PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

THERE WAS SOME RISK OF CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN’S

1 TURNING OUT AN IDLE MAN

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

1. In the year that the Beagle sailed, Darwin was regarded as a budding geologist. His geology mentor, Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge Adam Sedgwick, would write while this young protégé was sailing around the world that: [He] is doing admirable work in South America, and has already sent home a collection above all price.... There was some risk of his turning out an idle man, but his character will now be fixed, and if God spares his life he will have a great name among the naturalists of Europe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

“WALKING”: A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man — a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art compared with a fine, dark green one growing vigorously in the open fields.” Ben Jonson exclaims,— “How near to good is what is fair!” So I would say— How near to good is what is wild! Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.

CHARLES DARWIN BEN JONSON VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE II LOVE FREED FROM IGNOR ...

[For commentary on this scientist: Professor Laura Dassow Walls] It is interesting how Henry Thoreau deploys the elements of the biological thinking of his day, such as the “Great Chain of Being” concept, in such a manner as to make linguistic use of them while at the same time resisting any deployment which would work to contradict the Darwinian theory when it would be published in America in 1860. In WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE W OODS, where he says for instance that “The perch swallows the grubworm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled,” it is clear that the metaphor he is deploying is that of the Great Scale of Being, the one that is available to him, and yet he does not go on to any of the usual aberrations of that metaphor, so common in his era, such as the superiority of the human over the animal or such as the superiority of the civilized over the primitive. Where he provides a more complex analysis, such as at IX 459 in the JOURNAL, also, there is this apparent reluctance to push the metaphor in any manner which will prove later to be inconsistent with Darwinism. At IV 186 the ocean was a “vast morgue.” At XVI 435 the land, with its HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN predator and its victim, is a battlefield and a “Golgotha.” At XX 331 he speaks of the “wonderful greediness” with which each organism contends for possession of the earth. However, Victor Carl Friesen seems prepared to suppose that “Thoreau would also probably be predisposed to accept Charles Darwin’s later views because of the Transcendental notion of progress,” and cites not only the place in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS at which Thoreau says that nature “has perfected herself by an eternity of practice” but also a passage in the JOURNAL in which he speaks of the “steady onward progress of the universe” (VIII 391) in justification of this supposition. We can dismiss such an idea by considering that if Thoreau’s attitude had come merely from “the Transcendental notion of progress,” then Waldo Emerson should have been in agreement with Thoreau in regard to Darwinism in 1860 rather than standing with Professor Louis Agassiz, aghast in horror at this new theory. Also, my reading of the two proof texts offered by Friesen is that he has not detected, in these passages, Thoreau’s irony at work. The examples Thoreau offers demonstrate his irony. He is speaking of change, and yet the cricket of which he speaks has been chirping in this manner for aeons. The stream’s gurgling is a constant, as is the sound of wind rushing among the trees. To be encouraged by such sounds is to be encouraged by constancies, not by the improvements, the “progress,” of which Thoreau is pretending to speak. The reason why evolution has perfected the species is not because, over an extremely long period, the species have been getting better and better, but because there is no outside standard by comparison with which life may be said to be imperfect. Thus, at every point in the evolutionary struggle, life is perfect and complete precisely in the manner in which it lives and moves and has its being at that point. Thoreau is not saying that by looking back we can see that life has developed, and therefore before now it was not perfected. In fact, he is saying the opposite of this, he is saying that although we can look back and see that life before now was different, it specifically does not follow that in some sense it was imperfect or inferior, and that although we can look forward and see that life in the future will be different from the way it is now, it specifically does not follow that we should regard our present life as in any sense inadequate. These are points at which he disagrees with Emerson and his racist scientist buddy Agassiz, and if the mantle of the “Transcendental notion of progress” is to be worn by somebody, it must be worn by the Sage of Concord and it must be recognized that Thoreau disdained to attempt to put on such a mantle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1719

William Stukeley’s “An Account of the Impreffion of the almoft Entire Sceleton of a large Animal in a very hard Stone” (these remains they were presuming to be an ancient crocodile or porpoise, noticed on the underside of a slab of rock by Charles Darwin’s great-grandfather the barrister Robert Darwin, was in fact a plesiosaur and the 1st-known fossil of a Jurassic reptile). ALMOFT ENTIRE SCELETON PALEONTOLOGY

With the planet Mars in opposition to the sun, and therefore at its brightest, many were taking it to be a red comet representing calamity. Observations at the Paris Observatory, however, were establishing on the basis of the appearance and disappearance of surface features that the planet’s rotation period was approximately 24 hours, 40 minutes. They were able at this point to identify not only Syrtis Major but also a darkish swath from Mare Sirenum to Mare Tyrrhenum, and to verify that Mars, like Earth, had two noticeably whitish polar spots.

ASTRONOMY THE SCIENCE OF 1719 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1755

Jean-Jacques Rousseau submitted a 2nd DISCOURSE in response to another contest proposed by the Academy of Dijon: “What is the origin of the inequality among men and is it justified by natural law?” In response to this challenge he produced an argument which amounted to speculative anthropology, following on the success of his 1st DISCOURSE by adding the concept that humankind was naturally good and by tracing the putative successive stages by which unneeded luxuries and their concomitant social divisiveness might have caused us

to descend from our originary or primitive innocence into our current corrupted sophistication. To this argument he assigned the title DISCOURS SUR L’ORIGINE ET LES FONDEMENTS DE L’INÉGALITÉ PARMI LES HOMMES (DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN OF INEQUALITY):

Luxury is a remedy far worse than the evil it means to cure; or rather it is itself the worst of all evils in any state, however large or small it may be, and which, in order to feed the hoards of lackeys and wretches it has produced, crushes and runs the laborer and the citizen — like those scorching south winds that, by covering grass and greenery with devouring insects, take sustenance away from useful animals, and bring scarcity and death to all the places where they make themselves felt.

The comparison text would of course be from WALDEN:

WALDEN: But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found, that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and “silent poor”. The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam.

EGYPT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Rousseau began this new DISCOURSE by the creation of a distinction between an essential inequality arising out of natural differences in strength, intelligence, etc., versus an accidental inequality arising from time to time and from place to place out of the merely artificial cultural happenstance conventions of local quotidian human society. By becoming able to distinguish between these two we can effect an imaginative reconstruction of the earliest phases of man’s experience of life on earth, the “nascent” era before the construction of the 1st shelter and before the 1st cohabitation between the male and the female and before the 1st family — and therefore before the 1st neighboring hut harboring its different male/female pair and its different family with all their comparisons of themselves with you and their jealousies over your different abilities and different levels of achievement. His concept was that the original man could not have been a social being and must therefore have lived an entirely solitary wandering life, but in contrast to Thomas Hobbes’s reconstruction that the life of a person in such circumstances could only have been “poor, nasty, brutish and short,” Rousseau reconstructed an original solitary wandering human who had been healthy, happy, good, and free of all these vices which originate only in the passions which are provoked by social interaction. Neighboring families, beginning to compare themselves with one another, amounted to “the first step toward inequality and at the same time toward vice.” It was at such a point that our families must have started to demand consideration and respect from other families; our innocent individual self-love had transmogrified itself into a culpable collective pride, with each settled family desiring to be considered better than anyone else in the neighborhood. Then came the introduction of property, which brought further inequality since it made law and government mandatory in order to make themselves secure in their possessions in the a social atmosphere of hostility and covetousness. Property was not theft, but it created the possibility of theft, and the possibility of theft created the necessity of police and government. The poor of course derived lesser benefit than the rich, but Rousseau was well aware that even the poor will benefit more from social stability than anyone would from continual hopeless social instability. However, nobody became any happier with the introduction of private property, not even the rich among us, because the nature of humankind in society is that we never can become fully satisfied. There’s always something more to be longing for, always some risk or other to be fretting about. Since to the degree that our interests conflict we harbor negative affect toward one another, the best we can expect is that we will all struggle to dissemble our hostilities behind a mask of courtesy — in order to render bearable the general levels of tension.

Incidentally, in this discourse Rousseau included a remark to the effect that since long-distance traveling was ordinarily done only by sailors, merchants, soldiers, missionaries and the like, Europeans could expect to accumulate little reliable information about this grand world and its creatures, and urged, therefore, that a way be found to include naturalists on all such expeditions. CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1779

Lorenz Oken was born as “Lorenz Okenfuss” in Bohlsback, which has now become part of Offenburg, in Baden. ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA has had only the following to say about this life: Oken, Lorenz (1779-1851), German naturalist, the most important of the early-19th-century German “nature philosophers,” who speculated about the significance of life, which they believed to be derived from a vital force that could not be understood totally through scientific means. He elaborated Wolfgang von Goethe’s theory that the vertebrate skull formed gradually from the fusion of vertebrae. Although the theory was later disproved, it helped prepare a receptive atmosphere for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1794

Dr. Alexander Adam, LL.D., Rector of the High School of Edinburgh’s A SUMMARY OF GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY, BOTH ANCIENT AND MODERN; CONTAINING, AN ACCOUNT OF THE POLITICAL STATE, AND PRINCIPAL REVOLUTIONS, OF THE MOFT ILLUFTRIOUS NATIONS IN ANCIENT AND MODERN TIMES; THEIR MANNERS AND CUSTOMS; THE LOCAL SITUATION OF CITIES, EFPECIALLY OF FUCH AS HAVE BEEN DIFTINGUIFHED BY MEMORABLE EVENTS: WITH AN ABRIDGEMENT OF THE FABULOUS HISTORY OF MYTHOLOGY OF THE GREEKS. TO WHICH IS PREFIXED, AN HIFTORICAL ACCOUNT OF THE PROGREFS AND IMPROVEMENTS OF ASTRONOMY AND GEOGRAPHY, FROM THE EARLIEFT PERIODS TO THE TIME OF SIR ISAAC NEWTON: ALFO, A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWTONIAN PHILOSOPHY, OCCAFIONALLY COMPARED WITH THE OPINIONS OF THE ANCIENTS, CONCERNING THE GENERAL AND PARTICULAR PROPERTIES OF MATTER; THE AIR, HEAT AND COLD, LIGHT, AND ITS EFFECTS; THE LAWS OF MOTION; THE PLANETARY SYSTEM &C. —— WITH A SHORT DEFCRIPTION OF THE COMPONENT PARTS OF THE TERRAQUEOUS GLOBE, ACCORDING TO THE NOTIONS OF THE ANCIENTS, AND THE MORE ACCURATE DIFCOVERIES OF MODERN CHEMIFTS. DEFIGNED CHIEFLY TO CONNECT THE STUDY OF CLASSICAL LEARNING WITH THAT OF GENERAL KNOWLEDGE (Edinburgh: Printed for T. Cadell and A. Strahan, London). ADAM’S SUMMARY

James Hutton’s AN INVESTIGATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF THE PROGRESS OF REASON, FROM SENSE TO SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY (Edinburgh: Strahan & Cadell) — buried within the 2,138 pages of the 3 volumes of this philosophical tome that advanced “Plutonism” as an alternative for Abraham Gottlob HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Werner’s “Neptunism” is a chapter about variety in nature in which the author anticipates Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection! PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1794 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1809

February 12, Sunday: Abraham Lincoln was born in a rustic cabin on Nolan Creek near Hogdenville, Kentucky and Charles Darwin was born on a country estate near Shrewsbury in Shropshire.

The child named Abraham would go on to become revered first as the bravest of frontier Indian-slayers and then as the author of an “emancipation” order in which he purported to have set free all persons whom he had no power to set free while keeping in slavery all persons whom he had the power to keep in slavery — surely one of the most cynical political documents ever produced by the powers of the human mind. The child named Charles would go on to author one of the most inspiring scientific treatises ever produced by the powers of the human mind, on the origin of species, and to be condemned as the creator of a new pseudo-scientific legitimation for the black slavery that as a young man he had seen in brutal practice along the coast of South America — a slavery which, for the remainder of his life in his comfortable home in Down, England, would be giving him recurrent nightmares and attacks of panic.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1 day 12 of 2 M / Rather small meetings & no preachings - Sister E dined with us - In the Afternoon I went to Saml Thurstons & took tea & spent the eveng & my H at brother Davids RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1816

June 23, Sunday morning: Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft had had a “waking” nightmare: I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life ... His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away ... hope that ... this thing ... would subside into dead matter ... he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

She scribbled a promising 1st draft of some lines: It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half- extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room....

She would originate a story about a monster created out of dead bodies and Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s life fluid of electricity, by a fictitious Dr. Victor Frankenstein. The lines scribbled this morning would become what now HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

2 opens Chapter IV of FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS.

George Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley began a boat tour of the lake.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal 1st day 23rd of 6th M 1816 / In our forenoon meeting James Halleck was largely & pertinently concerned in testimony - Dorothy Golding was short & pretty clever. - In the Afternoon 2. Laura Dassow Walls has inquired rhetorically, “Is it necessary to remark that Mary Shelly’s FRANKENSTEIN is still the paradigmatic myth of romantic science, right down to ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ Michael Crichton’s JURASSIC PARK, and the dystopias of cyberpunk?” — but as we shall see, this misappreciates our 20th-Century horror movies to have been accurate renditions of the Shelley romance, something which they simply are not. Shelley’s tale was not at all similar to the popular “Jurassic Park” with its focus upon hubristic science and the wrongfulness of others, but to the contrary was very similar to the unpopular “Elephant Man” with its focus upon our personal, instinctual, and very very wrong revulsion at the sight of human deformity. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

John Halleck was long & I thought his testimony was pretty sound & attended with a degree of life — I believe him to be an honest friend. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

(In this year Erasmus Darwin’s grandson Charles Robert Darwin had reached at the age of seven years — and his portrait was painted.)

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

The People of Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1818

Göran Wahlenberg described the glaciation of the Scandinavian peninsula as a mere regional phenomenon.

Ignaz Venetz was persuaded by Jean-Pierre Perraudin that some of the Alpine glaciers they could view had, once upon a time, exended some five kilometers beyond their present extents. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

Posthumous publication of Dr. William Charles Wells 1813 hypothesis about selection and human evolution (Charles Darwin would later acknowledge that this had been the 1st anticipation of his principle of natural selection as yet recognized in pre-1859 scientific literature). • Wells: “[What was done for animals artificially] seems to be done with equal efficiency, though more slowly, by nature, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which they inhabit. Of the accidental varieties of man, which would occur among the first scattered inhabitants, some one would be better fitted than the others to bear the diseases of the country. This race would multiply while the others would decrease, and as the darkest would be the best fitted for the [African] climate, at length [they would] become the most prevalent, if not the only race.”

• Darwin: “In this paper he [Wells] distinctly recognizes the principle of natural selection, and this is the first recognition which has been indicated; but he applies it only to man, and to certain characters alone. After remarking that negroes and mulattoes enjoy an immunity from certain tropical diseases, he observes, firstly, that all animals tend to vary in some degree, and, secondly, that agriculturalists improve their domesticated animals by selection; and then he adds, but what is done in this latter case by art, seems to be done with equal efficacy, though more slowly, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which they inhabit.” THE SCIENCE OF 1818 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1825

Professor William Jackson Hooker’s CATALOGUE OF PLANTS IN THE GLASGOW BOTANIC GARDEN.

John Halkett, Esq.’s HISTORICAL NOTES RESPECTING THE INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA: WITH REMARKS ON THE ATTEMPTS MADE TO CONVERT AND CIVILIZE THEM (London: Printed for Archibald Constable and Co. Edinburgh; and Hurst, Robinson, and Co. 90, Cheapside, and 8, Pall Mall).

RESPECTING THE INDIANS In this year, or in the following one, Charles Darwin would be reading his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s ZOONOMIA:

Charles Darwin read ZOONOMIA when he was sixteen or seventeen, and also listened to a panegyric in praise of evolution from his friend Dr Robert Grant at Edinburgh University. “At this time I greatly admired the ZOONOMIA,” he says. But neither Grant nor ZOONOMIA had “any effect on my mind.” This is true: otherwise he would have become an evolutionist before going on the voyage of the Beagle, rather than after.

The biographer Desmond King-Hele, who wrote the above, seems to me not to comprehend why it is that we assign authorship of the theory of evolution to the grandson, Charles, rather than to the grandfather, Erasmus. Therefore, perhaps, I should here explicate why it was that the early reading of ZOONOMIA, with its recognition of evolution, did nothing to help Charles: it is one thing to regard evolution as a fact, and another thing entirely to create a theory which accounts for it by hypothesizing a plausible mechanism and demonstrating the inevitability of this mechanism. Lots of people regarded evolution as a fact, before Charles created his theory. Almost as many people had been perfectly well aware of evolution as a fact in 1770, as had been perfectly well aware in 1491 that the earth was a globe — before Columbus obtained funding to sail west from Spain!

The first steam-locomotive railway was opened, between Stockton and Darlington in England, and George Stephenson’s Locomotion, the world’s first practically moveable steam engine for use on rails, managed to get a train of 29 little 4-wheeled carts up to a sustained speed of 8 mph.

David Douglas set out to explore the Columbia River area in British Columbia, with the cooperation of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Hudson Bay Company.

By mid-February he was off the coast of Oregon, setting ashore at Fort Vancouver. When he had gone 90 miles up that river, he began to have eye trouble due to the blown sand as well as due to the brilliance of the snow under the bright sun. He found Pinus lambertiana, which is almost as large as the giant redwoods, and fired his gun to knock some cones off the top of one. This turned out to be a serious mistake, as eight hostile Indians were alerted by the sound of gunfire. Douglas managed to elude them and would still be alive to return to England in 1827. (In 1829 he would return to the Pacific Northwest, collecting all the way from California to Alaska. He would die in Hawaii, while collecting, by falling into a pit trap in which a wild bull had already become ensnared. Douglas would introduce over 200 species to cultivation in Great Britain, including not only the Douglas fir but also the sugar pine, the noble fir, and the giant fir. BOTANIZING HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1827

Fall: Charles Darwin, finding himself to be extremely sensitive to the sight of blood, had given up on the idea of becoming a physician like his father and grandfather, deciding that instead he ought to go up to Christ’s College, Cambridge and make of himself a minister.

October 15, Monday: Charles Darwin arrived at Christ’s College, Cambridge. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1829

The external genitalia of a deceased “female Hottentot” (that is, of Saartje Baartman, a woman taken from one of the Khoikhoin tribes of South Africa) had been written up, scientifically of course, and were the talk of Paris. During her lifetime she had been, nude of course, the highlight of a high-society ball. It was droll, the

way the pink lips of her vagina hung down out of her dark pubic hair, contrasting sharply with her dusky skin. After her death, white male Parisians were able to dissect the “specimen’s oversized genitals.” (Want to see genitalia old enough to be those of your great-great-great-grandmother? They are preserved in the Museum of Man in Paris.) In France, also, Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck died alone, blind, and impoverished. For an obituary, the Baron Georges Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier would damn him with faint praise. The name of this naturalist had become associated with a theory of the progressive development of types, or “Lamarckism” that, utterly independent of any scientific evidence, proved to be exceedingly useful in support of various political ideologies such as racism, Communism, etc. The essence of this recurrent pseudo-scientific dogma is that striving to be man, the worm mounts through all the spires of form: “Waldo Emerson’s profound racism abated over time, but it never disappeared, always hovering in the background and clouding his democratic vision. Like all too many of his fellow intellectuals, throughout his life and works Emerson remained convinced that the characteristics that made the United States, for all its flaws, the great nation of the world were largely the product of its Saxon heritage and history. Here, alas, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s democratic imagination largely failed him.” — Peter Field HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

The theory would prove so useful that over and over laboratory evidence would simply be manufactured, or declared to exist somewhere, to prove its validity. The professor of geology and zoology at Harvard College, Louis Agassiz, Charles Darwin’s chief opponent in America, would be attracted to this theory because he needed a scientistic legitimation for belief in the separate and unequal essences of the various races of humankind and the inevitable rightness of racial purity, the overriding necessity of social order, and the preservation of Harvard as a bastion of white righteousness:

Selected white boys developing their attitudes of entitlement

However, Stephen Jay Gould has found reason to doubt this standard story about the French biologist. What Professor Gould has discovered is that Lamarck had on December 11, 1802, while attending a lecture on worms by Cuvier, achieved a realization that the pot category of worms would need to be subdivided into at HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN least two separate categories, one for the annelid worms and the other for the parasitic internal worms, and that this insight had, by 1820, caused Lamarck to entirely abandon his theology of a progressive ladder of life, in favor of a contingent bush or branching tree of life. In other words, Lamarck has been faulted for a theory which, faced with evidence, he had entirely abandoned. THE SCIENCE OF 1829

August 19, Wednesday: By this point the young William Chapman Hewitson had returned to Newcastle to pursue a career as a surveyor. On this date he and fellow students there held the initial meeting for a Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne (he would be a member of this society’s committee, and honorary curator of its entomological department).

Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin left Vienna for Warsaw.

John Stewart and Catherine Wright –who had been traveling around seeking employment, meanwhile sustaining themselves by doping successive travelers with laudanum, robbing them and killing them– were executed in Edinburgh. The husband and wife were allowed a last embrace, the wife was hooded, and then the husband, after which there were a few minutes for prayer. At the drop “the female struggled a good deal, but the man appeared to die easily.” An assembled multitude offered “hissing and other marks of disapprobation.” When the bodies had been suspended for the required amount of time, they were cut down and given to Dr. Alexander Munro “tertius,” Professor of Anatomy3 at Edinburgh University, for dissection.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 19th of 8 M / Enoch & Lydia being gone to Lynn to attend the Qtly Meeting there we sat the Meeting with our family alone. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

3. When Charles Darwin had been a student in 1825, he had been so disgusted by Professor Munro’s appearance in arriving in the classroom after dissections that he had written home “I dislike him & his lectures so much that I cannot speak with decency about them. He is so dirty in person & actions” (in 1828 Darwin dropped medicine in favor of theology). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1830

By about this point the writings of the naturalist Reverend Gilbert White had become so popular in England, that what has been termed “the cult of Gilbert White” was beginning to reach even into America. The steady stream of visitors to Selborne, England would eventually include both Charles Darwin and John Burroughs, and the money that was being made off the sale of such books would eventually draw even the American editor and critic wannabee James Russell Lowell. The rise of the natural history essay in the latter half of the nineteenth century was an essential legacy of the Selborne cult. It was more than a scientific-literary genre of writing, modeled after White’s pioneering achievement. A constant theme of the nature essayists was the search for a lost pastoral haven, for a home in an inhospitable and threatening world.... [N]atural history was the vehicle that brought readers to the quiet peace of hay barns, orchards, and mountain valleys. These virtuosi of the nature essay were among the best selling writers of their age.

In this regard, here is a quote from Professor Lawrence Buell’s analysis of the manner in which Henry Thoreau has entered the American canon:

A generation after Henry Thoreau, John Burroughs, America’s leading nature essayist at the turn of the twentieth century, wrote about Thoreau in somewhat the same way eighteenth- century and romantic poets tended to write about John Milton: as the imposing precursor figure whose shadow he must disown or destroy in order to establish his own legitimacy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Captain Robert FitzRoy’s HMS Beagle returned to England after several years of surveying the coast of South America in the vicinity of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. This depiction of the young captain, an illegitimate offspring of British royalty, was made in about this period:

(We note that despite all his obsession with noses, and his conviction that he himself had a fine aristocratic nose, his nose closely resembles the nose for which Thoreau would be mocked.)

By this point only about 300 Tasmanians remained alive (of the original 5,000 the balance having been reduced by open-season genocide as well as by introduced European diseases such as TB) and the white government was making efforts to round up this remainder to make caring for them more convenient. More than half this remainder would be killed during the roundup, of which Charles Darwin would witness the final stages.

Native Tasmanians

1802 5,000

1830 300

1847 47

1854 16

1876 0 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Georg Goldfuss announced that he could perceive “hairs” on a fossil of a pterosaur (and this outlandish assertion would in fact be supported by later fossil discoveries). THE SCIENCE OF 1830 PALEONTOLOGY

The initial volume of Charles Lyell’s THE PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY: AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE FORMER CHANGES OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE BY REFERENCE TO CAUSES NOW IN OPERATION appeared in London, distinguishing between three periods of geological history which Sir Charles termed the eocine (“recent”), the miocene (“less recent”), and the pliocene (“more recent”). The earth was depicted as millions of years old rather than thousands (the volumes would be printed year by year through 1833, but Charles Darwin would be taking this initial volume along with him aboard the Beagle for his voyage around the world; eventually Henry Thoreau would study the 5th British or 1st American edition, published in 1837 by John Murray in London and James Kay, Jun. & Brother at 122 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia).

LYELL’S GEOLOGY

When Darwin left England for his round-the-world voyage in 1831, he carried with him a departure gift: Volume I of Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, published in its first edition the previous year. Before reaching the Cape Verde Islands, he had already been swept into Lyell’s orbit. Thrilled, he preordered copies of Volumes II and III for pickup in ports of call as they were published. So influential was Lyell’s thinking during the voyage that Darwin dedicated his JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES to him with this comment: “The chief part of whatever scientific merit this journal and the other works of the author may possess, have been derived from studying the well-known and admirable PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY.” This dedication may have jumped out at Thoreau when he read it in 1851, because he, himself, had been smitten by Lyell’s great book in 1840, eleven years earlier. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1831

Patrick Matthew’s ON NAVAL TIMBER AND ARBORICULTURE contained an appendix in which he described what Charles Darwin would later designate as “natural selection” (Darwin would belatedly be made aware of Matthew’s hypothesis, and in a reprint of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES would carefully acknowledge this). PALEONTOLOGY

William Buckland conducted experiments with tortoises and crocodiles, to compare their footprints with fossil tracks found in Scotland.

A DISCOURSE ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE, AND THE CHANGES THEREBY PRODUCED IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. BY BARON G. C UVIER, COMMANDER OF THE LEGION OF HONOUR AND OF THE ORDER OF THE CROWN OF WURTEMBERG, MEMBER OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY, &C. &C. &C. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND A GLOSSARY (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea). CUVIER’S REVOLUTIONS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

This would be in Waldo Emerson’s library, and Henry Thoreau would make use of it for CAPE COD: “Cuvier says, that at the present time the jaw-bone of the whale is used in Norway for the purpose of making beams or posts for buildings.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

January 22, Saturday: Charles Darwin took his Bachelors of Art exam at Christ’s College, Cambridge. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

August 24, Wednesday: The Reverend John Stevens Henslow, Professor of Botany at Cambridge University and founder of the Botanic Garden there, suggested that Charles Darwin travel with him aboard HMS Beagle, a 10-gun brig, for its 2d world voyage of exploration and charting, visiting, among other locations, the Galápagos Islands. THE SCIENCE OF 1831

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 24th of 8th M 1831 / Rode with my wife to Smithfield & attended Moy [Monthly] Meeting - it was to me a remarkably solid & good meeting - in the first Meeting Wm Almy bore a short HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

testimony In the last we did not have much buisness but affairs were conducted in a solid manner I believe this was the first meeting I ever attended with Moses Brown where he was wholly silent in a Meeting for buisness. — he was pretty smart in health, but he told me after meeting that he had nothing special to offer tho’ he took an interest in the subject before us — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

September 1, Thursday: As Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle (passage for him and the manservant who would travel with him having been paid by his father) he brought with him the initial volume of Charles Lyell’s THE PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY: AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE FORMER CHANGES OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE BY REFERENCE TO CAUSES NOW IN OPERATION (London, 1830): When Darwin left England for his round-the-world voyage in 1831, he carried with him a departure gift: Volume I of Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, published in its first edition the previous year. Before reaching the Cape Verde Islands, he had already been swept into Lyell’s orbit. Thrilled, he preordered copies of Volumes II and III for pickup in ports of call as they were published. So influential was Lyell’s thinking during the voyage that Darwin dedicated his JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES to him with this comment: “The chief part of whatever scientific merit this journal and the other works of the author may possess, have been derived from studying the well-known and admirable PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY.” This dedication may have jumped out at Thoreau when he read it in 1851, because he, himself, had been smitten by Lyell’s great book in 1840, eleven years earlier.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN September 11, Sunday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 11th of 9 M / Silent Meeting in the Morning In the Afternoon Wm Almy attended as usual, there were several Strangers present & among them John & Samuel Gumere of Burlington. Thomas Howland, & some I did not know RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Charles Darwin met Captain Robert FitzRoy at Plymouth — and his prospects of traveling at his own expense aboard HMS Beagle almost evaporated because young Darwin’s nose was of a distinctly plebeian “pug” shape.

FitzRoy was a difficult person well known to his crew as “Hot Coffee.” As the name suggests, and as the nose above suggests, and as the disposition suggests, he was the illegitimate offspring of royalty.

December 27, Tuesday: While on a Mississippi River steamboat en route to New Orleans, Alexis de Tocqueville managed an interview with Sam Houston on the subject of native Americans: • Q. These notions of justice you speak of are very crude. They only apply to murder anyhow. What happens in case of theft? A. Theft was absolutely unknown among the Indians before the Europeans introduced among them objects calculated to be a lively temptation to their cupidity. Since then laws have had to be made to punish stealing. Among the Creeks, who are beginning to civilize themselves and have a written penal code, stealing is punished by whipping. It’s the chiefs who pronounce sentence. Adultery by the woman is punished in the same way; in addition they usually slit the nose and ears of the guilty. Creek law punishes fornication equally. • Q. What is the position of women among the Indians? A. Complete servitude. The women are burdened with all the unpleasant jobs and live in great degradation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

• Q. Is polygamy allowed? A. Yes. You can have as many wives as you can feed. Divorce is likewise permitted.

Upon arrival in New Orleans, De Tocqueville would have a conversation with M. Guillemin on the fate of mulattoes there: There exists, as a matter of fact, a great deal of immorality among the coloured people. But how could it be otherwise? The law destines, as it were, coloured women to debauchery. You’ve no doubt noticed, in the place reserved for mulattoes in the theatre and elsewhere, women as white as the most beautiful Europeans. Eh bien! For all that they belong to the proscribed race, because tradition makes it known that there is African blood in their veins. Yet all these women, and many others who, without being as white, possess yet almost the tint and the graces of Europeans and have often received and excellent education, are forbidden by law to marry into the ruling and rich race of whites. If they wish to contract a legitimate union, they have to marry with the men of their caste, and partake their humiliation. For the men of colour don’t even enjoy the shameful privilege accorded to their women. Even did neither their colour nor their education betray them, and that’s often the case, they would not be the less condemned to perpetual indignities. Not a [illegible] white but has the right to maltreat the happy person in his way and to thrust him in to the muck crying, “Get out of the way, mulatto!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

The HMS Beagle, a 10-gun Cherokee-class brig sloop of the Royal Navy, set out from Plymouth Sound on a voyage to the Cape Verde Islands, the coast of South America, the Strait of Magellan, the Galápagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand (where during this year whaling stations were being established at Tory Channel and Preservation Inlet), Australia, the Maldives, and Mauritius (where the dodo had been extinct for so long that the locals had quite forgotten it had ever been on the island), to conduct a survey for the Royal Navy. “Captain’s Companion” to the vessel’s unstable skipper, Robert FitzRoy, was a young gentleman named Charles Robert Darwin, who had been not much of a theology student and not much of a medical student, accompanied by one manservant. During this trip Darwin would contract Chagas’ disease from the bite of a South American kissing beetle

BIOLOGY

The vessel carried aboard it a naturalist — the ship’s surgeon Robert McCormick.4 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

The ship was to carry three surviving South Americans, including O’rundel’lico or “Jemmy Button,” back to

their home to civilize and Christianize their relatives. On the island of Jamaica in the British West Indies, some 20,000 slaves revolted. They would manage to kill 14 whites and destroy over a million pounds of property before being put down with 207 deaths. Then, of

4. “Captains Companion” was a necessary concession of the stratified society of that time to the weakness of human nature, a convention quite as necessary as the barrel of limes that prevented scurvy among the ordinary limeys who ate hardtack and barreled pork: on such long sailing voyages around the earth, the captain could not allow himself to develop any fellowship with members of the seamen or with the subordinate officers and, without some kind of companionship, would therefore tend to become pathologically isolated. This would prove to be especially the case in regard to Captain “Hot Coffee” FitzRoy, an illegitimate by- product of the British royalty. To be selected, Darwin had had to pass the captain’s inspection of his pug nose (a nose which seemed to indicate that one would be as pugnacious and as obnoxious as a bulldog), to be satisfied that it was an acceptable nose since FitzRoy, who had a nose like Henry Thoreau’s, believed that a man’s nose indicated his moral character. Refer to: 1819: C.C.H.’s “Noseology: A Dissertation on the Intellectual Faculties, as Manifested by the Various Configurations of the Nose” in Blackwood's Magazine 5 1834: Alexander Walker’s PHYSIOGNOMY FOUNDED ON PHYSIOLOGY 1838: Samuel Ferguson’s “A Vision of Noses” in Blackwood's Magazine 43: 648-60 1842: “Notes on Noses” in the Illustrated London News (May 28, 1842): 36 1848: George Jabet’s NASOLOGY (reprinted in 1851, 1864, and 1893) 1852: Eden Warwick’s (George Jabet’s) NOTES ON NOSES. London: Richard Bentley. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

course, some 500 more of the slaves would need to be executed.

1640-1713 seven slave revolts in the islands of the British West Indies

1655 With Jamaica in transition between Spanish control and English control, some 1,500 slaves escaped into the mountains to form maroon communities.

1656 Juan de Bolas led many of the escaped slaves in the maroon communities of the mountains of Jamaica down to the plains and the coast with a deal in which the English granted pardon and freedom. Many maroons, however, would elect to remain in the moun- tains.

1668 “Lobby’s rebellion” on Jamaica — several hundred black slaves escaped to the mountains.

1725-1740 1st Maroon War on Jamaica

March 1, The 1st Maroon War on Jamaica ended in a treaty guaranteeing freedom for the maroons, 1738-1739 the deal being that henceforward they would capture and turn in for a reward any new slave or bond-laborer escapees.

1760 slave uprising on Jamaica

1776 slave uprising on Jamaica

1784 slave uprising on Jamaica

1795-1796 2d Maroon War on Jamaica

1823 slave uprising on Jamaica

1824 slave uprising on Jamaica

1831 slave uprising on Jamaica HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

The utterly strange thing about this slave revolt is that it originated as an exercise in nonviolent passive resistance. On the Kensington Estate in St. James on Montego Bay, the slave Sam Sharpe, the main instigator, was a “daddy” or lay leader of local Baptists. By Sam’s plan the slaves were to begin to refuse to work on Christmas Day, until their grievances about their treatment and about the consideration of freedom were accepted by the state owners and managers. Adherents of his plan signed on by kissing the BIBLE. When the whites heard of this, troops were called into St. James and warships stood by in Montego Bay and Black River with their guns trained on the towns. The Kensington Estate’s Great House being set on fire was the signal that the resistance had begun. When a series of other fires broke out, however, it became clear that the non-violent resistance which Sam had imagined was not going to be feasible. Armed rebellion and seizing of property spread mostly through the western parishes of the island, and by the first week in January the uprising would be put down. A total of 14 whites would be killed.

Samuel Sharpe would be hanged on May 23, 1832, proclaiming that “I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery.” In 1834 the Abolition Bill would be passed by the British Parliament and in 1838 slavery would be abolished. SERVILE INSURRECTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1832

From this year into 1836, at some point while sailing on the Beagle Charles Darwin made a record to the effect

that his “whole course of life is due to having read and re-read” Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt’s unfinished (because he destroyed the fourth volume of his manuscript) RELATION HISTORIQUE or PERSONAL NARRATIVE “as a youth,” the three published volumes of which appeared in French in 1814, 1819, and 1825, and the first English version of which appeared in 1822 as the well-known radical Helen Maria Williams’s two-volume PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS OF THE NEW CONTINENT DURING THE YEARS 1799-1804 (London: Longman et al., 1822).

January 16, Monday: The HMS Beagle arrived at the port of San Tiago in the Cape Verde Islands. By this point Captain Robert FitzRoy’s companion gentleman Charles Darwin had consumed his initial gift volume of Charles Lyell’s THE PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY: AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE FORMER CHANGES OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE BY REFERENCE TO CAUSES NOW IN OPERATION (London, 1830) and was in need of more such stimulation. When Darwin left England for his round-the-world voyage in 1831, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

he carried with him a departure gift: Volume I of Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, published in its first edition the previous year. Before reaching the Cape Verde Islands, he had already been swept into Lyell’s orbit. Thrilled, he preordered copies of Volumes II and III for pickup in ports of call as they were published. So influential was Lyell’s thinking during the voyage that Darwin dedicated his JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES to him with this comment: “The chief part of whatever scientific merit this journal and the other works of the author may possess, have been derived from studying the well-known and admirable PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY.” This dedication may have jumped out at Thoreau when he read it in 1851, because he, himself, had been smitten by Lyell’s great book in 1840, eleven years earlier.

February 16, Thursday: On their way across the Atlantic Ocean to South America, the HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin arrived at the small equatorial group of islands known as St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks (0°56'N, 29°21'W).

Joseph Smith, Jr. recorded his revelation that there were 3 degrees of glory in heaven. In addition he began teaching that all humans are “begotten sons and daughters unto God.”

In Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 16 of 2 M / Preparative Meeting most of the Male Schoars attended — Wm Almy as usual was much favoured in testimony. — I have often seen & been sensible of the efficasy of Religion, from inward experience, & the evidence that is a divine reality has of late been much renew’d & confirmed in my mind. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

February 20, Monday: Charles Darwin visited the island of Fernando Noronha in the Atlantic Ocean, on which a Gypsy and Indian slave insurrection had recently been put down by the Brazilian military.

February 21, Tuesday: Clara Wieck and her father met Frédéric François Chopin for the initial time, in Paris. Chopin was very complementary of her talent and would send her a manuscript copy of his Piano Concerto in e minor.

In the antarctic region, Captain Biscoe went ashore on Graham’s Land.

February 29, Wednesday: The 1st Constitution of the State of New Granada (Colombia) was adopted.

Charles Darwin was able to visit a jungle near Bahia, Brazil.

In Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

4th day 29 of 2 M / Mary Shove was here & attended Meeting, she bore a short testimony under a good concern & I felt unity with her offering — We have been informed today of the wicked conduct of RR. - certainly trials of various kinds await us & it would seem that Father & Mother Rodmans cup was near full as any I know of or almost ever heard of - was it not for the support which is afforded them from relegion, & with which they were early acquainted, I dont see how they could be sustained. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

March: A negrero flying the Spanish flag (as shown below), the Catalana, master J.A. de la Vega, out of an unknown area of Africa on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba.

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE At Bahia on the coast of Brazil Charles Darwin was horrified by what he was learning about the treatment of slaves, so Captain Robert FitzRoy out of his inherent noblesse oblige attempted to reassure his traveling companion by relating that one of these South American slavemasters had once inquired of his slaves, whether they desired manumission — and had discovered to his surprise that they did not. Darwin incautiously opinioned that to such an inquiry from such a source a slave could not afford to provide an honest response, whereupon FitzRoy experienced the 1st of his many detonations during this voyage. Informing his traveling companion that if he was going to have his word doubted they could no longer be together aboard the Beagle, he stormed away. Later that day he would cool down, and send a note requesting that his traveling companion “continue to live with him.” RACE SLAVERY

April 4, Wednesday: HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin reached Rio de Janeiro.

Lowell Mason reached agreement with the Boston Handel and Haydn Society, allowing him to publish whatever he wanted independent of the society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

April 8, Sunday: A government commission took over in Greece, replacing President Avgoustinos Kapodistrias.

Charles Darwin went off on a trip through Rio de Janeiro.

July 5, Thursday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin sailed from Rio de Janeiro.

The German Diet enacted a “Ten Articles” document which reinstated restrictions on speech and press, and on political organizations. The German states pledged their mutual assistance in dealing with the current situation of popular unrest.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 5 of 7 M / Some who attended the Week Day Meeting in Town, report it to have been a very Solemn Meeting, Wm Almy in testimony & Anna A Jenkins in Supplication both alluded to the very serious & affecting season of Sickness which visits our Land. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Winter: In the Southern hemisphere, it was the summer season. The HMS Beagle put O’rundel’lico or “Jemmy Button” ashore at his home island: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

December 17, Monday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin sailed through the strait named “Le Maire” after its discoverer, toward the channel which we can see labeled on this current map as “Beagle Channel.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

December 18, Tuesday: Charles Darwin went ashore on Tierra del Fuego.

After five years and two symphonies since becoming infatuated with her, Harriet Smithson commented to Hector Berlioz “Eh bien, Berlioz.... Je vous aime.”

December 22, Saturday: At about 3PM with “a fine Easterly wind,” the lucky HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin doubled “the old-weather-beaten Cape Horn.” Per Darwin’s Journal: “In the morning watch it freshened into a fine Easterly wind, which is about as lucky & rare an event as getting a prize ticket in a lottery. We soon closed in with the Barnevelts; & running past Cape Deceit with its stony peaks, about 3 oclock doubled the old-weather-beaten Cape Horn. The evening was calm & bright & we enjoyed a fine view of the surrounding isles. The height of the hills varies from 7 or 800 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

to 1700, & together they form a grand irregular chain. Cape Horn however demanded his tribute & by night sent us a gale right in our teeth.”

Per Captain Fitzroy’s Journal: “On the 22d we saw Cape Horn, and being favoured with northerly winds, passed close to the southward of it before three o'clock. The wind then shifted to north-west, and began to blow strong. Squalls came over the heights of Hermite Island, and a very violent one, with thick weather, decided my standing out to sea for the night under close-reefed topsails. The weather continued bad and very cold during that night and next day.”

Per Syms Covington’s Journal: “Weathered Cape Horn the 22nd with a pleasant breeze, AND with studding sails set, a thing but rarely done. WE HAD A very fine view of the Cape and adjacent islands. Hermit Islands or the Cape is a small bare island, its top HAVING the appearance of a saddle. By our having a gentle breeze, we sailed very close to the Rock and from thence stood away; but this breeze, in the first watch, turned to one of a very different nature viz. that of blowing a heavy gale, which obliged us to take in the studding sails etc., and close reefed our main topsail. It is well known that the weather HERE is very precarious, which obliges every one to be on the alert.”

December 25, Tuesday: The brig Jasper set sail out of Boston harbor, bound for Malta with four other passengers besides Waldo Emerson.

Charles Darwin spent Christmas Day at St. Martin’s Cove at Cape Receiver near Cape Horn.

Piano Concerto no.7 by John Field was performed completely for the initial time.

William Davis Ticknor got married with Emeline Staniford Holt. The couple would produce seven children, five of whom would survive until adulthood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1833

January 13, Sunday: Clara Wieck played her Caprices en forme de valse pour le piano op.2 for the initial time, in a private concert given in her father’s house. She also played what might be the 1st performance of any solo piano music by Robert Schumann, two of the op.3 studies after Nicolò Paganini.

President Andrew Jackson provided a full and succinct explanation for his federalism in terms of the considerable contempt he held toward weakness: “nothing must be permitted to weaken our government at home or abroad.”

HMS Beagle, south of 48° off False Cape Horn, was being “Sorely Tried.” After 4PM, between the Ildefonsos and Diego Ramirez, it had a sea roller heel it well over, breaking over its quarter and poop decks. Its bowsprit was sprung, its lee-quarter gig was carried away, and some netting and one of the ship’s barometers. “Mr. Darwin’s collections, in the poop and forecastle cabins on deck, were much injured.” After the vessel had righted itself and the water had poured off its deck, the crew brought it to anchor under shelter of the land in Wind Bound Bay, where Charles Darwin wrote in his journal: The gale does not abate: if the Beagle was not an excellent sea- boat & our tackle in good condition, we should be in distress. A less gale has dismasted & foundered many a good ship. The worst part of the business is our not exactly knowing our position: it has an awkward sound to hear the officers repeatedly telling the look out man to look well to leeward. — Our horizon was limited to a small compass by the spray carried by the wind: — the sea looked ominous, there was so much foam that it resembled a dreary plain covered by patches of drifted snow. — Whilst we were heavily labouring, it was curious to see how the Albatross with its widely expanded wings, glided right up the wind. At noon the storm was at its height; & we began to suffer; a great sea struck us & came on board; the after tackle of the quarter boat gave way & an axe being obtained they were instantly obliged to cut away one of the beautiful whale-boats. — the same sea filled our decks so deep, that if another had followed it is not difficult to guess the result. — It is not easy to imagine what a state of confusion the decks were in from the great body of water. — At last the ports were knocked open & she again rose buoyant to the sea. — In the evening it moderated & we made out Cape Spencer (near Wigwam cove), & running in, anchored behind false Cape Horn. — As it was dark there was difficulty in finding a place; but as the men & officers from constant wet were much tired, the anchor was “let go” in the unusual depth of 47 fathoms. — The luxury of quiet water after being involved in such a warring of the elements is indeed great. — It could have been no ordinary one, since Capt. FitzRoy considers it the worst HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

gale he was ever in. — It is a disheartening reflection; that it is now 24 days since doubling Cape Horn, since which there has been constant bad weather, & we are now not much above 20 miles from it.

