish. They appear more forward than the oak trees. The red and black oaks are more forward than the white, which last is just opening its buds. The sweetfern shows minute green leaves expanding. The shad-blossom with pinkish scales, or Emerson calls them “purple or faint crimson” “stipules.” Botryapium (?). The amelanchiers (Botryapium, June-berry, which I suppose is the taller, and ovalis (Emerson), swamp sugar-pear, the shorter and more crowded) are now the prevailing flowers in the woods and swamps and sprout- lands, and a very beautiful, delicate flower the former is, with its purplish stipules and delicate drooping white blossoms, — so large and graceful a tree or bush. The shad-blossom days in the woods. The pines have started, white pines the most. These last are in advance of the white oak. The low early blueberry (Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum) (V. tenellum Big.) is just in blossom, and the Cerasus Virginiana, dwarf choke-cherry. The birds are silent and in their coverts, excepting the black and white creepers and the jay and a brown thrasher. You know not what has become of all the rest. Channing heard the quail yesterday. The cowslips, in rounded bunches a foot in diameter, make a splendid show, even fresher and brighter, methinks, in the rain. The Viola pedata and ovata now begin to be abundant on warm, sandy slopes. The leaves of the lupine, six inches high, are handsome, covered with rain-drops. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1853
November 6. Sunday. 2.30 P.M. — To Lee’s Cliff. I saw yesterday for a moment by the river a small olivaceous-yellow bird; possibly a goldfinch, but I think too yellow. I see some gossamer on the causeway this afternoon, though it is very windy; but it requires such a day as October 31st. It is remarkable how little we attend to what is passing before us constantly, unless our genius directs our attention that way. There are these little sparrows with white in tail [Vesper Sparrow Pooecetes gramineus], perhaps the prevailing bird of late, which have flitted before me so many falls and springs, and yet they have been as it were strangers to me, and I have not inquired whence they came or whither they were going, or what their habits were. It is surprising how little most of us are contented to know about the sparrows which drift about in the air before us just before the first snows. I hear the downy woodpecker’s metallic tchip or peep. Now I see where many a bird builded last spring or summer. These are leaves which do not fall. How similar in the main the nests of birds and squirrels and mice! I am not absolutely certain that the mice do not make the whole nest in a bush sometimes, instead of building on a birds nest. There is in the squirrel in this respect an approach to the bird, and, beside, one of his family is partially winged. Mere, too, is a sort of link between quadrupeds and birds. I perceive that the starting of the amelanchier buds is a very common phenomenon, this fall at least, and when partially unfolded they are, frost-bitten. See a few robins. Climbed the wooded hill by Holden’s spruce swamp and got a novel view of the river and Fair Haven Bay through the almost leafless woods. How much handsomer a river or lake such as ours, seen thus through a foreground of scattered or else partially leafless trees. though at a. considerable distance this side of it, especially if the water is open, without wooded shores or isles! It is the most perfect and beautiful of all frames, which yet the sketcher is commonly careful to brush aside. I mean a pretty thick foreground, a view of the distant water through the near forest, through a thousand little vistas, as we are rushing toward the former, -that intimate mingling of wood and water which excites an expectation which the near and open view rarely realizes. We prefer that some part be concealed, which our imagination may navigate. Still the Canada snapdragon, yarrow, autumnal dandelion, tansy, shepherd’s-purse, silvery cinquefoil, witch- hazel. The sweet-briar hips are abundant and fresh, a dozen sometimes crowded in a space of two inches square. Their form is a handsome oval with a flat apex. Is it not somewhat like an olive-jar? The hips hold on, then, though the haws have fallen, and the prinos, too, for the most part. There are also some fragrant and green leaves left. These are about the prettiest red berries that we have. Gathered some of those fine large mocker-nut (?) hickory nuts, which are now in their prime (Carya tomentosa?). I perceived a faint sweetness in the dry, crisp leaves on the ground (there were some also on the tree), and I perceive that Emerson speaks of their resinous-scented leaves. The witch-hazel spray is peculiar and interesting, with little knubs at short intervals, zigzag, crinkle-crankle.
How happens it? Did the leaves grow so close? The bud is long against the stem, with a neck to it. The fever- bush has small roundish buds, two or three commonly together, probably the blossom-r-buds. The rhodora buds are purplish, as well as the not yet dry seed-vessels, smaller but somewhat like the swamp-pink. The alternate cornel, small, very dark reddish buds, oil forking, smooth, slender twigs at long intervals. The panicked andromeda, minute pointed red buds, hugging the curving stuns. The plump, roundish, club-shaped, well- protected buds of the alders, and rich purplish or mulberry catkins, three, four, or five together. The red maple buds, showing three or more sets of scales. The remarkable roundish, plump red buds of the high blueberry. The four-sided, long (five eighths of air inch), spear-head-shaped buds of the Viburnum Lentago,
at the end of forked twigs, probably blossom-buds, with minute leaf-buds lower on sides of twigs. Sonic sallow buds already burst their scales and show the woolly catkins, reddish at base. Little brownish, scale-like buds on the ends of the red cedar leaves or leafets (branchlets), probably male blossom-buds. The creeping juniper HDT WHAT? INDEX
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berries are yet green, with three white, swelling lips -it apex and very minute buds in the arils of the leaves. I am struck: with the variety in the form and size of the walnuts in shells, — some with a slight neck and slightly club-shaped perhaps the most common; some much longer, nearly twice as long as wide; some, like the mocker- nut, slightly depressed or rather flattened above; sonic pignuts fiery large and regularly obovate, an inch and a quarter in diameter. A sweet-briar hip; but most are more regular jar-shape. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1854
March 6, Monday: Henry Thoreau was being written to by Horace Greeley / McElrath in New-York. In the afternoon he walked to Goose Pond. Greeley returned Thoreau’s second $2.00 because a thief in the newspaper office had been apprehended.7 Office of the Tribune[,] New York, 6 March 185[4] Mr. Henry D[.] Thoreau[ ] Sir: Yours of [3rd] to Mr[] Greeley is before us and we will send you the Tribune though the money has not reached us[.] Very [Respy,] Greeley & [McElrath] [pr] S[.] Sinclair[e]
New York Mar. 6, 1854. Dear Sir: I presume your first letter containing the $2 ha was robbed by our general mail robber at New Haven, who has just been sent to the State Prison. Your second letter has probably failed to receive due at- tention, owing to a press of business. But I will make all right. You ought to have the Semi-Weekly, and I shall order it [Page 2] sent you one year on trial; if you choose to write me a letter or s[o] some time, very well; if not, we will
7. This thief would do time. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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be even without that. Thoreau, I want you to do something on my [urging]. I want you to collect and ar- range your Miscella- n[i]es, and send them to me. Put in ‘Katahdin,’ ‘Carlyle,’ ‘A Winter Wood,’ and ‘Canada,’ &c. and I will try to find a pub- lisher who will bring them out at his own
[Page 3] risk and (I hope) to your ultimate profit. If you have any thing new to put with them, very well; but let us have the about a l2 mo volume whenever you can get it ready, and see if there is not something to your credit in the bank of Fortune. Yours, Horace Greeley. Henry D. Thoreau, Esq. Concord, Mass.
Waldo Emerson had advanced some money against subscription promises of various Concordians, including the Thoreau family, in order to enable Michael Flannery to send for his wife Ann and children from Ireland. At this point Thoreau was able to write the letter for this Irish laborer, sending for his family. He noted in particular Flannery’s concern that his wife be careful and not let their children fall overboard due to the rocking of the ship. THOREAU ON THE IRISH
March 6. A cool morning. The bare water here and there on the meadow begins to look smooth, and I look to see it rippled by a muskrat. The earth has to some extent frozen dry, for the drying of the earth goes on in the cold night as well as the warm day. The alders and hedgerows are still silent, emit no notes.
P.M. — To Goose Pond. According to G. Emerson, maple sap sometimes begins to flow in the middle of February, but usually in the second week of March, especially in a clear, bright day with a westerly wind, after a frosty night. The brooks--the swift ones and those in swamps--open before the river; indeed some of the first have been open the better part of the winter. I saw trout glance in the Mill Brook this afternoon, though near its HDT WHAT? INDEX
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sources, in Hubbard’s Close, it is still covered with dark, icy snow, and the river into which it empties has not broken up. Can they have come up from the sea? Like a film or shadow they glance before the eye, and you see where the mud is roiled by them. Saw children checker berrying in a meadow. I see the skunk-cabbage started about the spring at head of Hubbard’s Close, amid the green grass, and what looks like the first probing of the skunk. The snow is now all off on meadow ground, in thick evergreen woods, and on the south sides of hills, but it is still deep in sprout-lands, on the north sides of hills, and generally in deciduous woods. In sprout lands it is melted beneath, but upheld by the bushes. What bare ground we have now is due then not so much to the increased heat of the sun and warmth of the air as to the little frost there was in the ground in so many localities, This remark applies with less force, however, to the south sides of hills. The ponds are hard enough for skating again. Heard and saw the first blackbird, flying east over the Deep Cut, with a tchuck, tchuck, and finally a split whistle. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1855
George B. Emerson turned his school for young ladies in Boston over to a nephew (he would continue to tutor and counsel former students, and would remain active in educational affairs). He began to spend more time on philanthropic activity, serving, for example, on a commission responsible for recruiting teachers for schools for freedmen in the South during the Civil War. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1856
In 1848 Professor Asa Gray had issued an edition that would be owned by Henry Thoreau, A MANUAL OF THE BOTANY OF THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES, FROM NEW ENGLAND TO WISCONSIN AND SOUTH TO OHIO AND PENNSYLVANIA INCLUSIVE (THE MOSSES AND LIVERWORTS BY WM. S. SULLIVANT), ARRANGED ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL SYSTEM (Boston: J. Munroe and company), and in this year he issued a 2d edition (NY: G.P. Putnam & co) that would also be owned by Thoreau (in addition to Professor Gray’s BOTANICAL TEXTBOOK). MANUAL OF THE BOTANY
(The best study of Thoreau’s multiple references to Gray’s botanies is to be found at the back of THE MAINE WOODS.) MANUAL OF THE BOTANY
This new edition contained illustrations by Isaac Sprague.