April 2, Tuesday: In a program organized by Hector Berlioz to benefit Harriet Smithson, Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt played Liszt’s Sonata for four hands op.22. Nicolò Paganini had, however, declined to participate.

Charles Darwin set off on a two-week expedition into the interior of South America with a couple of hired guides and a team of a dozen horses. Captain Robert FitzRoy described in his journal the experience his crew had been having while in the Falkland Islands: The report of a gun usually alarmed the whole herd of cows, and off they went at a gallop; but the lordly bulls were not to be hurried, they would stand and face their enemies, often charge them; when a precipitate retreat behind a rock, or to the boat, or across a boggy place, which the bull would not try, was the only resource, if their hardy dog was not by, to seize the angry animal, and give time for a well-directed shot. In those excursions, also, while ashore at night in small tents, the foxes used to plague them continually, poking their unpleasant heads into the opening of the tent (while the man on watch was by the fire), stealing their provisions, and breaking their rest, after a fatiguing day’s work. What with the foxes, the wild bulls, and the wild horses, it is thoroughly unsafe for a person to walk alone about the unfrequented parts of the Falkland Islands — even with the best weapons for self-defence against either man or beast. Several unfortunate people have been missed there, who wandered away from their parties.

May 12, Sunday: Trio concertante for viola, guitar and cello by Nicolò Paganini was performed for the initial time, in London.

Charles Darwin described a way to catch partridges from horseback, employed at Las Minas in South America: We crossed the Rio Marmaraga & proceeded to the Tapes; where a widow woman, a friend of Gonzales gave us a most hospitable reception. The above rivers, ultimately flow into the R. Grande & thus belong to a different system from the others which we crossed. On the road Morante practised with success a method of catching partridges which I had often heard of but never seen, it requires a long stick, at the end of which there is a running noose, made of the stem of an Ostriches feather. As soon as a partridge is seen, & they are wonderfully numerous, the man with the stick rides in a circle or spire round & round the bird, gradually coming nearer & nearer; the partridge not knowing which way to run at last squats to conceal itself; the noose is then quietly put over its head & the bird secured by a jerk, in this manner a boy sometimes catches 30 or 40 in one day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

May 13, Monday: Joseph Emerson died in Wethersfield, Massachusetts.

Charles Darwin reached his farthest point on his two-week horsieback jaunt into the interior of South America, arriving at a Pulperia north of the Rio Polanco. “I here saw what I wanted in the geology & in the morning returned to near our former sleeping place.”

The contractor Joseph Clement wrote Charles Babbage requesting to withdraw his letter of the previous July and asking to be allowed to continue to finish the Calculational Engine in his own workshop.

Symphony no.4 “Italian” by Felix Mendelssohn was performed for the initial time, in London, directed by the composer. Nicolò Paganini was among the listeners. He asked Mendelssohn to play Beethoven sonatas with him. Vincenzo Bellini was also there, and the two composers met. Although the London public was growing increasingly fond of Mendelssohn, the criticisms of the symphony were mixed.

September 8, Sunday: Charles Darwin set off on horseback toward Buenos Aires, Argentina.

September 19, Thursday: Charles Darwin visited Guardia del Monte, Argentina.

Mary Jemison, white woman of the Genesee, died at Buffalo Creek Reservation in her early 90s.

Publication of 24 Etudes op.125 for piano by Johann Nepomuk Hummel was announced in the Wiener Zeitung.

September 20, Friday: Charles Darwin rode into Buenos Aires. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

September 27, Friday: Charles Darwin rode to Santa Fe.

Rammohan Roy died at Stapleton Hill near Bristol, England. His inscription, which would be placed on a mausoleum in the shape of a Hindu temple in 1872, would be as follows:

Beneath this stone rests the remains of Raja Rammohun Roy Bahadoor. A conscientious and steadfast believer in the unity of the Godhead; He consecrated his life with entire devotion to the worship of the divine Spirit alone. To great natural talents he united thorough mastery of many languages, and early distinguished himself as one of the greatest scholars of his day. His unwearied labours to promote the social, moral, and physical condition of the people of India, his earnest endeavours to suppress idolatry and the rite of suttee, and his constant zealous advocacy of whatever tended to advance the glory of God and the welfare of man, live in the grateful remembrance of his countrymen. This tablet records the sorrow and pride with which his memory is cherished by his descendants. He was born in Radhanagore, in Bengal, in 1774, and died at Bristol, September 27th, 1833. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

October 1, Tuesday: On the Atlantic coast of South America, Charles Darwin arrived at Rio Tercero, Argentina.

The Reverend George Waddington was made commissary and official of the prebend of Masham.

Felix Mendelssohn entered upon duties as the director of music in Dusseldorf. His duties would include directing the choral and orchestral societies of the city, and music for Catholic services.

In the frozen northlands of Canada, here is Commander George Back.

Starving Indians continued to arrive from every point of the compass, declaring that the animals had left the Barren Lands where they had hitherto been accustomed to feed at this season; and that the calamity was not confined to the Yellow Knives, but that the Chipewyans also were as forlorn and destitute as themselves. There is no reasoning with a hungry belly, that I HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

am acquainted with. THE FROZEN NORTH

October 2, Wednesday: Charles Stearns Wheeler checked out for David Henry Thoreau, from Harvard Library, Volumes I and II of an unidentified work labeled “France” and “2.4.7.”

Exploring South America, Charles Darwin rode through Corunda to Santa Fe, Argentina.

October 5, Saturday: Charles Darwin crossed the Parana River to Santa Fe Bajada, Argentina.

October 12, Saturday: Charles Darwin began his return to Buenos Aires.

October 20, Sunday: Charles Darwin reached the mouth of the Parana River.

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka and Fedor Gedeonov left Prague for Berlin, where they would arrive in a few days.

November 14, Thursday: Charles Darwin departed by horse toward Montevideo.

November 20, Wednesday: Charles Darwin reached Punta Gorda, and sighted the Rio Uruguay.

St. Vladimir University opened in Kiev as part of a general policy of Russification.

November 28, Thursday: Sarah Harris got married with George Fayerwether III of Kingston, Rhode Island.

Exploring in South America, Charles Darwin rode through Las Pietras, returning toward Montevideo. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

December 6, Friday: In Charlestown, Massachusetts, anti-Catholic rioting began after a WASP was beaten to death by Irish immigrants. The homes of many Catholics were destroyed.

The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin sailed from the mouth of the Rio de la Plata.

According to the “Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society, “In purity of motive, in earnestness of zeal, in decision of purpose, in intrepidity of action, in steadfastness of faith, in sincerity of spirit, we would not be inferior to them [to, that is, our forefathers who founded this temple of Freedom]. Their principles led them to wage war against their oppressors, and to spill human blood like water, in order to be free. Ours forbid the doing of evil that good may come, and lead us to reject, and to entreat the oppressed to reject, the use of all carnal weapons for deliverance from bondage; relying solely upon those which are spiritual, and mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds. Their measures of physical resistance —the marshalling in arms —the hostile array —the moral encounter. Ours shall be such only as the opposition of moral purity to moral corruption —the destruction of error by the potency of truth —the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love —and the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance. Their grievances, great as they were, were trifling in comparison with the wrongs and sufferings of those for whom we plead. Our fathers were never slaves —never bought and sold like cattle —never shut out from the light of knowledge and religion —never subjected to the lash of brutal taskmasters. But those, for whose emancipation we are striving....”

December 13, Friday: The HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin dropped anchor at Port Deseado, Patagonia.

Christmas: Charles Darwin spent this Christmas Day at Port Desire in Patagonia.

Commander George Back and his naturalist had a memory of previous Christmas-Day celebrations at home in England — which featured a menu of roast beef and plum pudding. (Page 219) Christmas-Day...Mr. King and I made a cheerful dinner of pemmican. Happiness on such occasions depends entirely on the mood and temper of the individuals; and we cheated ourselves into as much mirth at the fancied sayings and doings of our friends at home, as if we had partaken of the roast beef and plum pudding which doubtless “smoked upon the board” on that glorious day of prescriptive feasting. THE FROZEN NORTH HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1834

January 9, Thursday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin arrived in Port San Julian, Patagonia.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 9 of 1 M / Felt an inclination to attend the Meeting in Town which to me was a more solid time than I have sometimes enjoyed there Wm Almy preached a good sermon on the necessity of Overcoming &c. — After Meeting I called to see John Griscom who last evening in going from the Institution was over set & very considerably hurt — Mary who was with him was also some hurt but not badly. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

January 12, Sunday: William Wyndham Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville, Prime Minister of the United Kingdomdied.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 12 of 1 M / Our Meeting this Morning was a pretty good solid Season — Lydia Breed was favourd in a short pertinent testimony Silent & pretty good meeting in the Afternoon. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

April 18, Friday: The HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin sailed up the coast of Patagonia to Rio Santa Cruz.

Szenen aus Mozarts Leben, a Singspiel by Albert Lortzing to his own words, was performed for the initial time.

The Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad was completed. The Paumanok Long Island Railroad (LIRR) purchased it and began laying rails to the east of the line.

April 29, Tuesday: From Patagonia, Charles Darwin caught sight of peaks in the Andes chain.

May 4, Sunday: Charles Darwin had ridden across Patagonia from its Pacific coast to a point at which he was merely 200 kilometers from the Atlantic. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

May 5, Monday: The last movement of the Concerto for piano and orchestra no.1 was performed for the initial time, in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, with the composer Clara Wieck at the keyboard and Felix Mendelssohn conducting.

Charles Darwin began a new expedition at Rio Santa Cruz in the South American continent.

The original purpose of his venture into the boreal zone of the North American continent having vanished upon receipt of the news that Captain Ross had been able to return safely to England, Commander George Back determined to embark upon a straightforward exploration of the Thlew-ee-choh and the seacoast adjoining its mouth. (Page 247) ... now, when I knew of Captain Ross’s safety, [...] I determined at once on going with one boat instead of two along the coast, selecting the best men for my crew. This, in fact, was the only means left by which I could execute my instructions, and discharge the duty that I owed to the public; for though the enthusiasm that had before animated us was now of course much abated, it still set with a strong, because concentrated, stream, towards the region of discovery. THE FROZEN NORTH

May 8, Thursday: Felix Mendelssohn’s Rondo brillant in E flat for piano op.29 was performed for the initial time, in London.

Charles Darwin’s expedition returned to the HMS Beagle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

June 10, Tuesday: David Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, John Marshall (1755-1835)’s A HISTORY OF THE COLONIES PLANTED BY THE ENGLISH ON THE CONTINENT OF NORTH AMERICA, FROM THEIR SETTLEMENT, TO THE COMMENCEMENT OF THAT WAR WHICH TERMINATED IN THEIR INDEPENDENCE.... (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1824).

More than 3,000 gathered at Brown’s Race to celebrate Jonathan Child’s inauguration as Rochester, New York’s first mayor.

HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin sailed up the Pacific coast of the South American continent.

In Leipzig, Richard Wagner’s 1st published essay “Die deutsche Oper” appeared in Zeitung fur die elegante Welt.

In Oxford, England, “Captivity of Judah,” an oratorio by William Crotch to words of Schomberg and Owen, was performed for the initial time, at ceremonies installing the Duke of Wellington as Chancellor of the university (also performed was the premiere of Crotch’s ode “When these are days of old” to words of Keble).

Oxford

Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle moved to 5 Great Cheyne Row (now 24 Cheyne Row) in the Chelsea district of London near the Thames River. He has spent the last quarter of his life in London, writing books; has the fame, as all readers know, of having made England acquainted with Germany, in late years, and done much else that is novel and remarkable in literature. He especially is the literary man of those parts. You may imagine him living in altogether a retired and simple way, with small family, in a quiet part of London, called Chelsea, a little out of the din of commerce, in “Cheyne Row,” there, not far from the “Chelsea Hospital.” “A little past this, and an old ivy-clad church, with its buried generations lying around it,” writes one traveller, “you come to an antique street running at right angles with the Thames, and, a few steps from the river, you find Carlyle’s name on the door.” With the exception of the soundproofed room which the writer would have constructed at the top of the house during the 1850s, the building now preserved by the Carlyle’s House Memorial Trust and by the National Trust still very much echoes this contemporary description, which is of Carlyle’s penning: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The House itself is eminent, antique; wainscotted to the very ceiling, and has been all new-painted and repaired; broadish stair, with massive balustrade (in the old style) corniced and as thick as one’s thigh; floors firm as a rock, wood of them here and there worm-eaten, yet capable of cleanness, and still with thrice the strength of a modern floor. And then as to room ... Three stories besides the sunk story; in every one of them three apartments in depth (something like 40 feet in all; for it was 13 of my steps!): Thus there is a front dining room (marble chimney-piece &c); then a back dining room (or breakfast-room) a little narrower (by reason of the kitchen stair); then out from this, and narrower still (to allow a back- window, you consider), a china room, or pantry, or I know not what, all shelved, and fit to hold crockery for the whole street. Such is the ground-area, which of course continues to the top, and furnishes every Bedroom with a dressing room, or even with a second bedroom ... a most massive, roomy, sufficient old house; with places, for example, to hang say three dozen hats or cloaks on; and as many crevices, and queer old presses, and shelved closets (all tight and new painted in their way) as would gratify the most covetous Goody. Rent £35! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

August 16, Saturday: Charles Darwin was clambering up Mount Campana in Chile.

In Canton, Viceroy Lu K’un restricted trade with foreigners.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. sailed away on his excellent adventure as a common seaman.

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: The next morning was Saturday, and a breeze having sprung up from the southward, we took a pilot on board, hove up our anchor, and began beating down the bay. I took leave of those of my friends who came to see me off, and had barely opportunity to take a last look at the city, and well-known objects, as no time is allowed on board ship for sentiment. As we drew down into the lower harbor, we found the wind ahead in the bay, and were obliged to come to anchor in the roads. We remained there through the day and a part of the night. My watch began at eleven o’clock at night, and I received orders to call the captain if the wind came out from the westward. About midnight the wind became fair, and having called the captain, I was ordered to call all hands. How I accomplished this I do not know, but I am quite sure that I did not give the true hoarse, boatswain call of “A-a-ll ha-a-a-nds! up anchor, a-ho-oy!” In a short time every one was in motion, the sails loosed, the yards braced, and we began to heave up the anchor, which was our last hold upon Yankee land. I could take but little part in all these preparations. My little knowledge of a vessel was all at fault. Unintelligible orders were so rapidly given and so immediately executed; there was such a hurrying about, and such an intermingling of strange cries and stranger actions, that I was completely bewildered. There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor’s life. At length those peculiar, longdrawn sounds, which denote that the crew are heaving at the windlass, began, and in a few moments we were under weigh. The noise of the water thrown from the bows began to be heard, the vessel leaned over from the damp night breeze, and rolled with the heavy ground swell, and we had actually begun our long, long journey. This was literally bidding “good night” to my native land.

August 17, Sunday: Charles Darwin reached the top of Mount Campana in Chile.

Birth of Edward Fisher Nott.

An instrument for force feeding should a slave attempt to escape through self-starvation:

September 14, Sunday: Charles Darwin’s company passed Tagua-tagua-more in Chile.

Breveted Captain James Duncan Graham was breveted to the rank of Major (“brevet” in military parlance means “let’s pretend for awhile”), as a staff-assistant in the US Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

September 27: On the Pacific coast of South America, Charles Darwin returned to Valparaiso.

In the frozen Northern boreal slope of the Americas, Commander George Back arrived back at Fort Reliance. THE FROZEN NORTH

November 10, Monday: The new Zurich Theater opened with a performance of Die Zauberflote.

The HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin sailed from Valparaiso.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. described the weather at Cape Horn.

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: Monday, Nov. 10th. During a part of this day we were hove to, but the rest of the time were driving on, under close-reefed sails, with a heavy sea, a strong gale, and frequent squalls of hail and snow.

December 25, Thursday, Christmas: All liberals in Spain received a general amnesty.

Franz Liszt and Frédéric François Chopin appeared jointly in at Stoepel’s Music School, Paris, playing Moscheles Grand Duo for piano four hands and Liszt’s own Grosses Konzertstuck uber Mendelssohns Lieder ohne Worte.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 25th of 12th M 1834 / Rode to Portsmouth in the Stage & attended Moy [Monthly] Meeting - The Day was cold & some Snow falling which made the Meeting small — The Meeting was silent excepting a few words from Hannah Dennis towards the close. - it was also a low & hard time to me & I thought the same feeling was prevalent — In the last Waterman Chase & Elizabeth Anthony daughter of Job published their intentions of Marriage, a certificate granted to the Widow Whiting & her daughter & a complaint noticed against Wm T. Potter for his departure in dress & Address & also for Sufferning Music & dancing in his House. — After meeting dined at Asa Shermans & hired his Chaise & son to bring me home, as it looked like a Storm & not wishing to wait for the evening Stage or be obliged to stay from home all night. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS Charles Darwin spent this Christmas Day aboard the HMS Beagle in an unnamed harbor of the peninsula of Tres Montes in Patagonia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Christmas was becoming, at this point, an American national holiday. Frederick Douglass recounted that the contract his owner had made with the farmer Mr. Edward “The Snake” Covey, in accordance with the holiday convention of that period, was complete as of Christmas Day, but that the institution of slavery was so contaminated that even traditional generosity could easily be placed at the service of impure and base motives: Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE

The days between Christmas and New Year’s day are allowed as holidays; and, accordingly, we were not required to perform any labor, more than to feed and take care of the stock. This time we regarded as our own, by the grace of our masters; and we therefore used or abused it nearly as we pleased. Those of us who had families at a distance, were generally allowed to spend the whole six days in their society. This time, however, was spent in various ways. The staid, sober, thinking and industrious ones of our number would employ themselves in making corn-brooms, mats, horse-collars, and baskets; and another class of us would spend the time in hunting opossums, hares, and coons. But by far the larger part engaged in such sports and merriments as playing ball, wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking whisky; and this latter mode of spending the time was by far the most agreeable to the feelings of our masters. A slave who would work during the holidays was considered by our masters as scarcely deserving them. He was regarded as one who rejected the favor of his master. It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas; and he was regarded as lazy indeed, who had not provided himself with the necessary means, during the year, to get whisky enough to last him through Christmas.

Meanwhile, half a world away and on ’tother side of several cultural divides, our sailor boy Richard Henry Dana, Jr. was finding that on Christmas Day Captain F. Thompson of the Pilgrim was somewhat more interested in the discipline and control of his crew than in the good of his crew.

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AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: Thursday, Dec. 25th. This day was Christmas, but it brought us no holiday. The only change was that we had a “plum duff” for dinner, and the crew quarrelled with the steward because he did not give us our usual allowance of molasses to eat with it. He thought the plums would be a substitute for the molasses, but we were not to be cheated out of our rights in this way. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Such are the trifles which produce quarrels on shipboard. In fact, we had been too long from port. We were getting tired of one another, and were in an irritable state, both forward and aft. Our fresh provisions were, of course, gone, and the captain had stopped our rice, so that we had nothing but salt beef and salt pork throughout the week, with the exception of a very small duff on Sunday. This added to the discontent; and a thousand little things, daily and almost hourly occurring, which no one who has not himself been on a long and tedious voyage can conceive of or properly appreciate– little wars and rumors of wars,– reports of things said in the cabin,– misunderstanding of words and looks– apparent abuses,– brought us into a state in which everything seemed to go wrong. Every encroachment upon the time allowed for rest, appeared unnecessary. Every shifting of the studding-sails was only to “haze”5 the crew. In the midst of this state of things, my messmate S______and myself petitioned the captain for leave to shift our berths from the steerage, where we had previously lived, into the forecastle. This, to our delight, was granted, and we turned in to bunk and mess with the crew forward. We now began to feel like sailors, which we never fully did when we were in the steerage. While there, however useful and active you may be, you are but a mongrel,– a sort of afterguard and “ship’s cousin.” You are immediately under the eye of the officers, cannot dance, sing, play, smoke, make a noise, or growl, (i.e. complain,) or take any other sailor’s pleasure; and you live with the steward, who is usually a go-between; and the crew never feel as though you were one of them. But if you live in the forecastle, you are “as independent as a wood-sawyer’s clerk,” (nautice,) and are a sailor. You hear sailors’ talk, learn their ways, their peculiarities of feeling as well as speaking and acting; and moreover pick up a great deal of curious and useful information in seamanship, ship’s customs, foreign countries, etc., from their long yarns and equally long disputes. No man can be a sailor, or know what sailors are, unless he has lived the forecastle with them– turned in and out with them, eaten of their dish and drank of their cup. After I had been a week there, nothing would have tempted me to go back to my old berth, and never afterwards, even in the worst of weather, when in a close and leaking forecastle off Cape Horn, did I for a moment wish myself in the steerage. Another thing which you learn better in the forecastle than you can anywhere else, is to make and mend clothes, and this is indispensable to sailors. A large part of their watches below they spend at this work, and here I learned that art which stood me in so good stead afterwards. But to return to the state of the crew. Upon our coming into the forecastle, there was some difficulty about the uniting of the allowances of bread, by which we thought we were to lose a few pounds. This set us into a ferment. The captain would not condescend to explain, and we went aft in a body, with a Swede, the oldest and best sailor of the crew, for spokesman. The recollection of the scene that followed always brings up a smile, especially the quarter-deck dignity and eloquence of the captain. He was walking the weather side of the quarter-deck, and seeing us coming aft, stopped short in his walk, and with a voice and look intended to annihilate us, called out, “Well, what the d—-l do you want now?” Whereupon we stated our grievances as respectfully as we could, but he broke in upon us, saying that we were getting fat and lazy, didn’t have enough to do, and that made us find fault. This provoked us, and we began to give word for word. This would never answer. He clenched his fist, stamped and swore, and sent us all forward, saying, with oaths enough interspersed to send the words home,– “Away with you! go forward every one of you! I’ll haze you! I’ll work you up! You don’t have enough to do! If you a’n’t careful I’ll make a hell of the ship!…. You’ve mistaken your man! I’m F______T______, all the way from ‘down east.’ I’ve been through the mill, ground, and bolted, and come out a regular-built down-east johnny-cake, good when it’s hot, but when it’s cold, sour and indigestible;– and you’ll find me so! The latter part of this harangue I remember well, for

5.Haze is a word of frequent use on board ship, and never, I believe, used elsewhere. It is very expressive to a sailor, and means to punish by hard work. Let an officer once say, “I’ll haze you,” and your fate is fixed. You will be “worked up,” if you are not a better man than he is. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

it made a strong impression, and the “downeast johnny-cake” became a by-word for the rest of the voyage. So much for our petition for the redress of grievances. The matter was however set right, for the mate, after allowing the captain due time to cool off, explained it to him, and at night we were all called aft to hear another harangue, in which, of course, the whole blame of the misunderstanding was thrown upon us. We ventured to hint that he would not give us time to explain; but it wouldn’t do. We were driven back discomfited. Thus the affair blew over, but the irritation caused by it remained; and we never had peace or a good understanding again so long as the captain and crew remained together. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1835

February 18, Wednesday: Charles Darwin commented in his journal on the sorry condition of Fort Niebla above Valdivia, Chile:

I crossed over to the Fort called Niebla, which is on the opposite side of the bay to the Corral where we are at anchor. — The Fort is in a most ruinous state; the carriages of guns are so rotten that Mr Wickham remarked to the commanding officer, that with one discharge they would all fall. The poor man trying to put a good face on it, gravely replied, “No I am sure Sir they would stand two!” The Spaniards must have intended to have made this place impregnable. There is now lying in the middle of the court-yard a little mountain of mortar, which rivals in hardness the rock on which it lies. — It was brought from Chili & cost seven thousand dollars. The revolution breaking out prevented its being applied to any purpose; but now it remains a monument to the fallen greatness of Spain. — I wanted to go to a house about a mile & half distant; my guide said it was quite impossible to penetrate the wood in a straight line; but he offered to lead me by the shortest way, following obscure cattle tracks: after all, the walk took no less than three hours! This man is employed in hunting strayed cattle; yet well as he must know the woods, he was not long since lost for two whole days & had nothing to eat. These facts convey a good idea of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

impracticability of the forest of these countries. — A question often occurred to me, how long does any vestige of a fallen tree remain? This man showed me one which a party of fugitive Royalists had cut down fourteen years ago. — Judging from the state in which it was I should think a bole a foot and a half in diameter in thirty years would present a mere ridge of mould. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Henry Thoreau would apply this analysis to the military situation he examined at Québec in British Canada:

“A YANKEE IN CANADA”: The most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them; they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair from the day they are built, because they are not really the work of this age. The very place where the soldier resides has a peculiar tendency to become old and dilapidated, as the word barrack implies. I couple all fortifications in my mind with the dismantled Spanish forts to be found in so many parts of the world; and if in any place they are not actually dismantled, it is because there the intellect of the inhabitants is dismantled. The commanding officer of an old fort near Valdivia in South America, when a traveller remarked to him that, with one discharge, his gun-carriages would certainly fall to pieces, gravely replied, “No, I am sure, sir, they would stand two.” Perhaps the guns of Quebec would stand three. Such structures carry us back to the Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean d’Acre, and the days of the Bucaniers. In the armory of the citadel they showed me a clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a Lombard gun. I thought that their whole citadel was such a Lombard gun, fit object for the museums of the curious. Such works do not consist with the development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress than liberate the mind. They are tombs for the souls of men, as frequently for their bodies also. The sentinel with his musket beside a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason for his existence. Does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing with me? The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it almost from the first day of the settlement. The founders of the colony thought this an excellent site for a wall, –and no doubt it was a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,– but it chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced, too, that a Lower Town got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags, as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion, — interesting only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business. Or is this an indispensible machinery for the good government of the country?

CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

February 20, Friday: Waldo Emerson began reading Friend George Fox’s A NEW ENGLAND FIRE BRAND QUENCHED reply to the Reverend Roger Williams, and looked again at Volume I of Friend William Penn’s SELECT WORKS. Charles Darwin recorded in his journal the earthquake that destroyed the city of Concepcion, Chile: This day has been remarkable in the annals of Valdivia for the most severe earthquake which the oldest inhabitants remember.— Some who were at Valparaiso during the dreadful one of 1822, say this was as powerful.— I can hardly credit this, & must think that in Earthquakes as in gales of wind, the last is always the worst. I was on shore & lying down in the wood to rest myself. It came on suddenly & lasted two minutes (but appeared much longer). The rocking was most sensible; the undulation appeared both to me & my servant to travel due East. There was no difficulty in standing upright; but the motion made me giddy.— I can compare it to skating on very thin ice or to the motion of a ship in a little cross ripple. An earthquake like this at once destroys the oldest associations; the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, moves beneath our feet like a crust over fluid; one second of time conveys to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never create. In the forest, a breeze moved the trees, I felt the earth tremble, but saw no consequence from it.— At the town where nearly all the officers were, the scene was more awful; all the houses being built of wood, none actually fell & but few were injured. Every one expected to see the Church a heap of ruins. The houses were shaken violently & creaked much, the nails being partially drawn.— I feel sure it is these accompaniments & the horror pictured in the faces of all the inhabitants, which communicates the dread that every one feels who has thus seen as well as felt an earthquake. In the forest it was a highly interesting but by no means awe-exciting phenomenon.— The effect of the tides was very curious; the great shock took place at the time of low-water; an old woman who was on the beach told me that the water flowed quickly but not in big waves to the high-water mark, & as quickly returned to its proper level; this was also evident by the wet sand. She said it flowed like an ordinary tide, only a good deal quicker. This very kind of irregularity in the tide happened two or three years since during an Earthquake at Chiloe & caused a great deal of groundless alarm.— In the course of the evening there were other weaker shocks; all of which seemed to produce the most complicated currents, & some of great strength in the Bay. The generally active Volcano of Villa-Rica, which is the only part of the Cordilleras in sight, appeared quite tranquil.— I am afraid we shall hear of damage done at Concepcion.

February 22, Sunday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin departed Valdivia, Chile. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March 13, Friday: Charles Darwin rode out of Valparaiso headed for a crossing of the Andes chain of mountains.

March 18, Wednesday:Waldo Emerson delivered at the Concord Lyceum his Introductory Lecture on the Study of Uses of Biography. BIOGRAPHY

Charles Darwin rode out of Santiago, Chile on his way up into the Portillo Pass.

Johann Nepomuk Hummel was made an honorary member of the Maatschappy tot Bevordering der Toonkunst, Amsterdam.

March 21, Saturday: On the North American continent, Commander George Back left Fort Reliance, leaving the naturalist Dr. Richard King to follow with the men and equipment. THE FROZEN NORTH

On the South American continent, Charles Darwin met Mariano Gonzales in the Portillo Pass.

March 23, Monday: Charles Darwin reached Los Arenales, in the Andes.

April 10, Friday: From the diary of Philip Hone of New-York: “The weather being fine and spring-like, I walked for an hour before dinner with my wife on the Battery ... what a beautiful spot it is! The grounds are in fine order; the noble bay, with the opposite shores of New Jersey, Staten and Long Islands, vessels of every description, from the noble, well-appointed Liverpool packet to the little market craft, and steamers arriving from every point, give life and animation to a prospect unexcelled by any city view in the world.” Charles Darwin rode back down out of the Andes to Santiago, Chile.

May 12, Tuesday: The resignation of 1st Lieutenant of Dragoons Jefferson Davis was officially forwarded to US Army headquarters.

Charles Darwin visited some of the copper mines of North Chile.

Baden joined the German Zollverein.

May 14, Thursday: Charles Darwin reached Coquimbo in Northern Chile.

Nicolò Paganini received a gold medal from the City of Genoa.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 14th of 5 M / I attended Meeting which was a comfortable HDT WHAT? INDEX

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& refreshing Season & in the Afternoon took the Steam Boat Boston for New York with my wife to attend the Marriage of our dear son John Stanton Gould with Mary Ashby at Hudson — We had on the whole a pleasant & easy sail to NYork tho’ it was rather rolling round Point Judith, we arrived in NYork early in the Morning & rode across the City to the North River Steamboat the Albany & had a pleasant & exceedingly interesting sail the Scenery being beautiful & quite a novelty to my dear wife who enjoyed it exceedingly - we arrived at Hudson in season to ride five miles out to the residence of our dear Mary Ashby, found her & her Mother & Grandfather well & were affectionately received by them just as they were setting down to tea - After a little refreshment - I walked down to Joseph Marshall’s where our dear John has lived, & was not apprised of our arrival - he soon went back with me & Spent the evening pleasantly & sweetly — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

September 15, Tuesday: David Henry Thoreau was part of a committee of students sent to see Jones Very on behalf of the “Institute of 1770”, to request that he prepare and read a poem.

Messa di Gloria for solo voices, chorus and, orchestra by Giuseppe Verdi was performed for the initial time, in Busseto.

At Locust Grove plantation near Bayou Sara, Louisiana, Sarah Knox Taylor Davis died. Jefferson Davis was seriously ill.

The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin reached the Galápagos Islands. It would stay for 34 days. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 17, Thursday morning: HMS Beagle dropped anchor off Chatham Island, the easternmost of the Galápagos group, and Charles Darwin went ashore to attempt to make discoveries. BOTANIZING

That day David Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the 2d volume of Abraham Tucker (1705- 1774)’s THE LIGHT OF NATURE PURSUED (1768-1778, 7 volumes, published in part under the pseudonym Edward Search).

October 8, Thursday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin reached James Island of the Galápagos archipelago.

October 20, Tuesday: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. repeated his earlier activities of sailing hides off the cliffs of Santa Barbara.

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: Tuesday, Oct. 20th. Having got everything ready, we set the agent ashore, who went up to the mission to hasten down the hides for the next morning. This night we had the strictest orders to look out for south- easters; and the long, low clouds seemed rather threatening. But the night passed over without any trouble, and early the next morning, we hove out the long-boat and pinnace, lowered away the quarter-boats, and went ashore to bring off our hides. Here we were again, in this romantic spot; a perpendicular hill, twice the height of the ship’s mast-head, with a single circuitous path to the top, and long sand beach at its base, with the swell of the whole Pacific breaking high upon it, and our hides ranged in piles on the overhanging summit. The captain sent me, who was the only one of the crew that had ever been there before, to the top, to count the hides and pitch them down. There I stood again, as six months before, throwing off the hides, and watching them, pitching and scaling, to the bottom, while the men, dwarfed by the distance, were walking to and fro on the beach, carrying the hides, as they picked them up, to the distant boats, upon the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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tops of their heads. Two or three boat-loads were sent off, until, at last, all were thrown down, and the boats nearly loaded again; when we were delayed by a dozen or twenty hides which had lodged in the recesses of the hill, and which we could not reach by any missiles, as the general line of the side was exactly perpendicular, and these places were caved in, and could not be seen or reached from the top. As hides are worth in Boston twelve and a half cents a pound, and the captain’s commission was two per cent, he determined not to give them up; and sent on board for a pair of top-gallant studding-sail halyards, and requested some one of the crew to go to the top, and come down by the halyards. The older sailors said the boys, who were light and active, ought to go, while the boys thought that strength and experience were necessary. Seeing the dilemma, and feeling myself to be near the medium of these requisites, I offered my services, and went up, with one man to tend the rope, and prepared for the descent. We found a stake fastened strongly into the ground, and apparently capable of holding my weight, to which we made one end of the halyards well fast, and taking the coil, threw it over the brink. The end, we saw, just reached to a landing-place, from which the descent to the beach was easy. Having nothing on but shirt, trowsers, and hat, the common sea-rig of warm weather, I had no stripping to do, and began my descent, by taking hold of the rope in each hand, and slipping down, sometimes with hands and feet round the rope, and sometimes breasting off with one hand and foot against the precipice, and holding on to the rope with the other. In this way I descended until I came to a place which shelved in, and in which the hides were lodged. Keeping hold of the rope with one hand, I scrambled in, and by the other hand and feet succeeded in dislodging all the hides, and continued on my way. Just below this place, the precipice projected again, and going over the projection, I could see nothing below me but the sea and the rocks upon which it broke, and a few gulls flying in mid-air. I got down in safety, pretty well covered with dirt; and for my pains was told, “What a d----d fool you were to risk your life for a half a dozen hides!” While we were carrying the hides to the boat, I perceived, what I had been too busy to observe before, that heavy black clouds were rolling up from seaward, a strong swell heaving in, and every sign of a south- easter. The captain hurried everything. The hides were pitched into the boats; and, with some difficulty, and by wading nearly up to our armpits, we got the boats through the surf, and began pulling aboard. Our gig’s crew towed the pinnace astern of the gig, and the launch was towed by six men in the jolly-boat. The ship was lying three miles off, pitching at her anchor, and the farther we pulled, the heavier grew the swell. Our boat stood nearly up and down several times; the pinnace parted her tow-line, and we expected every moment to see the launch swamped. We at length got alongside, our boats half full of water; and now came the greatest difficulty of all,– unloading the boats, in a heavy sea, which pitched them about so that it was almost impossible to stand in them; raising them sometimes even with the rail, and again dropping them below the bends. With great difficulty, we got all the hides aboard and stowed under hatches, the yard and stay tackles hooked on, and the launch and pinnace hoisted, checked, and griped. The quarter-boats were then hoisted up, and we began heaving in on the chain. Getting the anchor was no easy work in such a sea, but as we were not coming back to this port, the captain determined not to slip. The ship’s head pitched into the sea, and the water rushed through the hawse-holes, and the chain surged so as almost to unship the barrel of the windlass. “Hove short, sir!” said the mate. “Aye, aye! Weather-bit your chain and loose the topsails! Make sail on her, men– with a will!” A few moments served to loose the topsails, which were furled with reefs, to sheet them home, and hoist them up. “Bear a hand!” was the order of the day; and every one saw the necessity of it, for the gale was already upon us. The ship broke out her own anchor, which we catted and fished, after a fashion, and stood off from the lee-shore against a heavy head sea, under reefed topsails, fore-topmast staysail and spanker. The fore course was given to her, which helped her a little; but as she hardly held her own against the sea which was settling her leeward– “Board the main tack!” shouted the captain; when the tack was carried forward and taken to the windlass, and all hands called to the handspikes. The great sail bellied out horizontally as though it would lift up the main HDT WHAT? INDEX

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stay; the blocks rattled and flew about; but the force of machinery was too much for her. “Heave ho! Heave and pawl! Yo, heave, hearty, ho!” and, in time with the song, by the force of twenty strong arms, the windlass came slowly round, pawl after pawl, and the weather clew of the sail was brought down to the waterways. The starboard watch hauled aft the sheet, and the ship tore through the water like a mad horse, quivering and shaking at every joint, and dashing from its head the foam, which flew off at every blow, yards and yards to leeward. A half hour of such sailing served our turn, when the clews of the sail were hauled up, the sail furled, and the ship, eased of her press, went more quietly on her way. Soon after, the foresail was reefed, and we mizen-top men were sent up to take another reef in the mizen topsail. This was the first time I had taken a weather earing, and I felt not a little proud to sit, astride of the weather yard-arm, pass the earing, and sing out “Haul out to leeward!” From this time until we got to Boston, the mate never suffered any one but our own gang to go upon the mizen topsail yard, either for reefing or furling, and the young English lad and myself generally took the earings between us. Having cleared the point and got well out to sea, we squared away the yards, made more sail, and stood on, nearly before the wind, for San Pedro. It blew strong, with some rain, nearly all night, but fell calm toward morning, and the gale having gone over, we came-to,–

The above was going on aboard the Alert in the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of the North American continent. Meanwhile, off the coast of the South American continent in the Pacific Ocean, the HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin headed out toward the island of Tahiti. The survey of the Galapagos Archipelago being concluded, we steered towards Tahiti and commenced our long passage of 3200 miles. In the course of a few days we sailed out of the gloomy and clouded ocean-district which extends during the winter far from the coast of South America. We then enjoyed bright and clear weather, while running pleasantly along at the rate of 150 or 160 miles a day before the steady trade-wind. The temperature in this more central part of the Pacific is higher than near the American shore. The thermometer in the poop cabin, by night and day, ranged between 80 and 83 degs., which feels very pleasant; but with one degree or two higher, the heat becomes oppressive. We passed through the Low or Dangerous Archipelago, and saw several of those most curious rings of coral land, just rising above the water’s edge, which have been called Lagoon Islands. A long and brilliantly white beach is capped by a margin of green vegetation; and the strip, looking either way, rapidly narrows away in the distance, and sinks beneath the horizon From the mast-head a wide expanse of smooth water can be seen within the ring. These low hollow coral islands bear no proportion to the vast ocean out of which they abruptly rise; and it seems wonderful, that such weak invaders are not overwhelmed, by the all-powerful and never-tiring waves of that great sea, miscalled the Pacific.

November 15, Sunday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 15th of 11th M / Yesterday our dear friend Thos Anthony came down the river from Wickford to be at Meeting with us - he HDT WHAT? INDEX

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came directly to our house & lodged & has attended both our Meetings today, which have indeed been watering & refreshing seasons - he dined at Henry Goulds & has gone to lodge at David Buffums. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin reached Tahiti. At daylight, Tahiti, an island which must for ever remain classical to the voyager in the South Sea, was in view. At a distance the appearance was not attractive. The luxuriant vegetation of the lower part could not yet be seen, and as the clouds rolled past, the wildest and most precipitous peaks showed themselves towards the centre of the island. As soon as we anchored in Matavai Bay, we were surrounded by canoes. This was our Sunday, but the Monday of Tahiti: if the case had been reversed, we should not have received a single visit; for the injunction not to launch a canoe on the sabbath is rigidly obeyed. After dinner we landed to enjoy all the delights produced by the first impressions of a new country, and that country the charming Tahiti. A crowd of men, women, and children, was collected on the memorable Point Venus, ready to receive us with laughing, merry faces. They marshalled us towards the house of Mr. Wilson, the missionary of the district, who met us on the road, and gave us a very friendly reception. After sitting a very short time in his house, we separated to walk about, but returned there in the evening. The land capable of cultivation, is scarcely in any part more than a fringe of low alluvial soil, accumulated round the base of the mountains, and protected from the waves of the sea by a coral reef, which encircles the entire line of coast. Within the reef there is an expanse of smooth water, like that of a lake, where the canoes of the natives can ply with safety and where ships anchor. The low land which comes down to the beach of coral-sand, is covered by the most beautiful productions of the intertropical regions. In the midst of bananas, orange, cocoa- nut, and bread-fruit trees, spots are cleared where yams, sweet potatoes, and sugar-cane, and pine-apples are cultivated. Even the brush-wood is an imported fruit-tree, namely, the guava, which from its abundance has become as noxious as a weed. In Brazil I have often admired the varied beauty of the bananas, palms, and orange-trees contrasted together; and here we also have the bread-fruit, conspicuous from its large, glossy, and deeply digitated leaf. It is admirable to behold groves of a tree, sending forth its branches with the vigour of an English oak, loaded with large and most nutritious fruit. However seldom the usefulness of an object can account for the pleasure of beholding it, in the case of these beautiful woods, the knowledge of their high productiveness no doubt enters largely into the feeling of admiration. The little winding paths, cool from the surrounding shade, led to the scattered houses; the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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owners of which everywhere gave us a cheerful and most hospitable reception. I was pleased with nothing so much as with the inhabitants. There is a mildness in the expression of their countenances which at once banishes the idea of a savage; and intelligence which shows that they are advancing in civilization. The common people, when working, keep the upper part of their bodies quite naked; and it is then that the Tahitians are seen to advantage. They are very tall, broad- shouldered, athletic, and well-proportioned. It has been remarked, that it requires little habit to make a dark skin more pleasing and natural to the eye of an European than his own colour. A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian, was like a plant bleached by the gardener's art compared with a fine dark green one growing vigorously in the open fields. Most of the men are tattooed, and the ornaments follow the curvature of the body so gracefully, that they have a very elegant effect. One common pattern, varying in its details, is somewhat like the crown of a palm-tree. It springs from the central line of the back, and gracefully curls round both sides. The simile may be a fanciful one, but I thought the body of a man thus ornamented was like the trunk of a, noble tree embraced by a delicate creeper. Many of the elder people had their feet covered with small figures, so placed as to resemble a sock. This fashion, however, is partly gone by, and has been succeeded by others. Here, although fashion is far from immutable, every one must abide by that prevailing in his youth. An old man has thus his age for ever stamped on his body, and he cannot assume the airs of a young dandy. The women are tattooed in the same manner as the men, and very commonly on their fingers. One unbecoming fashion is now almost universal: namely, shaving the hair from the upper part of the head, in a circular form, so as to leave only an outer ring. The missionaries have tried to persuade the people to change this habit; but it is the fashion, and that is a sufficient answer at Tahiti, as well as at Paris. I was much disappointed in the personal appearance of the women: they are far inferior in every respect to the men. The custom of wearing a white or scarlet flower in the back of the head, or through a small hole in each ear, is pretty. A crown of woven cocoa-nut leaves is also worn as a shade for the eyes. The women appear to be in greater want of some becoming costume even than the men. Nearly all the natives understand a little English -- that is, they know the names of common things; and by the aid of this, together with signs, a lame sort of conversation could be carried on. In returning in the evening to the boat, we stopped to witness a very pretty scene. Numbers of children were playing on the beach, and had lighted bonfires which illumined the placid sea and surrounding trees; others, in circles, were singing Tahitian verses. We seated ourselves on the sand, and joined their party. The songs were impromptu, and I believe related to our arrival: one little girl sang a line, which the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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rest took up in parts, forming a very pretty chorus. The whole scene made us unequivocally aware that we were seated on the shores of an island in the far-famed South Sea.

Henry Thoreau would comment on this in his essay “WALKING”:

“WALKING”: A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man — a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art compared with a fine, dark green one growing vigorously in the open fields.” Ben Jonson exclaims,— “How near to good is what is fair!” So I would say— How near to good is what is wild! Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.

CHARLES DARWIN BEN JONSON VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE II LOVE FREED FROM IGNOR ...

November 17, Tuesday: Cesar Franck offered his 1st piano recital in Paris, at the Gymnase Musical. In spite of a vigorous advertising campaign by his father, no review would appear in the press.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 17 of 11 M / The weather being very calm the Wickford Boat did not get power till near night & Thos again Staid with us RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

At anchor off the South Pacific island of Tahiti, the HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin registered the fact that they had crossed over this planet’s Date Line and therefore needed to pay due homage to the calendar deity: This day is reckoned in the log-book as Tuesday the 17th, instead of Monday the 16th, owing to our, so far, successful chase of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the sun. Before breakfast the ship was hemmed in by a flotilla of canoes; and when the natives were allowed to come on board, I suppose there could not have been less than two hundred. It was the opinion of every one that it would have been difficult to have picked out an equal number from any other nation, who would have given so little trouble. Everybody brought something for sale: shells were the main articles of trade. The Tahitians now fully understand the value of money, and prefer it to old clothes or other articles. The various coins, however, of English and Spanish denomination puzzle them, and they never seemed to think the small silver quite secure until changed into dollars. Some of the chiefs have accumulated considerable sums of money. One chief, not long since, offered 800 dollars (about 160 pounds sterling) for a small vessel; and frequently they purchase whale-boats and horses at the rate of from 50 to 100 dollars. After breakfast I went on shore, and ascended the nearest slope to a height of between two and three thousand feet. The outer mountains are smooth and conical, but steep; and the old volcanic rocks, of which they are formed, have been cut through by many profound ravines, diverging from the central broken parts of the island to the coast. Having crossed the narrow low girt of inhabited and fertile land, I followed a smooth steep ridge between two of the deep ravines. The vegetation was singular, consisting almost exclusively of small dwarf ferns, mingled higher up, with coarse grass; it was not very dissimilar from that on some of the Welsh hills, and this so close above the orchard of tropical plants on the coast was very surprising. At the highest point, which I reached, trees again appeared. Of the three zones of comparative luxuriance, the lower one owes its moisture, and therefore fertility, to its flatness; for, being scarcely raised above the level of the sea, the water from the higher land drains away slowly. The intermediate zone does not, like the upper one, reach into a damp and cloudy atmosphere, and therefore remains sterile. The woods in the upper zone are very pretty, tree-ferns replacing the cocoa-nuts on the coast. It must not, however, be supposed that these woods at all equal in splendour the forests of Brazil. The vast numbers of productions, which characterize a continent, cannot be expected to occur in an island. From the highest point which I attained, there was a good view of the distant island of Eimeo, dependent on the same sovereign with Tahiti. On the lofty and broken pinnacles, white massive clouds were piled up, which formed an island in the blue sky, as Eimeo itself did in the blue ocean. The island, with the exception of one small gateway, is completely encircled by a reef. At this distance, a narrow but well- defined brilliantly white line was alone visible, where the waves first encountered the wall of coral. The mountains rose abruptly out of the glassy expanse of the lagoon, included within this narrow white line, outside which the heaving waters of the ocean were dark- coloured. The view was striking: it may aptly be compared to a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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framed engraving, where the frame represents the breakers, the marginal paper the smooth lagoon, and the drawing the island itself. When in the evening I descended from the mountain, a man, whom I had pleased with a trifling gift, met me, bringing with him hot roasted bananas, a pine-apple, and cocoa-nuts. After walking under a burning sun, I do not know anything more delicious than the milk of a young cocoa-nut. Pine-apples are here so abundant that the people eat them in the same wasteful manner as we might turnips. They are of an excellent flavor -- perhaps even better than those cultivated in England; and this I believe is the highest compliment which can be paid to any fruit. Before going on board, Mr. Wilson interpreted for me to the Tahitian who had paid me so adroit an attention, that I wanted him and another man to accompany me on a short excursion into the mountains.

November 18, Wednesday: Jose Jorge Loureiro replaced Joao Carlos Gregorio Domingues Vicente Francisco de Saldanha Oliveira e Daun, marques e conde de Saldanha as prime minister of Portugal.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 18 of 11 M / The wind being favourable this Morng Our fr Thos Anthony left us & returned home - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Charles Darwin went exploring on Tahiti: In the morning I came on shore early, bringing with me some provisions in a bag, and two blankets for myself and servant. These were lashed to each end of a long pole, which was alternately carried by my Tahitian companions on their shoulders. These men are accustomed thus to carry, for a whole day, as much as fifty pounds at each end of their poles. I told my guides to provide themselves with food and clothing; but they said that there was plenty of food in the mountains, and for clothing, that their skins were sufficient. Our line of march was the valley of Tiaauru, down which a river flows into the sea by Point Venus. This is one of the principal streams in the island, and its source lies at the base of the loftiest central pinnacles, which rise to a height of about 7000 feet. The whole island is so mountainous that the only way to penetrate into the interior is to follow up the valleys. Our road, at first, lay through woods which bordered each side of the river; and the glimpses of the lofty central peaks, seen as through an avenue, with here and there a waving cocoa-nut tree on one side, were extremely picturesque. The valley soon began to narrow, and the sides to grow lofty and more precipitous. After having walked between three and four hours, we found the width of the ravine scarcely exceeded that of the bed of the stream. On each hand the walls were nearly vertical, yet from the soft nature of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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volcanic strata, trees and a rank vegetation sprung from every projecting ledge. These precipices must have been some thousand feet high; and the whole formed a mountain gorge far more magnificent than anything which I had ever before beheld. Until the midday sun stood vertically over the ravine, the air felt cool and damp, but now it became very sultry. Shaded by a ledge of rock, beneath a facade of columnar lava, we ate our dinner. My guides had already procured a dish of small fish and fresh- water prawns. They carried with them a small net stretched on a hoop; and where the water was deep and in eddies, they dived, and like otters, with their eyes open followed the fish into holes and corners, and thus caught them. The Tahitians have the dexterity of amphibious animals in the water. An anecdote mentioned by Ellis shows how much they feel at home in this element. When a horse was landing for Pomarre in 1817, the slings broke, and it fell into the water; immediately the natives jumped overboard, and by their cries and vain efforts at assistance almost drowned it. As soon, however, as it reached the shore, the whole population took to flight, and tried to hide themselves from the man-carrying pig, as they christened the horse. A little higher up, the river divided itself into three little streams. The two northern ones were impracticable, owing to a succession of waterfalls which descended from the jagged summit of the highest mountain; the other to all appearance was equally inaccessible, but we managed to ascend it by a most extraordinary road. The sides of the valley were here nearly precipitous, but, as frequently happens with stratified rocks, small ledges projected, which were thickly covered by wild bananas, lilaceous plants, and other luxuriant productions of the tropics. The Tahitians, by climbing amongst these ledges, searching for fruit, had discovered a track by which the whole precipice could be scaled. The first ascent from the valley was very dangerous; for it was necessary to pass a steeply inclined face of naked rock, by the aid of ropes which we brought with us. How any person discovered that this formidable spot was the only point where the side of the mountain was practicable, I cannot imagine. We then cautiously walked along one of the ledges till we came to one of the three streams. This ledge formed a flat spot, above which a beautiful cascade, some hundred feet in height, poured down its waters, and beneath, another high cascade fell into the main stream in the valley below. From this cool and shady recess we made a circuit to avoid the overhanging waterfall. As before, we followed little projecting ledges, the danger being partly concealed by the thickness of the vegetation. In passing from one of the ledges to another, there was a vertical wall of rock. One of the Tahitians, a fine active man, placed the trunk of a tree against this, climbed up it, and then by the aid of crevices reached the summit. He fixed the ropes to a projecting point, and lowered them for our dog and luggage, and then we clambered up ourselves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Beneath the ledge on which the dead tree was placed, the precipice must have been five or six hundred feet deep; and if the abyss had not been partly concealed by the overhanging ferns and lilies my head would have turned giddy, and nothing should have induced me to have attempted it. We continued to ascend, sometimes along ledges, and sometimes along knife- edged ridges, having on each hand profound ravines. In the Cordillera I have seen mountains on a far grander scale, but for abruptness, nothing at all comparable with this. In the evening we reached a flat little spot on the banks of the same stream, which we had continued to follow, and which descends in a chain of waterfalls: here we bivouacked for the night. On each side of the ravine there were great beds of the mountain-banana, covered with ripe fruit. Many of these plants were from twenty to twenty- five feet high, and from three to four in circumference. By the aid of strips of bark for rope, the stems of bamboos for rafters, and the large leaf of the banana for a thatch, the Tahitians in a few minutes built us an excellent house; and with withered leaves made a soft bed. They then proceeded to make a fire, and cook our evening meal. A light was procured, by rubbing a blunt pointed stick in a groove made in another, as if with intention of deepening it, until by the friction the dust became ignited. A peculiarly white and very light wood (the Hibiscus tiliareus) is alone used for this purpose: it is the same which serves for poles to carry any burden, and for the floating out-riggers to their canoes. The fire was produced in a few seconds: but to a person who does not understand the art, it requires, as I found, the greatest exertion; but at last, to my great pride, I succeeded in igniting the dust. The Gaucho in the Pampas uses a different method: taking an elastic stick about eighteen inches long, he presses one end on his breast, and the other pointed end into a hole in a piece of wood, and then rapidly turns the curved part, like a carpenter's centre-bit. The Tahitians having made a small fire of sticks, placed a score of stones, of about the size of cricket-balls, on the burning wood. In about ten minutes the sticks were consumed, and the stones hot. They had previously folded up in small parcels of leaves, pieces of beef, fish, ripe and unripe bananas, and the tops of the wild arum. These green parcels were laid in a layer between two layers of the hot stones, and the whole then covered up with earth, so that no smoke or steam could escape. In about a quarter of an hour, the whole was most deliciously cooked. The choice green parcels were now laid on a cloth of banana leaves, and with a cocoa-nut shell we drank the cool water of the running stream; and thus we enjoyed our rustic meal. I could not look on the surrounding plants without admiration. On every side were forests of banana; the fruit of which, though serving for food in various ways, lay in heaps decaying on the ground. In front of us there was an extensive brake of wild sugar-cane; and the stream was shaded by the dark green knotted HDT WHAT? INDEX

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stem of the Ava, — so famous in former days for its powerful intoxicating effects. I chewed a piece, and found that it had an acrid and unpleasant taste, which would have induced any one at once to have pronounced it poisonous. Thanks to the missionaries, this plant now thrives only in these deep ravines, innocuous to every one. Close by I saw the wild arum, the roots of which, when well baked, are good to eat, and the young leaves better than spinach. There was the wild yam, and a liliaceous plant called Ti, which grows in abundance, and has a soft brown root, in shape and size like a huge log of wood: this served us for dessert, for it is as sweet as treacle, and with a pleasant taste. There were, moreover, several other wild fruits, and useful vegetables. The little stream, besides its cool water, produced eels, and cray-fish. I did indeed admire this scene, when I compared it with an uncultivated one in the temperate zones. I felt the force of the remark, that man, at least savage man, with his reasoning powers only partly developed, is the child of the tropics. As the evening drew to a close, I strolled beneath the gloomy shade of the bananas up the course of the stream. My walk was soon brought to a close, by coming to a waterfall between two and three hundred feet high; and again above this there was another. I mention all these waterfalls in this one brook, to give a general idea of the inclination of the land. In the little recess where the water fell, it did not appear that a breath of wind had ever blown. The thin edges of the great leaves of the banana, damp with spray, were unbroken, instead of being, as is so generally the case, split into a thousand shreds. From our position, almost suspended on the mountain side, there were glimpses into the depths of the neighbouring valleys; and the lofty points of the central mountains, towering up within sixty degrees of the zenith, hid half the evening sky. Thus seated, it was a sublime spectacle to watch the shades of night gradually obscuring the last and highest pinnacles. Before we laid ourselves down to sleep, the elder Tahitian fell on his knees, and with closed eyes repeated a long prayer in his native tongue. He prayed as a Christian should do, with fitting reverence, and without the fear of ridicule or any ostentation of piety. At our meals neither of the men would taste food, without saying beforehand a short grace. Those travellers who think that a Tahitian prays only when the eyes of the missionary are fixed on him, should have slept with us that night on the mountain-side. Before morning it rained very heavily; but the good thatch of banana-leaves kept us dry.

November 19, Thursday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 19th of 11th M 1835 / Our Meeting today was a solid good one - Father had a short encouraging testimony. — In the Preparative Meeting which followed, Thos P Nichols appeared in it & requested to become a member of our Society.— I felt glad HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thos had given up to request Membership - he has been examplary in the use of the plain language for some time, & a very dilligent attender of our religious Meetings both on First day & in the middle of the Week.— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Meanwhile, at the Masonic Temple in Boston, Waldo Emerson was delivering lecture Number 3 of the series “English Literature,” entitled “The Age of Fable.”

In the South Pacific, a Western ship ferried about 500 Mäori warriors from New Zealand’s North Island to the Chatham Islands, 500 miles to the east. The Moriori of the Chatham Islands were of the same stock as the Mäori, but had been living in isolation for some 15 generations. Having learned from sealers of the existence of the Chatham Islands and of the existence of their relatives the Moriori, the Mäori were going to make them be their slaves, and then, in short order, to exterminate them. This was their custom.

Meanwhile, on the island of Tahiti elsewhere in the South Pacific, Charles Darwin continued his explorations: At daylight my friends, after their morning prayer, prepared an excellent breakfast in the same manner as in the evening. They themselves certainly partook of it largely; indeed I never saw any men eat near so much. I suppose such enormously capacious stomachs must be the effect of a large part of their diet consisting of fruit and vegetables, which contain, in a given bulk, a comparatively small portion of nutriment. Unwittingly, I was the means of my companions breaking, as I afterwards learned, one of their own laws, and resolutions: I took with me a flask of spirits, which they could not refuse to partake of; but as often as they drank a little, they put their fingers before their mouths, and uttered the word “Missionary.” About two years ago, although the use of the ava was prevented, drunkenness from the introduction of spirits became very prevalent. The missionaries prevailed on a few good men, who saw that their country was rapidly going to ruin, to join with them in a Temperance Society. From good sense or shame, all the chiefs and the queen were at last persuaded to join. Immediately a law was passed, that no spirits should be allowed to be introduced into the island, and that he who sold and he who bought the forbidden article should be punished by a fine. With remarkable justice, a certain period was allowed for stock in hand to be sold, before the law came into effect. But when it did, a general search was made, in which even the houses of the missionaries were not exempted, and all the ava (as the natives call all ardent spirits) was poured on the ground. When one reflects on the effect of intemperance on the aborigines of the two Americas, I think it will be acknowledged that every well-wisher of Tahiti owes no common debt of gratitude to the missionaries. As long as the little island of St. Helena remained under the government of the East India Company, spirits, owing to the great injury they had produced, were not allowed to be imported; but wine was supplied from the Cape of Good Hope. It is rather HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a striking and not very gratifying fact, that in the same year that spirits were allowed to be sold in Helena, their use was banished from Tahiti by the free will of the people. After breakfast we proceeded on our Journey. As my object was merely to see a little of the interior scenery, we returned by another track, which descended into the main valley lower down. For some distance we wound, by a most intricate path, along the side of the mountain which formed the valley. In the less precipitous parts we passed through extensive groves of the wild banana. The Tahitians, with their naked, tattooed bodies, their heads ornamented with flowers, and seen in the dark shade of these groves, would have formed a fine picture of man inhabiting some primeval land. In our descent we followed the line of ridges; these were exceedingly narrow, and for considerable lengths steep as a ladder; but all clothed with vegetation. The extreme care necessary in poising each step rendered the walk fatiguing. I did not cease to wonder at these ravines and precipices: when viewing the country from one of the knife- edged ridges, the point of support was so small, that the effect was nearly the same as it must be from a balloon. In this descent we had occasion to use the ropes only once, at the point where we entered the main valley. We slept under the same ledge of rock where we had dined the day before: the night was fine, but from the depth and narrowness of the gorge, profoundly dark. Before actually seeing this country, I found it difficult to understand two facts mentioned by Ellis; namely, that after the murderous battles of former times, the survivors on the conquered side retired into the mountains, where a handful of men could resist a multitude. Certainly half a dozen men, at the spot where the Tahitian reared the old tree, could easily have repulsed thousands. Secondly, that after the introduction of Christianity, there were wild men who lived in the mountains, and whose retreats were unknown to the more civilized inhabitants.

November 20, Friday: Charles Darwin continued his explorations on Tahiti: In the morning we started early, and reached Matavai at noon. On the road we met a large party of noble athletic men, going for wild bananas. I found that the ship, on account of the difficulty in watering, had moved to the harbour of Papawa, to which place I immediately walked. This is a very pretty spot. The cove is surrounded by reefs, and the water as smooth as in a lake. The cultivated ground, with its beautiful productions, interspersed with cottages, comes close down to the water’s edge. From the varying accounts which I had read before reaching these islands, I was very anxious to form, from my own observation, a judgment of their moral state, — although such judgment would necessarily be very imperfect. First impressions at all times very much depend on one’s previously acquired ideas. My notions were drawn from Ellis’s “Polynesian HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Researches” — an admirable and most interesting work, but naturally looking at everything under a favourable point of view, from Beechey’s Voyage; and from that of Kotzebue, which is strongly adverse to the whole missionary system. He who compares these three accounts will, I think, form a tolerably accurate conception of the present state of Tahiti. One of my impressions which I took from the two last authorities, was decidedly incorrect; viz., that the Tahitians had become a gloomy race, and lived in fear of the missionaries. Of the latter feeling I saw no trace, unless, indeed, fear and respect be confounded under one name. Instead of discontent being a common feeling, it would be difficult in Europe to pick out of a crowd half so many merry and happy faces. The prohibition of the flute and dancing is inveighed against as wrong and foolish; — the more than presbyterian manner of keeping the sabbath is looked at in a similar light. On these points I will not pretend to offer any opinion to men who have resided as many years as I was days on the island. On the whole, it appears to me that the morality and religion of the inhabitants are highly creditable. There are many who attack, even more acrimoniously than Kotzebue, both the missionaries, their system, and the effects produced by it. Such reasoners never compare the present state with that of the island only twenty years ago; nor even with that of Europe at this day; but they compare it with the high standard of Gospel perfection. They expect the missionaries to effect that which the Apostles themselves failed to do. Inasmuch as the condition of the people falls short of this high standard, blame is attached to the missionary, instead of credit for that which he has effected. They forget, or will not remember, that human sacrifices, and the power of an idolatrous priesthood — a system of profligacy unparalleled in any other part of the world — infanticide a consequence of that system — bloody wars, where the conquerors spared neither women nor children — that all these have been abolished; and that dishonesty, intemperance, and licentiousness have been greatly reduced by the introduction of Christianity. In a voyager to forget these things is base ingratitude; for should he chance to be at the point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have extended thus far. In point of morality, the virtue of the women, it has been often said, is most open to exception. But before they are blamed too severely, it will be well distinctly to call to mind the scenes described by Captain Cook and Mr. Banks, in which the grandmothers and mothers of the present race played a part. Those who are most severe, should consider how much of the morality of the women in Europe is owing to the system early impressed by mothers on their daughters, and how much in each individual case to the precepts of religion. But it is useless to argue against such reasoners; — I believe that, disappointed in not finding the field of licentiousness quite so open as HDT WHAT? INDEX

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formerly, they will not give credit to a morality which they do not wish to practise, or to a religion which they undervalue, if not despise.

November 22, Sunday: Le cinq Mai: chant sur la mort de l’Empereur Napoléon for bass, chorus, and orchestra by Hector Berlioz to words of de Beranger was performed for the initial time, at the Paris Conservatoire.

Charles Darwin recorded the condition of Tahiti in his journal: The harbour of Papiete, where the queen resides, may be considered as the capital of the island: it is also the seat of government, and the chief resort of shipping. Captain Fitz Roy took a party there this day to hear divine service, first in the Tahitian language, and afterwards in our own. Mr. Pritchard, the leading missionary in the island, performed the service. The chapel consisted of a large airy framework of wood; and it was filled to excess by tidy, clean people, of all ages and both sexes. I was rather disappointed in the apparent degree of attention; but I believe my expectations were raised too high. At all events the appearance was quite equal to that in a country church in England. The singing of the hymns was decidedly very pleasing, but the language from the pulpit, although fluently delivered, did not sound well: a constant repetition of words, like “tata ta, mata mai,” rendered it monotonous. After English service, a party returned on foot to Matavai. It was a pleasant walk, sometimes along the sea-beach and sometimes under the shade of the many beautiful trees.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 22 of 11 M / Both Meetings were silent with the exception of a Short offering by Father in the Morning - Both were seasons of some favour RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

November 24, Tuesday: In Parma, Italy, Nicolò Paganini had an audience with Grand Duchess Maria Louisa, widow of the Emperor Napoléon.

Records of the “Institute of 1770”: Lecture by Stone on “Witchcraft.” Debated: “Ought the military law to bind all classes?” Decided in the affirmative — 15 to 8.

In the south Pacific ocean, in the English chapel on the island of Papaiti, Captain Robert FitzRoy, accompanied by Mr. Darwin among others, had an audience with Pōmare IV, Queen of Tahiti: With all the officers who could be spared from the duty of the ship, Mr. Darwin and I repaired early to Papiete. Mr. Wilson, Mr. Henry, and Hitote, were of the party. Arrived at the hospitable HDT WHAT? INDEX

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abode of Mr. Pritchard, we waited until a messenger informed us of the queen’s arrival at the appointed place of meeting — the English chapel. From our position we had just seen the royal escort — a very inferior assemblage. It appeared that the chiefs and elderly people had walked to the chapel when our boats arrived, leaving only the younger branches of the community to accompany Pomare. The English chapel is a small, wooden structure, with a high, angular roof; it is about fifty feet in length and thirty feet wide; near the eastern end is a pulpit, and at each corner a small pew. The rest of the building is occupied by strong benches, extending nearly from side to side; latticed windows admit light and air; the roof is thatched in a partly Otaheitan manner; none of the woodwork is painted, neither is there any decoration. Entering the chapel with my companions, I turned towards the principal pews, expecting to see Pomare there; but no, she was sitting almost alone, at the other end of the building, looking very disconsolate. Natives sitting promiscuously on the benches saluted us as we entered: — order, or any kind of form, there was none. The only visible difference between Pomare and her subjects was her wearing a gay silk gown, tied however round the throat, though entirely loose elsewhere; being made and worn like a loose smock- frock, its uncouth appearance excited more notice from our eyes than the rich material. In her figure, her countenance, or her manner, there was nothing prepossessing, or at all calculated to command the respect of foreigners. I thought of Oberea,* and wished that it had been possible to retain a modified dress of the former kind. A light undergarment added to the dress of Oberea might have suited the climate, satisfied decency, and pleased the eye, even of a painter. Disposed at first to criticise rather ill-naturedly — how soon our feelings altered, as we remarked the superior appearance and indications of intellectual ability shown by the chieftains, and by very many of the natives of a lower class. Their manner, and animated though quiet tone of speaking, assisted the good sense and apparent honesty of the principal men in elevating our ideas of their talents, and of their wish to act correctly. Every reader of voyages knows that the chiefs of Otaheite are large, fine-looking men. Their manner is easy, respectful, and to a certain degree dignified; indeed on the whole surprisingly good. They speak with apparent ease, very much to the purpose in few words, and in the most orderly, regular way. Not one individual interrupted another; no one attempted to give his opinions, or introduce a new subject, without asking permission; yet did the matters under discussion affect them all in a very serious manner. Might not these half-enlightened Otaheitans set an example to numbers whose habits and education have been, or ought to have been, so superior? It had become customary to shake hands with the queen, as well as with the chiefs. This compliment we were expected to pay; but it seemed difficult to manage, since Pomare occupied a large share of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the space between two benches nearest to the wall, and the next space was filled by natives. However, squeezing past her, one after another, shaking hands at the most awkward moment, we countermarched into vacant places on the benches next in front of her. The principal chiefs, Utaame, Taati, Hitote, and others, sat near the queen, whose advisers and speakers appeared to be Taati and her foster-father. It was left for me to break the silence and enter upon the business for which we had assembled. Desirous of explaining the motives of our visit, by means of an interpreter in whom the natives would place confidence, I told Mitchell the pilot to request that Queen Pomare would choose a person to act in that character. She named Mr. Pritchard. I remarked, that his sacred office ought to raise him above the unpleasant disputes in which he might become involved as interpreter. The missionaries had approached, and were living in Otaheite, with the sole object of doing good to their fellowmen, but I was sent in a very different capacity. As an officer in the service of my king, I was either to do good or harm, as I might be ordered; and it was necessary to distinguish between those who were, and ought to be always their friends, and men whose duty might be unfriendly, if events should unfortunately disappoint the hopes of those interested in the welfare of Otaheite. These expressions appeared to perplex the queen, and cause serious discussions among the chiefs. Before any reply was made, I continued: “But if Mr. Pritchard will undertake an office which may prove disagreeable, for the sake of giving your majesty satisfaction, by forwarding the business for which this assembly was convened, it will not become me to object; on the contrary, I shall esteem his able assistance as of the most material consequence.” The queen immediately replied, through the chieftain at her right hand, Taati, that she wished Mr. Pritchard to interpret. Removing to a position nearer the queen and chiefs (he had been sitting at a distance), Mr. Pritchard expressed his entire readiness to exert himself on any question which might affect the good understanding and harmony that hitherto had existed between the natives of Otaheite and the British; and he trusted that those persons present who understood both languages, (Messrs. Wilson, Bicknell, Henry, and others,) would assist and correct his interpretations as often as they thought it necessary. Commodore Mason’s letter to me, authorizing my proceedings, was then read —in English, by myself— and translated by Mr. Pritchard. Next was read an agreement or bond, by which Queen Pomare had engaged to pay 2,853 dollars, or an equivalent, on or before the 1st day of September 1835, as an indemnification for the capture and robbery of the Truro at the Low Islands. The queen was asked whether her promise had been fulfilled? Taati answered, “Neither the money nor an equivalent has yet been given.” “Why is this?” I asked. “Has any unforeseen accident hindered your acting up to your intentions; or is it not to be paid?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Utaame and Hitote spoke to Taati, who replied, “We did not understand distinctly how and to whom payment was to be made. It is our intention to pay; and we now wish to remove all doubts, as to the manner of payment.” I observed, that a clear and explicit agreement had been entered into with Capt. Seymour; if a doubt had arisen it might have been removed by reference to the parties concerned, or to disinterested persons; but no reference of any kind had been made, and Mr. Bicknell, the person appointed to receive the money, or an equivalent, had applied to the queen, yet had not obtained an answer. I then reminded Pomare of the solemn nature of her agreement; of the loss which her character, and that of her chiefs, would sustain; and of the means England eventually might adopt to recover the property so nefariously taken away from British subjects. I said that I was on my way to England, where her conduct would become known; and if harsh measures should, in consequence, be adopted, she must herself expect to bear the blame. These words seemed to produce a serious effect. Much argumentative discussion occupied the more respectable natives as well as the chiefs; while the queen sat in silence. I must here remark, in explanation of the assuming or even harsh tone of my conduct towards Pomare, at this meeting, that there was too much reason for believing that she had abetted, if not in a great measure instigated, the piracy of the Paamuto people (or Low Islanders). For such conduct, however, her advisers were the most to blame. She was then very young; and during those years in which mischief occurred, must have been guided less by her own will than by the desires of her relations. I had been told that excuses would be made; and that unless something like harshness and threatening were employed, ill effects, instead of a beneficial result, would be caused by the meeting: for the natives, seeing that the case was not taken up in a serious manner, and that the captain of the ship of war did not insist, would trouble themselves no farther after she had sailed away; and would laugh at those by whom the property was to be received. The ‘Paamuto,’ or Low Islands, where the piracies have occurred, in which she and her relations were supposed to have been concerned, were, and are still considered (though nominally given up by her), as under her authority and particular influence. Her father was a good friend to all the natives of those islands; and the respect and esteem excited by his unusual conduct have continued to the present time, and shown themselves in attachment to his daughter. So much hostility has in general influenced the natives of different islands, that to be well treated by a powerful chief, into whose hands a gale of wind, or warfare throws them, is a rare occurrence. The Paamuto Isles are rich in pearl oysters. Pomare, or her relations, desired to monopolize the trade. Unjustifiable steps were taken, actuated, it is said, by her or by these relations; HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and hence this affair. They soon decided to pay the debt at once. Thirty-six tons of pearl oyster-shells, belonging to Pomare, and then lying at Papiete, were to form part of the equivalent; the remainder was to be collected among the queen’s friends. Taati left his place near her, went into the midst of the assembly, and harangued the people in a forcible though humorous manner, in order to stimulate them to subscribe for the queen. After he had done speaking, I requested Mr. Pritchard to state strongly that the innocent natives of Otaheite ought not to suffer for the misdeeds of the Low Islanders. The shells which had come from those ill-conducted people, might well be given as part of the payment; but the queen ought to procure the rest from them, and not from her innocent and deserving subjects. A document, expressing her intention to pay the remaining sum within a stated time, signed by herself and by two chiefs, with a certainty that the property would be obtained from the Low Islanders, would be more satisfactory than immediate payment, if effected by distressing her Otaheitan subjects, who were in no way to blame. Taati replied, “The honour of the queen is our honour. We will share her difficulties. Her friends prefer assisting her in clearing off this debt, to leaving her conduct exposed to censure. We have determined to unite in her cause, and endeavour to pay all before the departure of the man-of-war.” It was easy to see that the other principal chiefs had no doubt of the propriety of the demand; and that they thought the queen and her relations ought to bear the consequences of their own conduct. Taati, who is related to her, exerted himself far more than Utaame, Hitote, or any of the others. This part of the business was then settled by their agreeing to give the shells already collected, such sums of money as her friends should choose to contribute, and a document signed by two principal chiefs, expressing the sum already collected and paid; and their intention of forthwith collecting the remainder, and paying it before a stipulated time. Difficulties about the present, as compared with the former value of the shells, were quickly ended by arbitration; and their value estimated at fifty dollars per ton: the ready way in which this question about the value of the shells was settled, gave me a high idea of the natives’ wish to do right, rather than take advantage of a doubtful point of law. I next had to remark, that the queen had given up the murderers of the master and mate of the Truro in a merely nominal manner, and not in effect; and that she must expect to receive a communication upon that subject by the next man-of-war. She asked me — whether I really thought they would be required from her by the next man-of-war? I replied: “Those men were tried and condemned by the laws of Otaheite. Your majesty, as sovereign, exercised your right of pardoning them. I think that the British Government will respect your right as queen of these islands; and that his Britannic Majesty will not insist upon those men being punished, or again HDT WHAT? INDEX

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tried for the same offence; but the propriety of your own conduct in pardoning such notorious offenders, is a very different affair. It will not tend to diminish the effect of a report injurious to your character, which you are aware has been circulated.” After a pause, I said, “I was desired to enquire into the complaints of British subjects and demand redress where necessary. No complaints had been made to me; therefore I begged to congratulate her majesty on the regularity and good conduct which had prevailed; and thanked her, in the name of my countrymen, for the kindness with which they had been treated.” I then reminded Pomare of the deep interest generally felt for those highly deserving and devoted missionaries, whose exertions, hazardous and difficult as they had been, and still were, had raised the natives of Otaheite to their present enlightened and improved condition; and that every reason united to demand for them the steady co-operation of both her and her chiefs. Finding that they listened attentively to Mr. Pritchard’s interpretation, which I was told was as good as it appeared to me fluent and effective, I requested permission to say a few words more to the queen — to the effect that I had heard much of her associating chiefly with the young and inexperienced, almost to the exclusion of the older and trustworthy counsellors whom she had around her at this assembly. To be respected, either at home or abroad, it was indispensably necessary for her to avoid the society of inferior minds and dispositions; and to be very guarded in her own personal conduct. She ought to avoid taking advice from foreigners, whom she knew not, and whose station was not such as might be a guarantee for their upright dealings: and she ought to guard carefully against the specious appearances of adventurers whose intentions, or real character, it was not possible for her to discover readily. Such men could hardly fail to misinform her on most subjects; but especially on such as interested themselves; or about which they might entertain the prejudices and illiberal ideas which are so prevalent among ignorant or ill-disposed people. I tried to say these things kindly, as the advice of a friend: Pomare thanked me, acknowledged the truth of my remarks, and said she would bear them in mind. Turning to the chiefs, a few words passed, previous to Taati asking me, in her name, “Whether they were right in allowing a foreigner to enlist Otaheitans to serve him as soldiers; and in permitting them and other men to be trained, for warlike purposes, upon their island?”* My reply was, “If Otaheitan subjects, so trained, almost under the queen’s eye, act hostilely against the natives of any other island, will not those natives deem her culpable? To my limited view of the present case, it appears impolitic, and decidedly improper to do so.” After a few words with Utaame and Hitote, Taati rose and gave notice that no Otaheitan should enlist or be trained to serve as a soldier, in a foreign cause. By this decree de Thierry lost his enlisted troops, except a few New Zealanders, and whaling seamen. One of the seven judges, an intelligent, and, for an Otaheitan, a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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very well educated man, named ‘Mare,’ asked to speak to me. “You mentioned, in the third place,” said Mare, “that you were desired to enquire into the complaints of British subjects, and demand redress, if necessary. You have stated that no complaint has been made, and you have given us credit for our conduct: allow me now to complain of the behaviour of one of your countrymen, for which we have failed in obtaining redress.” Here Mare detailed the following case of the ‘Venilia,’ and said that no reply to their letter to the British government, had yet been received. Mare then added, in a temperate though feeling manner, “does it not appear hard to require our queen to pay so large a sum as 2,853 dollars out of her small income; while that which is due to her, 390 dollars, a mere trifle to Great Britain, has not obtained even an acknowledgment from the British government?” I ventured to assure Mare that some oversight, or mistake, must have occurred, and promised to try to procure an answer for them, which, I felt assured, would be satisfactory. The letter on the subject of the Venilia, very literally translated, is as follows: it is, for many reasons, a curious document. “Our friend, the king of Britain, and all persons in office in your government, may you all be saved by the true God! “The following is the petition of Pomare, of the governors, and of the chiefs of Tahiti. “A whale-ship belonging to London, has been at Tahiti: ‘Venilia’ is the name of the ship, ‘Miner’ is the name of the captain. This ship has disturbed the peace of the government of Queen Pomare the first. We consider this ship a disturber of the peace, because the captain has turned on shore thirteen of his men, against the will of the governor of this place, and other persons in office. The governor of this district made known the law clearly. The captain of the ship objected to the law, and said that he would not regard the law. We then became more resolute: the governor said to the chiefs, ‘Friends, chiefs of the land, we must have a meeting.’ The chiefs assembled on the twenty-second day of December 1831. The governor ordered a man to go for the captain of the ship. When he had arrived on shore, the governor appointed a man to be speaker for him. The speaker said to the captain of the ship, ‘Friend, here are your men, take them, and put them on board of your ship; it is not agreeable to us that they should remain upon our land.’ The captain said, ‘I will not by any means receive them again: no, not on any account whatever!’ The governor again told his speaker to say, ‘Take your men, and put them on board your ship, we shall enforce our laws.’ The captain strongly objected to this, saying, ‘I will not, on any account, again receive these bad men, these mutineers.’ We then said, ‘It is by no means agreeable to us for these men to live on shore: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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if they are disturbers of the peace on board the ship, they will disturb the peace on shore.’ Captain Hill, who has long been a captain belonging to Britain, spoke to the captain of the ship: this is what he said to him: ‘It is not at all agreeable to the laws of Britain that you should discharge, or in any manner turn away your men in a foreign land.’ This is another thing Captain Hill said, ‘you should write a document, stating clearly the crime for which these men have been turned on shore; that the governor and chiefs may know how to act towards them, and that they may render you any assistance.’ But this was not agreeable to the captain; he would not write a document. The governor then said to the captain, ‘If you will not take your men on board again, give us the money, as expressed in the law.’ The captain said, ‘I will not give the money, neither will I again take the men: no, not on any terms whatever; and if you attempt to put them on board the ship, I will resist, even unto death.’ The governor then said, ‘We shall continue to be firm; if you will not give the money, according to the law, we shall put your men on board the ship, and should you die, your death will be deserved.’ When the captain perceived that we were determined to enforce the law, he said, ‘It is agreed; I will give you the money, three hundred and ninety dollars.’ “On the 24th of December the governor sent a person for the money. The captain of the ship said, ‘He had no money.’ We then held a meeting: the governor’s speaker said to the captain, ‘Pay the money according to the agreement of the 22d day of this month.’ The captain said, ‘I have no money.’ The governor told him, ‘If you will not pay the money we will put your men on board the ship.’ “One Lawler said, ‘Friends, is it agreeable to you that I should assist him? I will pay the money to you, three hundred and ninety dollars! I will give property into your hands: this is the kind of property; such as may remain a long time by the sea-side and not be perishable. In five months, should not the money be paid, this property shall become your own.’ “Mr. Pritchard said that this was the custom among foreigners. We agreed to the proposal. “On the 26th of December we went to Lawler’s house to look at the property, and see if it was suitable for the sum of money; and also to make some writings about this property. While there, Lawler made known to us something new, which was, that we should sign our names to a paper, written by the captain, for him to show his owners. We did not agree to this proposal, because we did not know the crime for which these men were turned on shore. We saw clearly that these two persons were deceiving us, and that they would not pay the money; also that the captain would not again take his men; but we did not attempt to put his men on board the ship, because another English whaler had come to anchor. We told the captain that we should write a letter to the British HDT WHAT? INDEX

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government, that they might order this business to be investigated, and might afford us their assistance. “This is the substance of what we have to say:— We entreat you, the British Government, to help us in our troubles. Punish this Captain Miner, and command the owners of the Venilia to pay us three hundred and ninety dollars for thirteen of their men having been left on our land; and also to send the wages of a native man who was employed to supply the whole crew with bread-fruit while at anchor here. Let them send a good musket for this man, because the captain has not given him a good musket according to the agreement at the beginning. Captain Miner also gave much trouble to the pilot. He took his ship out himself: the pilot went after the ship to get his money, and also the money for Pomare, for anchorage. He would not give the pilot his share. After some time he gave the pilot some cloth for his share. “In asking this, we believe that our wish will be complied with. We have agreed to the wish of the British government in receiving the Pitcairn’s people, and in giving them land. We wish to live in peace, and behave well to the British flag, which we consider our real friend, and special protection. We also wish that you would put in office a man like Captain Hill, and send him to Tahiti, as a representative of the king of Great Britain, that he may assist us. If this should not be agreeable to you, we pray you to give authority to the reverend George Pritchard, the missionary at this station. “This is the conclusion of what we have to say. Peace be with you. May you be in a flourishing condition, and may the reign of the beloved king of Britain be long! Written at Tahiti on the sixth day of January, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-two. “On behalf of POMARE, the queen. “Signed by APAAPA, chief secretary. ARUPAEA, district governor. TEPAU, district governor. TEHORO, one of the seven supreme judges. MARE, a district judge, (since raised to be a supreme judge).”

“Addition:— “This man, Lawler, is an Irishman: he has been living at Tahiti about three months: he came from the Sandwich Islands. Of his previous conduct we can say nothing. We much wish that a British ship of war would come frequently to Tahiti to take to their own lands these bad foreigners that trouble us. It is useless for us to depend upon the consul at the Sandwich Islands. We have long known that we can obtain no assistance from him. “We wish to do our duty towards you Britons. You are powerful and rich — but we are like weak children. “On behalf of POMARE, the queen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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APAAPA, chief secretary.” “Paofai (close to Papiete), Tahiti, 7th January 1832." This interesting letter needs no apology for its insertion at full length. Besides explaining Mare’s application, it helps to give an idea of the state of Otaheite; and it appeals to our better feelings in a persuasive manner. That the electric agent (whether fire or fluid) goes upward from the earth to the atmosphere, as well as in the contrary direction, showing that a mutual action takes place between air and land, many facts might be brought to prove: I will only mention two. “On October 25th we had a very remarkable storm: the sky was all in flames. I employed part of the night in observing it, and had the pleasure of seeing three ascending thunderbolts! They rose from the sea like an arrow; two of them in a perpendicular direction, and the third at an angle of about 75 degrees.”—(De Lamanon, in the Voyage of La Pérouse, vol. iii. pp. 431-2). While H.M. corvette Hind, was lying at anchor off Zante, in 1823, in twelve fathoms water, an electric shock came in through her hawse, along the chain-cable, by which she was riding. Two men, who were sitting on the cable, before the bitts, were knocked down —felt the effects of the shock about half an hour —but were not seriously hurt. A noise like that of a gun startled every one on board; yet there was neither smell, nor smoke, nor any other visible effect. The sky was heavily clouded over; small rain was falling; and there was distant thunder occasionally, but no visible lightning. The cable was hanging slack, almost ‘up and down.’ I witnessed this myself. The queen’s secretary next asked to speak, and said that a law had been established in the island, prohibiting the keeping, as well as the use or importation of any kind of spirits. In consequence of that law, the persons appointed to carry it into effect had desired to destroy the contents of various casks and bottles of spirits; but the foreigners who owned the spirits objected, denying the right to interfere with private property. The Otaheitan authorities did not persist, as they were told that the first man- of-war which might arrive would certainly take vengeance upon them if they meddled with private property. He wished to ask whether the Otaheitans ought to have persisted in enforcing their own laws; and what I should have done, had the law been enforced with a British subject, and had he made application to me. My answer was, “Had the Otaheitans enforced their law, I could in no way have objected. In England a contraband article is seized by the proper officers, and is not treated as private property while forbidden by the law.” Much satisfaction was evidently caused by this declaration: also, at a former part of the discussions, when a remonstrance was made against Otaheitans paying the Truro debt, the greater part of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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assembly seemed to be much pleased. A respectable old man then stood up, and expressed his gratification at finding that another of King William’s men-of-war had been sent — not to frighten them, or to force them to do as they were told, without considering or inquiring into their own opinions or inclinations, but to make useful enquiries. They feared the noisy guns which those ships carried, and had often expected to see their island taken from them, and themselves driven off, or obliged in their old age to learn new ways of living. I said, “Rest assured that the ships of Great Britain never will molest Otaheitans so long as they conduct themselves towards British subjects as they wish to be treated by Britons. Great Britain has an extent of territory, far greater than is sufficient for her wishes. Conquest is not her object. Those ships, armed and full of men, which from time to time visit your island, are but a very few out of a great many which are employed in visiting all parts of the world to which British commerce has extended. Their object is to protect and defend the subjects of Great Britain, and also take care that their conduct is proper — not to do harm to, or in any way molest those who treat the British as they themselves would wish to be treated in return.” I was much struck by the sensation which these opinions caused amongst the elderly and the more respectable part of the assemblage. They seemed surprised, and so truly gratified, that I conclude their ideas of the intentions of foreigners towards them must have been very vague or entirely erroneous. The business for which we had assembled being over, I requested Mr. Pritchard to remind the queen, that I had a long voyage to perform; and ought to depart from her territories directly she confided to me the promised document, relating to the affair of the Truro; and I then asked the queen and principal chiefs to honour our little vessel by a visit on the following evening, to see a few fireworks: to which they willingly consented: some trifling conversation then passed; and the meeting ended. Much more was said, during the time, than I have here detailed: my companions were as much astonished as myself at witnessing such order, so much sensible reasoning, and so good a delivery of their ideas! I shall long remember that meeting at Otaheite, and consider it one of the most interesting sights I ever witnessed. To me it was a beautiful miniature view of a nation emerging from heathen ignorance, and modestly setting forth their claims to be considered civilized and Christian. We afterwards dined with Mr. Pritchard, his family, and the two chiefs, Utaame and Taati. The behaviour of these worthies was extremely good; and it was very gratifying to hear so much said in their favour by those whose long residence on the island had enabled them to form a correct judgment. What we heard and saw showed us that mutual feelings of esteem existed between those respectable and influential old chieftains and the missionary families. It was quite dark when we left Papiete to return, by many miles HDT WHAT? INDEX

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among coral reefs, to the Beagle; but our cat-eyed pilot undertook to guide our three boats safely through intricate passages among the reefs, between which I could hardly find my way in broad daylight, even after having passed them several times. The distance to the ship was about four miles; and the night so dark, that the boats were obliged almost to touch each other to ensure safety; yet they arrived on board unhurt, contrary to my expectation; for my eyes could not detect any reason for altering our course every few minutes, neither could those of any other person, except the pilot, James Mitchell. Had he made a mistake of even a few yards, among so many intricate windings, our boats must have suffered (because the coral rocks are very sharp and soon split a plank), though in such smooth and shallow water, a wrong turning could have caused inconvenience only to ourselves, for there was little or no danger of more than a wetting. The observations at Matavai being completed, I was enabled to leave the place, and invited Hitote and Mr. Henry (who had returned with us) to pay another visit to Papiete in the Beagle, and meet the royal party.

December 19, Saturday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin approached New Zealand.

December 25, Friday: Charles Darwin celebrated Christmas in Pahia, New Zealand.

Grand Duchess Maria Louisa (widow of the Emperor Napoléon) granted Nicolò Paganini complete control of court music in the Duchy of Parma.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. described a sailors’ Christmas in California waters.

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR:6 Friday, December 25th. This day was Christmas; and as it rained all day long, and there were no hides to take in, and nothing especial to do, the captain gave us a holiday, (the first we had had since leaving Boston,) and plum duff for dinner. The Russian brig, following the Old Style, had celebrated their Christmas eleven days before; when they had a grand blow-out and (as our men said) drank, in the forecastle, a barrel of gin, ate up a bag of tallow, and made a soup of the skin.