In this year the Calanthe dominii flowered, the world’s 1st planned orchid hybrid (raised by John Dominy for Veitch & Sons). PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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January 19, Saturday: The great elm in from of postmaster Charles B. Davis’s house in Concord was chopped down, as explained in Henry Thoreau’s journal: “Davis and the neighbors were much alarmed by the creaking in the late storms, for fear it would fall on their roofs. It stands two or three feet into Davis’s yard” “Four men, cutting at once, began to fell the big elm at 10 A.M., went to dinner at 12, and got through at 2:30 P.M. They used a block and tackle with five balls, fastened to the base of a buttonwood, and drawn by a horse ...” “The tree was so sound I think it might have lived fifty years longer; but Mrs. Davis said that she would not like to spend another such a week at the last before it was cut down.” Afterwards, Thoreau would write: “I have attended the felling and, so to speak, the funeral of this old citizen of the town...” (we note that someone has planted another elm in place of that old tree, on the east side of the Concord Art Center).
Thoreau for the 10th time (Dr. Bradley P. Dean has noticed) deployed in his journal a weather term that had been originated by Luke Howard: “There were eight or ten courses of clouds, so broad that with equal intervals of blue sky they occupied the whole width of the heavens, broad white cirro-stratus in perfectly regular curves from west to east across the whole sky.”
Thoreau made a reference to Natick, Massachusetts and to Oliver N. Bacon’s and Samuel Hunt’s A HISTORY OF NATICK, FROM ITS FIRST SETTLEMENT IN 1651 TO THE PRESENT TIME: WITH NOTICES OF THE FIRST WHITE FAMILIES, AND ALSO AN ACCOUNT OF THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, OCT. 16, 1851, REV. MR. HUNT’S ADDRESS AT THE CONSECRATION OF DELL PARK CEMETERY, &C.... A HISTORY OF NATICK
January 19: Another bright winter day. P.M. — To river to get some water asclepias to see what birds’ nests are made of. The only open place in the river between Hunt’s Bridge and the railroad bridge is a small space against Merrick’s pasture just below the Rock.8 As usual, just below a curve, in shallow water, with the added force of the Assabet. The willow osiers of last year’s growth on the pollards in Shattuck’s row, Merrick’s pasture, from four to seven 8. Hubbard’s Bridge and, I have no doubt. Lee’s Bridge, as I learned in my walk the next day. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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feet long, are perhaps as bright as in the spring, the lower half yellow, the upper red, but they are a little shriveled in the bark. Measured against the great elm in front of Charles Davis’s on the Boston road, which he is having cut down. The chopper, White, has taken off most of the limbs and just begun, tried his axe, on the foot of the tree. He will probably fall it on Monday, or the 21st. At the smallest place between the ground and the limbs, seven feet from the ground, it is fifteen feet and two inches in circumference; at one foot from the ground on the lowest side, twenty-three feet and nine inches. White is to have ten dollars for taking off the necessary limbs and cutting it down merely, help being found him, He began on Wednesday. Davis and the neighbors were much alarmed by the creaking in the late storms, for fear it would fall on their roofs. It stands two or three feet into Davis’s yard. As I came home through the village at 8.15 P.M., by a bright moonlight, the moon nearly full and not more than 18° from the zenith, the wind northwest, but not strong, and the air pretty cold, I saw the melon-rind arrangement of the clouds on a larger scale and more distinct than ever before. There were eight or ten courses of clouds, so broad that with equal intervals of blue sky they occupied the whole width of the heavens, broad white cirro-stratus in perfectly regular curves from west to east across the whole sky. The four middle ones, occupying the greater part of the visible cope, were particularly distinct. They were all as regularly arranged as the lines on a melon, and with much straighter sides, as if cut with a knife. I hear that it attracted the attention of those who were abroad at 7 P.M., and now, at 9 P.M., it is scarcely less remarkable. On one side of the heavens, north or south, the intervals of blue look almost black by contrast. There is now, at nine, a strong wind from the northwest. Why do these bars extend cast and west? Is it the influence of the sun, which set so long ago? or of the rotation of the earth? The bars which I notice so often, morning and evening, are apparently connected with the sun at those periods, BOTANIZING In Oliver N. Bacon’s History of Natick, page 235, it is said that, of phænogamous plants, “upwards of 800 species were collected from Natick soil in three years’ time, by 11 single individual.” I suspect it was Bacon the surveyor. There is given a list of those which are rare in that vicinity. Among them are the following which I do not know to grow here: Actæa rubra (W.),9 Asclepias tuberosa,10 Alopecurus pratensis,11 Corallorhiza odontorhiza (?) (Nutt.), Drosera filiformis (Nutt.), Ledum latifolium,12 Malaxis lilifolia (W.) (what in Gray?), Sagina procumbens.13 Among these rare there but common here are Calla Virginica, Glecoma hederacea, Iris prismatica, Lycopus Virginicus, Mikania scandens, Prunus borealis, Rhodora Canadensis, Xyris aquatica, Zizania aquatica. They, as well as we, have Equisetum hyemale, Kalmia glauca, Liatris scariosa, Ulmus fulva, Linnæa borealis, Pyrola maculata, etc., etc. Bacon quotes White, who quotes Old Colony Memorial account of manners and customs, etc., of our ancestors. Bacon says that the finest elm in Natick stands in front of Thomas F. Hammond’s house, and was set out “about the year 1760.” “The trunk, five feet from the ground, measures fifteen and a half feet.” G. Emerson gives it different account, q.v. Observed within the material of a robin’s nest, this afternoon, a cherry-stone. Gathered some dry water milkweed stems to compare with the materials of the bird’s nest [Yellow Warbler Dendroica petechia] of the 18th. The bird used, I am almost certain, the fibres of the bark of the stem, –not the pods,– just beneath the epidermis; only the bird’s is older and more fuzzy and finer, like worn twine or string. The fibres and bark have otherwise the same appearance under the microscope. I stripped off some bark about one sixteenth of an inch wide and six inches long and, separating ten or twelve fibres from the epidermis, rolled it in my fingers, making a thread about the ordinary size. This I could not break by direct pulling, and no man could. I doubt if a thread of flax or hemp of the same size could be made so strong. What an admirable material for the Indian’s fish-line! I can easily get much longer fibres. I hold a piece of the dead weed in my hands, strip off a narrow shred of the bark before my neighbor’s eyes and separate ten or twelve fibres as fine as hair, roll them in my fingers, and offer him the thread to try its strength. He is surprised and mortified to find that he cannot break it. Probably both the Indian and the bird discovered for themselves this same (so to call it) wild hemp. The corresponding fibres of the mikania seem not so divisible, become not so fine and fuzzy; though somewhat similar, are not nearly so strong. I have a hang-bird’s nest from the riverside, made almost entirely of this, in narrow shreds or strips with the epidermis on, wound round and round the twigs and woven into a basket. That is, this bird has used perhaps the strongest fibres which the fields afforded and which most civilized men have not detected. Knocked down the bottom of that summer yellowbird’s nest made on the oak at the Island last summer. It is chiefly of fern wool and also, apparently, some sheep’s wool(?), with a fine green moss (apparently that which 9. Found since. 10. Probably here. 11. Found since. 12. Found since. 13. Found since. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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grows on button-bushes) inmixed, and some milkweed fibre, and all very firmly agglutinated together. Some shreds of grape-vine bark about it. Do not know what portion of the whole nest it is.
July 6, Wednesday: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway preached to his congregation in Washington DC that “All other war yields to civil war in terror,” and yet that “hypocrisy is worse than war.” He worked up to the following concluding statement:
I hear the flutter of the Angel’s wings as he comes to roll away the stone and break the seal of the Slave Power.