6. Since Dana was on one side of the international dateline and Darwin on the other, and since I don’t really understand these things (in New Zealand waters, wouldn’t this still have been Thursday?), my chronology here may be a day off one way or t’other. –But, never mind. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 30, Wednesday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin sailed from New Zealand toward Sydney, Australia.

At Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, the original version of Maria Stuarda, a tragedia lirica by Gaetano Donizetti to words of Bardari after Schiller, was performed for the initial time. Maria Felicita Malibran performed as lead soprano despite being noticeably ill.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: —th day 30th of 12th M / This day I complete my 54th Year While I am sensible that my glass in running out - that Youthfulness has departed, & that my whole man begins to exhibit a decaying & venerable aspect - I am favour’d with a concern to so live, as that Age may be honourable & peaceful, & as I have often expressed to others “Grow old with a good grace” — How much have I had to be thankful for, & tho’ portions of bitterness have been my lot, yet in truth I have had much, which calls forth the tribute of thanksgiving & praise - Never in the abundance, but as yet, always enough to satisfy present necessary wants. — My heart is often fraught with gratitude for the many favours I have recd & Oh that I may ever feel so & ascribe - not unto me, not unto me, but to thy goodness & mercy, O Lord, are all my blessings RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1836

The Beagle brought Charles Darwin back to London after a mind-bending circumnavigation of the globe (his journal of this voyage would become Henry Thoreau’s favorite travel reading). THE SCIENCE OF 1836

In Switzerland, Louis Agassiz began to study the movements and effects of glaciers. Several writers had already expressed themselves as of the opinion that these solid rivers must once had been much more extensive than at present, and must have been what produced the various boulders that could now be observed erratically scattered across the surface of the region. Some of these boulders were present even up toward the summit of the Jura Mountains, and how did they get there if they had not been carried there by the movements of glaciers? Agassiz constructed a hut out on the ice of the Aar Glacier, terming this the “Hôtel des Neuchâtelois,” and from this hut he and his associates began to trace the structure and movements of the ice.

In Massachusetts, Dr. Augustus Addison Gould became a corresponding member of the Connecticut Natural History Society.

January 12, Tuesday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin reached Sydney, Australia.

After six performances of Maria Stuarda by Gaetano Donizetti, the Austrian governor of Lombardy got around to banning the work because it included profanity and abominations. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 6, Saturday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin reached Diemen’s Land, also known as Tasmania, Australia.

The publication of John Field’s Nocturnes nos.14-16 was advertised in BIBLIOGRAPHIE DE FRANCE.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day Morning I went to Town & after attending to some buisness their - took the Stage & came by the way of Slades ferry to Fall river where I dined at Wilders public House & from thence home, by the way of the Stone Bridge - finding our family & concerns, all well. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

February 17, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured in Salem. This was lecture Number 2 of the series: he would receive $25.

The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin left Tasmania.

March 14, Monday: The HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin left Australia.

Sam Houston continued his retreat (known now as the “Runaway Scrape”), moving eastward in a zig-zagging pattern (until April 20th). TEXAS

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 14th of 3rd M / This day 24 Years ago our only living son John was born. — I cannot pass over the event without noting it in commemoration of the Mercy & goodness of God which have followed us ever since - for tho’ we have had to partake of some bitter cups, known to few but ourselves, - yet surely Mercy & Goodness have followed us & we have partaken of many good things - both in regard to his presence often Mercifully vouchsafed & interposed for our help & support, & also in our getting along in the affairs of this world - for tho’ abounding in this respect was never Known by us yet we have been so favourd as to have sufficient for our needs & some to spare. John has so far done well, lived respectably & I hope has known a growth in religion & we believe is blessed with a good wife — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 1, Friday: William Lloyd Garrison, who at the start of the year had begun a personal journal in a leather- bound booklet, on this date abandoned the effort after but few entries. Self-knowledge was simply not his cup of tea:

Garrison never wrote in a quest for self-knowledge, but in an effort to persuade others of what he already knew.

Charles Darwin, aboard the HMS Beagle, reached the Cocos Islands. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 9, Saturday: The HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin sailed from Port Louis, Mauritius.

Waldo Emerson’s greatly beloved brother and close friend and adviser, Charles Chauncy Emerson, died in New-York of tuberculosis (Waldo would mention this in his journal on the 16th):

Charles died at New York Monday afternoon, 9 May.... He rode out on Monday afternoon with Mother, promised himself to begin his journey with me on my arrival, the next day; on reaching home, he stepped out of the carriage alone, walked up the steps & into the house without assistance, sat down on the stairs, fainted, & never recovered.

WALDO’S RELATIVES

June 1, Wednesday: Charles Darwin returned to Capetown.

At the Teatro Nuovo of Naples, Gaetano Donizetti’s melodramma giocoso Il campanello di notte to words of the composer after Brunswick, Troin, and Lherie was performed for the initial time to a good reception.

July 8, Friday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin reached the island of St. Helena. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 12, Tuesday: Charles Darwin was exploring the island of St. Helena: My guide was an elderly man, who had been a goatherd when a boy, & knew every step amongst the rocks. He was of a race many times mixed, & although with a dusky skin, he had not the disagreeable expression of a Mulatto: he was a very civil, quiet old man, & this appears the character of the greater part of the lower class. — It was strange to my ears to hear a man nearly white, & respectably dressed, talking with indifference of the times when he was a slave. — With my companion, who carried our dinners & a horn of water, which latter is quite necessary, as all in the lower valleys is saline, I every day took long walks. Beyond the limits of the elevated & central green circle, the wild valleys are quite desolate & untenanted. Here to the geologist, there are scenes of interest, which shew the successive changes & complicated violence, which have in past times happened. According to my views, St Helena has existed as an Isd from a very remote period, but that originally like most Volcanic Isds it has been raised in mass from beneath the waters. St Helena, situated so remote from any continent, in the midst of a great ocean & possessing an unique Flora, this little world, within itself excites our curiosity. — Birds & insects, as might be expected, are very few in number, indeed I believe all the birds have been introduced within late years. — Partridges & pheasant are tolerably abundant; the Isd is far too English not to be subject to strict game laws. I was told of a more unjust sacrifice to such ordinances, than I ever heard of even in England: the poor people formerly used to burn a plant which grows on the coast rocks, & export soda; — a peremptory order came out to prohibit this practice, giving as a reason, that the Partridges would have no where to build!

July 19, Tuesday: The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin reached Ascension Island.

July 20, Wednesday: Charles Darwin climbed Green Hill on Ascension Island.

British settlement of South Australia began with the establishment of a colony on Kangaroo Island.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 20th of 7 M 1836 / With my dear Wife rode to Portsmouth to attend Our Select Meeting - The first was Silent & but little life so also was the Preparatve & Select Meeting which followed — We dined at Susanna Hathaways & spent the Afternoon very pleasantly with them her two daughters were Scholars at the YMBSchool while we were there & intimate acquaintances of ours. — We took a pleasant Ride home thro’ by Thos Potters & then turned into the Middle Road & came out into the West opposite S T Northams Farm - This Road we had not been for many years before & it was new & looked pleasant to us RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

August 1, Monday: Abraham Lincoln was re-elected to the Illinois General Assembly (by this point he had made himself a leader in the Whig party).

The case of the two allegedly enslaved women seized in the port of Boston on the previous Saturday morning had been delayed by the fact that Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who had signed the writ of habeas corpus, was absent from his upstairs courtroom over the weekend. At this point, however, the legal proceedings could not be further deferred. When the attorney A.H. Fiske asked for a further postponement while evidence was being brought from Baltimore to the effect that the two women were still enslaved, the opposition attorney Samuel Eliot Sewall argued that since all human beings were born free, the presumption of the court must be that the women were free and, unless and until demonstrated otherwise, must be allowed to exit the courthouse upon their own responsibility. The Chief Justice, however, saw a narrower issue: “Has the captain of the brig Chickasaw a right [under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793] to convert his vessel into a prison?” Since he had done nothing to bring himself within the provisions of that act, “the prisoners must therefore be discharged from all further detention.” At that point Mr. Turner, the alleged agent for Mr. Morris, arose and implied to the court that he would make a fresh arrest under the provisions of said act, and inquired whether a warrant would be necessary for such purpose. A constable was dispatched to lock the only door leading downstairs. Someone cried out “Take them!” The spectators in the courtroom began a chant of “Go! Go!” and stormed forward while Justice Shaw stood at the bench shouting “Stop! Stop!” The Justice made a dash for the courtroom door and attempted to himself hold the door against the excited crowd. The only officer in the room, a man named Huggerford, was seized and choked. The crowd bore the two women away through the private passageway normally used by the judiciary, shoved them into a carriage, and drove them out of the city. As the carriage passed over the Mill Dam, the horses were held at a full gallop while the toll money was thrown at the attendant. According to one Boston merchant paper, this was action threatening “the very existence of the state.” According to another paper, however, the Daily Evening Transcript, “The Judge stated that they (the women) must be brought back to be regularly discharged in open court.”

In the South Atlantic, the HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin returned to Bahia, Brazil.

August 17, Wednesday: Bad weather forced the climbing party of Ebenezer Emmons/William G. Redfield to abandon their project for the time being.

The HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin left South American waters for the final time.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day — This Morning rode to Lynn with David Buffum in his carriage - attended Select Meeting & tho’ the Answers to the Queries were pretty clear & favourable - I found it to be my duty to call the attention of Friends to the necessity of Watchfulness, it being a day of much trouble in our Society & the Watchmen ought to be on the Alert to arrest & detect whatever may be wrong, however refined it may be presented - Much Similar was expressed by Several others — In the Afternoon (after dining at Isaac Bassetts) we attended the committee & had a long & rather laborious Sitting concluding to Meet again next Morning — I called to Brother D Rodmans & not HDT WHAT? INDEX

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finding Cassandra Nichols there with whom I was to return to Salem I went to James Breeds & took tea & returned to Salem having a pleasant ride thro’ Danvers where Cassandra pointed out to me the Spot where her kins woman Cassandra Southwick lived who in ancient times was so cruely whiped in Boston — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

October 2, Sunday: The survey ship HMS Beagle returned to its home port in England after a 4½-year voyage around the earth of zoological, botanical, and geological discovery that included the Cape Verde islands, both coasts of South America, island groups such as the Galápagos, and the coastal waters of Australia.7

For many years Charles Darwin (who was not the ship’s naturalist but supercargo, a gentleman companion for the ship’s captain FitzRoy, sent along for the explicit purpose of keeping this captain sane despite his long enforced isolation from human contact as the man in command) would have nightmares about the cruel abuse of black slaves which he had witnessed along the east coast of the South American continent.

Salmon Brown was born in Hudson, Ohio to John Brown and Mary Ann Day Brown.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould in his journal:

7. What would eventually become of HMS Beagle? It would be used as a training ship in Japan until 1889, and would then be broken up. For a time, part of its rib cage would be used as a stand for stones piled up near the temple of Suitengu, near the Okai shipyards. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1st day 2nd of 10th M 1836 / Our Morning Meeting was silent & the weather being rainy was small, but to me a good solid meeting. — In the Afternoon it was larger than usual & a pretty good meeting but to me not equal to the Morning - which confirmed me that numbers does no always make weight not even with preaching added to it. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

November: Thomas Carlyle and Jane Carlyle met Harriet Martineau, who would be able to introduce them, among others, to Charles Darwin. She pleased us beyond expectation. She is very intelligent-looking, really of pleasant countenance; was full of talk, tho’ unhappily deaf almost as a post, so that you have to speak to her thro’ an ear-trumpet.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

The People of Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

December 2, Friday: Charles Darwin having returned to London from the Beagle expedition, Thomas Bell accepted the task of describing his reptile specimens. Bell would also be entrusted with the specimens of Crustacea collected on the voyage.

Waldo Emerson to his journal:

The present state of the colony at Liberia is a memorable fact. It is found that the black merchants are so fond of their lucrative occupations that it is with difficulty that any of them can be prevailed upon to take office in the colony. They dislike the trouble of it. Civilized arts are found to be as attractive to the wild negro, as they are disagreeable to the wild Indian.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 2nd of 12 M 1836 / This morning took the Stage & came home, finding our family & other things as well as when I left them HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1837

Early in this year, Alfred Russel Wallace was exposed to the utopian ideals of Robert Dale Owen and his followers.

Hermann von Meyer named Plateosaurus, the 5th named dinosaur species. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1837

Friedrich Tiedemann’s DAS HIRN DES NEGERS (THE BRAIN OF THE NEGRO) described his measurements of brain size, which had found no significant differences between Caucasian, Mongolian, (American) Indian, Malayan, and Negro races. He also told the stories of some members of the Negro race who had been educated and subsequently contributed to science and literature (given the times, Tiedemann’s book was, to say the least, unusual).

Thomas Bell’s A HISTORY OF BRITISH QUADRUPEDS, INCLUDING THE CETACEA. ILLUSTRATED BY NEARLY 200 WOODCUTS (London: J. Van Voorst). Henry Thoreau would have a copy of this in his library, and would HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

refer to it in CAPE COD, and his personal copy is now at the Concord Free Public Library. BRITISH QUADRUPEDS

It was early in this year that Charles Darwin found out that a flightless bird, the rhea, that he had collected in southern Patagonia, belonged to a new species even though it was very similar to another bird. Taking this into full consideration, he analogized that if one such species of bird could succeed another in the dimension of space, then perhaps one such species might also succeed another in the dimension of time.

Temporal sequence might be recording evolutionary transformation. (This was the eureka moment of evolution. Later, when Darwin was also informed that a number of the birds with distinctively different bills which he had collected on the various islands of the Galápagos group were, despite all appearances, nevertheless all finches, he would opt to elucidate his argument by employment of this example rather than by HDT WHAT? INDEX

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reference to his initial situation, of the various flightless rheas of Patagonia.)

Fearful of the intensity of the reaction his theory obviously was going to cause, Darwin would delay publishing.8

“Everything is what it is because it got that way.” — D’Arcy W. Thompson, ON GROWTH AND FORMS Cambridge UP, 1917

Gould, Stephen Jay. EIGHT LITTLE PIGGIES: REFLECTIONS IN NATURAL HISTORY. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1994, pages 147-9: Darwin ... revered William Paley during his youth. In a courageous act of intellectual parricide, he then overthrew his previous mentor — not merely by becoming an evolutionist, but by constructing a particular version of evolutionary theory maximally disruptive of Paley’s system and deepest beliefs.... Where did Darwin get such a radical version of evolution? Surely not from the birds and bees, the twigs and trees. Nature helped, but intellectual revolutions9 must also have ideological bases. Scholars ... agree that two Scottish economists of the generation just before Darwin played a dominant role: Thomas Robert Malthus and the great Adam Smith himself. From Malthus, 8. At some point in the late 1830s, Darwin jotted into a notebook that “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Darwin received the key insight that growth in population, if unchecked, will outrun any increase in the food supply. A struggle for existence must therefore arise, leading by natural selection to survival of the fittest (to cite all three conventional Darwinian aphorisms in a single sentence). Darwin states that this insight from Malthus supplied the last piece that enabled him to complete the theory of natural selection in 1838 (though he did not publish his views for twenty-one years). Adam Smith’s influence was more indirect, but also more pervasive. We know that the Scottish economists interested Darwin greatly and that, during the crucial months of 1838, while he assembled the pieces soon to be capped by his Malthusian insight, he was studying the thought of Adam Smith. The theory of natural selection is uncannily similar to the chief doctrine of laissez-faire economics. (In our academic jargon, we would say that the two theories are “isomorphic” — that is, structurally similar point for point, even though the subject matter differs.) To achieve the goal of a maximally ordered economy in the laissez-faire system, you do not regulate from above by passing explicit laws for order. You do something that, at first glance, seems utterly opposed to your goal: You simply allow individuals to struggle in an unfettered way for personal profit. In this struggle, the inefficient are weeded out and the best balance each other to form an equilibrium to everyone’s benefit. Darwin’s system works in exactly the same manner, only more relentlessly. No regulation comes from on high; no divine watchmaker superintends the work of his creation. Individuals are struggling for reproductive success, the natural analog of profit. No other mechanism is at work, nothing “higher” or more exalted. Yet the result is adaptation and balance — and the cost is hecatomb after hecatomb after hecatomb.... For Malthus, Paley actually cites the key line that inspired Darwin’s synthesis in 1838 (but in the context of a passage on civil vs. natural evils). Paley writes: The order of generation proceeds by something like a geometrical progression. The increase of provision, under circumstances even the most advantageous, can only assume the form of an arithmetic series. Whence it follows, that the population will always overtake the provision, will pass beyond the line of plenty, and will continue to increase till checked by the difficulty of procuring subsistence. [At this point, Paley adds a footnote: “See this subject stated in a late treatise upon population” — obviously Malthus.] 9. According to Davydd J. Greenwood, the phrase “intellectual revolution” is such an impoverished one that it should not be used in regard to Darwin’s accomplishment. It is a complaint about our mother tongue, that it offers us no better idiom than this to use to describe such an utterly fundamental reconceptualization. It is not anyone’s fault, for it is the language we are working with which is at fault. The idiom leads us to suppose that we are dealing with merely another “recirculation of the elites” among ideas, and Darwin’s contribution is more overwhelmingly fundamental than that. In frustration I would almost want to resort to the term “catastrophe,” referring to Darwin’s great reconceptualization as having been an intellectual catastrophe — except that people would suppose incorrectly that I was suggesting that what he accomplished was evil or incorrect! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

March: Thomas Bell presented a helpful fact toward the inception of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection when he confirmed that the giant tortoises that Darwin had observed in the Galápagos were native to the islands, rather than as had been supposed having been brought in by buccaneers for food.

March 14, Tuesday: John Gould having identified a small flightless rhea bird that Charles Darwin had collected in southern Patagonia as a newly discovered species, rather than merely another geographical variant, he denominated this new species Rhea darwinii. Darwin would be led by this recognition, not into pride, but into a most fruitful speculation: if two very similar but different species of rhea could thus live side by side geographically, in space, one to the east of the other, without the two groups representing one continuous population, might not two very similar but different species of rhea also live side by side chronologically, in time, one before the other? Might there, in other words, be temporal succession rather than mere continuity, as well as geographical succession rather than mere continuity? Darwin jotted into a small notebook he was carrying: The same kind of relation ... in former case position, in latter time. Darwin would form an analogy not only between such geographical and temporal discontinuities but also between the geological gradualism of Professor Charles Lyell in which one object eventually transforms by small steps into another, a mountain becoming a plain, and a biological gradualism in which one species eventually transforms by small steps into another.

“Has any truly brilliant insight ever been won by pure deduction, and not by metaphor or analogy?” — Stephen Jay Gould

The idea of the origin of species, its time had come.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 14th of 3rd M 1837 / There are certain periods which as they roll round seldom escape my notice & the present is one which I notice with feelings of interest - This day 25 Years ago our dear John Stanton Gould was born - May the Lord continue to bless him as he evidently has in a remarkably manner from his birth to the present time & may he by suitable & due returns of devotion render to God his due for the many mercies received from infancy to manhood. — 3rd day 14th of 3rd M / Visited Ezekiel Luther, he seems rather better but since I was there his wife had been taken very ill — I went into her room also & found them both very quiet & solid & he particularly in a very tender frame of spirit - I found my mind engaged to speak with them of things of eternal moment which they received kindly. —

July: Charles Darwin, who up to this point had the reputation of being primarily interested in the science of Geology, began his 1st notebook on transmutation of species. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1838

Charles Darwin formulated a new theory of natural selection, but due to a responsibility which he deeply felt in regard to its not fully thought out but obviously manifold implications for the practices of religion, politics, and culture, was careful to tell no-one. EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

After having published for a decade about fossil fishes, Louis Agassiz would until 1842 be publishing about the fossil echinoderms of Switzerland.

Although Thomas Bell had supported the arrangements for publication of ZOOLOGY OF THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. BEAGLE, he had been very slow to make progress on the work, and though the first parts of work were at this point published, Part 5, his contribution on reptiles, would not be published until 1842 and 1843 — and then subsequently he would neglect to take any action at all in regard to the crustacea. THE SCIENCE OF 1838

July: Charles Darwin jotted himself a 3-page note, balancing the pros and cons of marriage, and considering plans for his future. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN September 28, Friday: The drought having broken and headman John Ross having been able to obtain additional funds for travel food and clothing, this was the date on which some 1,200 members of the Cherokee Nation led by headman Cherokee John Benge, in the process of being wedged out of their homeland, departed from the Appalachian concentration camps into which they had been hounded by the US Cavalry in the direction of the Oklahoma Indian Territories. For most this was the point at which the “Trail of Tears” began.10

Charles Darwin was reading in the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus’s ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLES OF POPULATION (repeatedly revised and republished since 1798) when he had his moment of illumination. He was reviewing Malthus’s argument that growth in population, if entirely unchecked, must of necessity quickly outstrip all possible supplies of food, and inevitably lead to such a struggle for limited resources as would cause the death of losers. Copying the Reverend’s principle into his notebook, he added a comment of his own, his very 1st metaphor in regard to what would become his theory of descent with modification: One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the oeconomy of nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones. This is the insight which Darwin would hone and sharpen through the next two decades of speculation. In the very lengthy initial version of The Origin of Species, which would not be published during his lifetime, he would develop this wedge metaphor in great detail, and then he would compress this account of the metaphor for his shorter book which he would get published in 1859: Nature may be compared to a surface covered with ten thousand sharp wedges, many of the same shape and many of different shapes representing different species, all packed closely together and all driven in by incessant blows: the blows being far severer at one time than at another; sometimes a wedge of one form and sometimes another being struck; the one driven deeply in forcing out others; with the jar and shock often transmitted very far to other wedges in many lines of direction. This was the root of the idea that if favorable variations of a species would naturally tend to be preserved while unfavorable variations would naturally tend not to be preserved then, without the external intervention of any guiding hand or intention, the form of a species would “naturally” tend statistically to drift in the direction of adaptation for survival in its niche precisely as if it were subject to “artificial” selection by a breeder such as a breeder of pigeons: On an average every species must have same number killed year with year by hawks, by cold, & c. — even one species of hawk decreasing in number must affect instantaneously all the rest. The final cause of all this wedging must be to sort out proper structure....

10. This initial group of Cherokee would reach its destination beyond the Mississippi on January 17, 1839. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1839

In America, volumes 3 and 4 of Thomas Carlyle’s CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS were being put through the presses: MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. III MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. IV

Copies of these volumes would of course be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library.

The Chartist petition presented in the previous year having gotten exactly nowhere, a “charter” of political reforms was presented to Parliament by workers and was likewise rejected. Ebenezer Elliott renounced Chartism. A pamphlet entitled CHARTISM was being produced in England: [Carlyle’s] “might is right” argument presupposes ultimately benevolent and uncorrupt aims behind the might; those reading Carlyle now find it hard to share such assumptions, as indeed many of his contemporaries did. He justified his view by saying that a purely brutal conquest would never last, but would be flung out; in modern times, the fate of Nazism and Stalinism supports his view, and the Terror in France had proved it to him. The true strong man, for that reason, was always wise; his strength lay in the soul rather than the body, and was drawn from God. One true inheritor of this tradition of thought:

“I cannot see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.” — Adolf Hitler

PROTO-NAZISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Charles Darwin saw the raw effects of this Carlylean reasoning process and the alleged or eponymous founder of “Social Darwinism” was at once fascinated and bemused — and repelled.11 The Fuegians ... struck Darwin as more like animals than men.... Thoreau’s single overt citation of Darwin in WALDEN refers to one of Darwin’s few concessions to the Fuegians’ superior powers, their adaptation to the cold climate (WALDEN, pages 12-13). This is but one among many spots where WALDEN undermines the hierarchies of civilization/barbarity (the villagers are bizarre penance-performing Brahmins) and humanity/animal (the villagers as prairie dogs, himself competing with squirrels for fall forage). Such instances of undermining do not reflect Thoreau’s attempt to quarrel with Darwin as much as Thoreau’s desire to accentuate tendencies already present in Darwin and other travelers’ accounts. ...Darwin, like Thoreau albeit to a lesser degree, was prepared to relativize moral distinctions between “advanced’ and “backward” cultures and between human and animal estates. “It is impossible to reflect on the state of the American continent without astonishment. Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters; now we find mere pygmies compared with the antecedent, allied races.”

11. The guy who was absolutely fascinated by this hatemongering was not Darwin, a man who still had hope for human decency, but the headmaster of Rugby, Dr. Thomas Arnold. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Charles Darwin was seeing through the presses his JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES ... DURING THE VOYAGE OF HMS 12 BEAGLE about, among other things, his 1835 visit to the Galápagos.

From this year until 1841, he would be publishing five separate volumes about his trip aboard HMS Beagle.

He began by dedicating his effort to Charles Lyell, the successive volumes of whose THE PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY: AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE FORMER CHANGES OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE BY REFERENCE TO CAUSES NOW IN OPERATION (London) had kept him so very preoccupied during his long days at sea: When Darwin left England for his round-the-world voyage in 1831, he carried with him a departure gift: Volume I of Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, published in its first edition the previous year. 12. Henry Thoreau would not read this until 1846. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Before reaching the Cape Verde Islands, he had already been swept into Lyell’s orbit. Thrilled, he preordered copies of Volumes II and III for pickup in ports of call as they were published. So influential was Lyell’s thinking during the voyage that Darwin dedicated his JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES to him with this comment: “The chief part of whatever scientific merit this journal and the other works of the author may possess, have been derived from studying the well-known and admirable PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY.” This dedication may have jumped out at Thoreau when he read it in 1851, because he, himself, had been smitten by Lyell’s great book in 1840, eleven years earlier.

During this year he published the 3rd volume in the series NARRATIVE OF THE SURVEYING VOYAGES OF HIS MAJESTY’S SHIPS ADVENTURE AND BEAGLE, BETWEEN THE YEARS 1826 AND 1836. This established his further reputation as a scientist and author.

This was the year in which Charles Darwin himself alleged that he had first clearly formulated his theory of development with modification. Extremely reluctant to engage in controversy after what had happened to his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, he would wait until he had amassed an enormous amount of documentation and until his theory was at risk of being sketched out by others before he would publish. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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We know that as of this year, Charles Darwin was unaware of his family motto E conchis omnia or of what it meant.

In the following year this new author would have his obligatory authorial portrait prepared:

Robert FitzRoy published two volumes of NARRATIVE OF THE SURVEYING VOYAGES OF HIS MAJESTY’S SHIPS ADVENTURE AND BEAGLE BETWEEN THE YEARS 1826 AND 1836, DESCRIBING THEIR EXAMINATION OF THE SOUTHERN SHORES OF SOUTH AMERICA, AND THE BEAGLE’S CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE GLOBE.

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), son of Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker, had met Darwin in 1834 and in a few years they had become friends. In this year he received his MD degree from the University of Glasgow and sailed to the Antarctic in the HMS Erebus.

January 24: Charles Darwin was elected a member of Royal Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 29, Tuesday: The lightkeeper on Matinicus Rock, despite the demolition of his wooden home and its lighttowers in the storm of the 27th, had managed to hang a beacon from a jury-rigged mast in order to warn ships away from the shoal.

On this day (or possibly, shortly before) Jones Very attended one of Bronson Alcott’s “Conversations” in Lynn, Massachusetts. The topic was “Instinct” and Alcott felt that Very had made a real contribution, although the intensity of it made him wonder how long such a phenomenon could be sustained — whether to anticipate that Very would “decease soon.”

Charles Darwin got married with Emma Wedgwood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1840

Louis Agassiz’s ÉTUDES SUR LES GLACIERS ... OUVRAGE ACCOMPAGNÉ D’UN ATLAS DE 32 PLANCHES (Neuchatel, aux frais de l’auteur).13 In this he demonstrated irrefutably that at a geologically recent period all of Switzerland had been covered by “great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland,” resulting in all this “unstratified gravel (boulder drift)” that now clutters its surface. He and Charles Darwin made each other’s acquaintance at the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

13. Henry Thoreau would check this out of Harvard Library on March 13, 1854. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

(Characteristically, the author omitted any mention of Karl Friedrich Schimper, who had brought him into this glacial research and who also was preparing a book about the glaciation of the Alps.) Thus began Agassiz’s lifetime of intense personal conflicts with colleagues and contemporaries. One of these would be with a self-taught American field scientist named Henry D. Thoreau. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION THE SCIENCE OF 1840

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

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

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

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

The People of Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN John Charles Frémont led only three of these numerous expeditions across the western regions of the North

American continent. Between 1840 and 1860, the US government published 60 enormously expensive multi- volume double-folio or oversize treatises on the American West, in addition to 15 treatises on global naval expeditions and uncounted reports of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Very little of our incessant contemporary dialog about the “free enterprise system” dates back to that era, and the cost of all this seems to have amounted 1 1 to from /4th to /3d of the annual federal budget without having in any way set off alarm bells in the minds of the ideologues of the right of the political spectrum!14 Since Humboldt was very much in touch with these activities, a number of the explorers, scientists, and artists of the period may safely be characterized as “Humboldt’s Children”:15 personages such as Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Frederic Edwin Church, John Charles Frémont, and Professor Thomas Nuttall. However, Louis Agassiz would also need to be characterized as having been a protégé of Humboldt, and Charles Darwin, Professor Asa Gray, and Arnold Henri Guyot. Humboldt corresponded with and was visited by American scientists such as vice-president of the Boston Society of Natural History Charles T. Jackson, academic scholars such as Harvard professor George Ticknor, and popular writers such as Washington Irving (to whom in this year we were offering the position of Secretary of the Navy).

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

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

14. NASA, eat your heart out. 15. Goetzmann, William H. NEW LANDS, NEW MEN, AMERICA AND THE SECOND GREAT AGE OF DISCOVERY. NY: Viking, 1986 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

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

ELEMENTARY GEOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(You may be forgiven, I suppose, as modern types, for initially presuming that the colorized paleontological chart on the previous screen, revealing as it does the branchings of genera and species over immense eras of time, had something or other to do with “evolution of species” — in fact, however, it did not have anything at all to do with anything of that sort! Looking backward to the 1840s through our eyes, it is easy for us to be guilty of “presentism” — of, that is to say, supposing that the sorts of scientific understanding we now take for granted were being somehow prefigured or anticipated in the minds of yesteryear when they most definitely were not.) PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1842

Charles Darwin’s THE STRUCTURE AND DISTRIBUTION OF CORAL REEFS, BEING THE FIRST PART OF THE GEOLOGY OF THE VOYAGE OF THE H.M.S. BEAGLE was published.

[Bear in mind that these BEAGLE volumes carry not only the name of Charles Darwin on their spine, but also Phillip Parker King and Robert FitzRoy.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Darwin was already two years older than when this portrait had been painted:

During the year Darwin would be composing an abstract of his theory of species evolution. This brief SKETCH of his theory of evolution would not, however, see publication.

By this point six of the seven parts of John Torrey’s and Asa Gray’s FLORA OF NORTH AMERICA had been distributed. This work covered the vascular plants of North America north of Mexico except Greenland and was based on all readily accessible collections. It was organized according to a natural rather than a Linnaean system. Although Torrey and Gray’s work was not completed, Gray would take it up again years later. He would issue subsequent fascicles as part of a new work, the SYNOPTICAL FLORA OF NORTH AMERICA. Only the gamopetalous families were actually completed by Gray. Torrey and Gray’s studies were based largely on collections from the many expeditions being made at that time. Relying upon information gathered in the great western expeditions of the preceding decades, Watson and Robinson would publish additional parts of Gray’s SYNOPTICAL FLORA OF NORTH AMERICA in 1895. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1844

Mid-October: The anonymous publication VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, which eventually would turn out to have been by Robert Chambers, took what Henry Thoreau would accept as one of the

“wider views of the universe,” in allowing that since God’s law extended across the entire starry cosmos, we might legitimately hypothesize that elsewhere, circling any number of strange distant stars, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

there might well be other earths filled with other lives than ours here beside the star known as Sol:

WALDEN: We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

NICOLAS COPERNICUS TYCHO BRAHE TYCHONIAN/COPERNICAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Finding himself unable to overlook the manifest evidences of waste and cruelty in nature, Chambers was hypothesizing anonymously that God must have established two entirely separate sets of laws, one physical and the other moral, codes quite independent of one another, so that “Obedience to each gives only its own proper advantage, not the advantage proper to the other.”

This was of course being attacked as godlessness and so the publication would sell out four editions in seven months. In this year Charles Darwin was drafting an essay on his development theory, a theory very different in every particular, but he would not publish about this for some time either under his name or anonymously. All Thoreau was able to know of Darwin’s work therefore, at this point, was what he was able to read in the published journal of H.M.S. Beagle:

[Bear in mind that these BEAGLE volumes carry not only the name of Darwin on their spine, but also Phillip Parker King and Robert FitzRoy.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

As you remember, Thoreau would later make a passing remark in CAPE COD about this reading of Darwin:

Charles Darwin was assured that the roar of the surf on the coast of Chile, after a heavy gale, could be heard at night a distance of “21 sea miles across a hilly and wooded country.”

One thing the readers of this anonymous volume could tell for sure about its author, was that he or she was a believer in phrenology. Phrenological studies were revealing that on average, the brain of a female would weigh four ounces less than the brain of a male. How then could a woman, on average, possibly be of as strong a mind as her male counterpart? No wonder men are dominant! A woman’s rationality, since it was not as robust as a man’s, would more readily yield to her body and to her emotionality — something which anyway we can observe happening every day. (Had the gender politics of the era been reversed, we may notice, the opposite conclusions could have been derived from such period scientific “observations.” Notice that in our present-day computer CPUs, speed of computation is inversely proportional to size — the more closely the transistors are packed, the shorter the wires between them, the greater the number of megaflops that can be achieved, which is the reason why supercomputers made up of computational boards have been quite replaced with supercomputers made up of computational chipsets. No wonder women are dominant! Obviously, since women’s brains aren’t inflated with water to the same degree as men’s, their brain cells are closer together, resulting in shorter dendrons, resulting in a greater quickness and acuity of mind —something which anyway HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN we can observe happening every day.)

Dr. William Benjamin Carpenter was being suspected, incorrectly, of the authorship. His son Joseph Estlin Carpenter was born (eventually this son would help out in the republication of some of his father’s works).

When this VESTIGES first became available for purchase, its price of 7s. 6d. put it entirely out of the reach of the general public. This was not a pamphlet to unsettle the masses. If available at all for the general reader, it would be found in the lending library of a mechanics’ institute, for a person who had purchased an annual subscription which entitled him to check out books. –But then a “peoples’ edition” would be put out in 1846 at 2s. 6d. A lawyer of Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, would read straight through the anonymous VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION and would proclaim himself “a warm advocate of the doctrine.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN November 20, Wednesday-22, Friday: Frederick Douglass lectured at Mechanics’ Hall in Providence before the annual meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society.

In the library of the British Museum, while in London for a meeting of the Geological Society, Charles Darwin read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation: Large parts of what moved other readers, such as the stirring account of the nebular hypothesis or the future of humanity, were quickly skimmed. Darwin approached the text not as a sweeping cosmological narrative but as a botched version of his own manuscript. [H]is geology strikes me as bad, & his zoology far worse. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1846

This was the year in which Charles Darwin’s VOYAGE OF A NATURALIST ROUND THE WORLD / JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES INTO THE NATURAL HISTORY AND GEOLOGY OF THE COUNTRIES VISITED DURING THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. BEAGLE ROUND THE WORLD, UNDER THE COMMAND OF CAPT. FITZ ROY, R.N. would be published (New York: Harper & brothers): THE SCIENCE OF 1846

Henry Thoreau would be able to detect in these pages a new attitude toward body coloration, an attitude quite unlike the one that had been espoused by for instance Ben Jonson:

“WALKING”: A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man — a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art compared with a fine, dark green one growing vigorously in the open fields.” Ben Jonson exclaims,— “How near to good is what is fair!” So I would say— How near to good is what is wild! Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.

CHARLES DARWIN BEN JONSON VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE II LOVE FREED FROM IGNOR ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

“A YANKEE IN CANADA”: The most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them; they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair from the day they are built, because they are not really the work of this age. The very place where the soldier resides has a peculiar tendency to become old and dilapidated, as the word barrack implies. I couple all fortifications in my mind with the dismantled Spanish forts to be found in so many parts of the world; and if in any place they are not actually dismantled, it is because there the intellect of the inhabitants is dismantled. The commanding officer of an old fort near Valdivia in South America, when a traveller remarked to him that, with one discharge, his gun-carriages would certainly fall to pieces, gravely replied, “No, I am sure, sir, they would stand two.” Perhaps the guns of Quebec would stand three. Such structures carry us back to the Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean d’Acre, and the days of the Bucaniers. In the armory of the citadel they showed me a clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a Lombard gun. I thought that their whole citadel was such a Lombard gun, fit object for the museums of the curious. Such works do not consist with the development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress than liberate the mind. They are tombs for the souls of men, as frequently for their bodies also. The sentinel with his musket beside a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason for his existence. Does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing with me? The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it almost from the first day of the settlement. The founders of the colony thought this an excellent site for a wall, –and no doubt it was a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,– but it chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced, too, that a Lower Town got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags, as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion, — interesting only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business. Or is this an indispensible machinery for the good government of the country?

CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

CAPE COD: All the morning we had heard the sea roar on the eastern shore, which was several miles distant; for it still felt the effects of the storm in which the St. John was wrecked, –though a schoolboy, whom we overtook, hardly knew what we meant, his ears were so used to it. He would have more plainly heard the same sound in a shell. It was a very inspiriting sound to walk by, filling the whole air, that of the sea dashing against the land, heard several miles inland. Instead of having a dog to growl before your door, to have an Atlantic Ocean to growl for a whole Cape! On the whole, we were glad of the storm, which would show us the ocean in its angriest mood. Charles Darwin was assured that the roar of the surf on the coast of Chiloe, after a heavy gale, could be heard at night a distance of “21 sea miles across a hilly and wooded country.”

CHARLES DARWIN

CAPE COD: We discerned vessels so far off, when once we began to look, that only the tops of their masts in the horizon were visible, and it took a strong intention of the eye, and its most favorable side, to see them at all, and sometimes we doubted if we were not counting our eyelashes. Charles Darwin states that he saw, from the base of the Andes, “the masts of the vessels at anchor in the bay of Valparaiso, although not less than twenty- six geographical miles distant,” and that Anson had been surprised at the distance at which his vessels were discovered from the coast, without knowing the reason, namely, the great height of the land and the transparency of the air. Steamers may be detected much further than sailing vessels, for, as one says, when their hulls and masts of wood and iron are down, their smoky masts and streamers still betray them; and the same writer, speaking of the comparative advantages of bituminous and anthracite coal for war-steamers, states that, “from the ascent of the columns of smoke above the horizon, the motions of the steamers in Calais Harbor [on the coast of France] are at all times observable at Ramsgate [on the English coast], from the first lighting of the fires to the putting out at sea; and that in America the steamers burning the fat bituminous coal can be tracked at sea at least seventy miles before the hulls become visible, by the dense columns of black smoke pouring out of their chimneys, and trailing along the horizon.”

CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

CAPE COD: The Greeks would not have called the ocean or unfruitful, though it does not produce wheat, if they had viewed it by the light of modern science, for naturalists now assert that “the sea, and not the land, is the principal seat of life,”– though not of vegetable life. Darwin affirms that “our most thickly inhabited forests appear almost as deserts when we come to compare them with the corresponding regions of the ocean.” Agassiz and Gould tell us that “the sea teems with animals of all classes, far beyond the extreme limit of flowering plants”; but they add, that “experiments of dredging in very deep water have also taught us that the abyss of the ocean is nearly a desert”; –“so that modern investigations,” to quote the words of Desor, “merely go to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated by the ancient poets and philosophers, that the Ocean is the origin of all things.” Yet marine animals and plants hold a lower rank in the scale of being than land animals and plants. “There is no instance known,” says Desor, “of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after having lived in its lower stage on dry land,” but as in the case of the tadpole, “the progress invariably points towards the dry land.” In short, the dry land itself came through and out of the water on its way to the heavens, for, “in going back through the geological ages, we come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with water.” We looked on the sea, then, once more, not as , or unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the “laboratory of continents.”

PIERRE JEAN ÉDOUARD DESOR AGASSIZ & GOULD CHARLES DARWIN

WALDEN: Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra PEOPLE OF del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and WALDEN sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, “to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting.”

CHARLES DARWIN

VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE I VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE II HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

In this year the Phrenological Journal announced that

among nations, as among individuals, force of character is determined by the average size of head; and that the larger-headed nations manifest their superior power, by subjecting and ruling their smaller-headed brethren — as the British in Asia, for example.

PHRENOLOGY Ever careful of the sensitivities of its subscribers, who might for some reason have tender feelings toward their wives, this journal forbore to belabor the obvious, that their average reader’s manly brain was considerably more massive and ponderous than that of his sweet little wife. Their point, after all, was “We can dominate

foreigners,” and they all already knew “We can domesticate domestics.” And in Europe, Louis Agassiz, a professor at Neuchâtel, declared, in regard to the collection of human skulls that Samuel George Morton had created in Philadelphia in order to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt the basic differences between human races, that

This collection alone is worth a journey to America.

(It’s worth a journey to America because it reassures us that we white people are inherently superior to any and all other people, irregardless of whether we comport ourselves with decency.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN “Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics?” — Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS NY: Norton, 1991, page 429 When Louis Agassiz elected to remain in the USA after his lecture tour, to become professor of zoology and geology at Harvard College, Asa Gray promptly escorted him to Philadelphia to meet the famous scientific racist Professor Samuel George Morton.

(In this year Professor Morton’s “Observations on the Ethnology and Archaeology of the American Aborigines” appeared in Silliman’s Journal.)

Professor Agassiz would found the American Association for the Advancement of Science as a vehicle for advancing his covert agenda of favoring the laboratory scientist over the field scientist and the technician/ specialist over the generalist16 and would then condemn Charles Darwin’s development theory as not only “mischievous” but also “unscientific.” He would also enact his overtly declared agenda to preserve the racial purity of our nation’s schools, starting with his own elementary school in which the Emerson children were

16. To his credit, Henry Thoreau would suspiciously decline to become involved with this group of people. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN being educated, and with the sacred halls and classrooms of Harvard.

Professor Agassiz in early 1846, while still at Neuchâtel

Not strangely, this scientist was a follower of the theory of the progressive development of types associated with the name of Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck, or “Lamarckism,” which was merely a 19th-Century adaptation of the old doctrine of the “great scale of being” (Scala Natura) according to which all of nature reflects human society, some obviously being worth more than others. As an illustration of how such belief systems functioned at that time, Elias Hicks had asserted in a sermon of December 1, 1824 in Philadelphia that “We are on a level with all the rest of God’s creatures.” After theories of evolution had become current, an adherent of a Lamarckian theory put on the hat “objective scientist” to attack such “leveller” allegations as being not only theologically pernicious, but also scientifically false. As a mere lay person, a nonscientist, Friend Elias did not understand, this scientist declared, that some current forms of life have been shown by science to be more advanced, and others more primitive, on the great scale of being! It is not amusing, but profoundly saddening, to see professed scientists oppose the trends that would become established in their own disciplines, and watch them lump Waldo Emerson together with Friend Elias as unscientific thinkers — in order to legitimate social agendas of viciousness such as black slavery. And, likewise, it is notable that some gifted amateurs like Henry Thoreau were able to get past this scientistic smoke screen. What was it in Thoreau’s spirit that enabled him to be a better scientist than some of the most accredited scientists of his day?

June 25, 1852: What a mean & wretched creature is man by & by some Dr Morton may be filling your cranium with white mustard seed to learn its internal capacity. Of all the ways invented to come at a knowledge of a living man — this seems to me the worst — as it is the most belated. You would learn more by once paring the toe nails of the living subject. There is nothing out of which the spirit has more completely departed — & in which it has left fewer significant traces. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN I asked what it was in Friend Elias’s spirit, and then in Henry’s spirit, that enabled them to be better scientists than some of the most accredited American scientists of their day. Yes, I do have a theory — can you figure out what it is?

Not a theologian pretending to be a scientist Agassiz standing on his head and stacking BBs (Some of us understood that all along) (Please don’t attempt this at home) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1847

Charles Darwin received, and marked up, a presentation (freebie) copy from its publisher of the 6th edition of VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION.

December 11, Saturday: A cartoon by Horace Mayhew in Punch depicted the sensational anonymous bestseller VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION as a bastard child, waiting disconsolately outside the door of the Foundling Hospital with a sign reading WANTS A FATHER.