Whereupon he turned to the organist and signalled to begin the choir’s prepared concluding hymn. However, the choir was so dumbstruck by what their pastor had just uttered that the organ played the entire piece while they stood with their mouths closed. When the music concluded, the reverend delivered a quick benediction and the thing was over and the assembly filed out of the church in silence. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II
July 6. P.M. — To Assabet Bath. Campanula aparinoides, roadside opposite centaurea, several days. Early low blueberries ripe. Crossed the river at bath place. On the sandy bank opposite, saw a wood tortoise voraciously eating sorrel leaves, under my face. In A. Hosmer's ice-bared meadow south of Turnpike, hear the distressed or anxious peet of a peetweet, and see it hovering over its young, half grown, which runs beneath and suddenly hides securely in the grass when but few feet from me. White avens, evidently Bigelow's Geum album (which Gray makes only a variety of G. Virginianum), a good while, very rough and so much earlier than the G. Virginianum that only one flower remains. The heads have attained their full size, with twisted tails to the awns, while the other will not open for some days. I think Bigelow must be right. Lysimachia lanceolata, a day or two. Rhus typhina in our yard; how long? Did not see it out in New Bedford ten days ago. There is a young red mulberry in the lower hedge beneath the celtis. G. Emerson says the sweet-briar was doubtless introduced, yet, according to Bancroft, Gosnold found it on the Elizabeth Isles. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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August 30, Saturday/31, Sunday: Frederick Brown (2) was killed at Osawatomie, Kansas.
“BLEEDING KANSAS” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Aug. 30. Rain again in the night, as well as most of yesterday, raising the river a second time. They say there has not been such a year as this for more than half a century, —for winter cold, summer heat, and rain.
P.M. — To Vaccinium Oxycoccus Swamp. Fair weather, clear and rather cool. Pratt shows me at his shop a bottle filled with alcohol and camphor. The alcohol is clear and the camphor beautifully crystallized at the bottom for nearly an inch in depth, in the form of small feathers, like a boar frost. He has read that this is as good a barometer as any. It stands quite still, and has not been unstoppled for a year; yet some days the alcohol will be quite clear, and even no camphor will be seen, and again it will be quite full of fine feathery particles, or it will be partly clear, as to-day. Bidens connata abundant at Moore’s Swamp, how long? The aspect of some of what I have called the swamp Solidago stricta there at present makes me doubt if it be not more than a variety, the leaves are so broad, smooth (i.e. uncurled or wrinkled), and thick, and some cauline ones so large, almost speciosa-like, to say nothing of size of rays. The Aster puniceus is hardly yet in prime; its Great umbel-shaped tops not yet fully out. Its leaves are pretty generally whitened with mildew and unsightly. Even the chelone, where prostrate, has put forth roots from its stem, near the top. The sarothra is now apparently in prime on the Great Fields, and comes near being open now, at 3 P.M. Bruised, it has the fragrance of sorrel and lemon, rather pungent or stinging, like a bee. Hypericum corymbosum lingers still, with perforatum. I have come out this afternoon a-cranberrying, chiefly to gather some of the small cranberry, Vaccinium Oxycoccus, which Emerson says is the common cranberry of the north of Europe. This was a small object, yet not to be postponed, on account of imminent frosts, i.e., if I would know this year the flavor of the European cranberry as compared with our larger kind. I thought I should like to have a dish of this sauce on the table at Thanksgiving of my own gathering. I could hardly make up my mind to come this way, it seemed so poor an object to spend the afternoon on. I kept foreseeing a lame conclusion, — how I should cross the Great Fields, look into Beck Stowe’s, and then retrace my steps no richer than before. In fact, I expected little of this walk, yet it did pass through the side of my mind that somehow, on this very account (my small expectation), it would turn out well, as also the advantage of having some purpose, however small, to be accomplished — of letting your deliberate wisdom and foresight in the house to some extent direct and control your steps. If you would really, take a position outside the street and daily life of men, you must have deliberately planned your course, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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you must have business which is not your neighbors’ business, which they cannot understand. For only absorbing employment prevails, succeeds, tallies all space, occupies territory, determines the future of individuals and states, drives Kansas out of your head, and actually and permanently occupies the only desirable and free Kansas against all border ruffians. The attitude of resistance is one of weakness, inasmuch as it only faces an enemy; it has its back to all that is truly attractive. You shall have your affairs, I will have mine. You will spend this afternoon in setting up your neighbor’s stove, and be paid for it; I will spend it in gathering the few berries of the Vaccinium Oxycoccus which Nature produces here, before it is too late, and be paid for it also after another fashion. I have always reaped unexpected and incalculable advantages from carrying out at last, however tardily, any little enterprise which my genius suggested to me long ago as a thing to be done. some step to be taken, however slight, out of the usual course. How many schools I have thought of which I might go to but did not go to! expecting foolishly that some greater advantage or schooling would come to me! It is these comparatively cheap and private expeditions that substantiate our existence and batten our lives, as, where a vine touches the earth in its undulating course, it puts forth roots and thickens its stock. Our employment generally is tinkering, mending the old worn-out teapot of society. Our stock in trade is solder. Better for me, says my genius, to go cranberrying this afternoon for the Vaccinium Oxycoccus in Gowing’s Swamp, to get but a pocketful and learn its peculiar flavor, aye, and the flavor of Gowing’s Swamp and of life in New England, than to go consul to Liverpool and get I don’t know how many thousand dollars for it, with no such flavor. Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man’s genius must have suggested to him. Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy. Both a conscious and an unconscious life are good. Neither is good exclusively, for both have the same source. The wisely conscious life springs out of an unconscious suggestion. I have found my account in travelling in having prepared beforehand a list of questions which I would get answered, not trusting to my interest at the moment, and can then travel with the most profit. Indeed, it is by obeying the suggestions of a higher light within you that you escape from yourself and, in the transit, as it were see with the unworn sides of your eye, travel totally new paths. What is that pretended life that does not take up a claim, that does not occupy ground, that cannot build a causeway to its objects, that sits on a bank looking over a bog, singing its desires? However, it was not with such blasting expectations as these that I entered the swamp. I saw bags of cranberries, just gathered and tied up, on the banks of Beck Stow’s Swamp. They must have been raked out of the water, now so high, before they should rot. I left my shoes send stockings on the bank far off and waded barelegged through rigid andromeda and other bushes a long way, to the soft open sphagnous centre of the swamp. I found these cunning little cranberries lying high and dry on the firm uneven tops of the sphagnum, — their weak vine considerably on one side, — sparsely scattered about the drier edges of the swamp, or sometimes more thickly occupying some little valley a foot or two over, between two mountains of sphagnum. They were of two varieties, judging from the fruit. The one, apparently the ripest, colored most like the common cranberry but more scarlet, i.e. yellowish-green, blotched or checked with dark scarlet-red, commonly pear-shaped; the other, also pear-shaped, or more bulged out in the middle, thickly and finely dark-spotted, or peppered oil yellowish-green or straw-colored or pearly ground, — almost exactly like the smilacina and convallaria berries now, except that they are a little larger and not so spherical, — and with a tinge of purple. A singular difference. They both lay very snug in the moss, often the whole of the long (an inch and a half or more) peduncle buried, their vines very inobvious, projecting only one to three inches, so that it was not easy to tell what vine they belonged to, and you were obliged to open the moss carefully with your fingers to ascertain it, while the common large cranberry there, with its stiff erect vine, was commonly lifted above the sphagnum. The grayish speckled variety was particularly novel and pretty, though not easy to detect. It lay here and there snugly sunk in the sphagnum, whose drier parts it exactly resembled in color, just like some kind of swamp sparrows, eggs in their nest. I was obliged with my finger carefully to trace the slender pedicel through the moss to its vine, when I would pluck the whole together. Like jewels worn on, or set in, these sphagnous breasts of the swamp, — swamp pearls, call them. One or two to a vine and, on an average, three eighths of an inch in diameter. They are so remote from their vines, on their long thread-like peduncles, that they remind you the more forcibly of eggs, and in May I might mistake them for such. These plants are almost parasitic, resting wholly on the sphagnum, in water instead of air. The sphagnum is a living soil for it. It rests on and amid this, on an acre of sponges. They are evidently earlier than the common. A few are quite soft and red-purple. I waded quite round the swamp for an hour, my bare feet in the cold water beneath, and it was a relief to place them on the warmer surface of the sphagnum. I filled one pocket with each variety, but sometimes, being confused, crossed hands and put them into the wrong pocket. I enjoyed this cranberrying very much, notwithstanding the wet and cold, and the swamp seemed to be yielding its crop to me alone, for there are none else to pluck it or to value it. I told the proprietor once that they grew HDT WHAT? INDEX