During Robert Chambers’s lifetime he would confide in only seven people. Among the over sixty suggestions as to the authorship were, in alphabetical order: • Ada, countess of Lovelace •Neil Arnott • Charles Babbage • Samuel Bailey • Henry Peter Brougham • William Carpenter • Anne Chambers (the manuscript was in her handwriting) • Robert Chambers • George Combe • Andrew Crosse • Catherine Crowe • Charles Darwin • Edward Forbes • Charles Lyell • Thomas Simmons Mackintosh • Harriet Martineau • Francis Newman • John Pringle Nichol • William Makepeace Thackeray • Sir Richard Rawlinson Vyvyan, Bart. (Emerson’s guess) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

• Hewett Watson

The authorship would be revealed in 1884, after Chambers was safely in his grave. For the time being, only the following people would know for sure: •Neil Arnott • Anne Chambers, who copied manuscripts for her husband so his handwriting would not appear • William Chambers • Robert Cox • Alexander Ireland • John Pringle Nichol • David Page, who would become a disgruntled ex-employee and try to reveal the actual authorship, with his problematic accusations hitting the newspapers on November 24, 1854 and December 2, 1854 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1848

February 12, Saturday: At the home of Mrs. Crowe in Edinburgh, Waldo Emerson met Thomas De Quincey, who had walked ten miles through stormy weather to attend the supper and was still wet, and Robert Chambers, whose anonymous 1844 VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, or whose equally wrongheaded 1845 elaboration EXPLANATIONS: ASEQUEL TO “VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION,” had encouraged him to be misconceiving evolution in a conventional self-congratulatory Hegelian and unDarwinian manner, as a mere progressive ascent from volvox globator through the animalcule savages of the waterdrop, through the ape, through the Negro, “up to the wise man of the nineteenth century,” that is, up to himself the pinnacle, the apex, the paragon, the reward. CHARLES DARWIN

Having given up not only on The Nation but also on the Irish Confederation, John Mitchel put out the first issue of his The United Irishman. This newspaper would openly espouse the preparation of his countrymen for rebellion against their English overlords. Its target audience was to be “that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property.” The newspaper would characterize His Excellency Lord Clarendon as “H(er) Majesty’s Executioner General and General Butcher in Ireland,” and would write openly of its project to “sweep the English out of Ireland.” All this would be for a few weeks ignored by the British authorities. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

July 1, Saturday: Thomas Bell, as the new President of the Linnean Society, chaired the meeting at which Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s papers on their theories on natural selection were jointly presented: “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection.” Apparently he disapproved of this, or failed entirely to comprehend the enormity of what was being suggested, for in his annual presidential report of May 1849 he would opinion that “The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1849

May: Thomas Bell, who as President of the Linnean Society had chaired the meeting of July 1, 1848 at which Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s papers on their theories on natural selection had jointly been presented: “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection,” at this point offered his annual presidential report. He opinioned, amazingly, that “The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1850

Alexander von Humboldt engineered an award for John Charles Frémont from the King of Prussia, the “Great Golden Medal of Progress in the Sciences.” In return a good deal of Nevada was named after him (in 1863 the entire state would come close to being named Humboldt). There is in fact a profusion of such place-names in America, especially in the Midwestern regions where Germans settled, scattered across the Southwest — and a cluster of such names in northern California.17 The USA had honored “America’s friend” Humboldt more often than any other country. Considering only major geographical features, there are 11 in the Old World, 13 in the New World south of the US border, 8 in the New World north of the US border, and 37 inside the frontiers of the USA.

Frederic Edwin Church’s “Twilight, ‘Short Arbiter Twixt Day and Night’.” It was at about this point that the painter was reading Humboldt and becoming inspired to go live in the tropics. He would reside for a time in Humboldt’s old house in Quito, Ecuador, and would paint nature –according to the account of Laura Dassow Walls– in terms of a “detailed yet holistic Humboldtian vision.” (According to another accounting, the artist was reading Humboldt’s PERSONAL NARRATIVES and COSMOS, and viewing the South American landscape, through lenses devised by the Calvinist theologian, the Reverend James McCosh, lenses that had been delivered in an 1856 treatise titled TYPICAL FORMS AND SPECIAL ENDS IN CREATION, lenses that had nothing

17.Refer to the study by Ulrich-Dieter Oppitz, who has dated most of the names in America from the 1840s through the early 1870s: »Der Name der Bruder Humboldt in Aller Welt« in ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, WERK UND WELTGELTUNG. München: R. Piper and Co. Verlag, 1969. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN whatever to do with science.)

During this year and the following one, Charles Darwin would be studying the major works of Professor Francis William Newman (June 27, 1805-October 4, 1897, the Unitarian younger brother of Cardinal John Henry Newman), starting with his PHASES OF FAITH published in this year, in an attempt to get clear about religious belief. During this period he would lose his beloved daughter Annie to a mysterious, senseless illness. He would arrive at an anti-dogma attitude similar to the younger Newman’s theology, but would also reject Newman’s attitude toward personal devotion, resorting instead to a personal skepticism. For more about this younger brother Newman, consult Meg Schellenberg’s 1994 PRIZE THE DOUBT: THE LIFE AND WORK OF FRANCIS WILLIAM NEWMAN.

September 4, Tuesday: Charles Darwin commented on Louis Agassiz’s pseudoscientific political agenda, in a private letter to the Reverend William Darwin Fox (1805-1880), his second cousin and a former classmate at Cambridge College:

I wonder whether the queries addressed to me about the specific distinctions of the races of man are a reflexion from Agassiz’s Lectures in the U.S. in which he has been maintaining the doctrine of several species, —much, I daresay, to the comfort of the slave- holding Southerners.— HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1851

Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker’s VICTORIA REGIA.

Gregor Mendel began a 2-year program of study at the University of Vienna. He would take a variety of courses and study with, or attend the lectures of, among others, Professor of Plant Physiology Franz Unger whose BOTANISCHE BRIEFE would in 1852 argue for the evolution of (i.e. non-fixity) of species, Andreas von Ettinghausen, whose course on experimental method and physical apparatus likely drew on his 1826 writings on combinatorial analysis and 1842 writings on the organization of experiments, and Christian Johann Doppler, a well-regarded lecturer on experimental physics.

Hofmeister described alternation of generations in higher plants.

Over the following four years Charles Darwin would be issuing 4 volumes of monographs on cirripedes (marine invertebrates including barnacles). His thorough research would be recognized with the Royal Medal.

Henry Thoreau read in Zoölogy and in Botany: • William Bartram and John Bartram JOHN BARTRAM’S BOOK WM. BARTRAM’S BOOK • Peter Kalm, a disciple of Carolus Linnaeus • the Baron Cuvier, teacher of Louis Agassiz • Loudon, apostle of the Linnaean “artificial” system of botanical classification • Stoever, the biographer of Carolus Linnaeus • Pultenay, a Linnaean • Carolus Linnaeus (in February 1852) • Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyramus de Candolle, apostle of the Linnaean “artificial” system of botanical classification (later) • Louis Agassiz and Augustus A. Gould’s revised edition of their 1848 PRINCIPLES OF ZOÖLOGY: TOUCHING THE STRUCTURE, DEVELOPMENT, DISTRIBUTION AND NATURAL ARRANGEMENT OF THE RACES OF ANIMALS, LIVING AND EXTINCT; WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS. FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES. PT. I. COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGY AGASSIZ & GOULD 1851 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

CAPE COD: The Greeks would not have called the ocean or unfruitful, though it does not produce wheat, if they had viewed it by the light of modern science, for naturalists now assert that “the sea, and not the land, is the principal seat of life,”– though not of vegetable life. Darwin affirms that “our most thickly inhabited forests appear almost as deserts when we come to compare them with the corresponding regions of the ocean.” Agassiz and Gould tell us that “the sea teems with animals of all classes, far beyond the extreme limit of flowering plants”; but they add, that “experiments of dredging in very deep water have also taught us that the abyss of the ocean is nearly a desert”; –“so that modern investigations,” to quote the words of Desor, “merely go to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated by the ancient poets and philosophers, that the Ocean is the origin of all things.” Yet marine animals and plants hold a lower rank in the scale of being than land animals and plants. “There is no instance known,” says Desor, “of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after having lived in its lower stage on dry land,” but as in the case of the tadpole, “the progress invariably points towards the dry land.” In short, the dry land itself came through and out of the water on its way to the heavens, for, “in going back through the geological ages, we come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with water.” We looked on the sea, then, once more, not as , or unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the “laboratory of continents.”

PIERRE JEAN ÉDOUARD DESOR AGASSIZ & GOULD CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN In England, the forces of establishmentarianism explanationism exerted their sway, in the guise of Herbert Spencer’s SOCIAL STATICS: THE CONDITIONS ESSENTIAL TO HUMAN HAPPINESS SPECIFIED, AND THE FIRST OF THEM DEVELOPED. The message was that all we have to do to correct social injustice is wait for things to work themselves out, time being on our side.18 It was this book which originated the theory which has come down to us misnamed as Social Darwinism, an attitude or approach to life which would much more precisely be denominated Social Spencerism, or Social Dubyaism.

(It was this Spencer, in fact, not Charles Darwin, who urged the deployment of the term “evolution,” Darwin preferring the more neutral “descent with modification.” Darwin favored “descent with modification” because it did not suggest progress; Spencer favored “evolution” because it did suggest progress:

It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” It was Spencer, not Darwin, who 18.The non-Hicksite, Orthodox, Evangelical Quaker meeting in Philadelphia (which is to say, the apartheiders, the segregationists) evidently read this book, for just prior to the US Civil War these good white people would attempt to give profound moral advice based upon it to America’s enslaved black people: wait, obey, time is on your side. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

was a foe of free education for all. If that wasn’t enough, Spencer was also the enemy of the postal service. If that wasn’t being individualistic enough, he was also the enemy of all regulation of city housing conditions. If that wasn’t hostile and brutal enough, he was also the enemy of all construction of city public sanitary systems and sewerage. The people who cannot provide such things for themselves, as far as he was concerned, ought to simply be allowed to die off and get the hell out of his face. To have any pity for the unfortunate would be to create “greater misery” for “future generations,” something only a pussy would be guilty of. The pitiers among us are “sigh-wise and groan-foolish.” All this would cause Darwin to sigh.) PROTO-NAZISM Blind to the fact that under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members, these unthinking, though well- meaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation — absolutely encouraging the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision. ... All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives.... Equally true is it that evil perpetually tends to disappear. In virtue of an essential principle of life, this non-adaptation of an organism to its conditions is ever being rectified; and modification of one or both, continues until the adaptation is complete. Whatever possesses vitality, from the elementary cell up to man himself, inclusive, obeys this law. We see it illustrated in the acclimatization of plants, in the altered habits of domesticated animals, in the varying characteristics of our own race.... Keeping in mind then the two facts, that all evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions; and that where this non-adaptation exists it is continually being diminished by the changing of constitution to suit conditions, we shall be prepared for comprehending the present position of the human race.... Concerning the present position of the human race, we must therefore say, that man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; that he needs another to fit him for his present state; and that he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation. By the term civilization we signify the adaptation that has already taken place. The changes that constitute progress are the successive steps of the transition. And the belief in human perfectibility, merely amounts to the belief, that in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life.... Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness.... One true inheritor of this line of thought:

“I cannot see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.” — Adolf Hitler

(Well then again, I have to confess that just as Darwin was not a Social Darwinist, so also Spencer was not exactly a Social Spencerist, or Social Dubyaist. For instance when he made his triumphal tour of America in 1882 and was the guest of honor of a plutocratic banquet at Delmonico’s in New York on November 9th, everyone there praised him for his Whiggism and triumphalism — and then he stood up, guest of honor that he was, and informed the assembled biggies that he had no respect whatever for their work ethic. They should rest on their assets and try to have more fun, he advised. What’s the point in taking money away from other people if you aren’t enjoying yourself?) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

June: Henry Thoreau studied Charles Darwin’s voyage and his remarks about the skin color of Pacific Islanders, and acquired a new attitude toward desirable skin colors for Americans.

Charles Darwin, 1849 Pacific Islander, 1963 VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE I VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE II HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

“WALKING”: A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man — a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art compared with a fine, dark green one growing vigorously in the open fields.” Ben Jonson exclaims,— “How near to good is what is fair!” So I would say— How near to good is what is wild! Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.

CHARLES DARWIN BEN JONSON VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE II LOVE FREED FROM IGNOR ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

In radical contrast with the attitude that had been espoused by Ben Jonson, Henry Thoreau acquired the attitude that olive was a suitable color for Americans. He became persuaded that the future belonged to a stronger, duskier, wilder sort of mingled-race United States citizen, a sort which would be the result of racial blending.19 He became an advocate of what in his era was being horrifically characterized as “amalgamation.” From Frederick Douglass to Obama Nation!

The skins of our great-great-great-grandchildren, in Concord, Massachusetts, should have a dusky suntanned hue, not merely from outdoor exposure but also by virtue of their heredity. Not for America, this Old World attitude that what the good deserve is the fair — in the New World, our attitude needs to become that it will be good for us to become dusky! This will be what will render us truly alive, Thoreau would venture in his lecture “WALKING”.

June 11, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau continued reading in Charles Darwin’s journal of his voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle: VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE I VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE II

19. Note that there is nothing whatever to be found about hybrid vigor in the Darwin texts that Thoreau was studying in the 1850s. Darwin would not begin to publish about such a topic for at least another two decades, in his THE EFFECTS OF CROSS- AND SELF- FERTILIZATION IN THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM (London: John Murray, 1876). Therefore, in dismissing the “whiteness is next to Godliness” attitude of Jonson to create here a 19th-Century prototype for the “black is beautiful” attitude, Thoreau was not so much learning from Darwin as thinking at least alongside this scientist or perhaps in advance of him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

When Darwin left England for his round-the-world voyage in 1831, he carried with him a departure gift: Volume I of Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, published in its first edition the previous year. Before reaching the Cape Verde Islands, he had already been swept into Lyell’s orbit. Thrilled, he preordered copies of Volumes II and III for pickup in ports of call as they were published. So influential was Lyell’s thinking during the voyage that Darwin dedicated his JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES to him with this comment: “The chief part of whatever scientific merit this journal and the other works of the author may possess, have been derived from studying the well-known and admirable PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY.” This dedication may have jumped out at Thoreau when he read it in 1851, because he, himself, had been smitten by Lyell’s great book in 1840, eleven years earlier.

June 11, Wednesday: Last night –a beautiful summer night not too warm moon not quite full20 –after 2 or 3 rainy days. Walked to Fair Haven by RR returning by Potter’s pasture & Sudbury Road. I feared at first that there would be too much white light –like the pale remains of day light –and not a yellow gloomy dreamier light –that it woud be like a candle light by day but when I got away from the town & deeper into the night, it was better. I hear whipporwills & see a few fire flies in the meadow I saw by the shadows cast by the inequalities of the clayey sand-bank in the Deep Cut, that it was necessary to see objects by moon light –as well as sunlight –to get a complete notion of them– This bank had looked much more flat by day when the light was stronger, but now the heavy shadows revealed its prominences. The prominences are light made more remarkable by the dark shadows which they cast. When I rose out of the deep Cut into the old Pigeon place field, I rose into a warmer stratum of air it being lighter. It told of the day, of sunny noon tide hours, an air in which work had been done –which men had breathed. It still remembered the sunny banks –of the laborer wiping his brow –of the bee humming amid flowers –the hum of insects Here is a puff of warmer air which has taken its station on the hills which has come up from the sultry plains of noon I hear the nighthawks uttering their squeaking notes high in the air now at nine o’clock PM –and occasionally what I do not remember to have heard so late –their booming note. It sounds more as if under a cope than by day –the sound is not so fugacious going off to be lost amid the spheres but is echoed hollowly to earth –making the low roof of heaven vibrate– a sound is more confused & dissipated by day. The whipporwill suggests how wide asunder the woods & the town– Its note is very rarely heard by those who live on the street, and then it is thought to be of ill omen –only the dwellers on the outskirts of the village –hear it occasionally– It sometimes comes into their yards– But go into the woods in a warm night at this season – & it is the prevailing sound– I hear now 5 or 6 at once– It is no more of ill omen therefore here than the night & the moonlight are. It is a bird not only of the woods but of the night side of the woods. New beings have usurped the air we breathe –rounding nature filling her crevices with sound– To sleep where you may hear the whipporwill in your dreams. I hear from this upland from which I see Wachusett by day –a wagon crossing one of the bridges– I have no doubt that in some places to-night I could hear every carriage which crossed a bridge over the river within the limits of concord –for in such an hour & atmosphere the sense of hearing is wonderfully assisted & asserts a new dignity –& become the Hearalls of the story– The late traveller cannot drive his horse across the distant bridge but this still & resonant atmosphere tells the tale to my ear. Circumstances are very favorable to the transmission of such a sound– In the first place planks so placed & struck like a bell swung near the earth emit a very resonant & penetrating sound –add that the bell is in this instance hung over water, and that the night air, not only on account of its stillness, but perhaps on account of its density –is more favorable to the transmission of sound. If the whole town were a raised planked floor –what a din there would be! I hear some whipporwills on hills –others in thick wooded vales –which ring hollow & cavernous –like an apartment or cellar with their note.– as when I hear the working of some artisan from within an apartment. I now descend round the corner of the grain field –through the pitch-pine wood in to a lower field, more inclosed 20. The moon would be full on the night of the 12th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

by woods –& find my self in a colder damp & misty atmosphere, with much dew on the grass– I seem to be nearer to the origin of things– There is something creative & primal in the cool mist –this dewy mist does not fail to suggest music to me –unaccountably –fertility the origin of things– An atmosphere which has forgotten the sun –where the ancient principle of moisture prevails. The woodland paths are never seen to such advantage as in a moonlight night so embowered –still opening before you almost against expectation as you walk –you are so completely in the woods & yet your feet meet no obstacles. It is as if it were not a path but an open winding passage through the bushes which your feet find. Now I go by the spring and when I have risen to the same level as before find myself in the warm stratum again –The woods are about as destitute of inhabitants at night as the streets in both there will be some night walkers– Their are but few wild creatures to seek their prey. The greater part of its inhabitants have retired to rest. Ah that life that I have known! How hard it is to remember what is most memorable! We remember how we itched, not how our hearts beat. I can sometimes recall to mind the quality the immortality of my youthful life –but in memory is the only relation to it. The very cows have now left their pastures & are driven home to their yards –I meet no creature in the fields. I hear the night singing bird breaking out as in his dreams, made so from the first for some mysterious reason.21 Our spiritual side takes a more distinct form like our shadow which we see accompanying us I do not know but I feel less vigor at night –my legs will not carry me so far –as if the night were less favorable to muscular exertion –weakened us somewhat as darkness turns plants pale –but perhaps my experience is to be referred to being already exhausted by the day and I have never tried the experiment fairly. It was so hot summer before last that the Irish laborers on the RR worked by night instead of day for a while –several of them having been killed by the heat & cold water. I do not know but they did as much work as ever by day. Yet methinks nature would not smile on such labors. Only the Hunter’s & Harvest moons are famous –but I think that each full moon deserves to be & has its own character well marked.– One might be called the midsummer night moon The wind & water are still awake at night you are sure to hear what wind there is stirring. The wind blows –the river flows without resting– There lies Fair Haven lake undistinguishable from fallen sky. The pines seem forever foreign; at least to the civilized man –not only their aspect but their scent –& their turpentine. So still & moderate is the night –no scream is heard whether of fear or joy –no great comedy nor tragedy is being enacted. The chirping of crickets is the most universal if not the loudest sound. There is no French revolution in Nature.– no excess– She is warmer or colder by a degree or two. By night no flowers –at least no variety of colors– The pinks are no longer pink –they only shine faintly reflecting more light Instead of flowers under foot stars over head.22 My shadow has the distinctness of a 2nd person –a certain black companion bordering on the imp –and I ask “Who is this?” Which I see dodging behind me as I am about to sit down on a rock No one to my knowledge has observed the minute differences in the seasons– Hardly two nights are alike– The rocks do not feel warm tonight for the air is warmest –nor does the sand particularly. A Book of the seasons – each page of which should be written in its own season & out of doors or in its own locality wherever it may be– When you get into the road though far from the town & feel the sand under your feet –it is as if you had reached your own gravel-walk –you no longer hear the whipporwill nor regard your shadow –for here you expect a fellow traveller– You catch yourself walking merely The road leads your steps & thoughts alike to the town– You see only the path & your thoughts wander from the objects which are presented to your senses– You are no longer in place. In Charles Darwins Voyage of a Naturalist round the World –commenced in 1831– He gave to Ehrenberg some of an impalpably fine dust which filled the air at sea near the Cape de Verd Islands & he found it to consist in great part of “infusoria with siliceous shields, and of the siliceous tissue of plants” –found in this 67 dif organic forms.– The infusoria with 2 exceptions inhabitants of fresh water. Vessels have even run on shore owing to the obscurity. Is seen a thousand miles from Africa– Darwin found particles of stone above a thousandth of an inch square. Speaking of St. Paul’s Rocks Lat 58´ N Long. 29 15´ W– “Not a a single plant, not even a lichen, grows on this islet; yet it is inhabited by several insects & spiders. The following list completes, I believe, the terrestrial fauna: a fly (Olfersia) living on the booby, and a tick which must have come here as a parasite on the birds; a small brown moth, belonging to a genus that feeds on feathers; a beetle (Quedius), and a woodlouse from beneath the dung; and lastly numerous spiders, which I suppose prey on these small attendants and scavengers of the waterfowl. The often-repeated description of the stately palm and other noble tropical plants, then birds, 21. This appears to be Thoreau’s first mention of the mysterious night warbler. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN and lastly man, taking possession of the coral islets as soon as formed, in the Pacific, is probably not quite correct; I fear it destroys the poetry of this story, that feather & dirt-feeding and parasitic insects and spiders should be the first inhabitants of newly formed oceanic land.” At Bahia or San Salvador Brazil took shelter under a tree “so thick that it would never have been penetrated by common English rain” but not so there. of A partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus?] near the mouth of the Plata– “A man on horse back, by riding round & round in a circle, or rather in a spire, so as to approach closer each time, may knock on the head as many as he pleases.”– refers to Hearne’s Journey, p.383 for “In Arctic North America the Indians catch the Varying Hare by walking spirally round & round it, when on its form: the middle of the day is reckoned the best time, when the sun is high, and the shadow of the hunter not very long” In the same place “General Rosas is also a perfect horseman –an accomplishment of no small consequence in a country where an assembled army elected its general by the following trial: A troop of unbroken horses being driven into a corral, were let out through a gateway, above which was a cross-bar: it was agreed whoever should drop from the bar on one of these wild animals, as it rushed out, and should be able, without saddle or bridle, not only to ride it, but also to bring it back to the door of the corral, should be their general. The person who succeeded was accordingly elected, and doubtless made a general fit for such an army. This extraordinary feat has also been performed by Rosas.” Speaks of the Gaucho sharpening his knife on the back of the armadillo before he kills him. Alcide d’Orbigny –from 1825 to 33 in S. Am. now (1846) publishing the results on a scale which places him 2d to Humboldt among S. Am. travellers. Hail in Buenos Ayres as large as small apples –killed 13 deer beside ostriches –which last also it blinded. –&c &c Dr Malcomson told him of hail in India in 1831 which “much injured the cattle” Stones flat one ten inches in circumference. passed through windows making round holes. A difference in the country about Monte Video & somewhere else attributed to the manuring & grazing of the cattle. refers to Atwater as saying that the same thing is observed in the prairies of N. America “where coarse grass, between five and six feet high, when grazed by cattle, changes into common pasture land” V Atwater’s words in Sill. N. A. Journ. V. 1. p 117 I would like to read Azara’s Voyage Speaks of the fennel & the cardoon (Cynara cardunculus) introduced from Europe, now very common in those parts of S. America. The latter occurs now on both sides the Cordillera, across the Continent. In Banda Oriental alone “very many (probably several hundred) square miles are covered 22. William M. White’s version of the journal entry is:

So still and moderate is the night! No scream is heard, whether of fear or joy. No great comedy nor tragedy is being enacted. The chirping of crickets is the most universal, If not the loudest, sound. There is no French Revolution in Nature, No excess. She is warmer or colder by a degree or two.

By night no flowers, At least no variety of colors. The pinks are no longer pink; They only shine faintly, Reflecting more light. Instead of flowers underfoot, Stars overhead. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN by one mass of these prickly plants, and are impenetrable by man or beast. Over the undulating plains, where these great beds occur, nothing else can now live. – – I doubt whether any case is on record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant over the aborigines.” Horses first landed at the La Plata in 1535 Now these, with cattle & sheep have altered the whole aspect of the country vegetation &c.– “The wild pig in some parts probably replaces the peccari; packs of wild dogs may be heard howling on the wooded banks of the less frequented streams; and the common cat, altered into a large and fierce animal, inhabits rocky hills.” At sea eye being 6 ft above level horizon is 24/5 miles dist. “In like manner, the more level the plain, the more nearly does the horizon approach within these narrow limits; and this, in my opinion, entirely destroys that grandeur which one would have imagined that a vast level plain would have possessed.” Darwin found a tooth of a native horse contemporary with the mastodon –on the Pampas of Buenos Ayres – though he says there is good evidence against any horse living in America at the time of Columbus– He speaks of their remains being common in N America. Owen has found Darwin’s tooth similar to one Lyell brought from the U States –but unlike any other fossil or living & named this American horse equus curvidens –from a slight but peculiar curviture in it. The great table land of Southern Mexico makes the division between N & S America with ref. to the migration of animals Quotes Capt. Owen’s Surveying voyage for saying that at the town of Benguela on the west coast of Africa in a time of great drought a number of elephants entered in a body to possess themselves of the wells, after a desperate conflict & the loss of one man the inhabitants –3000 –drove them off. During a great drought in India says Dr Malcomson, “a hare drank out of a vessel held by the adjutant of the regiment.” The Guanacos wild llama –& other animals of this genus –have the habit of dropping their dung from day to day in the same heap– The Peruvian Indians use it for fuel and are thus aided in collecting it. Rowing up a stream which takes its rise in a mountain you meet at last with pebbles which have been washed down from it when many miles distant. I love to think of this kind of introduction to it. The only quadruped native to the Falkland Islands is a large wolf-like fox. As far as he is aware, “there is no other instance in any part of the world of so small a mass of broken land, distant from a continent, possessing so large an aboriginal quadruped peculiar to itself.” In the Falkland Isles where other fuel is scarce they frequently cook their beeef with the bones from which the meat has been scraped Also They have “a green little bush about the size of common heath, which has the useful property of burning while fresh & green.” Saw a cormorant play with its fishy prey as a cat with a mouse, 8 times let it go & dive after it again. Seminal propagation produces a more original individual than that by buds layers & grafts. Some inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego having got some putrid whale’s blubber in time of famine “an old man cut off thin slices and muttering over them, broiled them for a minute, and distributed them to the famished party, who during this time preserved a profound silence.” This was the only evidence of any religious worship among them. It suggests that even the animals may have something divine in them & akin to revelation. Some inspiration, allying them to man as to God. “Nor is it easy to teach them our superiority except by striking a fatal blow. Like wild beasts they do not appear to compare numbers; for each individual, if attacked, instead of retiring, will endeavor to dash your brains out with a stone, as certainly as a tiger under similar circumstances would tear you.” “We were well clothed, and though sitting close to the fire, were far from too warm; yet these naked savages, though further off, were observed, to our great surprise, to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting.” Ehrenberg examined some of the white paint with which the Fuegians daub themselves –and found it to be composed of infusoria, including 14 polygastrica, and 4 phytolitharia, inhabitants of fresh water –all old & known forms!! Again of the Fuegians “Simple circumstances –such as the beauty of scarlet cloth or blue beads, the absence of women, our care in washing ourselves –excited their admiration far more than any grand or complicated object, such as our ship. Bougainville has well remarked concerning these people, that they treat the “chef-d’oeuvres de l’industrie humaine, comme ils traitent les loix de la nature, et ses phénonomènes.” He was informed of a tribe of foot-Indians now changing into horse-Indians –apparently in Patagonia. “With the exception of a few berries, chiefly of a dwarf arbutus, the natives (i.e. of T. del-Fuego) eat no Vegetable food besides this fungus.” [Cyttaria Darwinii] the “only country where a cryptogamic plant affords a staple article of food.” No reptiles in T. del Fuego nor in Falkland Islands. Describes a species of kelp there –Macrocystis pyrifera– “I know few things more surprising than to see this plant growing and flourishing amidst those great breakers of the Western Ocean, which no mass of rock, let it HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

be ever so hard, can long resist. – – A few [stems] taken together are sufficiently strong to support the weight of the large loose stones to which, in the inland channels, they grow attached; and yet some of these stones were so heavy that when drawn to the surface, they could scarcely be lifted into a boat by one person.” Capt. Cook thought that some of it grew to the length of 360 ft “The beds of this sea-weed even when not of great breadth,” says D. “make excellent natural floating breakwaters. It is quite curious to see, in an exposed harbor, how soon the waves from the open sea, as they travel through the straggling stems, sink in height, and pass into smooth water.” Number of living creatures of all orders whose existence seems to depend on the kelp –a volume might be written on them. If a forest were destroyed anywhere so many species would not perish as if this weed were – & with the fish would go many birds & larger marine animals, and hence the Fuegian himself perchance. Tree-ferns in Van Diemen’s Land (Lat 45) 6 feet in circ. Missionaries encountered icebergs in Patagonia in lat. corresponding to the Lake of Geneva, in a season corresponding to June in Europe. In Europe –the most southern glacier which comes down to the sea is on coast of Norway lat 67 20 or 1230 nearer the pole. erratic boulders not observed in the inter tropical parts of the world.– due to ice-bergs or glaciers. Under Soil perpetually frozen in N. A. in 56 at 3 feet in Siberia in 62 at 12 to 15 ft In an excursion from Valparaiso to the base of the Andes– “We unsaddled our horses near the spring and prepared to pass the night. The evening was fine, and the atmosphere so clear, that the masts of the vessels at anchor in the bay of Valparaiso, although no less than 26 geographical miles distant, could be distinguished clearly as little black streaks.” Anson had been surprised at the distance at which his vessels were discovered from the coast without knowing the reason –the great height of the land and the transparency of the air. Floating islands from 4 to 6 ft thick in lake Tagua-tagua in central Chile –blown about.

June 15, Sunday: From the red farmhouse in the Berkshires Hills, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed engagingly in a letter to a Salem correspondent the most deep-seated and disturbing racism it is possible for us now to imagine: I have not, as you suggest, the slightest sympathy for the slaves; or, at least, not half as much as for the laboring whites, who, I believe, are ten times worse off than the Southern negroes.23

June 15, Sunday: Darwin still VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE I VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE II Finds run away sailors on the Chonos Archipelago who he thought “had kept a very good reckoning of time” having lost only 4 days in 15 months Near same place on the islands of the Archipelago –he found wild potatoe the tallest 4 ft high –tubers generally small –but one 2 inch in Diam. “resembled in every respect and had the same smell as English potatoes; but when boiled they shrunk much, & were watery & insipid, without any bitter taste.” Speaking of the surf on the coast of Chiloe –“I was assured that, after a heavy gale, the roar can be heard at night even at Castro, a distance of no less than twenty-one sea miles, across a hilly and wooded country.” Subsidence & elevation of the W Coast of S America & of the Cordilleras “Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.” Would like to see Sir Francis Head’s ? travels in S America –Pampas perhaps Also Chamber’s Sea Levels “ Travels of Spix & Von Martius It is said that hydrophobia was first known in S. America in 1803 At the Galapagos the tortoises going to any place travel night & day & so get there sooner than would be 23. Refer to Richard Klayman’s article “What Should We Make of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Racism?” on the History News Network for August 24th, 2009: http://hnn.us/articles/97175.html HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

expected –about 8 miles in 2 or 3 days– He rode on their backs. The productions of the Galapagos Archipelago from 5 to 600 miles from America –are still of the American type.– “It was most striking to be surrounded by new birds, new reptiles, new shells, new insects, new plants, and yet, by innumerable trifling details of structure, and even by the tones of voice & plumage of the birds, to have the temperate plains of Patagonia, or the hot, dry deserts of Northern Chile, vividly brought before my eyes.” What is most singular –not only are the plants &c to a great extent peculiar to these islands, but each for the most part has its own kinds. though they are within sight of each other. Birds so tame there they can be killed with a stick. I would suggest that from having dealt so long with the inoffensive & slow moulded tortoise they have not yet inquired an instintive fear of man who is a new comer. Methinks tortoises lizzards &c for wild creatures are remarkable for the nearness to which man approaches them & handles them as logs –coldblooded lumpish forms of life –only taking care not to step into their mouths. An aligator has been known to have come out of the mud like a mud volcano where was now the floor of a native’s hut. “The common dock is widely disseminated, [in New Zealand] and will, I fear, forever remain a proof of the rascality of an Englishman, who sold the seeds for those of the tobacco plant.” The New Hollanders a little higher in the scale of civilization than the Fuegians. Puzzled by a “well rounded fragment of greenstone, rather larger than a man’s head” which a captain had found on a small coral circle or atoll near Keeling Island “where every other particle of matter is calcareous.” about 600 miles from Summatra D agrees with Kotzebue (V Kotzebue) who states that “the inhabitants of the Radack Archipelago, a group of lagoon-islands in the midst of the Pacific, obtained stones for sharpening their instruments by searching the roots of trees which are cast upon the beach.” –and “laws have been established that such stones belong to the chief, and a punishment is inflicted on any one who attempts to steal them.” Let geologists look out “Some natives carried by Kotzebue to Kamtschatka collected stones to take back to their country.” Found no bottom at 7200 ft & 2200 yds from shore of Keeling Island –a coral isle His theory of the formation of Coral isles by the subsidence of the land appears probable.– He concludes that “the great continents are, for the most part, rising areas; and – – the central parts of the great oceans are sinking areas.” Not a private person on the island of Ascension –the inhabitants are paid & victualled by the Brit. government –springs cisterns &c are managed by the same “Indeed, the whole island may be compared to a huge ship kept in first rate order.” V Circumnavig. of Globe up to Cook. V. Voyages Round the World since Cook. The author of the article on Orchids in the Eclectic says that “a single plant produced three different flowers of genera previously supposed to be quite distinct.” Saw the first wild rose today on the west side of the Rail Road causeway. The white weed has suddenly appeared and the clover gives whole fields a rich & florid appearance The rich red & the sweet scented white The fields are blushing with the red species as the western sky at evening.– The blue-eyed grass well named looks up to heaven– – And the yarrow with its persistent dry stalks & heads –is now ready to blossom again– The dry stems & heads of last years tansy stand high above the new green leaves I sit in the shade of the pines to hear a wood thrush [Hermit Thrush Catharus guttatus] at noon –the ground smells of dry leaves –the heat is oppressive. The bird begins on a low strain i.e. it first delivers a strain on a lower key –then a moment after anothe a little higher –then another still varied from the others –no two successive strains alike, but either ascending or descending. He confines himself to his few notes in which he is unrivalled. As if his kind had learned this and no more anciently. I perceive as formerly a white froth dripping from the pitch-pines just at the base of the new shoots– It has no taste. The pollywogs in the Pond are now full-tailed. The hickory leaves are blackened by a recent frost –which reminds me that this is near their northern limit. It is remarkable the rapidity with which the grass grows The 25th of May I walked to the hills in Wayland and when I returned across lots do not remember that I had much occasion to think of the grass, or to go round any fields to avoid treading on it– But just a week afterward at Worcester it was high & waving in the fields & I was to some extent confined to the road & the same was the case here. Apparently in one month you get from fields which you can cross without hesitation –to haying time– It has grown you hardly know when. be the weather what it may sunshine or storm– I start up a solitary wood-cock in the shade in some copse –goes off with a startled rattling hurried note. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

After walking by night several times –I now walk by day –but I am not aware of any crowning advantage in it. I see small objects better, but it does not enlighten me any. The day is more trivial. (What a careful gardener nature is! She does not let the sun come out suddenly with all his intensity after rain & cloudy weather –but graduates the change to suit the tenderness of plants) I see the tall crowfoot now in the meadows –Ranunculus acris –with a smooth stem– I do not notice the bulbosus which was so common a fortnight ago. The rose colored flowers of the Kalmia Angustifolia lambkill just opened & opening– The Convalaria bifolia growing stale in the woods.– the Hieracium venosum veiny- leaved Hawkweed with its yellow blossoms in the woodland path– The Hypoxis erecta Yellow Bethlehem star where there is a thick wiry grass in open paths should be called yellow-eyed grass methinks The Pyrola asarifolia with its pagoda-like stem of flowers i.e. broad leaved winter green. The Trientalis Americana like last in the woods –with its starlike white flower & pointed whorled leaves– The Prunella too is in blossom & the rather delicate Thesium umbellatum a white flower– The solomons seal with a greenish drooping raceme of flowers at the top I do not identify. I notice today the same remarkable bunchy growth on the fir –(in wheildons garden) that I have noticed on the pines & cedars –) the leaves are not so thickly set & are much stiffer. I find that I postpone all actual intercourse with my friends to a certain real intercourse which takes place commonly when we are actually at a distance from one another {One-fifth page blank}

July-August: During this July and August Henry Thoreau would be making entries in his journal as preparation for lectures that eventually would become AN EXCURSION TO CANADA (Huntington HM 949): Such works do not consist with the development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress than liberate the mind. They are tombs for the souls of men, as frequently for their bodies also. The sentinel with his musket beside a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason for his existence. Does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing with me? (99-100)

The problem appeared to be how to smooth down all individual protuberances or idiosyncrasies, and make a thousand men move as one man, animated by one central will; and there was some approach to success. They obeyed the signals of a commander who stood at a great distance, wand in hand; and the precision, and promptness, and harmony of their movements could not easily have been matched. The harmony was far more remarkable than that of any choir or band, and obtained, no doubt, at a greater cost. TIMELINE OF CANADA HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

“A YANKEE IN CANADA”: The most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them; they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair from the day they are built, because they are not really the work of this age. The very place where the soldier resides has a peculiar tendency to become old and dilapidated, as the word barrack implies. I couple all fortifications in my mind with the dismantled Spanish forts to be found in so many parts of the world; and if in any place they are not actually dismantled, it is because there the intellect of the inhabitants is dismantled. The commanding officer of an old fort near Valdivia in South America, when a traveller remarked to him that, with one discharge, his gun-carriages would certainly fall to pieces, gravely replied, “No, I am sure, sir, they would stand two.” Perhaps the guns of Quebec would stand three. Such structures carry us back to the Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean d’Acre, and the days of the Bucaniers. In the armory of the citadel they showed me a clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a Lombard gun. I thought that their whole citadel was such a Lombard gun, fit object for the museums of the curious. Such works do not consist with the development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress than liberate the mind. They are tombs for the souls of men, as frequently for their bodies also. The sentinel with his musket beside a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason for his existence. Does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing with me? The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it almost from the first day of the settlement. The founders of the colony thought this an excellent site for a wall, –and no doubt it was a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,– but it chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced, too, that a Lower Town got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags, as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion, — interesting only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business. Or is this an indispensible machinery for the good government of the country?

CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE I VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE II

July 23, Wednesday: A treaty was made and concluded at Traverse des Sioux upon the Minnesota River between the United States of America (by Luke Lea, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Alexander H. Ramsey, governor and ex-officio superintendent of Indian affairs in the Territory of Minnesota, commissioners duly appointed for that purpose) and the See-see-toan and Wah-pay-toan bands of Dakota tribespeople. The tribalists ceded, sold, and relinquished to the United States all their lands in the State of Iowa and all their lands in the Territory of Minnesota east of a line beginning at the junction of the Buffalo River with the Red River of the North, thence along the western bank of that Red River to the mouth of the Sioux Wood River, thence along the western bank of that Sioux Wood River to Lake Traverse, thence along the western shore of that lake to the southern extremity thereof, thence in a direct line to the Junction of Kampeska Lake with the Sioux River, and thence along the western bank of that river to its point of intersection with the northern line of the State of Iowa (inclusive of the islands in said rivers and lake). The treaty document was signed in the presence of Thomas Foster, Secretary, Nathaniel McLean, Indian Agent, Alexander Faribault and Stephen R. Riggs, Interpreters, A.S.H. White, Thos. S. Williamson, W.C. Henderson, A. Jackson, James W. Boal, W.G. Le Duc, Alexis Bailly, H.L. Dousman, and Hugh Tyler. L. Lea, [SEAL]; Alex. Ramsey, [SEAL] Een-yang-ma-nee (Running Walker or “the Gun”) [HIS MARK] Wee-tchan-h’ pee-ee-tay-toan (the Star face or the “Orphan”) [HIS MARK] Ee-tay-wa-keen-yan (“Limping Devil” or “Thunder Face”) [HIS MARK] Eesh-ta-hum-ba (“Sleepy Eyes”) [HIS MARK] Oo-pee-ya-hen-day-a (Extending his train) [HIS MARK] Hoak-shee-dan-wash-tay (Good Boy) [HIS MARK] Ee-tay-tcho-ka (Face in the midst) [HIS MARK] Hay-ha-hen-day-ma-za (Metal Horn) [HIS MARK] Am-pay-too-sha (Red Day) [HIS MARK] Eesh-ta-humba-koash-ka (Sleepy Eyes young) [HIS MARK] A na-wang-ma-nee (Who goes galloping on) [HIS MARK] Ma-h’pee-wee-tchash-ta (Marpiyawicasta, Cloud man) [HIS MARK] Tan-pa-hee-da (Sounding Moccasin) [HIS MARK] Eenk-pa (the upper end) [HIS MARK] Wee-yoa-kee-yay (Standard) [HIS MARK] Wa-kan-man-nee (Walking Spirit) [HIS MARK] Ee-tay-sha (the one that reddens his face) [HIS MARK] Ta-ka-ghay (Elk maker) [HIS MARK] Wa-ma-ksoon-tay (“Walnut” or Blunt headed arrow) [HIS MARK] Ma-za-sh’a (Metal Sounding) [HIS MARK] Ya-shoa-pee (The wind instrument) [HIS MARK] Noan-pa keen-yan (Twice Flying) [HIS MARK] Wash-tay-da (Good, a little) [HIS MARK] Wa-keen-yan-ho-ta (Grey Thunder) [HIS MARK] Wa-shee-tchoon-ma-za (Iron French man) [HIS MARK] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Ta-pe-ta-tan-ka (His Big fire) [HIS MARK] Ma-h’pee-ya-h’na-shkan-shkan (Moving Cloud) [HIS MARK] Wa-na-pay-a (The pursuer) [HIS MARK] Ee-tcha-shkan-shkan-ma-nee (Who walks shaking) [HIS MARK] Ta-wa-kan-he-day-ma-za (His Metal Lighthing) [HIS MARK] Ee-tay doo-ta (Red Face) [HIS MARK] Henok-marpi-yahdi-nape (Reappearing Cloud) [HIS MARK] Tchan-hedaysh-ka-ho-toan-ma-nee (the moving sounding Harp) [HIS MARK] Ma-zaku-te-ma-ni (Metal walks shooting) [HIS MARK] A-kee-tchee-ta (Standing Soldier) [HIS MARK]

July 23, Wednesday: I remember the last moon, shining through a creamy atmosphere, with a tear in the eye of Nature and her tresses dishevelled and drooping, sliding up the sky, the glistening air, the leaves shining with dew, pulsating upward; an atmosphere unworn, unprophaned by day. What self-healing in Nature! -swept by the dews. For some weeks past the roadsides and the dry and trivial fields have been covered with the field trefoil (Trifolium arvense), now in bloom.