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here, but he, learning that they were not abundant enough to be gathered for the market, has probably never thought of them since. I am the only person in the township who regards them or knows of them, and I do not regard them in the light of their pecuniary value. I have no doubt I felt richer wading there with my two pockets full, treading on wonders at every step, than any farmer going to market with a hundred bushels which he has raked, or hired to be raked. I got further and further away from the town every moment, and my good genius seemed [to] have smiled on me, leading me hither, and then the sun suddenly came out clear and bright, but it did not warm my feet. I would gladly share my gains, take one, or twenty, into partnership and get this swamp with them, but I do not know an individual whom this berry cheers and nourishes as it does me. When I exhibit it to them I perceive that they take but a momentary interest in it and commonly dismiss it from their thoughts with the consideration that it cannot be profitably cultivated. You could not get a pint at one haul of a rake, and Slocum would not give you much for them. But I love it the better partly for that reason even. I fill a basket with them and keep it several days by my side. If anybody else — any farmer, at least — should spend an hour thus wading about here in this secluded swamp, barelegged, intent on the sphagnum, filling his pocket only, with no rake in his hand and no bag or bushel on the bank, he would be pronounced insane and have a guardian put over him; but if he’ll spend his tune skimming and watering his milk and selling his small potatoes for large ones, or generally in skinning flints, he will probably be made guardian of somebody else. I have not garnered any rye or oats, but I gathered the wild vine of the Assabet. As I waded there I came across an ant-like heap, and, breaking it open with my hand, found it to my surprise to be an ant-hill in the sphagnum, full of ants with their young or ova. It consisted of particles of sphagnum like sawdust, was a foot and a half in diameter, and my feet sunk to water all around it! The ants were small and of a uniform pale sorrel-color. I noticed also a few small peculiar-looking huckleberries hanging on bushes amid the sphagnum, and, tasting, perceived that they were hispid, a new kind to me. Gaylussacia dumosa var. hirtella (perhaps just after resinosa), though Gray refers it to a “sandy low soil” and says nothing of the hispid fruit. It grows from one to two feet high, the leaves minutely resinous-dotted — are not others? — and mucronate, the racemes long, with leaf-like bracts now turned conspicuously red. Has a small black hairy or hispid berry, shining; but insipid and inedible, with a tough, hairy skin left in the mouth; has very prominent calyx-lobes. I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place that the very huckleberries grew hairy and were inedible. I feel as if I were in Rupert’s Land, and a slight cool but agreeable shudder comes over me, as if equally far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty? But why should not as wild plants grow here as in Berkshire, as in Labrador? Is Nature so easily tamed? Is she not as primitive and vigorous here as anywhere? How does this particular acre of secluded, unfrequented, useless (?) quaking bog differ from an acre in Labrador? Has any white man ever settled on it? Does any now frequent it? Not even the Indian comes here now. I see that there are some square rods within twenty miles of Boston just as wild and primitive and unfrequented as a square rod in Labrador, as unaltered by man. Here grows the hairy huckleberry as it did in Squaw Sachem’s day and a thousand years before, and concerns me perchance more than it did her. I have no doubt that for a moment I experience exactly the same sensations as if I were alone in a bog in Rupert’s land, and it saves me the trouble of going there; for what in any case makes the difference between being here and being there but many such little differences of flavor and roughness put together? Rupert’s Land is recognized as much by one sense as another. 1 felt a shock, a thrill, an agreeable surprise in one instant, for, no doubt, all the possible inferences were at once drawn, with a rush, in my mind, — I could be in Rupert’s Land and supping at home within the hour! This beat the railroad. I recovered from my surprise without danger to my sanity, and permanently annexed Rupert’s Land. That wild hairy huckleberry, inedible as it was, was equal to a domain secured to me and reaching to the South Sea. That was an unexpected harvest. I hope you have gathered as much, neighbor, from your corn and potato fields. I have got in my huckleberries. I shall be ready for Thanksgiving. It is in vain to dreams of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess in Concord, i.e. than I import into it. A little more manhood or virtue will make the surface of the globe anywhere thrillingly novel and wild. That alone will provide and pay the fiddler; it will convert the district road into an untrodden cranberry bog, for it restores all things to their original primitive flourishing and promising state. A cold white horizon sky in the north, forerunner of the fall of the year. I go to bed and dream of cranberry- pickers far in the cold north. With windows partly closed, with continent concentrated thoughts, I dream. I get JENNY LIND my new experiences still, not at the opera listening to the Swedish Nightingale, but at Beck Stow’s Swamp listening to the native wood thrush [Wood Thrush Catharus mustelina]. Wading in the cold swamp braces me. I was invigorated, though I tasted not a berry. The frost will soon come and smite them on the surface of the sphagnum. Consider how remote and novel that swamp. Beneath it is a quaking bed of sphagnum, and in it grow HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Andromeda Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, menyanthes (or buck-bean), Gaylussacia dumosa, Vaccinium Oxycoccus, — plants which scarcely a citizen of Concord ever sees. It would be as novel to them to stand there as in a conservatory, or in Greenland. Better it is to go a-cranberrying than to go a-huckleberrying. For that is cold and bracing, leading your thoughts beyond the earth, and you do not surfeit on crude or terrene berries. It feeds your spirit, now in the season of white twilights, when frosts are apprehended, when edible berries are mostly gone. Those small gray sparrow-egg cranberries lay so prettily in the recesses of the sphagnum, I could wade for hours in the cold water gazing at them, with a swarm of mosquitoes hovering about my bare legs, — but at each step the friendly sphagnum in which I sank protected my legs like a buckler, — not a crevice by which my foes could enter. I see that all is not garden and cultivated field and crops, that there are square rods in Middlesex County as purely primitive and wild as they were a thousand years ago, which have escaped the plow and the axe and the scythe and the cranberry-rake, little oases of wildness in the desert of our civilization, wild as a square rod on the moon, supposing it to be uninhabited. I believe almost in the personality of such planetary matter, feel something akin to reverence for it, can even worship it as terrene, titanic matter extant in my day. We are so different we admire each other, we healthily attract one another. I love it as a maiden. These spots are meteoric, acrolitic, and such matter has in all ages been worshipped. Aye, when we are lifted out of the slime and film of our habitual life, we see the whole globe to be an aerolite, and reverence it as such, and make pilgrimages to it, far off as it is. How happens it that we reverence the stones which fall from another planet, and not the stones which belong to this, — another globe, not this, — heaven, and not earth? Are not the stones in Hodge’s wall as good as the aerolite at Mecca? Is not our broad back-door-stone as good as any corner-stone in heaven? It would imply the regeneration of mankind, if they were to become elevated enough to truly worship sticks and stones. It is the sentiment of fear and slavery and habit which makes a heathenish idolatry. Such idolaters abound in all countries, and heathen cross the seas to reform heathen, dead to bury the dead, and all go down to the pit together. If I could, I would worship the parings of my nails. If he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before is a benefactor, he who discovers two gods where there was only known the one (and such a one!) before is a still greater benefactor. I would fain improve every opportunity to wonder and worship, as a sunflower welcomes the light. The more thrilling, wonderful, divine objects I behold in a day, the more expanded and immortal I become. If a stone appeals to me and elevates me, tells me how many miles I have come, how many remain to travel, — and to the more, the better, — reveals the future to me in some measure, it is a matter of private rejoicing. If it did the same service to all, it might well be a matter of public rejoicing.
FALL OF STONES THE BLACK STONE OF MECCA HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 2, Tuesday: Hung Hsiu Ch’üan had one of his generals, Yang Hsiu-ch’ing, murdered by another, Wei, because this general had had the temerity to remonstrate with the little Chinese brother of Jesus Christ for kicking one of his concubines. (Later, Hung would have General Wei murdered in his turn.)14
Five Foot Five and Born to Kill
Henry Thoreau wrote to Friend Daniel Ricketson.
Concord Sep 2nd ’56 Friend Ricketson, My father & mother regret that your indisposition is likely to prevent your coming to Concord at present. It is as well that you do not, if you depend on seeing me, for I expect to go to New Hampshire the latter part of the week. I shall be glad to see you afterward, if you are prepared for & can endure my unsocial habits. I would suggest that you have one or two of the teeth — which you can best spare, extracted at once — for the sake of your general no less than particular health. This is the advice of one who has had quite his share of toothache in this world. — I am a trifle stouter than when I saw you last, yet far — far short of my best estate. I thank you for two newspapers which you have sent me — am glad to see that you have studied out the history of the ponds, got the Indian names
14. Lest we speculate that this is mere Oriental barbarism, we should reflect on the fact that Hung’s behavior seems remarkably similar to that of John “The Prophet” of Leyden, leader of a sect of Anabaptists, who in about 1535 or 1536 cut off the head of a wife who had spoken disrespectfully to him — cut off her head in the presence of his other wives. In that incident in Germany, the religious leader and his remaining wives then danced around the dead body. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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straightened — which means made more crooked. — &c &c — I re- member them with great satisfaction. They are all the more interest- ing to me for the lean & sandy soil that surrounds them. Heaven is not one your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it. Ah, the Middleboro Ponds! — Great Platte Lakes! Remember me to the perch in them. I trust that I may have some better craft than that oar- less pumpkin-seed the next time I navigate them.— From the size of your family I infer that Mrs Ricketson & your daughters have re- turned from Franconia. Please remember me to them, & also to Ar- thur & Walton, & tell the latter that if in the course of his fishing he should chance to come across the shell of a terrapin & will save it for me, I shall be exceedingly obliged to him. Channing dropped in on us the other day, but soon dropped out again. Yrs Henry D. Thoreau.