8A.M. — A comfortable breeze blowing. Methinks I can write better in the afternoon, for the novelty of it, if I should go abroad this morning. My genius makes distinctions which my understanding cannot, and which my senses do not report. If I should reverse the usual, - go forth and saunter in the fields all the forenoon, then sit down in my chamber in the afternoon, which it is so unusual for me to do, -it would be like a new season to me, and the novelty of it [would] inspire me. The wind has fairly blown me outdoors; the elements were so lively and active, and I so sympathized with them, that I could not sit while the wind went by. And I am reminded that we should especially improve the summer to live out-of-doors. When we may so easily, it behooves us to break up this custom of sitting in the house, for it is but a custom, and I am not sure that it has the sanction of common sense. A man no sooner gets up than he sits down again. Fowls leave their perch in the morning, and beasts their lairs, unless they are such as go abroad only by night. The cockerel does not take up a new perch in the barn, and he is the embodiment of health and common sense. Is the literary man to live always or chiefly sitting in a chamber through which nature enters by a window only? What is the use of the summer? You must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the faculties being in repose, Your mind must not perspire. True, out of doors my thought is commonly drowned, as it were, and shrunken, pressed down by stupendous piles of light ethereal influences, for the pressure of the atmosphere is still fifteen pounds to a square inch. I can do little more than preserve the equilibrium and resist the pressure of the atmosphere. I can only nod like the rye-heads in the breeze. I expand more surely in my chamber, as far as expression goes, as if that pressure were taken off; but. here outdoors is the place to store up influences. The swallow’s twitter is the sound of the lapsing waves of the air, or when they break and burst, as his wings represent the ripple. He has more air in his bones than other birds; his feet are defective. The fish of the air. His note is the voice of the air. As fishes may hear the sound of waves lapsing on the surface and see the outlines of the ripples, so we hear the note and see the flight of swallows. The influences which make for one walk more than another, and one day more than another, are much more ethereal than terrestrial. It is the quality of the air much more than the quality of the ground that concerns the walker, — cheers or depresses him. What he may find in the air, not what he may find on the ground. On such a road (the Corner) I walk securely, seeing far and wide on both sides, as if I were flanked by light infantry on the hills, to rout the provincials, as the British marched into Concord, while my grenadier thoughts keep the main road. That is, my light-armed and wandering thoughts scour the neighboring fields, and so I know if the coast is clear. With what a breadth of van I advance! I am not bounded by the walls. I think more than the road full. (Going southwesterly.) While I am abroad, the ovipositors plant their seeds in me; I am fly-blown with thought, and go home to hatch and brood over them. I was too discursive and rambling in my thought for the chamber, and must go where the wind blows on me walking. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

A little brook crossing the road (the Corner road), a few inches’ depth of transparent water rippling over yellow sand and pebbles, the pure blood of nature. How miraculously crystal-like, how exquisite, fine, and subtle, and liquid this element, which an imperceptible inclination in the channel causes to flow thus surely and swiftly! How obedient to its instinct, to the faintest suggestion of the hills! If inclined but a hair’s breadth, it is in a torrent haste to obey. And all the revolutions of the planet - nature is so exquisitely adjusted - and the attraction of the stars do not disturb this equipoise, but the rills still flow the same way, and the water levels are not disturbed. We are not so much like debauchees as in the afternoon. The mind is subject to moods, as the shadows of clouds pass over the earth. Pay not too much heed to them. Let not the traveller stop for them. They consist with the fairest weather. By the mood of my mind, I suddenly felt dissuaded from continuing my walk, but I observed at the same instant that the shadow of a cloud was passing over [the] spot on which I stood, though it was of small extent, which, if it had no connection with my mood, at any rate suggested how transient and little to be regarded that mood was. I kept on, and in a moment the sun shone on my walk within and without. The button-bush in blossom. The tobacco-pipe in damp woods. Certain localities only a few rods square in the fields acid on the hills, sometimes the other side of a wall, attract me as if they had been the scene of pleasure in another state of existence. But this habit of close observation, — in Humboldt, Darwin, and others. Is it to be kept up long, this science? Do not tread on the heels of your experience. Be impressed without making a minute of it. Poetry puts an interval between the impression and the expression, — waits till the seed germinates naturally. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1852

October: Charles Darwin, who had been suffering from terrible toothaches for months, visited his dentist, and Mr. Waite gave him chloroform and extracted five teeth. Darwin had been administering chloroform to his wife during her labors, but had not yet tried it himself. He recorded it as “this wonderful Substance.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1853

May 3, Tuesday: Moncure Daniel Conway had kept a letter of introduction to Waldo Emerson from the Reverend John G. Palfrey tucked away in a drawer for several weeks, for he was fearful that the person would not be so impressive as the essays. On this morning, very early, he took the Fitchburg train out past Walden Pond to Concord.

While working up his courage he had breakfast at an inn, and walked over to the Old Manse and meditated for a while the Old North Bridge. Then, having exhausted his possibilities, he walked out the Lexington road to the Emerson home and presented his credentials. “Eloquent, wonderful, grand and simple, his speech flowed constantly, bearing the wealth of ages on it.” Emerson gave his visitor a copy of Margaret Fuller’s WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY bearing her autograph. Then the two of them walked over to visit with Henry Thoreau, who asked him what he was studying at the Harvard Divinity School. When Conway indicated that he was studying “The Scriptures,” Thoreau affected naïveté and inquired “The Hindu, Arabic or Jewish?”24 May 3, 1853. is a date under which I wrote a couplet from Emerson’s “Woodnotes,”—

’Twas one of the charmèd days When the genius of God doth flow.

—for on that day I first met Emerson. Dr. Palfrey, on finding in our conversations that it was Emerson who had touched me in my sleep in Virginia, advised me to visit him. I felt shy about 24. How different Thoreau’s little jest was from what is known as “the Belfast joke”:

A guy walking through a dark alley in Belfast feels something against his back. “Protestant or Catholic?” he hears. “Actually I’m a Quaker,” the guy blurts out. Pause — then “Protestant Quaker or Catholic Quaker?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

invading the “spot that is sacred to thought and God.” but he urged me to go and gave me a letter to Emerson. I knew too well the importance of a morning to go straight to Emerson’s house, and inquired the way to the Old Manse. It was a fortunate excursion. The man I most wished to meet was Emerson; the man I most wished to see was Hawthorne. He no longer resided at the Old Manse, but as I was gazing from the road down the archway of ash-trees at the house whose “mosses” his genius had made spiritual moss-roses, out stepped the magician himself. It has been a conceit of mine that I had never seen a portrait of Hawthorne, but recognized him as one I had seen in dreams he had evoked. At any rate, I knew it was my Prospero. Who else could have those soft-flashing unsearchable eyes, that beauté du diable at middle age? He did not observe me, and as I slowly followed him towards the village, doubts were awakened by the elegance and even smartness of his dress. But I did not reflect that Prospero had left his isle, temporarily buried his book, and was passing from his masque to his masquerade as consul at Liverpool and man of the world. Hawthorne was making calls before his departure for Europe. I felt so timid about calling on Emerson –it appeared such a one-sided affair– that I once turned my steps toward the railway station. But soon after twelve I knocked at Emerson’s door, and sent in Dr. Palfrey’s letter, with a request that I might call on him during the afternoon. The children came to say that their father was out, but would return to dinner at one, and their mother wished me to remain. The three children entertained me pleasantly, mainly in the bower that Alcott had built in the front garden. I was presently sent for. Emerson met me at the front door, welcome beaming in his eyes, and took me into his library. He remembered receiving a letter from me two or three years before. On learning that I was at the Divinity School and had come to Concord simply to see him, he called from his library door, “Queeny!” Mrs. Emerson came, and I was invited to remain some days. I had, however, to return to college that evening, and though I begged that his day should not be long interfered with, he insisted on my passing the afternoon with him. When we were alone, Emerson inquired about the experiences that had led me away from my Methodism, and about my friendships. “The gods,” he said, “generally provide the young thinker with friends.” When I told him how deeply words of his, met by chance in an English magazine, had moved me while I was a law student in Virginia, he said, “When the mind has reached a certain stage it may be sometimes crystallized by a slight touch.” I had so little realized their import, I told him that they only resulted in leading me to leave the law for the Methodist ministry. It had been among the Hicksite Quakers that I found sympathetic friends, after entering on the path of inquiry. He then began to talk about the Quakers and their inner light. He had formed a near friendship with Mary Rotch of New Bedford. “Mary Rotch told us that her little girl one day asked if she might do HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

something. She replied, ‘What does the voice in thee say?’ The child went off, and after a time returned to say ‘Mother, the little voice says, no.’ That,” said Emerson, “starts the tears to one’s eyes.” He especially respected the Quaker faith that every “scripture” must be held subject to the reader’s inner light. “I am accustomed to find errors in writings of the great men, and it is an impertinence to demand that I shall recognize none in some particular volume.” The children presently came in, — Ellen, Edward, and Edith. They were all pretty, and came up to their father with their several reports on the incidents of the morning. Edith had some story to tell of a trouble among one or two rough families in Concord. A man had hinted that a woman next door had stolen something, and she had struck him in the leg with a corkscrew. Emerson summed this up by saying, “He insinuated that she was a rogue, and she insinuated the corkscrew in his leg.” Ellen perceived the joke. and I many times remarked the quickness with which, while not yet out of girlhood, she appreciated every word of her father. The dinner was early; the children were with us, and the talk was the most homelike and merry that I had known for a long time. When the children were gone Mrs. Emerson told me that they had been christened. “Husband was not willing the children should be christened in the formal way, but said he would offer no objection when I could find a minister as pure and good as the children. That was reasonable, and we waited some time; but when William Henry Channing came on a visit to us, we agreed that he was good enough to christen our children.” While Emerson was preparing for the walk, I looked about the library. Over the mantle hung a large copy of Michael Angelo’s “Parcæ;” there were two statuettes of Goethe, of whom also there was an engraved portrait on the wall. Afterwards Emerson showed me a collection of portraits — Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne, Goethe, and Swedenborg. The furniture of the room was rather antique and simple. There were four long shelves completely occupied, he said, by his MSS., of which there must have been enough to furnish a score of printed volumes. Our walk was around Walden Pond, on both sides of which Emerson owned land. Our conversation related to the religious ferment of the time. He said that the Unitarian churches were stated to be no longer producing ministers equal to their forerunners, but were more and more finding their best men in those coming from orthodox churches. That was a symptom. Those from other churches, having gone through experiences and reached personal convictions strong enough to break with their past. would of course have some enthusiasm for their new faith. But the Unitarians might take note of that intimation that individual growth and experience are essential for the religious teacher. I mentioned Theodore Parker. and he said, “It is a comfort to remember that there is one sane voice amid the religious and political affairs of the country.” I said that I could not understand how I could have tolerated those dogmas of inherited depravity, blood atonement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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eternal damnation for Adam’s sin, and the rest. He said, “I cannot feel interested in Christianity; it seems deplorable that there should be a tendency to creeds that would take men back to the chimpanzee.” He smiled at the importance ascribed to academic terms. “I have very good grounds for being Unitarian and Trinitarian too: I need not nibble at one loaf forever, but eat it and go on to earn another.” He said that while he could not personally attend any church, he held a pew in the Unitarian church for his wife and children who desired it, and indeed would in any case support the minister, because it is well “to have a conscientious man to sit on school committees, to help at town meetings, to attend the sick and the dead.” As we were walking through the woods he remarked that the voices of some fishermen out on the water, talking about their affairs, were intoned by the distance and the water into music; and that the curves which their oars made, marked under the sunlight in silver, made a succession of beautiful bows. This may have started a train of thought related to the abhorrence I had expressed of the old dogmas, to which I had added something about the Methodist repugnance with which I had witnessed in Maryland some Catholic ceremonies. “Yet,” he said, “they possess beauty in the distance. When one sees them on the stage, –processions of priests in their vestments chanting their hymns at the opera,– they are in their place, and offend no sentiment.” I mentioned a task set me at the Divinity School, to write an essay on Eschatology, and Emerson said, “An actually existent fly is more important than a possibly existent angel.” Again presently: “The old artist said, Pingo in eternitatem; this eternitatem for which I paint is not in past or future, but is the height of every living hour.” When we were in a byway among the bushes, Emerson suddenly stopped and exclaimed, “Ah! there is one of the gods of the wood!” I looked and saw nothing; then turned to him and followed his glance. but still beheld nothing unusual. He was looking along the path before us through a thicket. “Where?” I asked. “Did you see it?” he said, now moving on. “No, I saw nothing — what was it? “No matter,” said he gently. I repeated my question, but he still said smilingly, “Never mind, if you did not see it.” I was a little piqued, but said no more, and very soon was listening to talk that made my Eschatology seem ridiculous. Perhaps the sylvan god I had missed was a pretty snake, a squirrel or other little note in the symphony of nature. My instruction in the supremacy of the present hour began not so much in Emerson’s words as in himself. Standing beside the ruin of the shanty Thoreau built with his own hands. and lived in for a year at a cost of twenty-eight dollars, twelve and a half cents, Emerson appeared an incarnation of the wondrous day he was giving me. My enthusiasm for Margaret Fuller Ossoli, excited by her “Memoirs,” led Emerson in parting to give me a copy of her WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, — an English edition she had sent him from London, with her initials in it. At my request he added his own name and the date. That evening I sat HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN in my room in Divinity Hall (No. 34) as one enriched, and wrote: “May 3. The most memorable day of my life: spent with Ralph Waldo Emerson!” Two days later I attended a great dinner given in Boston to Senator Hale of New Hampshire. I went over with Dr. Palfrey, who was chairman. Emerson was there, but when Palfrey called for a speech from him he had departed. What was my chagrin, on my return to the Divinity School, to find that Emerson had been there to call upon me! Being homeless in the North, my summer vacation (1853) was passed at Concord. The Emersons found for me a very pleasant abode at “Hillside,” on Ponkatasset [Ponkawtasset] Hill, about a mile out of the village, where Ellery Channing once lived, and where he wrote his poem on New England. Two sisters, the Misses Hunt, educated ladies, received me into this pleasant cottage, where I was the only boarder. These ladies were cousins of Miss Martha Hunt, whose suicide in Concord River and the recovery of her body are described in Hawthorne’s BLITHEDALE ROMANCE. They were troubled because G. W. Curtis, in his HOMES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS, had suggested that Martha’s suicide was due to the contrast between her transcendental ideals and the coarseness of her home. They described the family of their cousin as educated people. One of these sisters walked with me to the river and pointed out all the places connected with the tragedy, and some years later another cousin drowned herself there. Emerson introduced me to his friends. First of all he took me to Henry Thoreau, who lived in the village with his parents and his sister. The kindly and silent pencil-maker, his father, John Thoreau, was French in appearance, and Henry resembled him physically; but neither parent impressed me as possessing mental qualities that could account for such a rare spirit as Henry. He was thirty-six when I met him. He received me pleasantly, and asked what we were studying at Cambridge. I answered, “The Scriptures.” “Which?” he asked. Emerson said, “You will find our Thoreau a sad pagan.” Thoreau had long been a reverent reader of Oriental scriptures, and showed me his bibles, translated from various languages into French and English. He invited me to come next day for a walk, but in the morning I found the Thoreaus agitated by the arrival of a coloured fugitive from Virginia, who had come to their door at daybreak. Thoreau took me to a room where his excellent sister, Sophia, was ministering to the fugitive, who recognized me as one be had seen. He was alarmed, but his fears passed into delight when after talking with him about our county I certified his genuineness. I observed the tender and lowly devotion of Thoreau to the African. He now and then drew near to the trembling man, and with a cheerful voice bade him feel at home, and have no fear that any power should again wrong him. That whole day he mounted guard over the fugitive, for it was a slave-hunting time. But the guard had no weapon, and probably there was no such thing in the house. The next day the fugitive was got off to Canada, and I enjoyed my first walk with Thoreau. He was a unique man every way. He was short of stature, well built; every movement was full of HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN courage and repose; his eyes were very large, and bright, as if caught from the sky. “His nose is like the prow of a ship,” said Emerson one day. He had the look of the huntsman of Emerson’s quatrain: —

He took the colour of his vest From rabbit’s coat and grouse’s breast; For as the wild kinds lurk and hide, So walks the huntsman unespied.

The cruellest weapons, however, which this huntsman took with him were lenses and an old book in which to press plants. He was not talkative, but his occasional monologues were extraordinary. I remember being surprised at every step with revelations of laws and significant attributes in common things — as a relation between different kinds of grass and the geological characters beneath them, the variety and grouping of pine-needles and the effect of these differences on the sounds they yield when struck by the wind, and the varieties of taste represented by grasses and common herbs when applied to the tongue. He offered me a peculiar grass to chew for an instant, laying, “It is a little sharp, but an experience.” Deep in the woods his face shone with a new light. He had a mental calendar of the flora of the neighbourhood, and would go some distance around to visit some floral friend. We were too early for the hibiscus, a rare flower in New England, which I desired to see. He pointed out the spot near the river where alone it could be found, and said it would open about the following Monday and not stay long. I went on Tuesday or Wednesday, but was too late — the petals were scattered on the ground. Thoreau ate no meat; he told me his only reason was a feeling of the filthiness of f1esh-eating. A bear huntsman he thought was entitled to his steak. He had never attempted to make any general principle on the subject, and later in life ate meat in order not to cause inconvenience to the family. On our first walk I told him the delight with which I read his book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” He said that the whole edition remained on the shelf of his publisher, who wished to get rid of them. If he could not succeed in giving them away they would probably be sold as old paper. I got from him valuable hints about reading. He had studied carefully the old English Chronicles, and Chaucer, Froissart, Spenser, and Beaumont and Fletcher. He recognized kindred spirits in George Herbert, Cowley, and Quarles, considering the latter a poet but not an artist. He explored the old books of voyages -Drake, Purchas, and others, who assisted him in his circumnavigation of Concord. The Oriental books were his daily bread; the Greeks (especially Æschylus, whose “Prometheus” and “The Seven against Thebes” he translated finely) were his luxuries. He was an exact Greek scholar. Of modems he praised Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, to a less extent, Carlyle and Goethe. He admired Ruskin’s “Modern Painters,” though he thought the author bigoted, but in the “Seven Lamps of Architecture” he found with the good stuff “too much about art for me and the Hottentots. Our house is yet HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a hut.” He enjoyed William Gilpin’s “Hints on Landscape Gardening: Tour of the River Wye.” He had read with care the works of Franklin. He had as a touchstone for authors their degree of ability to deal with supersensual facts and feelings with scientific precision. What he admired in Emerson was that he discerned the phenomena of thought and functions of every idea as if they were antennæ or stamina. It was a quiet joke in Concord that Thoreau resembled Emerson in expression, and in tones of voice. He had grown up from boyhood under Emerson’s influence, had listened to his lectures and his conversations, and little by little had grown this resemblance. It was the more interesting because so superficial and unconscious. Thoreau was an imitator of no mortal; but Emerson had long been a part of the very atmosphere of Concord, and it was as if this element had deposited on Thoreau a mystical moss. During that halcyon summer I read the Oriental books in Emerson’s library, for he not only advised me in my studies but insisted on lending me books. To my hesitation about taking even to Ponkatasset the precious volumes, he said, “What are they for?” In my dainty little room whose window opened on a beautiful landscape with the Musketaquit wandering through it to the Merrimack, or perhaps seated in the vine-covered veranda, I read Wilkins’s “Bhagavat Geeta,” which thenceforth became part of my canon. Close indeed to my heart came the narrative of the charioteer (the god Krishna in disguise) driving Arjoona to the field, where the youth sees that his struggle is to be with his parents, teachers, early companions. Emerson also introduced me to the Persian “Desatir.” In lending me this he said that he regarded the ancient Persian scriptures as more intellectual than the sacred writings of other races. I found delight in these litanies uttered in the beginning of our era, amid whose exaltations there was always the happy beam of reason. “Thy knowledge is a ray of he knowledge of God.” “0 my Prophet ever near me, I have given thee an exalted angel named Intelligence.” “How can we know a prophet? By his giving you information regarding your own heart.” Emerson also in that summer introduced me to Saadi of Schiraz, who has been to me as an intimate friend through life’s pilgrimage. For the “Rose Garden” (Gulistan) I had been prepared by my garden in Frederick Circuit, my “Seclusaval:” Saadi was its interpreter, and restored it to me. For I could not enter deeply into wild nature, but dearly loved a garden. One day when I was walking with Emerson in his garden, he stopped near a favourite plum and said, “This is when ripe a fruit of paradise.” He then discovered one that was ripe and managed to pluck it for me. How simply was this man fulfilling all my youthful dreams I He personally loved Saadi, and later edited the “Gulistan.” One day he told me he bad found somewhere a story about him. Saadi was travelling on foot towards Damascus, alone and weary. Presently he overtook a boy travelling the same way, and asked HDT WHAT? INDEX

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him to point out the road. The boy offered to guide him some distance, and in the course of conversation Saadi spoke of having come from Persia and from Schiraz. “Schiraz!” exclaimed the boy, “then perhaps you can tell me something of Sheik 8aadi of Sohiraz.” The traveller said, “I am Saadi.” Instantly the boy knelt and with tears kissed the hem of his skirt, and after that could not be parted from Saadi, but guided and served him during his stay in Damascus. (And lo, here I am with my grey hairs seeing my own Saadi as he told me the little tale that filled my eyes, all unconscious that my soul was that of the Damascus boy and was kissing the hem of his garment!) I made the acquaintance of several elderly persons in Concord who told me incidents related by their grandparents concerning the Concord fight of April 19, 1775, but I was too much interested in the heroes of 1858 to care much for those of the old Revolution. One day Emerson pointed out to me across the street the venerable Bon. Samuel Hoar and his daughter Elizabeth, and told me the story of their visit to Charleston, S.C. (1844), the eminent lawyer being commissioned by his State to plead for the release of Massachusetts seamen seized from ships and imprisoned there because of their colour. Amid threats of violence the lawyer and his daughter were driven out of Charleston unheard. I had not known this, and thenceforth bowed low whenever I passed the old lawyer. Without any historic halo the Hon. Samuel Hoar would have arrested the attention of a stranger, not only by his very tall thin form and the small face — blond and beardless — that looked as if come out of Bellini’s canvas, but also by his dreamy look and movement. He was seventy- five, but no indications of age explained that absorbed look. Probably it was this as well as the face that suggested to Emerson a resemblance to Dante. U He is a saint,” said Emerson as the old gentleman passed one day; “he no longer dwells with us· down on earth.n There could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the old man and his Bon Judge Rockwood: Hoar, — and I should think also Senator Hoar, so far as appearance went, for the latter I knew only by seeing him occasionally. The “Jedge,” as Lowell calls him in “The Biglow Papers,” made an admirable attorney-general of the United States, but his force was almost formidable in little Concord. One felt in meeting him that the glasses on those bright eyes were microscopic, and that he was under impending cross-examination. He was rationalistic and a “free-soiler,” though his antislavery record did not satisfy abolitionists.25 The judge was unconscious of the satirical accent in his humour. He was personally devoted to Emerson, who, however, rather dreaded him, as he told me half- bumourous, on account of his tendencies to argumentative and remorselessly logical talk. The judge, however, was very amiable in his family and especially with his sister Elizabeth. This lady, who resembled the father more than her brothers did, was 25. A severe criticism on Judge Hoar by Wendell Phillips was resented even by Emerson. The judge was asked by Sanborn, I believe, whether he was going to the funeral of Wendell Phillips, and replied, “No, but I approve of it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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most lovely and intellectual. The death of Emerson’s brilliant brother Charles, to whom Miss Elizabeth was betrothed, was the pathetic legend of Concord, and the reverential affection of Emerson for her represented a sentiment of the community. But the lady, in a sense widowed, was interested and active in all the culture and affairs of Concord; her sorrows had turned to sunshine for those around her. Mrs. Ripley, the widow of the Rev. Samuel Ripley, a kinsman of Emerson, occupied the famous “Old Manse.” An admirable sketch of her life was written by Elizabeth Hoar. She had a wide reputation for learning. I had heard at Cambridge that when students were rusticated they used to board at Concord in order to be coached by her. She was a fine botanist. A legend ran that Professor Gray called on her and found her instructing a student in differential calculus, correcting the Greek translation of another, and at the same time shelling peas, and rocking her grandchild’s cradle with her foot. But never was lady more simple and unostentatious. In her sixty-third year she was handsome, and her intelligent interest extended from her fruit- trees and poultry to the profoundest problems of her time. Thus the Old Manse had for me precious “mosses” which Hawthorne had not gathered. Her daughters Phœbe and Sophia (afterwards wife of Professor Thayer of Cambridge) always met me with a friendliness gratefully remembered. No doubt they and other ladies in Concord bore in mind that I was far away from my relatives. I found in Mrs. Ripley an intelligent sympathizer with my advancing religions ideas. She was a Theist through recognition of a supreme Reason intimated in the facts of individual reason. She said, “I cannot believe in miracles, because I believe in God.” The subject of spirit manifestations was considered by her worthy of study only as a contemporary illustration of the fallaciousness of human testimony wherever emotions or passions are involved. “People believe what they’ve a mind to,” she said. The well-informed rationalism of Mrs. Ripley, and of her nearest friend Elizabeth Hoar, led me to suppose that the ideas of Emerson were universal in Concord. In this, however, I presently discovered my mistake. One day when I was with Emerson and his wife he referred to Goethe, and I perceived that the great German was a sort of bogy to her. She quoted verbatim two sentences from a letter written to her by her husband before their marriage in which he expressed misgivings about Goethe, beneath whose fiDe utterances be had found “no faith.” Emerson was silent, and his wife went on in a way almost pathetic to describe her need of faith. When after the talk at dinner I was walking with Emerson, he said that Goethe had written some things — “Elective Affinities,” for instance — which could be really read only by minds which had undergone individual training. He was the only great writer who had tamed upon the moral conventions and demanded by what right they claimed to control his life. But HDT WHAT? INDEX

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people with eyes could not omit Goethe. Mr. William Emerson, an eminent lawyer of New York, occasionally visited his younger brother in Concord. I remember him as an interesting gentleman, and was surprised to find any lawyer with his unworldly and even poetic look. In a letter from Germany of William Emerson shown me by his son, Dr. Emerson of New York, he speaks of his acquaintance with Goethe. William was studying divinity, but found that he had not even Socinian faith enough to preach, and was in distress about the disappointment to his parents. Goethe advised him not to disappoint them, but go on with his ministry. I think the Goethean cult at Cambridge and Concord had cooled. And by the way there was a droll relic of it in the Emerson household; one of the children — Edith I think — had the fancy to name her handsome cat “Goethe.” Emerson affected to take it seriously, and once when the cat was in the library and scratched itself, he opened the door and politely said, “Goethe, you must retire; I don’t like your manners.” I managed to make friends with the Concord children. Never had a small town a more charming circle of lovely children. The children of Emerson, of Judge Rockwood Hoar, of the Loring and Barrett families, mostly girls between ten and twelve years, were all pretty and intelligent, and as it was vacation time they were prepared for walks, picnics, boating, etc. Other of their elders beside myself found delight in the society of these young people, especially Thoreau. He used to take us out on the river in his boat, and by his scientific talk guide us into the water-lilies’ fairyland. He showed us his miracle of putting his hand into the water and bringing up a fish.26 I remember Ellen Emerson asking her father, “Whom shall we invite to the picnic?” — his answer being, “All children from six years to sixty.” Then there were huckleberrying parties. These were under the guidance of Thoreau, because he alone knew the precise locality of every variety of the berry. I recall an occasion when little Edward Emerson, carrying a basket of fine huckleberries, had a fall and spilt them all. Great was his distress, and our offers of berries could not console him for the loss of those gathered by himself. But Thoreau came, put his arm around the troubled child, and explained to him that if the crop of huckleberries was to continue it was necessary that some should be scattered. Nature had provided that little boys should now and then stumble and sow the berries. We shall have a grand lot of bushes and berries in this spot, and we shall owe them to you. Edward began to smile. Not far from “Hillside” resided a lonely old man, with whom I exchanged greetings. Bereft of wife and children, he found consolation in “spiritualism.” The Hunt ladies thought that he was suffering his cottage and garden to fan gradually into ruin because of his absorption in another world, and giving his money 26. The bream. This fish has the peculiarity of defending its spawn. Thoreau would find some spot where he could see the spawn, then place his hand beneath it. The bream placed itself over its spawn, and his fingers closed around it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to a medium for bringing him communications from his wife and children. He was eager to convince me, and said that if I would visit Mrs. Freeman in Boston, and did not find something worth examining in this matter, he would not go there again. Whereupon I went off to Boston and Mrs. Freeman. Ushered into the mysterious presence, I found a substantial dark-eyed sibyl seated on a little throne. I was placed in a chair opposite by her husband, who, having made passes between us, left the room. Her eyes were closed, and she drew long breaths. Presently she cried, “Where shall I go with you: to the spirit world or to some place on earth?” I said, “Tell me about my home,” for I knew that no one in Boston could know anything of my home in Falmouth or my personal affairs. This woman then went on to describe in a vague way my father’s house, a description that would apply to many brick houses, She then mentioned several persons in the house and incidents I was sure were not true. I was 80 disgusted at the whole affair that I cut short the interview, and went back triumphantly to my old friend at Concord. The old man went to see the medium, and she said that she found me so sceptical that the rapport was imperfect. The old man, however, fulfilled his contract. Mrs. Freeman had said, “I see a lady who is a good deal worried about somebody named John.” The selection of a name so common rather amused me; but I afterwards had to show my neighbour a letter from my mother saying that she was troubled by the betrothal of a relative named John.27 From Agassiz I derived great benefit. When he rose before us in his class, a rosy flush on his face indicated his delight in communicating his knowledge. His shapely form, eager movements (“his body thought”), large soft eyes, easy unconscious gestures, and sonorous English, with just enough foreign accent to add piquancy, together made Agassiz the perfect lecturer. He was skillful too as a draughtsman, and often while speaking made a few marks on the blackboard which conveyed a complete impression of the thing elucidated. In the warmer months Agassiz used to take his class out into the country, there being no difficulty of finding in the neighbourhood places of scientific interest. Several times we visited Nahant, and I can never forget the charm of our sitting there OD the rocks while Agassiz pointed out on them the autographs of the glaciers recording their ancient itinerary. Or, standing on the top of some boulder, he would trace with his finger in the rocks far out in the sea the ancient outlines of the land; or with some small fossil in his hand, or peculiar shell, he would track the progress of organic development. On one ramble at Nahant Agassiz devoted himself to the sea- 27. In later life Madame Renan, after the decease of her husband, told me that some intelligent ladies of their acquaintance once came to him with marvellous narratives of some incidents in séances in Paris. When he intimated incredulity one of the ladies said, “But your friend Madame B. told me that she saw it herself.” “Ah,” said Renan, “so few people know how to see!” Nearly these same words were said to me by Mrs. Sarah Ripley of the Old Manse in Concord. Emerson had little patience with “spiritualism,” which he called “the rat-hole revelation.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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serpent, which had twice been reported as seen off that coast. One of our class had unintentionally suggested the subject by mentioning the recent apparition, and smiling at it as a sailor’s yarn. But Agassiz in his always good-natured way said that although there were no doubt exaggerations, it was not quite safe to ridicule the story. He then proceeded to give a summary of all the narratives about the alleged monster, with references to time and place that amazed us, as the subject was of casual suggestion. He described huge snakelike saurians of which some may have been amphibious or aquatic, and whose extinction might not be complete. One day in his lecture-room Agassiz displayed some new fossils, mainly of saurians, which had just been added to his collection. They gave him a text for a general review of the morphological chain of reptilian life. As he proceeded, darting off at times to his blackboard, and comparing the extinct form with contemporary fauna, he became more and more animated, his face reddening with excitement, until at last he said: “Gentlemen, I ask you to forgive me if to-day I end my lecture at this point, although the hour is not out. I assure you that while I have been describing these extinct creatures they have taken on a sort of life; they have been crawling and darting about me, I have heard their screaming and hissing, and am really exhausted. I regret it, gentlemen, but I trust that you will excuse me.” Our admiration for the great teacher was such as to break through all rules, and we gave him a hearty cheer. He bowed low to us and quickly disappeared. The determined repudiation by Agassiz of the discovery of Darwin caused something like dismay in scientific circles throughout Europe as well as in America. Concerning this I have some memories that may interest men of science. When I belonged to the class of Agassiz (1853-54), he repeatedly referred to the hypothesis of continuous development of species in a way which has suggested to me a possibility that he may have had some private information of what was to come from Charles Darwin. In his Introduction (1869) Darwin speaks of having submitted a sketch of his work to Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, — “the latter having seen my sketch of 1844.” Either of these, or Darwin himself, might have consulted Agassiz. Most of us knew about such a theory only through the popular “Vestiges of Creation,” to which he paid little attention. He seemed to have been excit.ed by some German, — perhaps Schopenhauer, in whose works the idea of self-evolution in organic nature is potential, — of whom he spoke with a flush of anger when adding, “He says himself that he is an atheist.” At any rate, during 1854 especially his mind was much occupied with the subject. I also remember well that during this time he often dwelt upon what he called the “ideal connection” between the different forms of life, describing with drawings the embryonic changes; in that progress no unbridged chasm after the dawn of organic life. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At the end of every week a portion of the afternoon was given for our putting questions to Agassiz, the occasion often giving rise to earnest discussion. These repeatedly raised the theory of development in “The Vestiges of Creation.” Agassiz frequently referred to the spiritual evolution with which Emerson was particularly associated. But just after Darwin’s discovery had appeared, I happened to be dining at the Saturday Club in Boston, when something like an encounter between these two friends occurred. Agassiz was seated at the head of the table, Emerson being on his right. It was near the end of the dinner, and around the long table those present were paired off in conversation; but being next to Emerson I could enjoy the conversation he held with Agassiz. After a time the professor made some little fling at the new theory. Emerson said smilingly that on reading it he had at once expressed satisfaction at confirmation of what he (Agassiz) had long been telling us. All of those beautiful harmonies of form with form throughout nature which he had so finely divined were now proved to be genuine relationship. “Yes,” said Agassiz eagerly, “ideal relationship, connected thoughts of a Being acting with an intelligent purpose.” Emerson, to whom the visible universe was all a manifestation of things ideal, said that the physical selection appeared to him a counterpart of the ideal development. Whereupon Agassiz exclaimed, “There I cannot agree with you,” and changed the subject. There was at Concord a course of lectures every year, one of which was given by Agassiz. His coming was an important event. He was always a guest of the Emer80ns, where the literary people of the village were able to meet him. On one such occasion I remember listening to a curious conversation between Agassiz and A. Bronson Alcott, — who lived and moved in a waking dream. After delighting Agassiz by repudiating the theory of the development of man from animals, he filled the professor with dismay by equally decrying the notion that God could ever have created ferocious and poisonous beasts. When Agassiz asked who could have created them, Alcott said they were the various forms of human sin. Man was the first being created. And the horrible creatures were originated by his lusts and animalisms. When Agassiz, bewildered, urged that geology proved that the animals existed before man, Alcott suggested that man might have originated them before his appearance in his present form. Agassiz having given a signal of distress, Emerson came to the rescue with some reconciling discourse on the development of life and thought, with which the professor had to be content, although there was a soupçon of Evolutionism in every word our host uttered. There was a good deal of suspicion in America that the refusal of Agassiz to accept Darwin’s discovery was due to the influence of religious leaders in Boston, and particularly to that of his father-in-law, Thomas Cary, who had so freely devoted his wealth to the professor’s researches. Some long intimacy with those families convinced me that there was no such influence exerted HDT WHAT? INDEX

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by the excellent Mr. Cary, but that it was the old Swiss pastor, his father, surviving in him. He had, indeed, departed far from the paternal creed; he repudiated all miracles at a time when Mr. Cary and other Unitarians upheld them tenaciously. He threw a bomb into the missionary camp by his assertion of racial diversity of origin. His utterances against Darwinism were evidently deistic, and had nothing whatever to do with any personal interest, except that he had a horror of being called an atheist. I say “deistic,” for “theistic” denotes a more spiritual conception of deity than I can associate with Agassiz. He had adopted Humboldt’s “Cosmos” idea, attached a dynamic deity to it, but did not appear to have any mystical or even reverential sentiment about nature, and pointed out humourously what he called nature’s “jokes.” I was sometimes invited to his house. He had by his first wife two beautiful daughters and the son (Alexander), now eminent. His wife (née Cary) and her sisters were ladies of finest culture and ability. Agassiz was a perfect character in his home life, and neighbourly also. Occasionally he would get together the young girls of Cambridge and guide them among the fossils, telling them the wonders of the primeval world. Longfellow told me that Agassiz was entreating him to write a poem on the primeval world. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1854

April 27, Thursday: Waldo Emerson had offered to read a paper in Moncure Daniel Conway’s room at Harvard Divinity School, and Conway had sent out invitations. The authorities had been perplexed for some time at this student’s closeness to the heretic of Concord, and when this latest thing came to their attention, they went into a panic of sorts. Conway would be challenged by Harvard’s Professor of Christian Morals with the possibility that this represented a “decline of Christian morals” in Divinity Hall. Two of the professors would visit student Conway in his room and give voice to their fears that there was being organized “a school within the school,” amounting to an “Emersonian cult.” But the meeting in question, on this date, had in fact gone off without incident, the group having moved because of its size to a public room and Emerson having merely read his paper on “Poetry” to an audience that included Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and faculty spouse Fanny Appleton Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Arthur Hugh Clough. We are left wondering why on earth all these authority figures were getting so exercised.28

Meanwhile, out at Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau was hypothesizing that the level of water in the pond ought to become very low again during the period 1866-1869 (amazingly, this anticipation would prove to have been accurate).

April 27. 7 A.M. –To Cliffs. ... The wood thrush [Hermit Thrush Catharus guttatus] afar, –so superior a strain to that of other birds. I was doubting if it would affect me as of yore, but it did measurably. I did not believe there could be such differences. This is the gospel according to the wood thrush. He makes a sabbath out of a week-day — I could go to hear him—could buy a pew in his church— Did he ever practice pulpit eloquence? He is right about the slavery question— ... Forbes says that the guides who crossed the alps with him lost the skin of their faces — (Ap from the reflections from the snow.) It is remarkable that the rise & fall of Walden though unsteady & whether periodical or merely occasional are not completed but after many years. I have observed one rise & part of 2 falls. It attains its maximum slowly & surely though unsteadily. It is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, requires many years for its accomplishment — and I expect that a dozen or 15 years hence it will again be as low as I have ever known it.

28. It wasn’t the fact that Waldo Emerson talked about “arrested and progressive development” in this paper on poetry which had gotten the faculty all excited, even though later it would be proposed, by some folks who demonstrably knew nothing whatever of evolutionary theory, that Emerson had here been anticipating Charles Darwin’s theory. What Emerson had said was simply “The electric word pronounced by [Doctor] John Hunter [1728-1793] a hundred years ago, — arrested and progressive development — indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organism, — gave the poetic key to natural science, — of which the theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, of Lorenz Oken [1779-1851], of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832], of Louis Agassiz [1807-1873], and [Sir] Richard Owen [1804-1892] and [Doctor] Erasmus Darwin [1731-1802] in zoölogy and botany, are the fruits, — a hint whose power is not exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics.” –Which is not Darwinism, but the obsolete mental universe of hierarchy and superiority, of Naturphilosophie, the great ladder of being, all of which amounted to the wanna-believe bullshit that Charles Darwin would be struggling to supersede. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Winter: Charles Darwin would later comment, in THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, “I estimate that the winter of 1854-55 destroyed four-fifths of the birds in my own grounds.” It was not this terrible winter, however, that destroyed his hair — even at the tender age of 45, it was already long gone:

This winter was a terrible one for the soldiers of Russia, Turkey, England, and France, fighting in the Crimea north of the Black Sea. During this emergency all opposition was overcome and Florence Nightingale was able for the first time to staff military hospitals with female nurses. In fact, her Reports of the sufferings of the British army in the Crimea, deprived of its supplies in that winter by the Nobel mines in the harbor of Sevastopol in conjunction with the great hurricane of November 14, 1854, would lead not only to a new form of organization under the name of the Red Cross but also to the fall of a British government.

In the absence of Professor of Chemistry John Torrey, Professor Isaac-Farwell Holton was lecturing on the properties of mercury before the medical students of the College of Physicians and Surgeons when he suddenly came to a realization that the name of the white substance “calomel” derived from the Greek , meaning “beautiful,” and mel meaning “black” (this etymology came to his mind as he touched a piece of mercurial chloride with potassa and noticed that it produced a black spot). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Lecture Season of ’54/55, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

16th Season of The Lowell Institute Professor C.C. Felton. On the Downfall and Resurrection of Greece 12 lectures Honorable John G. Palfrey. New England History 12 lectures James Russell Lowell. English Poetry 24 lectures Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge. Mediæval History 6 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1855

Alfred Russel Wallace began to publish the connections he was making between facts of geographical and geological distribution and the general idea of species evolution: “ON THE LAW WHICH HAS REGULATED THE INTRODUCTION OF NEW SPECIES.” He engaged in the first extensive collecting efforts and field studies of the orangutan. He investigated and described the faunal discontinuity which we now refer to as “Wallace’s Line.” THE SCIENCE OF 1855

Orra White Hitchcock was badly injured in falling from a balcony onto a brick surface, and in addition her eyesight was deteriorating. She would no longer be able to assist her husband the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock in the preparation of his publications.

Gregor Mendel applied for a 2d time to take the written teaching examination that would allow him to have a permanent teaching appointment. He would travel to Vienna to take the exam in 1856, but again would not pass.

In England, Charles Darwin began work on his “big book,” an exhaustive record of the evidence for his development theory that was to be replaced by a much shorter explanation-minus-evidence to be titled THE 29 ORIGIN OF SPECIES. On the continent, Gregor Johann Mendel discovered the mechanism of heredity, but was ignored because his discovery did not conform to the preconceptions of Lamarckian biologists. Although he sent a copy of his publication to Darwin, as it exists in Darwin’s library now its pages are uncut: Darwin had not been moved to give special consideration to this particular unsolicited communication.

In America, William Lloyd Garrison persuaded the New England Anti-Slavery Convention to witness a spiritual communication between John Orvis and a dead friend. The Massachusetts public school system began a long process of reforms dictated by the state government, that there were to be no more distinctions of color or religion. Garrison seized the opportunity to point out that this revolution had begun “in the heart of the solitary individual ... loving the right in all things, and having faith in the triumph of what is just and true ... and by and by, the little leaven leavens the whole lump, and in this way the world is to be redeemed.”

29. Darwin’s “big book” would not see print until the 1980s. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

Professor James Dwight Dana of Yale College declared that: The whole plan of creation had evident reference to Man as the end and crown of the animal kingdom, and ... progression from the lower to the higher races.... The earlier races were of lower types.... The development of the plan of creation ... was in accordance with the law of ... progress from the simple to the complex, from comprehensive unity to multiplicity through successive individualizations.

Dana clearly did not consider that the obvious self-serving and self-congratulatory nature of this nonscientific belief system was a reason for self-doubt. That his belief system was self-serving was obviously to him merely some sort of quaint coincidence! (Well, but he was a Yalie, and a Louis Agassiz colleague.) Stephen Jay Gould, page 105: “James Dwight Dana viewed the entire geological history of the earth and life as one long, coherent, and heroic story with a moral — a tale of inexorable progress, expressed in both physical and biological history, and leading, inevitably and purposefully, to God’s final goal of a species imbued with sufficient consciousness to glorify His name and works.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN During this year Charles Darwin began to write down his ideas about descent with modification. He wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker in regard to the providentialist idea that Nature exemplified God’s benevolence toward His creatures:

What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Darwin ... revered William Paley during his youth. In a courageous act of intellectual parricide, he then overthrew his previous mentor — not merely by becoming an evolutionist, but by constructing a particular version of evolutionary theory maximally disruptive of Paley’s system and deepest beliefs.... Where did Darwin get such a radical version of evolution? Surely not from the birds and bees, the twigs and trees. Nature helped, but intellectual revolutions must also have ideological bases. Scholars ... agree that two Scottish economists of the generation just before Darwin played a dominant role: Thomas Robert Malthus and the great Adam Smith himself. From Malthus, Darwin received the key insight that growth in population, if unchecked, will outrun any increase in the food supply. A struggle for existence must therefore arise, leading by natural selection to survival of the fittest (to cite all three conventional Darwinian aphorisms in a single sentence). Darwin states that this insight from Malthus supplied the last piece that enabled him to complete the theory of natural selection in 1838 (though he did not publish his views for twenty-one years). Adam Smith’s influence was more indirect, but also more pervasive. We know that the Scottish economists interested Darwin greatly and that, during the crucial months of 1838, while he assembled the pieces soon to be capped by his Malthusian insight, he was studying the thought of Adam Smith. The theory of natural selection is uncannily similar to the chief doctrine of laissez-faire economics. (In our academic jargon, we would say that the two theories are “isomorphic” — that is, structurally similar point for point, even though the subject matter differs.) To achieve the goal of a maximally ordered economy in the laissez-faire system, you do not regulate from above by passing explicit laws for order. You do something that, at first glance, seems utterly opposed to your goal: You simply allow individuals to struggle in an unfettered way for personal profit. In this struggle, the inefficient are weeded out and the best balance each other to form an equilibrium to everyone’s benefit. Darwin’s system works in exactly the same manner, only more relentlessly. No regulation comes from on high; no divine watchmaker superintends the work of his creation. Individuals are struggling for reproductive success, the natural analog of profit. No other mechanism is at work, nothing “higher” or more exalted. Yet the result is adaptation and balance — and the cost is hecatomb after hecatomb after hecatomb.... For Malthus, Paley actually cites the key line that inspired Darwin’s synthesis in 1838 (but in the context of a passage on civil vs. natural evils). Paley writes: The order of generation proceeds by something like a geometrical progression. The increase of provision, under circumstances even the most advantageous, can only assume the form of an arithmetic series. Whence it follows, that the population will always overtake the provision, will pass beyond the line of plenty, and will continue to increase till checked by the difficulty of procuring subsistence. (At this point, Paley adds a footnote: “See this subject stated in a late treatise upon population” — obviously Malthus.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN [NOTE: Compare and contrast this with Henry Thoreau’s horror at what he found himself thinking, about nature, late at night in the train station in Worcester!!]