Sept. 2: P.M. – To Painted Cup Meadow. Clear bright days of late, with a peculiar sheen on the leaves, — light reflected from the surface of each one, for they are grown and worn and washed smooth at last, no infantile downiness on them. This, say ever since August 26th, and we have had no true dog-day weather since the copious rains began, or three or four weeks. A sheeny light reflected from the burnished leaves as so many polished shields, and a steady creak from the locusts these days. Frank Harding has caught a dog-day locust which lit on the bottom of my boat, in which he was sitting, and z-ed there. When you hear him you have got to the end of the alphabet and may imagine the &. It has a mark somewhat like a small writing w on the top of its thorax. A few pigeons [American Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius] were seen a fortnight ago. I have noticed none in all walks, but G. Minott, whose mind runs to them so much, but whose age and infirmities GEORGE MINOTT confine him to his woodshed on the hillside, saw a small flock a fortnight ago. I rarely pass at any season of the year but he asks if I have seen any pigeons. One man’s mind running on pigeons, [he] will sit thus in the midst of a village, many of whose inhabitants never see nor dream of a pigeon except in the pot, and where even naturalists do not observe [them], and he, looking out with expectation and faith from morning till night, will surely see them. I think we may detect that some sort of preparation and faint expectation preceded every discovery we have made. We blunder into no discovery but it will appear that we have prayed and disciplined ourselves for it. Some years ago I sought for Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) hereabouts in vain, and concluded that it did not grow here. A month or two ago I read again, as many times before, that its blossoms were very small, scarcely a third as large as those of the common species, and for some unaccountable reason this distinction kept recurring to me, and I regarded the size of the flowers I saw, though I did not believe that it grew here; and in a day or two my eyes fell on [it], aye, in three different places, and different varieties of it. Also, a short time ago, I was satisfied that there was but one kind of sunflower (divaricatus) indigenous here. Hearing that one had found another kind, it occurred to me that I had seen a taller one than usual lately, but not so distinctly did I remember this as to name it to him or even fully remember it myself. (I rather remembered it afterward.) But within that hour my genius conducted me to where I had seen the tall plants, and it was the other man’s new kind. The next day I found a third kind, miles from there, and, a few days after, a fourth in another direction. It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I [am] in a thrilled and expectant mood, perhaps wading in some remote swamp where I have just found something novel and feel more than usually remote from the town. Or some rare plant which for some reason has occupied a strangely prominent place in my thoughts for some time will present itself. My expectation ripens to discovery. I am prepared for strange things. My father asked John Legross if he took an interest in politics and did his duty to his country at this crisis. He said he did. He went into the wood-shed and read the newspaper Sundays. Such is the dawn of the literary taste, the first seed of literature that is planted in the new country. His grandson may be the author of a Bhagvat-Geeta. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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I see bright-yellow blossoms on perfectly crimson Hypericum angulosum in the S. lanceolata path. By the Indian hemp at the stone bridge, am surprised to see the Salix lucida, a small tree with very marked and handsome leaves, on the sand, water's edge, at the great eddy. The branches of an inch in diameter are smooth and ash-colored, maple-like; the recent shoots stout and yellowish-green, very brittle at base. The leaves are the largest of any willow I have seen, ovate-oblong or ovate-lanceolate, with a long, narrow, tapering point (cuspidate), some on vigorous shoots, two and a half by seven inches wide in the blade, glandular-serrate, with pedicellate glands at the rounded base, thick, smooth, and glossy above, smooth and green beneath, with broad crescent-shaped, glandular-toothed stipules at base of petioles, five eighths to one inch long. According to Emerson, “Sir W.J. Hooker says it is one of the most generally diffused of all the willows in British North America.” Captain Hubbard said on Sunday that he had plowed up an Indian gouge, but how little impression that had made on him compared with the rotting of his cranberries or the loss of meadow-grass! It seemed to me that it made an inadequate impression compared with many trivial events. Suppose he had plowed up five dollars! The botanist refers you, for wild [sic] and we presume wild plants, further inland or westward to so many miles from Boston, as if Nature or the Indians had any such preferences. Perchance the ocean seemed wilder to them than the woods. As if there were primarily and essentially any more wildness in a western acre than an eastern one! The S. lucida makes about the eleventh willow that I have distinguished. When I find a new and rare plant in Concord I seem to think it has but just sprung up here, — that it is, and not I am, the newcomer, — while it has grown here for ages before I was born. It transports me in imagination to the Saskatchewan. It grows alike on the bank of the Concord and of the Mackenzie River, proving them a kindred soil. I see their broad and glossy leaves reflecting the autumn light this moment all along those rivers. Through this leaf I communicate with the Indians who roam the boundless Northwest. It tastes the same nutriment in sand of the Assabet and its water as in that of the Saskatchewan and Jasper Lake, suggesting that a short time ago the shores of this river were as wild as the shores of those. We are dwelling amid these wild plants still, we are eating the huckleberries which lately only the Indian ate and dried, we are raising and eating his wild and nutritive maize, and if we have imported wheat, it is but our wild rice, which we annually gather with grateful awe, like Chippewas. Potatoes are our groundnuts. Spiranthes cernua, apparently some days at least, though not yet generally; a cool, late flower, growing with fringed gentian. I cannot yet even find the leaves of the latter — at the house-leek brook. I had come to the Assabet, but could not wade the river, it was so deep and swift. The very meadow, poke-logan, was a quarter of a mile long and as deep as the river before. So I had come round over the bridge. In Painted-Cup Meadow the ferns are yellowing, imbrowned, and crisped, as if touched by frost (?), yet it may be owing to the rains. It is evident that, at this season, excessive rain will ripen and kill the leaves as much as a drought does earlier. I think our strawberries recently set out have died, partly in consequence. Perhaps they need some dryness as well as warmth it this season. Plainly dog-days and rain have had the most to do as yet with the changing and falling of the leaves. So trees by water change earliest, sassafrases at Cardinal Shore, for example, while those on hill are not turned red at all. These ferns I see, with here and there a single maple bough turned scarlet, — this quite rare. Some of the small early blueberry bushes are a clear red (Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum), and the lingering clusters of blueberries contrast strangely with the red leaves of the V. vacillans. Smooth sumachs show quite red on dry, warm hillsides. While I am plucking the almost spicy blueberries amid the crimson leaves there on the springy slope, the cows gather toward the outlet of their pastures and low for the herdsman, reminding me that the day is drawing to a close. Centaurea will apparently be entirely done in a week. How deceptive these maps of western rivers! Methought they were scattered according to the fancy of the map- maker, — were dry channels at best, — but it turns out that the Missouri at Nebraska City is three times as wide as the Mississippi at Burlington, and Grasshopper Creek, perhaps, will turn out to be as big as the Thames or Hudson. There was an old gentleman here to-day who lived in Concord when he was young and remembers how Dr. Ripley talked to him and other little boys from the pulpit, as they came into church with their hands full of lilies, saying that those lilies looked so fresh that they must have been gathered that morning! Therefore they must have committed the sin of bathing this morning! Why, this is as sacred a river as the Ganges, sir. I feel this difference between great poetry and small: that in the one, the sense outruns and overflows the words; in the other, the words the sense. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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(Lakota women gathering wild rice — by Captain Seth Eastman)
Sept. 8. Brattleboro. — Rains. Frost gives me an aster which he thinks A. concinnus of Wood; grows in woods and yet longer leaved.
P.M. — Clearing up. I went a-botanizing by the Coldwater Path, for the most part along a steep wooded hillside on Whetstone Brook and through its interval. In the last heavy rain, two or three weeks since, there was a remarkable freshet on this brook, such as has not been known before, the bridge and road carried away, the bed of the stream laid bare, a new channel being made, the interval covered with sand and gravel, and trees (buttonwood, etc.) brought down; several acres thus buried. Frost escaped from his house on a raft. I observed a stream of large bare white rocks four or five rods wide, which at first I thought had been washed down, but it seems this was the former bed of the stream, it having worn a new channel further east. Witch-hazel out, maybe a day or two, in some places, but the Browns do not think the fringed gentian out yet. There for the first time I see growing indigenously the Dirca palustris, leather-wood, the largest on the low HDT WHAT? INDEX
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interval by the brook. I notice a bush there seven feet high. In its form it is somewhat like a quince bush, though less spreading, its leaves broad, like entire sassafras leaves; now beginning to turn yellow. It has a remarkably strong thick bark and soft white wood which bends like lead (Gray says it is brittle!), the different layers separating at the end. I cut a good-sized switch, which was singularly tough and flexible, just like a cowhide, and would answer the purpose of one admirably. The color of the bark is a very pale brown. I was much interested in this shrub, since it was the Indian’s rope. Frost said that the farmers of Vermont used it to tie up their fences with. Certainly there can be no wood equal to it as a withe. He says it is still strong when dry. I should think it would be worth the while for the farmers to cultivate for this purpose. How often in the woods and fields we want a string or rope and cannot find one. Thus is the plant which Nature has made for this purpose. The Browns gave me some of the flowers, which appear very early in spring. Gray says that in northern New England it is called wicopy. Potter, in History of Manchester, says Indians sewed canoes with it. Beck says, “The hark has a sweetish taste, and when chewed excites a burring sensation in the fauces,” and, according to Emerson, the bark of this family, “taken into the stomach causes heat and vomiting, or purging.” According to the latter, cordage has been made from the bark of this family, also paper. Emerson says of this plant in particular, “The fresh bark produces a sensation of heat in the stomach, and at last brings on vomiting.... It has such strength that a man cannot pull apart so much as covers a branch of half or a third of an inch in diameter. It is used by millers and others for thongs.” Indian cordage. I feel as if I had discovered a more indigenous plant than usual, it was so peculiarly useful to the aborigines. On that wooded hillside, I find small-flowered asters, A. miser-like, hairy, but very long linear leaves; possibly the var. hirsuta of A. miser (Oakes gives of A. miser, only the var. hirsuticaulis to Vermont) or else a neighboring species, for they seem distinct. (Vide press.) There is the hobble-bush with its berries and large roundish leaves, now beginning to turn a deep dull crimson red. Also mountain maples, with sharp-lobed leaves and downy beneath, the young plants numerous. The Ribes cynosbati, or prickly gooseberry, with its bur-like fruit, dry and still hanging here and there. Also the ground-hemlock, with its beautiful fruit, like a red waxen cup with a purple (?) fruit in it. By the edge of a ditch, where it had been overwhelmed and buried with mud by the later freshet, the Solidago Muhlenbergii in its prime. (Vide press.) Near by, on the bank of the ditch, leaves of coltsfoot. I had cut across the interval, but, taking to the Coldwater Path again near its southeast end, I found, at an angle in it near the canal, beech-drops under a beech, not yet out, and the Equisetum scirpoides, also radical leaves, very broad, perhaps of a sedge, some much longer. (Vide press.) Gathered flowering raspberries in all my walks and found them a pleasant berry, large, but never abundant. In a wet place on the interval the Veronica Americana, according to Frost (beccabunga of some), not in bloom. Along this path observed the Nabalus altissimus, flowers in a long panicle of axillary and terminal branches, small-flowered, now in prime. Leaves apparently of Oxalis Acetosella. Large roundish radical leaves on the moist wooded hillside, which the Browns thought of the round-leaved violet. Low, flat-topped, very rough hairy, apparently Aster acuminatus. Erigeron annuus, broad, thin, toothed leaves. Also another, perhaps hirsute A. miser, with toothed leaves. I hear that two thousand dollars’ worth of huckleberries have been sold by the town of Ashby this season. Also gathered on this walk the Polypodium Dryopteris and Polystichum acrostichoides and a short heavy- odored (like stramonium) plant with aspect of lilac, not in bloom. (Vide press.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1857
August 24, Monday: Henry Thoreau visited Austin Bacon and schmoozed and botanized with him in Natick.