Hecatomb30 upon hecatomb, leading only to holocaust!31

But — by the time the ORIGIN OF SPECIES appeared in 1859, he had decided to excise its worst passages about how incompatible the natural facts of parasitism, cruelty, and waste were with any concept of a caring and all- observant deity.32

Later, Darwin would write in his AUTOBIOGRAPHY that: In order to pass the B.A. examination, it was, also, necessary to get up Paley’s EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY, and his MORAL PHILOSOPHY.... The logic of this book and as I may add of his NATURAL T HEOLOGY gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced of the long line of argumentation. THE SCIENCE OF 1856

September 29: Charles Darwin commented on Professor Louis Agassiz’s pseudoscientific political agenda, in a private letter to Professor James Dwight Dana, a zoologist and geologist at Yale College:

...the great Agassiz, who seems to me to retreat a step & take up a new position with a front so bold as to be admirable in a soldier....

Sept. 29. P. M. - To Grape Cliff. The pea-vine fruit is partly ripe, little black-dotted leans, about three in a pod. 1 (-.,in lucrdly clamher along the grape cliff now witlccact ge tting my clothes covered with desmodiuclc ticks, - there especially the rotarc.difblaUm and paioiculatunt. Though you were running for your life, they would have time to catch and cling to your clothes. - often the whole row of pods of the D. paniculaturn, like a piece of a saw blade with three teeth. You pause at a convenient place and spend a long time picking them off, which it took so short a time to attach. They will even cling to your hand as you go by. They cling like babes to the mother’s breast, by instinct. Instead of being caught and detained ourselves by birdlirrne, we are compelled to catch these seeds and carry them with 30. A hecatomb was the slaughter of 100 oxen, and thus by extension any large slaughter perpetrated in the expectation of a consequent divine benefit, or, rather, in order to reduce current levels of anxiety with regard to what would be to come. 31. An offering in which the entire offering is to be consumed by the flames, leaving nothing to be shared among its priests. 32. Stanley Edgar Hyman, THE TANGLED BANK, New York, 1962, page 38. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN us. These almost invisible nets, as it were, are spread for us, and whole coveys of desmodium and bidens seeds and burs steal transportation out of us. I have found myself often covered, as it were with an imbricated scaly coat of the brown desmodium seeds or a bristling chevaux-de(rise of beggar-ticks, and had to spend a quarter of an hour or more picking them off at some convenient place; and so they got just what they wanted, deposited in another place. How surely the desmodium, growing on some rough cliffside, or the bidens, on the edge of a pool, prophesy the coming of the traveller, brute or human, that will transport their seeds on his coat! I am late for grapes; most have fallen. The fruit of what I have called Y’itis astivalis has partly fallen. It is dark-purple, about seven sixteenths of an inch in diam eter, very acid and commonly hard. Stem and petiole smooth and purplish, but leaf not smooth or green lwncatlc. Should not this be called frost gape, rather Hum the earlier one I ate at Brattleboro? Urahcs arc singularly various for a wild fruit, like many cultivated ones. Dr. Reynolds told me the other day of a Canada lynx (?) killed in Andover, in a swamp, some years ago, when lie was teaching school in Tewksbury; thought to be one of a pair, the other being killed or seen in Derry. Its large track was seen in the snow in Tewlcsbury and traced to Andover and back. They saw -,where it had leaped thirty feet! and where it devoured rabbits . Was on a tree when shot. Skin stuffed somewhere.

Sept. 30. Cattle-Show. An overcast, mizzling, and rainy day. Minott tells of a General Hull, who lived somewhere in this county, who, he remembers, called out the whole division once or twice to a muster. Ile sold the army under him to the English in the last war, - thou(,rh General Miller of Lincoln besought [him] to let him lead them,-and never was happy after it, had no peace of mind. It was said that his life was in danger here in consequence of his treason. Once, at a muster in front of the Rayden house, when there was a sham fight, and an Indian party took a circuit round a piece of wood, some put green grapes into their guns, and lie, hearing one whistle by his head, thought some one wished to shoot him and ordered them to disperse, - dismissed them. Speaking of the meadow-ha v which is lost this year, Dlinott said that the little they had got since the last flood lwfore this was good for nothing, would only poison the cattle, l:~iug covered with the dried slime and filth of the freshet. When you mowed it there arose a great dust. He spoke of this grass, thus left over winter to nest year, as “old fog.” Said that Clark (Daniel or Brooks) asked him the other day what made so many young alders and birches and willows spring up in the river meadows of late; years; HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN it did n’t use to be so forty or fifty years ago; and lie told him that in old times, when they were accustomed to take something strong to drink, they did n’t stand for such shrubs but mowed all clear as they went, but now, not feeling so much energy for want of the stimulant, when they carne to a bush, though no bigger than a pipe-stem, they mowed all round it. and left it standing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1857

September 5, Saturday: Two orchestral works by Franz Liszt were performed for the first time, in Weimar, conducted by the composer: the symphonic poem Die Ideale and Eine Faust-Symphonie in drei Charakterbilden. They celebrate the unveiling today of the Goethe-Schiller Monument in Weimar. One of those in attendance, Hans Christian Andersen, an admirer of Liszt the performer, was less enthusiastic about his music. “[Liszt’s music] was wild, melodious, and turbid. At times there was a crash of cymbals. When I first heard it, I thought a plate had fallen down. I went home tired. What a damned sort of music.”

Charles Darwin wrote to the Harvard botanist, Dr. Asa Gray (Fisher Professor of Natural History 1842-1873) in a semi-legible scrawl, “I will enclose the briefest abstract of my notions on the means by which nature makes her species.... I ask you not to mention my doctrine.” Professor Gray would be the first person in North America to be so informed of Darwin’s ideas on natural selection.

“If ever you do read it, & can screw out the time to send me...however short a note...I should be extremely grateful.” “...I cannot possibly believe that a false theory would explain so many classes of facts.”

September 5, Saturday. I now see those brown shaving-like stipules33 of the white pine leaves, which are falling, i. e. the stipules, and caught in cobwebs. River falls suddenly, having been high all summer.

September 26, Saturday: Harper’s Weekly carried the following story: NIAGARA FALLS

Over Niagara — Mysterious Suicide An Englishman, well dressed and supplied with ordinary

33.Sheaths. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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luggage, arrived in the Great Western train on the 11th instant, at Niagara Falls, and registered his name on the books of the Clifton House, as W.T. Allen, Montreal. After getting his room he ordered a bottle of wine — drank it — wrote two letters, and then came down stairs; walked deliberately out on Table Rock; waded into the water as far as the rapid current would permit, took off his hat and threw it and plunged himself over the precipice into the roaring cataract to be seen no more. The letters left in his room were opened. One was directed to a Miss Allen, Ireland, probably a sister, the other to a business firm in Montreal. The first was an unintelligible scrawl; the other could only be deciphered partially. On his way from the dépôt he asked the driver whether any one had ever jumped over the Falls without being killed. An answer in the negative brought the response that he could or would do it. This threat was regarded by the driver as a foolish, idle boast, but about 3 1/2 P.M. the stranger made the attempt. Whether he intended to commit suicide or simply to outjump Sam Patch probably no one will ever be able to tell. The leap certainly was premeditated, but the letters assign no reason for the rash act. He seemed to have plenty of money, and a gold watch and chain, all of which, with his body, will probably lie wedged in the crevices of the rocks at the bottom of the Niagara River.

Charles Darwin commented on Louis Agassiz’s pseudoscientific political agenda, in a private letter to Thomas Henry Huxley:

I have always suspected Agassiz of superficiality & wretched reasoning powers; but I think such men do immense good in their way. See how he stirred up all Europe about Glaciers.

September 26, Saturday: A.M. –Apparently Hypericum prolificum in Monroe’s garden, still out. The season is waning. A wasp just looked in upon me. A very warm day for the season. P.M. Up river to Clamshell. These are warm, serene, bright autumn afternoons. I see far off the various-colored gowns of cranberry-pickers against the green of the meadow. The river stands a little way over the grass again, and the summer is over. The pickerel-weed is brown, and I see musquash-houses. Solidago rigida, just done, within a rod southwest of the oak. I see a large black cricket on the river, a rod from shore, and a fish is leaping at it. As long as the fish leaps, it is motionless as if dead; but as soon as it feels my paddle under it, it is lively enough. I sit on Clamshell bank and look over the meadows. Hundreds of crickets have fallen into a sandy gully and now are incessantly striving to creep or leap up again over the sliding sand. This their business this September afternoon. I watch a marsh hawk circling low along the edge of the meadow, looking for a frog, and now at last it alights to rest on a tussock. Coming home, the sun is intolerably warm on my left cheek. I perceive it is because the heat of the reflected sun, which is as bright as the real one, is added to that of the real one, for when I cover the reflection with my HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

hand the heat is less intense. That cricket seemed to know that if he lay quietly spread out on the surface, either the fishes would not suspect him to be an insect, or if they tried to swallow him would not be able to. What blundering fellows these crickets are, both large and small! They were not only tumbling into the river all along shore, but into this sandy gully, to escape from which is a Sisyphus labor. I have not sat there many minutes watching two foraging crickets which have decided to climb up two tall and slender weeds almost bare of branches, as a man shins up a liberty-pole sometimes, when I find that one has climbed to the summit of my knee. They are incessantly running about on the sunny bank. Their still larger cousins, the mole crickets, are creaking loudly and incessantly all along the shore. Others have eaten themselves cavernous apartments, sitting- room and pantry at once, in windfall apples. Speaking to Rice of that cricket’s escape, he said that a snake [sic] in like manner would puff itself up when a snake was about to swallow him, making right up to him. He once, with several others, saw a small striped snake swim across a piece of water about half a rod wide to a half-grown bullfrog which sat on the opposite shore, and attempt to seize him, but he found that he had caught a Tartar, for the bullfrog, seeing him coming, was not afraid of him, but at once seized his head in his mouth and closed his jaws upon it, and he thus held the snake a considerable while before the latter was able by struggling to get away. When that cricket felt my oar, he leaped without the least hesitation or perhaps consideration, trusting to fall in a pleasanter place. He was evidently trusting to drift against some weed which would afford him a point d’appui. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1858

Charles Scammon discovered the breeding grounds of the gray whale, in Baja waters. Soon the Pacific population of these animals, the Atlantic population of which had already been wiped out, would also be seriously threatened.

Up to this point, findings of human remains and artifacts in conjunction with the remains of extinct species had been disputable, because there was always the possibility that modern human hoaxers had dug holes and buried modern artifacts and/or human bones with the remains of these extinct species. In this year the entrance to an entirely undisturbed cave was uncovered on Windmill Hill above Brixham harbor in England, and the new site was excavated under the attentive supervision of a committee of eminent geologists. A layer of cave stone that sealed the site was first fully exposed and it was painstakingly verified that this barrier contained no breaks or holes from modern excavations. Under this intact layer were discovered the bones of cave lion, cave bear, hyena, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and reindeer, along with numerous flint tools which could have been shaped only by humans. There could be no doubt of the stratigraphy or the association. The existence of prehistoric humans had finally been verified in such manner as to put to rest all dissension.

The prospect of human extinction as a consequence of climatic change was first hypothesized, by J. Spotswood Wilson, in a paper entitled “On the General and Gradual Deterioration of the Earth and Atmosphere.” From this point forward, the building levels of greenhouse gasses being created by human civilization would come to be identified more and more as a focus for concern.

Alfred Russel Wallace had already written, in 1855, an essay “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species” which made clear his belief in what we now term evolution, which had been seen by Lyell and shown to Charles Darwin. In 1856 and 1857 he had followed this up by describing a provisional model of the relation of biogeography to organic change. In this year he wrote Darwin directly and much more specifically about new thoughts he had been having on the topic of descent with modification. Darwin and Wallace were hastily paired to jointly present their ideas “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection” before the Linnaean Society. Darwin had been slow and cautious about publishing his concepts concerning evolution. When a letter describing many of the same, independently conceived ideas arrived from Wallace to be read before the Society, arrangements were made to establish Darwin’s priority — as he had been circulating drafts of future publications among friends in London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

In this year Wallace set up a residence in New Guinea. He came to be of the suspicion that the Papuans were not of Malay stock. He defended, and eventually would institutionalize, the faunal realms classification scheme that had been developed by Philip L. Sclater.

Professor Asa Gray issued HOW PLANTS GROW, and revised his BOTANICAL TEXTBOOK.

Professor William Henry Harvey’s “List of Arctic Algae, Chiefly Compiled from Collections Brought Home by Officers of the Recent Searching Expeditions,” in SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO KNOWLEDGE (Part III, Supplement 2:132-134). Also, his and Otto Wilhelm Sonder’s three-volume 1859-1865 FLORA CAPENSIS (Cape Town and Dublin). FLORA CAPENSIS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February: At Ternate in the Moluccas in the South Pacific, in a state of delirium due to illness, Alfred Russel Wallace finished his paper “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type” connecting the theories of Thomas Robert Malthus on the limits to population growth with a biological mechanism that might ensure long-term organic change, and sent it off to Charles Darwin in England for comment.34Although BIOLOGY

he employed different terminology, and although he had been unable to theorize the mechanism that was driving this biological process, Wallace was independently able to arrive at the same conclusion as Darwin: that the driving force behind the evolution of new species was natural selection. Wallace’s and Darwin’s papers would therefore be read together at a Linnaean Society meeting despite the fact that Wallace would remain for the time being on the other side of the earth.

34. Exactly, he wasn’t on Ternate, but on an island nearby that Europeans had not much heard of — so when he wrote about this, he alleged that he was on Ternate knowing that this more familiar placename would give his audience the general idea. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN July 1, Thursday: Henry Thoreau wrote to H.G.O. Blake.

Galvanized by a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace in the South Pacific, in which Wallace had come to the same conclusions about the development of species as Darwin but had been unable to propose any mechanism that would enable this development, Lyell and Joseph Hooker presented Wallace’s essay, along with some unpublished fragments from Charles Darwin’s writings on the subject, before the Linnaean Society in London. No attempt was made to contact Wallace until this eminently fair proceeding was completed. BIOLOGY

August 14, Saturday: The phrenologist George Combe died at Dr Lane’s hydropathic establishment at Moor Park, Farnham (where Charles Darwin’s daughter Etty also was being treated) while engaged in a revision to the 9th edition of THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN.

There had been miles and miles of leftover cable aboard the US Steam Frigate Niagara, at the completion of the Atlantic Cable project. The initial advertisement for a souvenir chunk of it appeared in the Illustrated London News: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

With the publication of Mr. Charles Darwin’s ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE, Chauncey Wright of Cambridge became a determined defender of the theory of descent with modification. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Father Jean-Jacques Pouech described fossil eggshell fragments that would eventually be identified as the eggs of a dinosaur.

An exceptionally well-preserved birdlike dinosaur skeleton was discovered in Bavaria that would be identified as Compsognathus, “dainty jaw.” THE SCIENCE OF 1859

With funding from the Massachusetts legislature, the opening of Professor Louis Agassiz’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (FANFARE, APPLAUSE). But Harvard College’s department of natural history was under the control of Professor Asa Gray.

In this year Professor Gray published his idea that the north American and Eurasian floras had at one time been BOTANY homogeneous. He proposed that Pleistocene glaciation had separated the floras, and during this period of separation, through evolution (a new concept he had learned through personal correspondence with Charles Darwin), the species had become distinct. Gray would become Darwin’s leading advocate in US debates.

THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Meanwhile, at the end of this year, Darwin was publishing his ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE. As BIOLOGY explained by Darwin, evolution is a simple change in the overall character of a population of either plants or animals. Gradual change over countless generations can lead to origination of a population sufficiently different to be called a new species. The impact of Darwin’s work has been significant in all areas of biology, including the search for natural relationships of plants and interpretations of plant adaptations and ecology.

This year would mark the publication not only of the above science but also of Edward J. Fitzgerald’s very free “translation” known as THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM. Did Henry Thoreau have an opportunity to read the following? Into this Universe, and Why not knowing, Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing: And out of it, as Wind along the Waste I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This version of the “quatrains” or rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam would attract little attention until it was discovered by other artists and literary figures, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1860. The original verses from which Fitzgerald had drawn his inspiration consist of a collection of isolated and separate “quatrains” or robái which resemble the Japanese haiku in function, if not in form. This robái form which is the only form of poetry attributed to Khayyám has remained popular in Persian poetry and nearly every poet who has ever written in Farsi –there happen to have been one whole lot of poets who have written in Farsi– has written some at one time or another.35 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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35. Fitzgerald’s RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM, THE ASTRONOMER-POET OF PERSIA. TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE (London: Bernard Quaritch, Castle Street, Leicester Square. G. Norman, Printer, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London. Small quarto. Brown paper wrappers, 75 quatrains, 22 notes). By way of contrast, here is the most recent publication of these quatrains, by Ali Taghdarreh, done in 2008: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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OMAR KHAYYAM,

THE ASTRONOMER-POET OF PERSIA.

BY

EDWARD J. FITZGERALD

(1859; REVISED IN 1868, 1872, AND 1879)

Omar Khayyam was born at Naishapur in Khorassan in the latter half of our Eleventh, and died within the First Quarter of our Twelfth Century. The Slender Story of his Life is curiously twined about that of two other very considerable Figures in their Time and Country: one of whom tells the Story of all Three. This was Nizam ul Mulk, Vizier to Alp Arslan the Son, and Malik Shah the Grandson, of Toghrul Beg the Tartar, who had wrested Persia from the feeble Successor of Mahmud the Great, and founded that Seljukian Dynasty which finally roused Europe into the Crusades. This Nizam ul Mulk, in his Wasiyat –or Testament– which he wrote and left as a Memorial for future Statesmen — relates the following, as quoted in the Calcutta Review, No. 59, from Mirkhond’s HISTORY OF THE ASSASSINS. One of the greatest of the wise men of Khorassan was the Imam Mowaffak of Naishapur, a man highly honored and reverenced, — may God rejoice his soul; his illustrious years exceeded eighty-five, and it was the universal belief that every boy who read the Koran or studied the traditions in his presence, would assuredly attain to honor and happiness. For this cause did my father send me from Tus to Naishapur with Abd-us-samad, the doctor of law, that I might employ myself in study and learning under the guidance of that illustrious teacher. Towards me he ever turned an eye of favor and kindness, and as his pupil I felt for him extreme affection and devotion, so that I passed four years in his service. When I first came there, I found two other pupils of mine own age newly arrived, Hakim Omar Khayyam, and the ill-fated Ben Sabbah. Both were endowed with sharpness of wit and the highest natural powers; and we three formed a close friendship together. When the Imam rose from his HDT WHAT? INDEX

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lectures, they used to join me, and we repeated to each other the lessons we had heard. Now Omar was a native of Naishapur, while Hasan Ben Sabbah’s father was one Ali, a man of austere life and practise, but heretical in his creed and doctrine. One day Hasan said to me and to Khayyam, “It is a universal belief that the pupils of the Imam Mowaffak will attain to fortune. Now, even if we all do not attain thereto, without doubt one of us will; what then shall be our mutual pledge and bond?” We answered, “Be it what you please.” “Well,” he said, “let us make a vow, that to whomsoever this fortune falls, he shall share it equally with the rest, and reserve no pre-eminence for himself.” “Be it so,” we both replied, and on those terms we mutually pledged our words. Years rolled on, and I went from Khorassan to Transoxiana, and wandered to Ghazni and Cabul; and when I returned, I was invested with office, and rose to be administrator of affairs during the Sultanate of Sultan Alp Arslan. He goes on to state, that years passed by, and both his old school-friends found him out, and came and claimed a share in his good fortune, according to the school-day vow. The Vizier was generous and kept his word. Hasan demanded a place in the government, which the Sultan granted at the Vizier’s request; but discontented with a gradual rise, he plunged into the maze of intrigue of an oriental court, and, failing in a base attempt to supplant his benefactor, he was disgraced and fell. After many mishaps and wanderings, Hasan became the head of the Persian sect of the Ismailians, a party of fanatics who had long murmured in obscurity, but rose to an evil eminence under the guidance of his strong and evil will. In A.D. 1090, he seized the castle of Alamut, in the province of Rudbar, which lies in the mountainous tract south of the Caspian Sea; and it was from this mountain home he obtained that evil celebrity among the Crusaders as the OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS, and spread terror through the Mohammedan world; and it is yet disputed where the word Assassin, which they have left in the language of modern Europe as their dark memorial, is derived from the hashish, or opiate of hemp-leaves (the Indian bhang), with which they maddened themselves to the sullen pitch of oriental desperation, or from the name of the founder of the dynasty, whom we have seen in his quiet collegiate days, at Naishapur. One of the countless victims of the Assassin’s dagger was Nizam ul Mulk himself, the old school-boy friend.36

Omar Khayyam also came to the Vizier to claim his share; but not to ask for title or office. “The greatest boon you can confer

36. Some of Omar’s Rubaiyat warn us of the danger of Greatness, the instability of Fortune, and while advocating Charity to all Men, recommending us to be too intimate with none. Attar makes Nizam-ul-Mulk use the very words of his friend Omar [Rub. xxviii.], “When Nizam-ul-Mulk was in the Agony (of Death) he said, ‘Oh God! I am passing away in the hand of the wind.’” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN on me,” he said, “is to let me live in a corner under the shadow of your fortune, to spread wide the advantages of Science, and pray for your long life and prosperity.” The Vizier tells us, that when he found Omar was really sincere in his refusal, he pressed him no further, but granted him a yearly pension of 1200 mithkals of gold from the treasury of Naishapur.

At Naishapur thus lived and died Omar Khayyam, “busied,” adds the Vizier, “in winning knowledge of every kind, and especially in Astronomy, wherein he attained to a very high pre-eminence. Under the Sultanate of Malik Shah, he came to Merv, and obtained great praise for his proficiency in science, and the Sultan showered favors upon him.”

When the Malik Shah determined to reform the calendar, Omar was one of the eight learned men employed to do it; the result was the Jalali era (so called from Jalal-ud-din, one of the king’s names) — “a computation of time,” says Gibbon, “which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian style.” He is also the author of some astronomical tables, entitled “Ziji-Malikshahi,” and the French have lately republished and translated an Arabic Treatise of his on Algebra.

His Takhallus or poetical name (Khayyam) signifies a Tent-maker, and he is said to have at one time exercised that trade, perhaps before Nizam-ul-Mulk’s generosity raised him to independence. Many Persian poets similarly derive their names from their occupations; thus we have Attar, “a druggist,” Assar, “an oil presser,” etc.37 Omar himself alludes to his name in the following whimsical lines: — “’Khayyam, who stitched the tents of science, Has fallen in grief’s furnace and been suddenly burned; The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life, And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!’

We have only one more anecdote to give of his Life, and that relates to the close; it is told in the anonymous preface which is sometimes prefixed to his poems; it has been printed in the Persian in the Appendix to Hyde’s VETERUM PERSARUM RELIGIO, p. 499; and D’Herbelot alludes to it in his BIBLIOTHEQUE, under Khiam.38 — It is written in the chronicles of the ancients that this King of the Wise, Omar Khayyam, died at Naishapur in the year of the Hegira, 517 (A.D. 1123); in science he was unrivaled, — the very paragon of his age. Khwajah Nizami of Samarcand, who was one of his pupils, relates the following story: “I often used to hold conversations with my teacher, Omar Khayyam, in a garden; and one day he said to me, ‘My tomb shall be in a spot where the north wind may scatter roses over it.’ I wondered at the words he spake, but I knew that his were no idle words.39

37. Though all these, like our Smiths, Archers, Millers, Fletchers, etc., may simply retain the Surname of an hereditary calling. 38.“Philosophe Musulman qui a vecu en Odeur de Saintete dans sa Religion, vers la Fin du premier et le Commencement du second Siecle,” no part of which, except the “Philosophe,” can apply to our Khayyam. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Years after, when I chanced to revisit Naishapur, I went to his final resting-place, and lo! it was just outside a garden, and trees laden with fruit stretched their boughs over the garden wall, and dropped their flowers upon his tomb, so that the stone was hidden under them.” Thus far –without fear of Trespass– from the Calcutta Review. The writer of it, on reading in India this story of Omar’s Grave, was reminded, he says, of Cicero’s ACCOUNT OF FINDING A RCHIMEDES’ TOMB AT SYRACUSE, buried in grass and weeds. I think Thorwaldsen desired to have roses grow over him; a wish religiously fulfilled for him to the present day, I believe. However, to return to Omar.

Though the Sultan “shower’d Favors upon him,” Omar’s Epicurean Audacity of Thought and Speech caused him to be regarded askance in his own Time and Country. He is said to have been especially hated and dreaded by the Sufis, whose Practise he ridiculed, and whose Faith amounts to little more than his own, when stript of the Mysticism and formal recognition of Islamism under which Omar would not hide. Their Poets, including Hafiz, who are (with the exception of Firdausi) the most considerable in Persia, borrowed largely, indeed, of Omar’s material, but turning it to a mystical Use more convenient to Themselves and the People they addressed; a People quite as quick of Doubt as of Belief; as keen of Bodily sense as of Intellectual; and delighting in a cloudy composition of both, in which they could float luxuriously between Heaven and Earth, and this World and the Next, on the wings of a poetical expression, that might serve indifferently for either. Omar was too honest of Heart as well of Head for this. Having failed (however mistakenly) of finding any Providence but Destiny, and any World but This, he set about making the most of it; preferring rather to soothe the Soul through the Senses into Acquiescence with Things as he saw them, than to perplex it with vain disquietude after what they might be. It has been seen, however, that his Worldly Ambition was not exorbitant; and he very likely takes a humorous or perverse pleasure in exalting the gratification of Sense above that of the Intellect, in which he must have taken great delight, although it failed to answer the Questions in which he, in common with all men, was most vitally interested.

For whatever Reason, however, Omar as before said, has never been popular in his own Country, and therefore has been but scantily transmitted abroad. The MSS. of his Poems, mutilated beyond the average Casualties of Oriental Transcription, are so rare in the East as scarce to have reacht Westward at all, in 39. The Rashness of the Words, according to D’Herbelot, consisted in being so opposed to those in the Koran: “No Man knows where he shall die.” –This story of Omar reminds me of another so naturally –and when one remembers how wide of his humble mark the noble sailor aimed –so pathetically told by Captain Cook –not by Doctor Hawkworth –in his Second Voyage (i. 374). When leaving Ulietea, “Oreo’s last request was for me to return. When he saw he could not obtain that promise, he asked the name of my Marai (burying-place). As strange a question as this was, I hesitated not a moment to tell him ‘Stepney’; the parish in which I live when in London. I was made to repeat it several times over till they could pronounce it; and then ‘Stepney Marai no Toote’ was echoed through an hundred mouths at once. I afterwards found the same question had been put to Mr. Forster by a man on shore; but he gave a different, and indeed more proper answer, by saying, ‘No man who used the sea could say where he should be buried.’” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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spite of all the acquisitions of Arms and Science. There is no copy at the India House, none at the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris. We know but of one in England: No. 140 of the Ouseley MSS. at the Bodleian, written at Shiraz, A.D. 1460. This contains but 158 Rubaiyat. One in the Asiatic Society’s Library at Calcutta (of which we have a Copy), contains (and yet incomplete) 516, though swelled to that by all kinds of Repetition and Corruption. So Von Hammer speaks of his Copy as containing about 200, while Dr. Sprenger catalogues the Lucknow MS. at double that number.40 The Scribes, too, of the Oxford and Calcutta MSS. seem to do their Work under a sort of Protest; each beginning with a Tetrastich (whether genuine or not), taken out of its alphabetical order; the Oxford with one of Apology; the Calcutta with one of Expostulation, supposed (says a Notice prefixed to the MS.) to have arisen from a Dream, in which Omar’s mother asked about his future fate. It may be rendered thus: — “O Thou who burn’st in Heart for those who burn In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn, How long be crying, ‘Mercy on them, God!’ Why, who art Thou to teach, and He to learn?” The Bodleian Quatrain pleads Pantheism by way of Justification. “If I myself upon a looser Creed Have loosely strung the Jewel of Good deed, Let this one thing for my Atonement plead: That One for Two I never did misread.”

The Reviewer,41 to whom I owe the Particulars of Omar’s Life, concludes his Review by comparing him with Lucretius, both as to natural Temper and Genius, and as acted upon by the Circumstances in which he lived. Both indeed were men of subtle, strong, and cultivated Intellect, fine Imagination, and Hearts passionate for Truth and Justice; who justly revolted from their Country’s false Religion, and false, or foolish, Devotion to it; but who fell short of replacing what they subverted by such better Hope as others, with no better Revelation to guide them, had yet made a Law to themselves. Lucretius indeed, with such material as Epicurus furnished, satisfied himself with the theory of a vast machine fortuitously constructed, and acting by a Law that implied no Legislator; and so composing himself into a Stoical rather than Epicurean severity of Attitude, sat down to contemplate the mechanical drama of the Universe which he was part Actor in; himself and all about him (as in his own sublime description of the Roman Theater) discolored with the lurid reflex of the Curtain suspended between the Spectator and the Sun. Omar, more desperate, or more careless of any so complicated System as resulted in nothing but hopeless Necessity, flung his own Genius and Learning with a bitter or humorous jest into the general Ruin which their insufficient 40. “Since this paper was written” (adds the Reviewer in a note), “we have met with a Copy of a very rare Edition, printed at Calcutta in 1836. This contains 438 Tetrastichs, with an Appendix containing 54 others not found in some MSS.” 41. Professor Cowell. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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glimpses only served to reveal; and, pretending sensual pleasure, as the serious purpose of Life, only diverted himself with speculative problems of Deity, Destiny, Matter and Spirit, Good and Evil, and other such questions, easier to start than to run down, and the pursuit of which becomes a very weary sport at last!

With regard to the present Translation. The original Rubaiyat (as, missing an Arabic Guttural, these Tetrastichs are more musically called) are independent Stanzas, consisting each of four Lines of equal, though varied, Prosody; sometimes all rhyming, but oftener (as here imitated) the third line a blank. Somewhat as in the Greek Alcaic, where the penultimate line seems to lift and suspend the Wave that falls over in the last. As usual with such kind of Oriental Verse, the Rubaiyat follow one another according to Alphabetic Rhyme — a strange succession of Grave and Gay. Those here selected are strung into something of an Eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal proportion of the “Drink and make-merry,” which (genuine or not) recurs over- frequently in the Original. Either way, the Result is sad enough: saddest perhaps when most ostentatiously merry: more apt to move Sorrow than Anger toward the old Tentmaker, who, after vainly endeavoring to unshackle his Steps from Destiny, and to catch some authentic Glimpse of TO-MORROW, fell back upon TO- DAY (which has outlasted so many To-morrows!) as the only Ground he had got to stand upon, however momentarily slipping from under his Feet.

Edward J. Fitzgerald42

May 6, Friday: Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt died in Berlin, a few months before Mr. Charles Darwin. M.A.’s landmark volume, THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, was published.

Henry Thoreau was paid $3.50 for surveying a houselot and woodlot near Factory Village for Samuel A. Willis. This survey was copied by surveyor William D. Tuttle on April 25, 1864.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail:

42. Actually I took this from the 3d Edition, not of 1859 but of 1872. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/150a.htm

Thoreau also began to survey, for Edward Damon, the factory site in West Concord called Factory Village on the Assabet River near the Acton Line. He would continue on the 7th, 13th, 14th, and 16th. Thoreau would be paid $36.00 for this survey. This factory made satinet, white wool flannel, and domet flannel. This wooden structure was badly gutted by fire in 1862 but was rebuilt in brick, and can still be seen in part on Route 62 almost at the Acton line. http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/25a.htm

May 6: Surveying for Willis & Damon at the factory. Hear the tea-lee of the white-throat sparrow. It is suddenly very warm and oppressive, especially in the woods with thick clothing. Viola pedata begins to be common about white pine woods there. While surveying this forenoon behind Willis’s house on the shore of the mill-pond, I saw remarkable swarms of that little fuzzy gnat (Tipulidae). Hot as it was, –oppressively so,– they were collected in the hollows in the meadow, apparently to be out of the way of the little breeze that there was, and in many such places in the meadow, within a rod of the water, the ground was perfectly concealed by them. Nay, much more than that. I saw one shallow hollow some three feet across which was completely filled with them, all in motion but resting one upon another, to the depth, as I found by measurement with a stick, of more than an inch, – a living mass of insect life. There were a hundred of these basins full of them, and I then discovered that what I had mistaken for some black dye on the wet shore was the bodies of those that were drowned and washed up, blackening the shore in patches for many feet together like so much mud. We were also troubled by getting them into our mouths and throats and eyes. This insect resembles the plate of the Chironomus plumosus (“Library of Entertaining Knowledge, Insect Transformations,” page 305), also the Corethra plumicornis (page 287), both of which live at first in the water, like the mosquito. Young red maples suddenly bursting into leaf are very conspicuous now in the woods, among the most prominent of all shrubs or trees. The sprouts are reddish. Hear yellow-throat vireo, and probably some new warblers. See the strong-scented wood ants in a stump. Black suckers, so called, are being speared at the factory bridge.43 This is about the last of the very dry leaves in the woods, for soon the ground will be shaded by expanded green leaves. It is quite hazy, if not smoky, and I smell smoke in the air, this hot day. My assistants, being accustomed to work indoors in the factory, are quite overcome by this sudden heat. The old leaves and earth are driest now, just before the new leaves expand and when the heat is greatest. I see the black traces of many a recent fire in the woods, especially in young woods. At evening I hear the first sultry buzz of a fly in my chamber, telling of sultry nights to come.

November: Alfred Russel Wallace’s paper “On the Zoological Geography of the Malay Archipelago,” the paper describing “Wallace’s Line,” was read before the Linnaean Society.

Mr. Charles Darwin. M.A.’s ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVOURED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE was published at London by John Murray BIOLOGY of Albemarle Street. The author courteously sent a complementary copy to Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard College with a note: I have ventured to send you a copy of my Book ... on the origin of species.

43.Actually, the white sucker is not only the only species of sucker currently present in the Assabet River, but is the only one which has ever been detected there. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Well might he describe this as a “venture,” for we know from his letters the extremely low opinion Darwin had of this colleague’s intellect. (As it would turn out, he needn’t have bothered to send along a copy of his monograph. As this biologist would go through the green volume, he would be making resistant notes in the margin such as “What does this prove ...?” and “This is truly monstrous!”)

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (With the benefit of the hindsight that comes from the accumulation of our political and scientific experience since the US Civil War we can understand, very clearly, that here Professor Agassiz’s native politics were once again sadly getting in the way of his native wit.)

November 24, Thursday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Calvin H. Greene. Concord Nov. 24. ’59

Dear Sir, The lectures which you refer to were reported in the newspaper, af- ter a fashion, the last one in some half dozen of them, and if I pos- HDT WHAT? INDEX

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sessed one, or all, of those reports I would send them to you, bad as they are. The best, or at least longest one of the Brown Lecture was in the Boston “Atlas & Bee” of Nov 2d. May be half the whole— There were others in the Traveller— The Journal &c of the same date.

I am glad to know that you are interested to see my things, & I wish that I had them in a printed form to send to you. I exerted myself con- siderably to get the last discourse printed & sold for the benefit of Brown’s family—but the publishers are afraid of pamphlets & it is now too late.

I return the stamp which I have not used.

I shall be glad to see you if I ever come your way

[One-third page missing]

Yrs truly Henry D. Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE was published to acclaim and controversy by a gentleman naturalist with whose work Thoreau was already familiar. Have you ever wondered how Charles Darwin ever got his ORIGIN book, with its so utterly novel and abhorrent thesis, through the London presses? The standard accounts merely say that he sent off his MS and it was published.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

But what actually happened was that Charles Lyell fronted for him with a publisher, John Murray, and based on this recommendation Murray, being himself an amateur geologist, accepted the MS sight unseen. Once he got his hands on the actual manuscript, he became quite disenchanted at what he had committed himself to. He commented, in fact, that this new theory of descent with modification was like “contemplating the fruitful union of a poker and a rabbit.” The new theory was “absurd.” Pointing out to Darwin that “everybody is interested in pigeons,” he urged that the MS be entirely rewritten to limit the author’s remarks to pigeons, with only a brief reference to general principles. His recommendation, he confessed, was based upon a standard publishers’ fantasy, that of placing a copy of his book on the tea-table of every pigeon-fancier in Britain. The publisher was willing to put out only an edition of 1,250 copies, which at fifteen shillings was quickly sold out.

The argument about this had driven Darwin to one of those English water-resorts for “the cure.” While at this resort he was reading a new novel, ADAM BEDE, and on the evening of this day on which ORIGIN came out, George Eliot (Herbert Spencer’s girlfriend, sort of, although we have room to hope that they were never HDT WHAT? INDEX

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intimate) read Darwin’s book.

We don’t know either what he thought of her fiction or what she thought of his nonfiction. We do know that the publisher’s trepidations would prove to have been unwarranted, that two pirate editions would quickly roll off the American presses without the formality of permission or the forwarding of any royalties — and that at Cambridge College, William Whewell would not tolerate such a treatise as the ORIGIN to be placed in the library stacks.

The natural history encyclopedias of the 19th Century rarely included extinct animals. An exception was Samuel Goodrich’s ILLUSTRATED NATURAL HISTORY published in this year, in which, upon a notice of the common chameleon, the audience suddenly found itself in the presence of “fossil lizards.” Below is its woodcut of the Hylaeosaurus. Other illustrations show the Iguanodon, the Megalosaurus, and a collection of marine reptiles such as Ichthyosaurus. All these illustrations had been copied from the Crystal Palace concretions. Hylaeosaurus had been discovered by Gideon Mantell in 1832 and had been announced in his GEOLOGY OF THE SOUTHEAST OF ENGLAND in 1833. It was one of Richard Owen’s original three dinosaurs and stood proud on the relocated Crystal Palace’s grounds: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Friend Daniel Ricketson’s journal for this day reads:

1 Clear and fine for the season. Left Concord at 8 /2 A.M.

Frederick Douglass’s ship was arriving on this day in Liverpool harbor.

In a private letter, the Reverend Theodore Parker, who was entirely unfamiliar with evolutionary theory, confessed on this day to Francis Jackson (the namesake grandfather of the mentally imbalanced Francis Jackson Meriam of the Harpers Ferry raid whom Thoreau would help escape, supposedly toward Canada) that the reason he did not like slavery was, that if these inferior colored people were allowed to have any place at all in human society, they would merely take the opportunity to fecundate. To be kind to them was merely to create more of them that one would need to be kind to. The Reverend was an Aryan possessed of Aryan common sense, a veteran of preaching in downtown Boston to other Aryans possessed of Aryan common HDT WHAT? INDEX

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sense, and so of course he belabored the obvious, that:

An Anglo-Saxon with common sense does not like this Africanization of America.

Brit horrified at slavery USer horrified at slavery Confusing Darwinism with Spencerism and triumphalism (that is, with “Social Darwinism,” as is so very usual), the Reverend Parker would eventually get around to congratulating himself that on account of his deeply ingrained racism he had been “Darwinian before Darwin” (actually, in this “Anglo-Saxon” Aryan race- soulism of his, what he was in fact was Hitlerian before Hitler).44

November 24. The river has risen considerably, at last, owing to the rain of the 22d. Had been very low before. 44. Adolf Hitler, a Catholic, understood something about Christianity which few Christians are able to accept. “Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature” (HITLER’S TABLE TALK, Weidenfield and Nicolson, London 1963). Many German Christians supported Hitler because they had the spirit of Hitler within them while they supposed they had the spirit of Christ within them. Even today some Christians are unable to accept the truth of this remark, because they have the spirit of Hitler, or the Emperor Constantine, within them while they suppose they have the spirit of Christ within them. That sort of Christianity was in fact the only sort of Christianity which my mother in Indiana had ever known, which is why she could not consider me a Christian but needed to agonize over me as an “atheist” howevermuch I insisted that I was attempting to follow the way of Jesus as I construed it. If someone were to tell these “Constantinian” Christians that Hitler said that two plus two equals four, they would try to find some perversity in this remark by which to dismiss it (the guy lost a war, and that has forever discredited him as the leader of the state church), and if someone told them that the problem is not that Hitler did not know what true Christianity is, but that the actual problem is that they themselves do not know what true Christianity is, they .... My mother was in fact, like E.O. Wilson the Harvard sociobiologist, an admirer of Ronald Reagan. Wilson perceived President Reagan as the model of the “soft-core altruist,” which is the good because fake kind of altruist who does not qualify as a Christian “enemy of civilization” (Edward O. Wilson, ON HUMAN NATURE, Harvard UP, Cambridge MA 1978, page 157) because he does not operate out of a mere mindless death-wish. As Mary Midgley has pointed out, “Social Darwinism or Spencerism is the unofficial religion of the west. The official western religion, Christianity, is well known to be rather demanding and to have its eye on the next world rather than this one. In such situations, other doctrines step in to fill the gap. People want a religion for this world as well. They find it in the worship of individual success” (Mary Midgley, EVOLUTION AS A RELIGION: STRANGE HOPES AND STRANGER FEARS, Methuen, London 1985, page 140). The mock altruist is a person whose calculating “good behavior” is well rewarded. His “psychological vehicles are lying, pretense and deceit, including self-deceit, because the actor is most convincing who believes that his performance is real” (page 156). The real altruist, the hard-core one, “irrational,” would in fact be Social Darwinism’s enemy, sociobiology’s enemy, and the enemy of civilization. There were some German Christians, a few, to leaven Hitler’s loaf; they insisted on their right to die by way of the cross rather than the sword. There are some American Christians, a few, to leaven America’s loaf; they are of course condemned, but here they are. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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See, on the railroad-slope by the pond, and also some days ago, a flock of goldfinches eating the seed of the Roman wormwood. At Spanish Brook Path. the witch-hazel (one flower) lingers. I observe that ferns grow especially where there is an abrupt or broken bank, as where, in the woods, sand has been anciently dug out of a hillside to make a dam with and the semicircular scar has been covered with a sod and shrubs again. The shelter and steepness are favorable when there is shade and moisture. How pretty amid the downy and cottony fruits of November the heads of the white anemone, raised a couple of feet from the ground on slender stalks, two or three together,–small heads of yellowish-white down, compact and regular as a thimble beneath, but, at this time, diffusive and bursting forth above, somewhat like a little torch with its flame,–a very neat object!

December: In a sermon, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway welcomed Charles Darwin’s newly published THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.... He considered that here was scientific proof that everything was inevitably going to go on going to get better and better. He understood not a word of what he had read.45

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

45. He translated the most utterly nonprovidential of all science into the very most providential! A quarter-century later he would learn that in his initial enthusiasm for biological progress, he had neglected to observe “that it was possible for man to develop himself and his world downward.” –Well, nobody ever accused this gent of being excessively bright, though of course he could think very well on his feet when the situation demanded this, and also could think very well with his feet when that was what the situation seemed to demand. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

At the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, in Newport, Rhode Island, Charles Darwin’s newly published ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES was the cause of not so much as a ripple of concern.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

The Reverend Professor Francis Bowen was “Harvard’s philosopher” in the sense in which Professor Louis Agassiz was “Harvard’s scientist” — just as Professor Agassiz rejected Darwinism, so also Professor Bowen rejected Darwinism. It seemed that it was precisely Darwinism’s scientific strength which was to these scientists its fatal weakness: his scientific accomplishment removed “all proof of the incessant creative action of a designing mind, by reducing it to a blind mechanical process” (Darwin cast as Dr. Victor Frankenstein.) EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

During this year Henry Thoreau would be reappointed to Harvard University’s Visiting Committee in Natural History (something that simply would not have happened, had they made themselves cognizant of the scientific heresies that were on his mind). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Reverend Professor Francis Bowen HDT WHAT? INDEX

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New Year’s Day: Charles Brace, a New York social worker, came to Concord carrying a copy of Charles Darwin’s just- published ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, which he had obtained from Professor Asa Gray of Harvard College,

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

his botanist brother-in-law, a correspondent of Darwin’s. He, Bronson Alcott, and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn had dinner with Henry Thoreau and discussed the new theory. Thoreau had long been interested in the geographical distribution of plants and animals around Concord. Well read in the general subject, he had become skeptical of Professor Louis Agassiz’s certitudes about special creation and immutable species. Three days after the dinner, Thoreau would acknowledge the impact of Darwin’s new theory on him by making an observation about an actual working mechanism of influence: A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally ... We hear and apprehend only what we already half know ... Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and travelling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thoreau’s “The Dispersion of Seeds” may profitably be read not only as a contribution to science, but also as a fable of dissemination. Behind the details of the presentation, we note Thoreau’s insistent focus on natural fecundity. Starting, as Darwin started, from Thomas Robert Malthus’s astonished observation that “the germs of existence contained in this earth, if they could freely develop themselves, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years,” Thoreau mentions Darwin’s experiments. “I took in February, three table- spoonsful of mud,” Darwin says, “from three different points, beneath water, on the edge of a little pond; this mud when dried, weighed only 63 ounces. I kept it covered up in my study for six months, pulling up and counting each plant as it grew; the plants were of many kinds and were altogether 537 in number; and yet the viscid mud was all contained in a breakfast cup!” THE SCIENCE OF 1860

The seed had been a favorite metaphor of Friend George Fox. Thoreau had inherited a copy of Friend William Sewell’s account of the founding of the Religious Society of Friends from his Quaker grandmother on his mother’s side, Friend Sarah Orrok Burns. Emerson had made a note about this: “George Fox’s chosen expression for the God manifest in the mind is the Seed. He means the seed of which the Beauty of the world is the flower and Goodness the fruit.” Thoreau’s project was neither the same as Darwin’s, nor as Malthus’s — it was neither about speciation nor about population control, but about seed as apparent death, and as actual rebirth. In “The Dispersion of Seeds” Thoreau expands this. A plant is born again in every seed that sprouts. Every day is a day of creation because it is a day of rebirth. “The very earth itself is a granary and a seminary,” offered Thoreau, “so that to some minds, its surface is regarded as the cuticle of one living creature.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thoreau studied ORIGIN OF SPECIES as soon as it arrived in America. Charles Darwin commented near the end of the book “Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor.” This was an entirely new, non-Idealist reading of the Book of Nature, amounting in effect to the decision that nature was not a text at all. That finding has served ever since as a litmus-test to detect “essentialists,” that is, thinkers who regard the different species as immutable, distinct Ideas in the Mind of God. In the early days of 1860 Waldo Emerson and Louis Agassiz also would read this book, but both would flunk Darwin’s litmus-test for in the field of theoretical population ecology: neither were scientists at all, they were a metaphysician and a theologian.