The New-York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company failed, initiating a general financial panic. On October 3d there would be a sharp increase of withdrawals, and over the next few days withdrawals would nearly quadruple. Reports of financial instability, perhaps overstated, were being quickly communicated across the country by telegraph. The public’s faith in the solvency of financial institutions would continue to sour, leading to a run on the banks and a collapse of financial institutions throughout the nation. The climax would arrive on October 14th with suspension of banking services throughout New England. A total of 4,932 US firms would be forced out of business during this economic crisis, now referred to as “The Panic of 1857.” The family of Richard Hildreth would be virtually wiped out. He would need to return to full-time journalism, as a writer and editor for the voice of the emerging Republican Party, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. His final years would be plagued by illness, discouragement, poverty, and increasing deafness — and yet these Republicans would be interested in what he still had to offer.
August 24, Monday: A.M. – Ride to Austin Bacon’s, Natick. On the left hand, just this side the centre of Wayland, I measure the largest, or northernmost, of two large elms standing in front of an old house. At four feet from the ground, where, looking from one side, is the smallest place between the ground and the branches, it is seventeen feet in circumference, but there is a bulge on the north side for five feet upward. At five feet it divides to two branches, and each of these soon divides again. A. Bacon showed me a drawing apparatus which he said he invented, very simple and convenient, also CYPRESS microscopes and many glasses for them which he made. Showed me an exotic called “cypress,” which he said had spread from the cemetery over the neighboring fields. Did not know what it was. Is it not Euphorbia Cyparissias? and does it not grow by the north roadside east of Jarvis’s?15 I measured a scarlet oak northeast of his house, on land of the heirs of John Bacon, which at seven feet from the ground, or the smallest place below the branches, was ten feet eight inches in circumference, at one foot from ground sixteen and one fourth feet in circumference. It branched at twelve feet into three. Its trunk tapered or lessened very gradually and regularly from the ground to the smallest place, after the true Eddystone Lighthouse fashion. It has a large and handsome top, rather high than spreading (spreads about three and a half rods), but the branches often dead at the ends. This has grown considerably since Emerson measured; vide his account. Bacon says that E. pronounced it the largest oak in the State. Showed us an elm on the north side of the same field, some ten feet in circumference, which he said was as large in 1714, his grandmother having remembered it nearly so long. There was a dead Rhus radicans on it two inches 15.Also at J. Moore’s front yard. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in diameter. In the meadow south of this field, we looked for the Drosera filiformis, which formerly grew there, but could not find it. Got a specimen of very red clover, said to be from the field of Waterloo, in front of the house near the schoolhouse on the hill. Returned eastward over a bare hill with some walnuts on it, formerly called Pine Hill, from whence a very good view of the new town of Natick. On the northeast base of this hill Bacon pointed out to me what he called Indian corn-hills, in heavy, moist pasture ground where had been a pine wood. The hillocks were in irregular rows four feet apart which ran along the side of the hill, and were much larger than you would expect after this lapse of time. I was confident that if Indian, they could not be very old, perhaps not more than a century or so, for such could never have been made with the ancient Indian hoes, –clamshells, stones, or the like, –but with the aid of plows and white men’s hoes. Also pointed out to me what he thought the home site of an Indian squaw marked by a buckthorn bush by the wall. These hillocks were like tussocks with lichens thick on them, and B. thought that the rows were not running as a white man[’s] with furrow. We crossed the road which runs east and west, and, in the low ground on the south side, saw a white oak and a red maple, each forty or fifty feet high, which had fairly grown together for three or more feet upward from the ground. Also, near by, a large white ash which though healthy bore a mark or scar where a branch had been broken off and stripped down the trunk. B. said that one of his ancestors, perhaps his grandfather, before the Revolution, went to climb this tree, and reached up and took hold of this branch, which he stripped down, and this was the scar! Under the dead bark of this tree saw several large crickets of a rare kind. They had a peculiar naked and tender look, with branched legs and a rounded incurved front. Red cohosh grows along a wall in low ground close by. We ascended a ridge hill northeast of this, or east by south of Bacon’s house, on the north end of which Squaw Poquet, as well as her father, who was a powwow, before her, lived. Bacon thought that powwows commonly withdrew at last to the northeast side of a hill and lived alone. We saw the remains of apple trees in the woods, which she had planted. B. thought apple trees did not now grow so large in New England as formerly, that they only grew to be one foot in diameter and then began to decay, whereas they formerly grew to be two or three and even sometimes four feet in diameter. The Corallorhiza multiflora was common in these woods, and out. The Galium circæzans leaves taste very much like licorice and, according to B., produce a great flow of water, also make you perspire and are good for a cold. We came down northward to the Boston and Worcester turnpike, by the side of which the Malaxis liliifolia grows, though we did not find it. We waded into Coos Swamp on the south side the turnpike to find the ledum, but did not succeed. B. is sure it grows there. This is a large swamp with a small pond, or pond-hole, in the midst and the usual variety of shrubs. I noticed small spruces, high blueberry, the water andromeda, rhodora, Vaccinium dumosum (hairy) ripe, Kalmia glauca, Decodon verticillatus, etc. B. says that the arbor-vitæ grows indigenously in pretty large patches in Needham; that Cochituate Pond is only between three and four miles long, or five including the meadows that are flowed, yet it has been called even ten miles long. B. gave me a stone with very pretty black markings like jungermannias, from a blasting on the aqueduct in Natick. Some refer it to electricity. According to Guizot at the Montreal meeting the other day, Mt. Washington is 6285 feet above high-water mark at Portland. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1858
July 16 Friday: Continue on through Thornton and Campton. The butternut is first noticed in these towns, a common tree. Urtica Canadense in Campton. About the mountains were wilder and rarer birds, more or less arctic, like the vegetation. I did not even hear the robin on them, and when I had left them a few miles behind, it was a great change and surprise to hear the lark, the wood pewee, the robin, and the bobolink (for the last had not done singing). On the mountains, especially at Tuckerman’s Ravine, the notes even of familiar birds sounded strange to me. I hardly knew the wood thrush and veery and oven-bird at first. They sing differently there.16 In two instances, –going down the Mt. Jefferson road and along the road in the Franconia Notch,– I started an F. hyemalis within two feet, close to the roadside, but looked in vain for a nest. They alight and sit thus close. I doubt if the chipping sparrow is found about the mountains. We were not troubled at all by black flies after leaving the Franconia Notch. It is apparently only in primitive woods that they work. We had grand views of the Franconia Mountains from Campton, and were surprised by the regular pyramidal form of most of the peaks, including Lafayette, which we had ascended. I think that there must be some ocular illusion about this, for no such regularity was observable in ascending Lafayette. I remember that when I got more than half a mile down it I met two men walking up, and perspiring very much, one of whom asked me if a cliff within a stone’s throw before them was the summit. Indeed the summit of a mountain, though it may appear thus regular at a distance, is not, after all, the easiest thing to find, even in clear weather. The surface was so irregular that you would have thought you saw the summit a dozen times before you did, and in one sense the nearer you got to it, the further off it was. I told the man it was seven or eight times as far as that. I suspect that such are the laws of light that our eye, as it were, leaps from one prominence to another, connecting them by a straight line when at a distance and making one side balance the other. So that when the summit viewed is fifty or a hundred miles distant, there is but very general and very little truth in the impression of its outline conveyed to the mind. Seen from Campton and lower, the Franconia Mountains show three or four sharp and regular blue pyramids, reminding you of pictures of the Pyramids of Egypt, though when near you suspected no such resemblance. You know from having climbed them, most of the time out of sight of the summit, that they must be at least of a scalloped outline, and it is hardly to be supposed that a nearer or more distant prominence always is seen at a distance filling up the irregularities. It would seem as if by some law of light and vision the eye inclined to connect the base and apex of a peak in the horizon by a straight line. Twenty- five miles off, in this case, you might think that the summit was a smooth inclined plane, though you can reach
16. [His wood thrush and veery were probably the olive-backed thrush and the Bicknell thrush.] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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it only over a succession of promontories and shelves.
Cannon Mountain on the west side of the Franconia Notch (on whose side is the profile) is the most singularly lumpish mass of any mountain I ever saw, especially so high. It looks like a behemoth or a load of hay, and suggests no such pyramid as I have described. So my theory does not quite hold together, and I would say that the eye needs only a hint of the general form and completes the outline from the slightest suggestion. The huge lumpish mass and curving outline of Cannon Mountain is yet more remarkable than the pyramidal summits of the others. It would be less remarkable in a mere hill, but it is, in fact, an elevated and bald rocky mountain. My last view of these Franconia Mountains was from a hill in the road just this side of Plymouth village. Campton apparently affords the best views of them, and some artists board there. Gathered the Carex straminea (?), some three feet high, scoparia-like, in Bridgewater. Nooned on west bank of the Pemigewasset, half a mile above the New Hampton covered bridge. Saw first pitch pines in New Hampton. Saw chestnuts first and frequently in Franklin and Boscawen, or about 43½ N., or half a degree higher than Emerson put it. It was quite common in Hollis. Of oaks, I saw and heard only of the red in the north of New Hampshire. The witch-hazel was very abundant and large in the north part of New Hampshire and about the mountains. Lodged at tavern in Franklin, west side of river. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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November 27, Saturday: Henry Thoreau mentioned, in his journal, that some small bream Pomotis obesus had been caught by Spencer Fullerton Baird in the Charles River in Holliston, and referred also to Baird’s assistant Charles Frédéric Girard (this had to do with a four-page announcement that had appeared in the PROCEEDINGS OF THE BOSTON SOCIETY OF NATURAL HISTORY for 1854). BSNH 1854, PAGES 39-42
November 27: Those barren hollows and plains in the neighborhood of Walden are singular places. I see many which were heavily wooded fifteen or thirty years ago now covered only with fine sedge, sweet-fern, or a few birches, willows, poplars, small wild cherries, panicled cornels, etc. They need not amount to hollows at all: many of them are glades merely, and all that region is elevated, but the surrounding higher ground, though it may be only five or ten feet higher, will be covered with a good growth. One should think twice before he cut off such places. Perhaps they had better never be laid bare, but merely thinned out. We do not begin to understand the treatment of woodland yet. On such spots you will see various young trees – and some of them which I have named – dead as if a fire had run through them, killed apparently by frost. I find scarlet oak acorns like this;
in form not essentially different from those of the black oak, except that the scales of the black stand out more loose and bristling about the fruit. So all scarlet oak acorns Scarlet Oak do not regularly taper to a point from a broad base, and Emerson represents but one form of the fruit.17The leaf of this was not very deeply cut, was broad for its length. I got seventeen more of those little bream of yesterday. As I now count, the dorsal fin-rays are 9-10 (Girard says 9-11), caudal 17 (with apparently 4 short on each side), anal 3-11, pectoral 11, ventral l-5.18 They have about BREAM seven transverse dark bars, a vertical dark mark under eye, and a dark spot on edge of operculum. They appear to be the young of the Pomotis obesus, described by Charles Girard to the Natural History Society in April, ’54, obtained by Baird in fresh water about Hingham and in Charles River in Holliston.19 I got more perfect specimens than the bream drawn above. They are exceedingly pretty seen floating dead on their sides in a bowl of water, with all their fins spread out. From their size and form and position they cannot fail to remind you of coins in the basin. The conspicuous transverse bars distinguish them at once. This is the form of the dorsal fin, which consists of two parts, the foremost of shorter stiff, spiny rays, the other eleven at least half as long again 17. Vide Jan. 19th, 1859. 18. Vide December 3d. Vide also March 26. 19. [A newspaper clipping pasted into the Journal contains the following extract from a report of the proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History:– “Specimens of Pomotis and Esox, and of amphibians, were presented by Mr. H.D. Thoreau, from Concord, Mass. Mr. Putnam was of opinion that one of the Pomotis would prove a new species. There are with us two varieties of pickerel commonly known as the long or shovel-nosed, and the short or trout-nosed; these specimens were of the latter. Mr. Putnam was inclined to think these were distinct species, unless the differences should prove to be sexual. Drs. D. H. and H R. Storer considered them varieties of the same species; Messrs. Baird and Girard think them (Esox reticulatus and E. ornatus) distinct.” Another clipping says:– “Mr. F.W. Putnam at a previous meeting stated that possibly the young Pomotis presented by Mr. Thoreau were the P. obesus of Girard. He had since then examined Girard’s original specimens, and he finds that they are the same. The P. guttatus recently described in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia is identical with P. obesus. Having teeth on the palatines, and consequently belonging to the genus Bryttus, the proper name for the species is B. obesus (Putnam). He had also satisfied himself that the Esox ornatus of Girard is the same as the E. fasciatus of De Kay.”] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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and quite flexible and waving, falling together like a wet rag out of water.
So, with the anal fin, the three foremost rays are short and spiny, as I see, and one of each of the ventral (according to Girard, and to me). These foremost rays in each case look like slender raking masts, and their points project beyond the thin web of the fin, whose edge looks like the ropes which stretch from masthead to masthead, loopwise. The stiff and spiny foremost part of the fins evidently serves for a cut-water which bears the brunt of any concussion and perhaps may serve for weapons of offense, while the more ample and gently waving flexible after part more especially guides the motions of the fish. The transverse bars are continued across these parts of the dorsal and anal fins, as the markings of a turtle across its feet or flippers; methinks the fins of the minnows are peculiarly beautiful. How much more remote the newly discovered species seems to dwell than the old and familiar ones, though both inhabit the same pond! Where the Pomotis obesus swims must be a new country, unexplored by science. The seashore may be settled, but aborigines dwell unseen only thus far inland. This country is so new that species of fishes and birds and quadrupeds inhabit it which science has not yet detected. The water which such a fish swims in must still have a primitive forest decaying in it. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1859
George B. Emerson received the degree of LL.D. from Harvard College.
NEW “HARVARD MEN”
Petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania. This was, of course, a disaster for New Bedford, Massachusetts, and for oil magnates there such as Emerson’s in-law the whaleship owner Friend James Arnold. Petroleum would soon replace whale oil as the primary lighting fuel, setting in motion the irreversible decline of the whaling industry, there and elsewhere. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“The whaler was a kind of pirate-miner — an excavator of oceanic oil, stoking the furnace of the Industrial Revolution as much as any man digging coal out of the earth.” — Philip Hoare, THE WHALE: IN SEARCH OF THE GIANTS OF THE SEA (NY: HarperCollins, March 2010) MOBY-DICK, THE OIL SPILL HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1860
It is remarkable, how differently different rich old men dispose of their excess funds, once they have them and have nothing with which to preoccupy themselves! In this year Henry Grinnell contributed to the voyage of Isaac Israel Hayes, and he would contribute to the three expeditions that would be made during the decade by Charles Francis Hall. He would regularly correspond with the unsuccessful explorer William Parker Snow. THE FROZEN NORTH
Meanwhile, late in the year, having suddenly come to be without a blood heir for his oil wealth upon the deaths of his wife and only child, Friend James Arnold was revising his will and contemplating the commission of a philanthropy.
“The whaler was a kind of pirate-miner — an excavator of oceanic oil, stoking the furnace of the Industrial Revolution as much as any man digging coal out of the earth.” — Philip Hoare, THE WHALE: IN SEARCH OF THE GIANTS OF THE SEA (NY: HarperCollins, March 2010) MOBY-DICK, THE OIL SPILL
In this matter Friend James turned to three men of repute, his in-law George Barrell Emerson who was engaged in the growing of trees on the promontory that stretched into Boston Bay on the northeastern side of Chelsea harbor, the family friend John James Dixwell, president of the Massachusetts Bank, who was active in the Boston Society of Natural History and was engaged in the growing of trees on his Jamaica Plain estate on Moss Hill, and the Boston trust attorney Francis E. Parker.
September 20, Thursday: At the 66th exhibition of the Middlesex Agricultural Society, the one for the year 1860, known as the “annual Cattle Show,” although this was a rainy day, Henry Thoreau lined up at 2PM with the officials of the society at their hall under the direction of N. Henry Warren, Chief Marshal and the assembly marched under escort of Gilmore’s Band to the Town Hall. There Thoreau sat on the platform with President C.C. Felton of Harvard University (his old Greek professor), and President of the Middlesex Agricultural Society George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, a former Massachusetts governor whom Thoreau had criticized (but not by name) for his lack of effectiveness in the case of Simms. President Boutwell introduced Thoreau. At the conclusion of Thoreau’s remarks, Boutwell congratulated the audience on hearing an address “so plain and practical, and at the same time showing such close observation and careful study of natural phenomena.”
The woods-burner stood before the members of the Middlesex Agricultural Society assembled in the Town Hall to read his attempt to persuade the woodlot managers of Concord to save themselves from their own ignorance. Although this essay would have, within his lifetime, Laura Dassow Walls points out, the most extensive distribution of any he had authored, she has commented as well that In a moment steeped in ironies, not the lest is that the text in which he most artfully negotiated the difficult passage between poetry and science has fallen between them into obscurity. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Why would Walls offer that a “SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES” text which she has just characterized as the most widely distributed of all was a text which nevertheless fell into obscurity? Because in this text Thoreau was not merely offering a theory of forest succession. He was also demonstrating how science should be done. He was arguing for a new concept of science, a nonmodern science in which the subject and the object are not split into separate and independent entities but caught mutually in a web of relationship.
Pointing out that the text seems an odd specimen of “scientific” writing, full of jokes and wordplay, asides and parables, so that one might presume Thoreau to have been simply unable/unwilling to follow the established rules for the genre, Wells asks, instead, “how this essay would look if we take his words seriously, as if he meant what he said.”
She finds in the essay techniques of “feedbacking” and “inversion” designed to destabilize the usual preposterous pretenses of what goes under the rubric “scientific objectivity,” pretenses which are designed to cause the author/scientist to seem to quite vanish as the transparent channel for an objective truth. (In a footnote here, Walls indicates that she is borrowing the methodology for this from the “strong program” of “SSK, the sociology of scientific knowledge,” and that she is borrowing the specific terminology she deploys from Steve Woolgar’s 1988 volume SCIENCE, THE VERY IDEA, published in New York by Tavistock and Ellis in association with Methuen.) ”Feedbacking” focuses on the role of the putative “discoverer,” in this case Thoreau himself. In “objective” science, this role would be that of transparent intermediary between the scientist’s object and ourselves, the readers and witnesses. The act of discovery being essentially passive, anyone, the story goes, could have stumbled across it; I just happened to be the one, and I merely convey my finding to you. The narrating “I/eye” we expect in scientific rhetoric claims merely to record what is there all along for anyone to see, staying rhetorically out of sight, suppressing any sense of its own agency — for, recall, there has been no agency. The very power of this view rests on this premise: command by obedience. But if objectivity is undercut, one can no longer claim simply to channel the docile body of the discovered to its interested onlookers, nor posit oneself as the passive vehicle of intelligence, pure, unmarked, invisible, neutral, and uncontaminating. Feedbacking, therefore, disrupts this fictive role by foregrounding agency. The discoverer/scientist/author will emphasize rather than suppress individual presence, action, and circumstance, through the use of what Steve Woolgar calls “modalizers” which “draw attention to the existence and role of an agent in the constitution of a fact or factual statement.” Or even more dramatically, the author may put in a sudden and unexpected appearance –not an easy thing to do, I’ve noticed– revealing the convention that has kept her “silent” (pages 202-3).
DATE PLACE TOPIC
September 9, 1860 Lowell MA “Life Misspent” September 20, 1860 Concord “The Succession of Forest Trees” December 11, 1860 Waterbury CT “Autumnal Tints” HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
Thoreau quotes from John Claudius Loudon, in “SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES”: The very extensive and thorough experiments of the English have at length led them to adopt a method of raising oaks almost precisely like this, which somewhat earlier had been adopted by nature and her squirrels here; they have simply rediscovered the value of pines as nurses for oaks. The English experimenters seem, early and generally, to have found out the importance of using trees of some kind as nurse-plants for the young oaks. I quote from Loudon what he describes as “the ultimatum on the subject of planting and sheltering oaks,” — “an abstract of the practice adopted by the government officers in the national forests” of England, prepared by Alexander Milne.... Loudon says that “when the nut [of the common walnut of Europe] is to be preserved through the winter for the purpose of planting in the following spring, it should be laid in a rot-heap, as soon as gathered, with the husk on, and the heap should be turned over frequently in the course of the winter.” Here, again, he is stealing Nature’s “thunder.” How can a poor mortal do otherwise? for it is she that finds fingers to steal with, and the treasure to be stolen. In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know it. Generally, both large and small ones are most sure to germinate, and succeed best, when only beaten into the earth with the back of a spade, and then covered with leaves or straw. These results to which planters have arrived remind us of the experience of Kane and his companions at the North, who, when learning to live in that climate, were surprised to find themselves steadily adopting the customs of the natives, simply becoming Esquimaux. So, when we experiment in planting forests, we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does. Would it not be well to consult with Nature in the outset? for she is the most extensive and experienced planter of us all, not excepting the Dukes of Athol.... So far from the seed having lain dormant in the soil since oaks grew there before, as many believe, it is well known that it is difficult to preserve the vitality of acorns long enough to transport them to Europe; and it is recommended in Loudon’s “Arboretum,” as the safest course, to sprout them in pots on the voyage. The same authority states that “very few acorns of any species will germinate after having been kept a year,” that beech mast “only retains its vital properties one year,” and the black-walnut “seldom more than six months after it has ripened.” I have frequently found that in November, almost every acorn left on the ground had sprouted or decayed. What with frost, drouth, moisture, and worms, the greater part are soon destroyed. Yet it is stated by one botanical writer that “acorns that have lain for centuries, on being ploughed up, have soon vegetated.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
September 20, Thursday: Cattle-Show. Rainy in forenoon.
Mr. George B. Emerson, in his valuable REPORT ON THE T REES AND S HRUBS OF THIS STATE, says of the pines: “The tenacity of life of the seeds is remarkable. They will remain for many years unchanged in the ground, protected by the coolness and deep shade of the forest above them. But when the forest is removed, and the warmth of the sun admitted, they immediately vegetate.” Since he does not tell us on what observation his remark is founded, I must doubt its truth. — “The Succession of Forest Trees” HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1862
Henry Grinnell was one of the founders of the American Geographical and Statistical Society.
MANUAL OF AGRICULTURE: FOR THE SCHOOL, THE FARM, AND THE FIRESIDE BY GEORGE B. EMERSON, CHARLES L. FLINT (Boston: Swan, Brewer & Tileston, 131 Washington Street).
Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History: PROCEEDINGS, FOR 1862 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1872
March 29, Friday: George Barrell Emerson had influenced his brother-in-law James Arnold the New Bedford whaling vessel owner –who had lost both his wife and his only child and therefore no longer had any blood heir– to leave a bequest.
At this point Arnold Arboretum was officially established as the three trustees of that bequest, Emerson, Dixwell, and Parker, signed it over to the President and Fellows of Harvard College with the institution’s pledge to use the money for no other purpose than to develop the some 120 acres of real estate that had been bequeathed in 1835 by Benjamin Bussey, as: “an Arboretum, to be called the Arnold Arboretum, which shall contain, as far as is practicable, all the trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants, either indigenous or exotic, which can be raised in the open air at the said West Roxbury, all which shall HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
be raised or collected as fast as is practicable, and each specimen thereof shall be distinctly labelled, and [for] the support of a professor, to be called the Arnold Professor, who shall have the care and management of the said Arboretum, subject to the same control by the said President and Fellows to which the professors in the Bussey Institution are now subject, and who shall teach the knowledge of trees in the University which is in the charge of the said President and Fellows, and shall give such other instruction therein as may be naturally, directly, and usefully connected therewith. And as the entire fund, increased by the accumulations above named, under the best management and with the greatest economy, is barely sufficient to accomplish the proposed object, it is expressly provided that it shall not be diminished by supplementing any other object, however meritorious or kindred in its nature.” ARNOLD ARBORETUM HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1875
A 2d edition was prepared of George B. Emerson’s REPORT ON THE TREES AND SHRUBS GROWING NATURALLY IN THE FORESTS OF MASSACHUSETTS, which had originally been published with illustrations by Isaac Sprague in Boston in 1846.
EMERSON/SPRAGUE HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1878
George B. Emerson’s REMINISCENCES OF AN OLD TEACHER (Boston: A. Mudge and Sons). HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
1881
March 4, Thursday: While Charles S. Sargent and Frederick Law Olmsted were at the height of their campaign to convince city officials to bring the Arnold Arboretum into the Boston park system, George Barrell Emerson died at the Brookline home of his daughter Lucy Lowell, in the 84th year of his age (Emerson Preparatory School in Washington DC would be named in his honor).
As James Abram Garfield succeeded Rutherford B. Hayes as President of the United States, “President Garfield’s Inauguration March” by John Philip Sousa was receiving its initial performance.20
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FABULATION: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
20. How could anyone tell they hadn’t heard it before? –All these Sousa thingies sound like the same piece of bombastic crap: “Wham wham wham. Ta, ta de ta ta, doodle oh tee ay. (Repeat.)” HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
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 2014. 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
Prepared: October 5, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
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 A WEEK:GEORGE B. EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
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