Louis Agassiz standing on his head and stacking BBs (Don’t try this at home)

In particular Louis Agassiz needed to dispute Charles Darwin in order to retain his belief in the immutable HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN inferiority of the Negro. EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

“Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics?” — Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS NY: Norton, 1991, page 429 There is no question but that Professor Agassiz of Harvard was one of the leading lights among American biologists. As such he was quite familiar with all the factual evidences concerning environmental change, variability, and hereditary modification upon which Darwin had been building his insights, but he held in addition that the organic world represented repeated interventions by a Supreme Being. These ordinary physical events upon which Darwin was relying, such as climatic and geologic change, and even glaciers, might indeed bring about extinctions, but nothing of this order could create a new species. Agassiz was ready to grant that the sequence in the fossil record from simple animals and plants in the ancient, deeper strata to the more complex, recent forms found near the surface represented a progressive development, but these different animals and plants did not arise as Darwin was supposing out of interactions between populations and external environmental changes. Agassiz maintained that organisms arose by a series of independent and special creations, there with no hereditary continuity whatever between the different types of organisms. Each species of plant and animal was a separate “thought of God” and what we saw as homologies or anatomical similarities were nothing more than “associations of ideas in the Divine Mind.” Thoreau, on the other hand, easily passed Darwin’s test; what was said in ORIGIN was not only convincing but obvious. Rationality did not produce, but was the product of, nature. The subject did not originate the text. Here is a general analysis of the situation, from Adam Kuper’s THE INVENTION OF PRIMITIVE SOCIETY: TRANSFORMATIONS OF AN ILLUSION (NY: Routledge, 1988), pages 44-6 (shown on a following page): HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Whittier-Holmes-Emerson-Motley-Alcott-Hawthorne-Lowell-Agassiz-Longfellow HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The northern Presbyterians in fact welcomed Darwin’s witness with respect to one very sensitive political issue. This was the question of the unity of origin of the human species. They were up in arms against their southern Presbyterian brethren, who justified slavery on the grounds that God had created several distinct species of man, each with a particular destiny. During the Civil War an ‘American school of anthropology’ developed in the South which propagated this view. It drew the support even of Agassiz, the eccentric Lamarckian biologist of Harvard. According to the northern Presbyterians, this ‘polygenist’ thesis was a denial of the truth, to which both the Bible and the Declaration of Independence bore witness, that all men were created equal. Darwin unequivocably supported the view that all the races were simply varieties of one species, with a common origin. This aspect of Darwinian theory was particularly stressed by Asa Gray, Agassiz’s rival at Harvard, and the leader of the American Darwinians. On one vital matter, however, Darwin’s views were unacceptable to many, indeed most, Christians. He posited the mutability of species and –despite his initial caution– it became evident that he believed man had evolved from non-human primate forbears. This theory of the transmutation of species was clearly irreconcilable with the Book of Genesis, but there were many respectable scholars who believed that it was also at odds with biological facts. A great number of mainstream biologists in the 1860s believed that the species were fixed. Agassiz’s version of Cuvier’s typology even allowed for the separate creation of each individual species. Morgan, a competent amateur biologist, sided with Agassiz on this issue. He wrote a naturalist’s study of the American beaver (which won Agassiz’s admiration) in which he strongly affirmed his faith in Cuvier and in the separate creation of the human species. One could, however, believe that the species were fixed without having to believe that they were changeless. Agassiz and many of his colleagues might rule out ‘transmutation’, the change of one species into another; but they still believed that a species could develop along appropriate lines. Each species might realize an inner potential, which gradually unfolded. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After Louis Agassiz had retraced the steps of Humboldt by visiting Brazil, he confided to Waldo Emerson, according to Emerson’s son’s account, that the whole population of that country was “wretchedly immoral, the colours and features of the people showing the entire intermixing of all the races.” Scientistic racism recapitulates typology. We can learn from the same source that Professor Agassiz believed that, were he able to obtain enough live subjects to perform the requisite dissections, “hundreds, that is, of live subjects,” he would be able to demonstrate that a baby elephant while in utero was a mastodon, and a baby tapir in utero a megatheron.46

Thoreau once killed a cistudo for Professor Louis Agassiz, and upon reflection was ashamed.

Scientistic embryology recapitulates theology. While we might prefer not to entertain questions such as whether Thoreau should instead have killed Louis Agassiz for the cistudo: was the placing of such a man in a chair at Harvard College, an institution at that time primarily useful for the habilitation of the younger sons of businessmen, under conditions of primogeniture, as reverend divines, precisely the placing of such a mentality where it didn’t belong, or was it precisely the placing of such a mentality where it did belong?

January 7, Saturday: The 2nd edition of Charles Darwin’s ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

Jan. 7. A thaw begins, with a southerly wind. From having been about 20° at midday, it is now (the thermometer) some 35° quite early, and at 2 P. M. 45°. At once the snow, which was dry and crumbling, is softened all over the country, not only in the streets, but in the remotest and slightest sled-track, where the farmer is hauling his wood; not only in yards, but in every woodland hollow and on every hill. There is a softening in the air and a softening underfoot. The softness of the air is something tangible, almost gross. Some are making haste to get their wood home before the snow goes, sledding, i. e. sliding, it home rapidly. Now if you take up a handful, it holds together and is readily fashioned and compressed into a ball, so that an endless supply of one kind of missiles is at hand. I find myself drawn toward this softened snow, even that which is stained with dung in the road, as to a friend. I see where some crow has pecked at the now thawing dung here. How provident is Nature, who permits a few kernels of grain to pass undigested through the entrails of the ox, for the food of the crow and dove, etc.! As soon as I reach the neighborhood of the woods I begin to see the snow-fleas, more than a dozen rods from woods, amid a little goldenrod, etc., where, methinks, they must have come up through the snow. Last night 46. Have you heard that the initial script for the movie Jurassic Park had it as “Park Agassiz”? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Those who thought in this way commonly conceived of the development of species on the analogy of the evolution of the embryo. The tadpole might become a frog, but that did not amount to a change of species. Indeed, ontogeny, the development of an individual, might recapitulate phylogeny, the history of a species. The term ‘evolution’ itself was generally used in this embryological sense until about 1880, and neither Darwin in THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859) nor Morgan in SYSTEMS (1871) or ANCIENT SOCIETY (1877), used the word ‘evolution’ at all. Agassiz’s version of evolution assumed that the world had been designed by God. Particular species had been created in order to fit into particular ecological relations. They were, moreover, programmed to develop as the whole cosmological order itself progressed. Adaptation was a sign of planning rather than of selection. Agassiz was quite explicit that evolution was comprehensible only as the gradual unfolding of a divine plan. Species were incarnations of a divine idea. ‘Natural history must, in good time, become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe, as manifested in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.’ Agassiz’s theory of development was the biological equivalent of a common New England Calvinist belief that human history, since Christ, was a record of progress and moral improvement inspired by God, in which every group had its preordained rôle. This idealistic view was in stark contrast to the scepticism of Darwin or the pessimism of Malthus. ‘I believe in no fixed law of development’, Darwin had written in ORIGIN, and when Christian intellectuals attacked his ‘materialist’ theory they meant in particular his view that history is contingent, unplanned, without a goal, the product simply of random mutation and natural selection.

(See especially William Stanton, THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS: SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDES TOWARD RACE IN AMERICA 1815-1859, 1960. See Morgan, THE AMERICAN BEAVER AND HIS WORKS, 1868.. See Mayr, AGASSIZ, DARWIN AND EVOLUTION, 1959. The passage from Louis Agassiz is cited on page 171.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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there was not one to be seen. The frozen apples are thawed again. You hear (in the house) the unusual sound of the eaves running. Saw a large flock of goldfinches [These were goldfinches (see below 3 pages).] running and feeding amid the weeds in a pasture, just like tree sparrows. Then flitted to birch trees, whose seeds probably they eat. [So it is possible that they also eat hemlock seed.] Heard their twitter and mew. Nature so fills the soil with seeds that I notice, where travellers have turned off the road and made a new track for several rods, the intermediate narrow space is soon clothed with a little grove which just fills it. See, at White Pond, where squirrels have been feeding on the fruit of a pignut hickory, which was quite full of nuts and still has many on it. The snow for a great space is covered with the outer shells, etc.; and, especially, close to the base of this and the neighboring trees of other species, where there is a little bare ground, there is a very large collection of the shells, most of which have been gnawed quite in two. The white pine cones show still as much as ever, hanging sickle-wise about the tops of the trees. I saw yesterday the track of a fox, and in the course of it a place where he had apparently pawed to the ground, eight or ten inches, and on the just visible ground lay frozen a stale-looking mouse, probably rejected by him. A little further was a similar hole with some fur in it. Did he smell the dead or living mouse beneath and paw to it, or rather, catching it on the surface, make that hollow in his efforts to eat it? It would be remarkable if a fox could smell and catch a mouse passing under the snow beneath him! You would say that he need not make such a hole in order to eat the mouse.

February 17, Friday: Bronson Alcott came home from Boston with a copy of the March issue of Atlantic Monthly, containing Louisa May Alcott’s article “Love and Self-Love.”

Professor William Henry Harvey read a “serio-comic squib” on Darwinism, before the Dublin University Zoological and Botanical Association. This would subsequently be printed for private circulation as A GUESS AS TO THE PROBABLE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL CONSIDERED BY THE LIGHT OF MR DARWIN’S THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION, AND IN OPPOSITION TO LAMARCK’S NOTION OF A MONKEY PARENTAGE. Charles Darwin, who had a great admiration for Harvey’s work, would display a remarkable forbearance: I am not sorry for a natural opportunity of writing to Harvey, just to show that I was not piqued at his turning me and my book into ridicule, not that I think it was a proceeding that I deserved, or worthy of him.

Feb. 17. P. M.—Cold and northwest wind, drifting the snow. 3 P. M., thermometer 14°. A perfectly clear sky except one or two little cloud-flecks in the southwest, which, when I look again after walking forty rods, have entirely dissolved. When the sun is setting the light reflected from the snow-covered roofs is quite a clear pink, and even from white board fences. Grows colder yet at evening, and frost forms on the windows. I hear that some say they saw a bluebird and heard it sing last week!! It was probably a shrike. Minott says that he hears that Heard’s testimony in regard to Concord River in the meadow case was that “it is dammed at both ends and cursed in the middle,” i. e. on account of the damage to the grass there. GEORGE MINOTT We cannot spare the very lively and lifelike descriptions of some of the old naturalists. They sympathize with the creatures which they describe. Edward Topsell in his translation of Conrad Gesner, in 1607, called “The CONRAD GESNER History of Four-footed Beasts,” says of the antelopes that “they are bred in India and Syria, near the river Euphrates,” and then—which enables you to realize the living creature and its habitat—he adds, “and delight EDWARD TOPSELL much to drink of the cold water thereof.” The beasts which most modern naturalists describe do not delight in anything, and their water is neither hot nor cold. Reading the above makes you want to go and drink of the Euphrates yourself, if it is warm weather. I do not know how much of his spirit he owes to Gesner, but he proceeds in his translation to say that “they have horns growing forth of the crown of their head, which are very long and sharp; so that Alexander affirmed they pierced through the shields of his soldiers, and fought with them very irefully: at which time his company slew as he travelled to India, eight thousand five hundred and fifty, which great slaughter may be the occasion why they are so rare and seldom seen to this day.” Now here something is described at any rate; it is a real account, whether of a real animal or not. You can plainly HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN see the horns which “grew forth” from their crowns, and how well that word “irefully” describes a beast’s fighting! And then for the number which Alexander’s men slew “as he travelled to India,” — and what a travelling was that, my hearers! — eight thousand five hundred and fifty, just the number you would have guessed after the thousands were given, and [AN] easy one to remember too. He goes on to say that “their horns are great and made like a saw, and they with them can cut asunder the branches of osier or small trees, whereby it cometh to pass that many times their necks are taken in the twists of the falling boughs, whereat the beast with repining cry, bewrayeth himself to the hunters, and so is taken.” The artist too has done his part equally well, for you are presented with a drawing of the beast with serrated horns, the tail of a lion, a cheek tooth (canine?) as big as a boar’s, a stout front, and an exceedingly “ireful” look, as if he were facing all Alexander’s army. Though some beasts are described in this book which have no existence as I can learn but in the imagination of the writers, they really have an existence there, which is saying not a little, for most of our modern authors have not imagined the actual beasts which they presume to describe. The very frontispiece is a figure of “the gorgon,” which looks sufficiently like a hungry beast covered with scales, which you may have dreamed of, apparently just fallen on the track of you, the reader, and snuffing the odor with greediness. These men had an adequate idea of a beast, or what a beast should be, a very bellua (the translator makes the CAT word bestia to be “a vastando”); and they will describe and will draw you a cat with four strokes, more beastly or beast-like to look at than Mr. Ruskin’s favorite artist draws a tiger. They had an adequate idea of the wildness of beasts and of men, and in their descriptions and drawings they did not always fail when they surpassed nature. Gesner says of apes that “they are held for a subtil, ironical, ridiculous and unprofitable beast, whose flesh is not good for meat as a sheep, neither his back for burthen as an asses, nor yet commodious to keep a house like a dog, but of the Grecians termed gelotopoios, made for laughter.” As an evidence of an ape’s want of “discretion,” he says: “A certain ape after a shipwreck, swimming to land, was seen by a countryman, who thinking him to be a man in the water gave him his hand to save him, yet in the mean time asked him what countryman he was, to which he answered that he was an Athenian: Well, said the man, dost thou know Piraeus (a port in Athens)? Very well, said the ape, and his wife, friends and children. Whereat the man being moved, did what he could to drown him.” “They are best contented to sit aloft although tied with chains.... They bring forth young ones for the most part by twins, whereof they love the one and hate the other; that which they love they bear on their arms, the other hangeth at the dam’s back, and for the most part she killeth that which she loveth, by pressing it too hard: afterward, she setteth her whole delight upon the other.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

May 22, Tuesday: Charles Darwin wrote, to Professor Asa Gray of Harvard College, the most famous statement ever on the topic of the relationship between natural science and religion (refer to Stephen Jay Gould’s 1999 defense of both religion and science, entitled ROCK OF AGES: SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THE FULLNESS OF LIFE.)

Had this botanist shared this letter with his acquaintance Henry Thoreau who was living a day’s walk away, what would have been Thoreau’s reaction?

Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Capture of the slaver William: Message from the President ... transmitting correspondence relative to the capture of the slaver William, etc.” –HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 36 Cong. 1 sess. XII. No. 83.

May 22. Another cold and wet day, requiring fire. Ceases to rain at midday, but continues foul. The principal rain was during last night, and was quite considerable. C. hears a cuckoo, and appears, by his account, to have seen the Sylvia maculosa. I see the effects of frost (probably the morning of the 21st) on squashes that sowed themselves.

November 3, Sunday: Professor William Henry Harvey wrote to Harvard professor Asa Gray about the completion of his reading of Charles Darwin’s ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES: I have no objection per se to a doctrine of derivative descent.... I have had a short friendly correspondence with Darwin on the subject, but without much result one way or the other.... His latter chapters are those which have most impressed me.... Certainly there are many broad facts which can be read by a supposition of descent with variation. How broad those facts are, and how broad the limits of descent with variation may be, are questions which I do not think his theory affords answer to. It opens vistas vast, and so it evidently points whence, through time, light may come by which to see the objects in those vistas, but to my mind it does no more.... A good deal of Darwin reads to me like an ingenious dream. ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Friend Lucretia Mott, the foremost spokesperson for nonviolence in the abolitionist movement in America, brought forward the position she had taken in regard to the “Christiana riot” near Philadelphia by declaring in regard to the raid by John Brown that47

It is not John Brown the soldier we praise, it is John Brown the moral hero; John Brown the noble confessor and patient martyr we honor, and whom we think it proper to honor in this day when men are carried away by the corrupt and proslavery clamour against him. Our weapons were drawn only from the armory of Truth; they were those of faith and love.

Nevertheless, in this supercharged atmosphere in which men were just then being asked to abandon the arms of faith and love in order to pick up the “New Minnie,” Lucretia’s use of the vocabulary of violence, her use of terms like “weapons” and “armory,” were bound to be problematic, bound to be misused by those, such as Horace Greeley, who were determined to misunderstand and mock.

[NO ENTRY IN THOREAU’S JOURNAL, FOR 3 NOVEMBER]

47. We might say that HDT was the most belligerent nonresistor of evil the world had yet seen, but in fact that description had already been awarded to someone. It was awarded by Robert Purvis to Lucretia Mott, and there is no shadow of a doubt that Friend Lucretia was a convinced disbeliever in violence. These words of hers are from the National Anti-Slavery Standard of November 3, 1860. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1861

The 3rd edition of Charles Darwin’s ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN May 18, Saturday: On this day and the following one, there was fighting at Sewell’s Point.

This appeared in Punch:

Am I satyr or man? Pray tell me who can, And settle my place in the scale. A man in ape’s shape, An anthropoid ape, Or monkey deprived of his tail? The Vestiges taught, That all came from naught By “development,” so called, “progressive;” That insects and worms Assume higher forms By modification excessive. Then DARWIN set forth, In a book of much worth, The importance of “Nature’s selection;” How the struggle for life Is a laudable strife, And results in “specific distinction.” Let pigeons and doves Select their own loves, And grant them a million of ages, Then doubtless you’ll find They’ve altered their kind, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

And changed into prophets and sages.... EVOLUTION RACE POLITICS CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1862

Lord Kelvin asserted that the earth and sun must be cooling from their initial formation, between 20,000,000 and 400,000,000 years ago (he would later adopt the smaller number).

London’s Great Exhibition featured a frog that miners claim to have found alive in a coal seam hundreds of feet underground. Naturalist Frank Buckland wrote an angry letter to the editor of The Times of London BIOLOGY demanding that said frog be removed from the display.

Charles Darwin published the first thorough study of orchid pollination, ON THE VARIOUS CONTRIVANCES BY OTANY B WHICH BRITISH AND FOREIGN ORCHIDS ARE FERTILISED BY INSECTS, AND ON THE GOOD EFFECTS OF INTERCROSSING.

Professor James Dwight Dana of Yale College, in offering his MANUAL OF GEOLOGY in this year, felt obliged to denigrate the new theory of descent with modification — despite the fact that he had not as yet perused the copy of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES with which he had been presented by his friend Charles Darwin.

He explained privately that he had not had time to consider his correspondent’s various arguments about evolution because “my head has all it can now do in my college duties,” a remark which of course amounted to a jibe at the fact that Darwin was merely an independent scholar, rather than an accredited and accomplished academician such as himself. Darwin would respond by personal letter, that he wished his friend had read his book because he might thereby “have been here or there staggered.” ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

Despite being a careful scientist, this American thinker had such an investment in the Providence of Deity, such a conceptual lock based on his understanding of the white man’s place and role in God’s Creation, that he would not until the mid-1870s be forced to succumb to the evidences of Darwinian evolution. To put the matter plainly, Yale Professor Dana had, like his fellow the benighted Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz, been a committed Platonist, and a Providentialist, as well as a racist self-privileger — and this Platonism, this Providentialism, and this racist self-privileging were dying a painfully hard and slow death: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Dana viewed the entire geological history of the earth and life as one long, coherent, and heroic story with a moral — a tale of inexorable progress, expressed in both physical and biological history, and leading, inevitably and purposefully, to God’s final goal of a species imbued with sufficient consciousness to glorify His name and works. EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1865

October: The Governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, put down a rising at Morant Bay by the black population of the island in which 18 whites had been killed and 31 wounded, by the imposition of a very severe martial law. Over the course of the conflict 439 of the blacks were killed, 354 of these being hangings subsequent to courts martial. In addition there was of course a great deal of flogging, and the torching of various black settlements. Back home in England, as news of this began to filter in, there was outrage, and a judicial inquiry into the conduct of the governor was being contemplated. John Stuart Mill, John Bright, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Leslie Stephen would form a committee to seek the governor’s prosecution for malfeasance. Thomas Carlyle and Jane Carlyle would come down 100% on Governor Eyre’s side — and Mill would condemn sympathizers such as these as “the same kind of people who have so long upheld negro slavery.” As a result of this unrest Jamaica would be made a Crown Colony under full British rule. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1866

The 4th edition of Charles Darwin’s ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

In this edition, Darwin came out against what we might term “constant-speedism,” by inserting the following sentence: Many species once formed never undergo any further change...; and the periods, during which species have undergone modification, though long as measured by years, have probably been short in comparison with the periods during which they retain the same form. (We can see from this that Professor Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “punctuated equilibrium” is not nearly as un-Darwinian as some of its vocal opponents have been asserting it to be.)

Gregor Mendel sent a copy of his paper describing the basic patterns of inheritance and his understanding of the hereditary nature of variation between individuals in a population to the Linnaean Society in London, where the pages would remain uncut. It is startling that this work in botany, though highly complementary to Darwin’s concepts, did not emerge for general scientific discussion until after 1900.

Austria was defeated by a combined Italian/Prussian force, and became the dual monarchy of Austria- Hungary. GERMANY

The term oecologie was coined by Ernst Haeckel in his GENERELLE MORPHOLOGIE DER ORGANISMEN.48 CONSERVATIONISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

(This “Survival Is Everything” advocate of Naturphilosophie did not assign the same meaning to his coinage oecologie which today we assign to our term “Ecology,” to wit, the manner in which co-evolving biomes of organisms create homes and food supplies for one another. His usage was not at all adventurous. He deployed his new term merely as a synonym for what we now refer to as “our environment.” He used this term “oecologie” to designate a subspecialty in biology, the description and cataloging of species. Thoreau had had the concept of ecology without the word; this man merely had the word without the concept, which was a much shallower accomplishment if it was an accomplishment at all.49)

This was the year in which Professor Louis Agassiz finally apologized to Professor Asa Gray for having 48. The conservation movement was little more than a shabby fraud. From the historical record, these early environmental technocrats were intent not on solving our ecological crisis but on destroying the earth as quickly as possible. Their net impact has been negative: we would have been better off had we never had a conservation movement, to teach us how to manage our looting so that we looted with greater and greater effectiveness and economy. According to Samuel P. Hays’s EXPLORATIONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: ESSAYS BY SAMUEL P. H AYS (Pittsburgh PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998), these men were mere pawns of the powers that be, careerists bought by their careers: Conservation, above all, was a scientific movement, and its role in history arose from the implications of science and technology in modern society. Conservation leaders sprang from such fields as hydrology, forestry, agrostology, geology, and anthropology. Vigorously active in professional circles in the national capital, these leaders brought the ideals and practices of their crafts into federal resource policy. Loyalty to these professional ideals, not close association with the grass-roots public, set the tone of the Theodore Roosevelt conservation movement. Its essence was rational planning to promote efficient development and use of all natural resources. The idea of efficiency drew these federal scientists from one resource task to another, from specific programs to comprehensive concepts. It molded the policies which they proposed, their administrative techniques, and their relations with Congress and the public. It is from the vantage point of applied science, rather than of democratic protest, that one must understand the historic role of the conservation movement. The new realms of science and technology, appearing to open up unlimited opportunities for human achievement, filled conservation leaders with intense optimism. They emphasized expansion, not retrenchment; possibilities, not limitations.... They displayed that deep sense of hope which pervaded all those at the turn of the century for whom science and technology were revealing visions of an abundant future.... Conflicts between competing resource users, especially, should not be dealt with through the normal processes of politics. Pressure group action, logrolling in Congress, or partisan debate could not guarantee rational and scientific decisions. Amid such jockeying for advantage with the resulting compromise, concern for efficiency would disappear. Conservationists envisaged, even though they did not realize their aims, a political system guided by the ideal of efficiency and dominated by the technicians who could best determine how to achieve it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN quarreled with him in 1864, and so Professor Gray seized on the occasion to suggest to Professor Agassiz that he should answer a question that Charles Darwin had once attempted to put to him, a question about fishes. Agassiz wrote Darwin belatedly answering the question, but took the occasion to comment that he considered Darwin’s views to be “mischievous because they lead to a looseness of argumentation which it has been the aim of science to avoid.” We may note again the inversion technique: Agassiz’s arguments against the theory of evolution had been so bombastic and ad hominem and slipshod that he had eventually been unable to continue scientific publication on the matter, and had been limited instead to posturing in public lectures before lay audiences. What I would need to point out isn’t that it was untrue that Darwin’s well-constructed reasonings were “mischievous because they lead to a looseness of argumentation which it has been the aim of science to avoid,” but that it was true that Agassiz’s brazen opinioneering were “mischievous because they lead to a looseness of argumentation which it has been the aim of science to avoid.” Yes, inversion, and in Edward Luria’s LOUIS AGASSIZ: A LIFE IN SCIENCE (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, page 209) Lurie would comment that: The adoration of a public that had sent him fishes and turtle and subscribed in large numbers to his CONTRIBUTIONS [TO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA] was only one mark of the influence he now exerted upon the national culture.... The weight of his reputation was so powerful as to impel editor Horace Greeley to refuse to publish an attack on him by an amateur naturalist and to warn the man that it would be futile to pursue a quarrel against such a personage. THE SCIENCE OF 1866

July 2, Monday: Alfred Russel Wallace complained to Charles Darwin about his unfortunate choice of terminology. “Natural selection” simply was not doing the trick. The common reader was misunderstanding this to mean that a pagan deity, Nature, was doing the selecting. Wouldn’t Darwin please switch to the use of the self- explanatory and non-confusing terminology so ably sponsored by Herbert Spencer, “survival of the fittest”? (Fortunately, Darwin would resist this suggestion.)

49. Refer to Bramwell, Anna. ECOLOGY IN THE 20TH CENTURY: A HISTORY. New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1989. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1869

The 5th edition of Charles Darwin’s THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE 50 PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

50. At some point along the way the initial word of the title, “on,” got lost or was pronounced unnecessary. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1871

Charles Darwin’s THE DESCENT OF MAN: AND SELECTION IN RELATION TO SEX. THE DESCENT OF MAN, I THE DESCENT OF MAN, II

St. George Jackson Mivart, in ON THE GENESIS OF SPECIES, was so apeshit enraged at the very idea of human evolution that he was unable even to copy his quotations from Darwin’s writings with accuracy. He, like Alfred Russel Wallace, considered that the human species must be an exception to the biological laws that governed non-human courses of events. PALEONTOLOGY ON THE GENESIS OF SPECIES

An aggregation of American Passenger Pigeons Ectopistes migratorius nesting in Wisconsin occupied 750 square miles.

Lord Kelvin suggested that “the germs of life might have been brought to the earth by some meteorite” — a kick-the-can-down-the-road kind of argument that would still be being offered a century later. THE SCIENCE OF 1871 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

February 24, Friday: Charles Darwin’s THE DESCENT OF MAN, AND SELECTION IN RELATION TO SEX appeared in two volumes in London. This work cited the 1854 text by Dr. Josiah Clark Nott and George Robin Gliddon TYPES OF MANKIND: OR, ETHNOLOGICAL RESEARCHES, BASED UPON THE ANCIENT MONUMENTS, PAINTINGS, SCULPTURES, AND CRANIA OF RACES, AND UPON THEIR NATURAL, GEOGRAPHICAL, PHILOLOGICAL, AND BIBLICAL HISTORY: ILLUSTRATED BY SELECTIONS FROM THE INEDITED PAPERS OF SAMUEL GEORGE MORTON, M.D., AND BY ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS FROM PROF. L. AGASSIZ, LL.D., W. USHER, M.D.; AND PROF. H.S. PATTERSON, M.D. (London: Trübner; Philadelphia), popularizing the polygenist theory of separate origins for various races of humans, as an example of the attempt to consider the races of man to be separate species (Darwin insisting that to the contrary, all humanity is one single species).

Benjamin Dudley Emerson made his will. He would leave, for a schoolteacher, surprisingly large sums to his alma mater Dartmouth College, and to his home town Hampstead, New Hampshire: I, Benjamin D. Emerson of West Roxbury, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, make this my last will and Testament. ... 8th. All the residue of my estate, real and personal, I direct shall be sold by my executors, at public or private sale, according to their best discretion, as soon as conveniently may be after my decease, and the proceeds applied as hereinafter directed. Whereas it is my desire to provide for the establishment and permanent maintenance in my native town of Hampstead, in the state of New Hampshire, of a school to be called “The Hampstead High School,” and to be for the free use and benefit of that town forever, but only upon the following conditions, namely:— HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN First. That within two years from the final probate of this Will, there shall be procured from the Legislature of said State an act of incorporation, making seven persons, namely, John Ordway, Tristram Little, William C. Little, Amos Buck, Amos Ring, and Frederick A. Pike, together with the pastor of the present Congregational Society in town for the time being, ex-officio, or such of said persons as shall then be living and residing in said Hampstead, together with such other persons residing in said town as said Legislature may name in the place of any who may have deceased or removed from said town, a body corporate by the name of the “Trustees of Hampstead High School,” with the power to fill all vacancies that may occur in their own body, and to establish, govern, maintain, and administer a high school in said town of Hampstead, subject to the substantial observance of the following principles and regulations, which are to be regarded as the fundamental constitution of said school, namely: (1) The said school shall be open and free to youth of both sexes belonging to said town of Hampstead, impartially and without distinction; but no scholar shall be admitted who shall not have attained the age of twelve years, and who can read, write and spell the English language with reasonable correctness and facility, considering his or her age; nor shall any scholar be admitted or retained who does not sustain a good moral character. (2) The whole number of scholars in said school shall not exceed thirty at anyone time. (3) No person 8hall be appointed to the office of preceptor or master of said school, who has not been regularly graduated at some University or College in our country, or who does not sustain a good moral character. (4) It shall be the duty of the preceptor to commence the daily exercises of the school by reading, or causing to be read, some portion of the sacred scriptures, and by prayer; and on each alternate Saturday during school term, he shall be required to devote one half hour at least to instruction calculated to improve the manners and morals of his pupils, impressing on their minds the duty of practising the cardinal virtues of truth, temperance, modesty, industry, benevolence, and especially filial love and obedience, and deference and. respect for old age. The last named virtues, which have been too much neglected in later years, should be made an important part in every youth’s education: they are indispensable to the forming of good morals and good manners, as well as the religious character. I cannot too strongly urge their claim upon those who have in charge the education of youth. The emphatic words of Sacred Writ are, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” “Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honor the face of the old man, and fear thy God.” On each other alternate Saturday during term time, said preceptor shall devote one half hour or more to the inculcation of the doctrine and practice of religion 88 displayed in the Old and New Testaments, and as exemplified in the conduct of our great exampler, Jesus Christ, and his disciples; carefully excluding all sectarianism and uncharitableness, as tending to not only to make the narrow way still narrower without necessity, but even turn it from its HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN heavenly direction: it being believed that simply inculcating the doctrine of the Saviour and his apostles, 88 nearly 88 possible in their own language, without attempting to make proselytes to the peculiar views of any class of Christians, is the best instruction in religious knowledge. Second. That within three years of the final probate of said Will the said town of Hampstead. shall erect a suitable and substantial schoolhouse, satisfactory to said trustees, 011 a lot of land containing not less than one acre, measuring not less than two hundred and ten feet on any side, and situated in said Hampstead, on the main road between the Old Meeting House and the house formerly owned by Dr. James Knight, at the corner of what is called “Kent’s Farm Road,” and shall within said three years convey said lot of land, with said schoolhouse finished and well fitted for the reception of scholars, to the said Trustees for the use of the said High school forever; the said lot to be planted with not less than fifty ornamental shade trees, one half elms, and the other one half sugar maples, and the distance between the schoolhouse and the road to be not less than one hundred feet. Now, therefore, in case the foregoing conditions are complied with, then, and not otherwise, I direct my executors to pay one half of the net proceeds of the sale of my real estate in West Roxbury, together with one-half of any net income of such proceeds that may accrue before the time of such payment, to the said Trustees of the Hampstead High School upon the following trusts: namely, to invest the same, and from time to time to change the investments, having regard always to the safety of the fund, rather than to its productiveness; and all the net income thereof, but no part of the principal, to apply to the use, benefit, and support of said High School, forever. • • • • • • • • • • In witness whereof I hereto set my hand and declare this to be my last will in the presence of three witnesses, this twenty- fourth day of February A.D. eighteen hundred and seventy-one. BENJAMIN D. EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN May 11: The Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot wrote from Toledo, Ohio to Charles Darwin in Down, England, to alert him that, contrary to his impression, natural selection was widely accepted by educated men in the United States of America. He included with his letter copies of his writings, and of The Free Religious Index.

May 27: Charles Darwin responded to the letter he had received from the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot, reporting that he was surprised and gratified by the interest in his views in America, and that he had read the extract sent to him from the LIBERAL CHRISTIAN and also TRUTHS FOR THE TIMES, which he admired.

June 6: Charles Darwin subscribed to the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot’s The Free Religious Index. In his subscription letter he mentioned that the article “The intuitional and scientific schools of free religion” in the Index for April 15, 1871 was one of the most striking he had read.

August 20: The Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot wrote from Toledo, Ohio to Charles Darwin in Down, England, thanking him for his interest in his work and for his paid subscription to The Free Religious Index, and sending the 1870 volume of the Index. He praised Darwin’s services to free-thought and asked him for his view of the influence of his theory on religion, so that he would be able to use this response in a lecture.

September 6, Wednesday: Charles Darwin responded to the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot’s inquiry about his religious attitudes, that his ideas on this were far from clear. He did not feel he had thought deeply enough to express himself publicly. He was unable to make up his mind how far an inward conviction that there must be some Creator or First Cause is really trustworthy evidence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN November 1: Angelo Mariani conducted a performance of Lohengrin at Teatro Communale, Bologna, the first performance of a Wagner opera in Italy. Giuseppe Verdi considered Mariani a traitor but this would not preclude him from attending a later performance on November 19th.

For the first time, Richard Wagner wrote to the town fathers in Bayreuth, laying out the plans for his new theater. Their response was enthusiastic.

The Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot wrote from Toledo, Ohio to Charles Darwin in Down, England, providing a passage from Darwin’s note that he desired to quote in a lecture, and asking Darwin for his support in the free-thought movement. He sent a payment of 50 (we don’t know whether this was American dollars or British pounds), asking Darwin to become a regular contributor to The Free Religious Index.

November 16: Charles Darwin responded to the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot’s request that he become a regular contributor to The Free Religious Index, explaining that he would need to decline this request due to poor health and due to the fact that he had never systematically thought much on religion. He suggested that if his American correspondent desired to do so, his comments might be published “with qualifications.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1872

Opening of the Stazione Zoologica at Naples by A. Dohrn.

The 6th and final edition of Charles Darwin’s THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN By this point Chauncey Wright had become one of the elders of the proto-pragmatist Metaphysical Club, “our boxing-master” for his junior colleagues C.S. Peirce, William James, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. In this year his support for the theory of Charles Darwin, and his attack on St. George Mivart’s anti-selectionist GENESIS OF SPECIES in the North American Review, earned him a personal invitation to visit at Down (this would be his only trip abroad). Darwin would arrange to have Wright’s attack on Mivart reprinted in England at his own expense.

January 8: Charles Darwin wrote to the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot to express his gratitude for the eulogy that had been published in The Free Religious Index #104. He offered that there were many who would disagree with such a eulogy, it being the fashion to say that Darwin despite being a good observer had “an utterly illogical mind.”

July 2, Tuesday: Charles Darwin wrote to the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot to renew his subscription to The Free Religious Index. He offered that he had been interested by the Reverend’s “The God of science” in the Index for February 24, 1872.

July 18,Thursday: The Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot wrote to Charles Darwin, thanking him for his $5 for a 2- year subscription to The Free Religious Index, and for permission to quote his compliments on TRUTHS FOR THE TIMES. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1873

January: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway visited Down House. He would send Charles Darwin a copy of the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s OUTDOOR PAPERS.

March 30, Sunday: The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote from Newport, Rhode Island to Charles Darwin in Down, England about how pleased he was that Darwin had enjoyed his book OUTDOOR PAPERS of 1871. He rejoiced at Darwin’s kindly feelings toward the coloured race. He reported that, unfortunately, due to the “unworldliness” of its editor the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot, The Free Religious Index was in financial trouble. He reported that Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard College, a denier of the theory of evolution, was setting up a summer school for natural history on an island off the Massachusetts coast (this was on the island of Penikese, the outermost of the Elizabeth Islands below Cape Cod) — but that there his pupils had been developing more liberal scientific opinions than those held by their august professor (Agassiz, determinedly racist, was a scoffer at Darwin’s theory of evolution since such a scientific theory might indicate there to be some commonality between the white race and the black one). Since Darwin had recently published on THE EXPRESSION OF THE EMOTIONS IN MAN AND ANIMALS, the Reverend Higginson enclosed some of his scientific notes on the expression of emotions.

Fall Brownson’s Quarterly Review, No. 3

I. Whose is the Child? II. Science, Philosophy, and Religion CATHOLICISM III. Papal Infallibility IV. Darwin’s DESCENT OF MAN V. The Church Above the State VI. True and False Science VII. Sisters of Mercy VIII. Literary Notices and Criticisms

ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1874

March 3, Tuesday: The Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot wrote to Charles Darwin, asking that he read, and comment for publication, on his forthcoming essay in The Free Religious Index on the evolution of conscience and morals through action and reaction between man and the moral environment.

March 30, Monday: Charles Darwin responded from Down, England to the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot, to indicate that he had expressed Darwin’s views on the moral sense with remarkable clearness and correctness, and that his eulogy “Darwin’s theory of conscience and its relation to scientific ethics” published in The Free Religious Index for March 12, 1874 had been “magnificent.” He was unable, however, to provide a judgment on the essay because he had “no practice in following abstract and abstruse reasoning.” He did not see how morality could be “objective and universal.” No one would call the maternal bond in lower animals a “moral obligation.” When a social animal “becomes in some slight incipient degree” a moral creature “capable of approving or disapproving of its own conduct,” did not such obligations remain of a so-called instinctive nature rather than becoming at once moral obligations? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1875

Summer: Thomas Carlyle inquired of Charles Darwin, whether humans might again become apes.

December 20, Monday: W.E. Darwin sent some money to the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot on behalf of himself and his father Charles Darwin, to help The Free Religious Index during its present financial difficulties. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1876

Professor Asa Gray issued DARWINIANA.

Charles Darwin’s CROSS AND SELF FERTILIZATION IN THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM explained the concept of hybrid vigor, stimulating experiments and studies by other scientists. Though the basic concept of hybrid vigor had been discussed by various researchers during the earlier decades of this century, this was the first complete analysis and description. BOTANY

Charles Doolittle Walcott was able to find and describe legs of trilobite, putting to rest some speculation about how these creatures had moved about. PALEONTOLOGY

Robert Koch validates the germ theory of disease, postulated by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s, identifying a bacterium as the cause of anthrax.

Cesare Lombroso’s THE CRIMINAL MAN describing physical characteristics that identify inborn criminals. THE SCIENCE OF 1876 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1880

April 15, Thursday: Charles Darwin wrote from Down, England to the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot, sending £5 for a subscription to The Free Religious Index and thanking him for a copy of a review of a book on evolution by “an ignorant lawyer.”

May 15, Saturday: The Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot wrote from Boston to Charles Darwin to thank him for his subscription money for The Free Religious Index, and to advise that he was stepping down as that publication’s editor. He commented on Darwin’s solid reputation in America among rising men of science. THE SCIENCE OF 1880

June 13, Sunday: W.E. Darwin wrote to the Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot to indicate that his father Charles Darwin had asked him to express appreciation for The Free Religious Index and to express regret that the Reverend Abbot will no longer be running it. His father desired that the Reverend Abbot at this point discontinue printing a weekly advertisement of his appreciation of the Index. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1881

Charles Darwin and others persuaded the British government to grant the impoverished Alfred Russel Wallace an annual civil list pension of £200 on the basis of his many services to science.

Ragnar Hult’s study of successional processes FÖRSÖK TILL ANALYTISK BEHANDLING AF VÄXTFORMATIONERNA (ATTEMPT AT AN ANALYTIC TREATMENT OF PLANT COMMUNITIES). THE SCIENCE OF 1881 ECOLOGY

Opening of the British Museum’s buildings at South Kensington in London, which house the natural history collection, after years of campaigning by Richard Owen.

In London, Leadenhall Market opened. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN In London, the Leyton Orient football team was formed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1882

April 19, Wednesday: Upon his return from Watertown, Massachusetts, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson called upon his father Waldo Emerson in Concord and found him in his study, “bright & happy” but with a bad cold and a trifle feverish.

Charles Robert Darwin died at his home in Down, England at the age of 73. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1894

William Bateson’s MATERIALS FOR THE STUDY OF VARIATION (a saltationist attack on Charles Darwin’s gradualist genetics).

Eugène Dubois’s monograph on Pithecanthropus erectus, Java Man, a missing link between humans and apes.

Charles Brongniart described a Carboniferous dragonfly having a 2-foot wingspan — because of the manner in which insects of this sort absorb oxygen from the air, such a form of life simply could not have come into existence unless the earth’s ancient atmosphere contained a greater proportion of oxygen than now. THE SCIENCE OF 1894 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1900

Simultaneous rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s laws of genetic inheritance, by Hugo de Vries and Carl Erich Correns (De Vries made his discovery while studying the common American evening primrose Oenothera lamarckiana, originally named for Jean Baptiste Lamarck, that he had found growing in the disturbed soil of a “waste space” in his back yard; Correns had been a student of Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli, the eminent botanist whose incomprehension had discouraged Mendel from continuing his work, and discovered that Mendel had in fact been correct in his evaluation of the genetics of the hawkweed Hieracium).

A copy of Mendel’s paper on genetics was discovered in the library of the Linnean Society in London. The pages were uncut.51 EUGENICS

51. There is a persistent textbook-tale that this unperused copy of the paper had been discovered in Charles Darwin’s library. No evidence supports this. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1958

Nora Barlow acknowledged, in a new edition of Charles Darwin’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY, that his personal materials had been censored by the Darwin/Wedgewood family as originally published in DATE [??], and that deleted from them at page 90 had been her grandfather’s insufficiently pious remark that “[The] very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one; whereas … the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1993

Publication of a reassuring book entitled THE BOOK YOUR CHURCH DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ, Tim C. Leedom editor, by “The Truth Seeker Company.” Now from time to time we run into “village atheist” types, who define themselves in opposition to the hypocrisy of religion, and from time to time we hear Henry Thoreau disparaged as one of these types who define themselves in opposition, who know everything about HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN everything that is wrong with everybody else.

So I looked into this new volume with some trepidation, wondering to what use they would be attempting to turn the memory of Thoreau. In scanning through the 400+ glossy pages of this publication, I failed to note HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN any citations, and then at the end I discovered an appendix which attempted to make a list of the “Freethinkers” who are to be honored by these naysayers. And, glory be, Thoreau’s name is not on that rather extensive list! Here are a few of the “Freethinkers,” with the characterizations under which they have been selected out to be thus honored:

Freethinkers

Marlon Brando Movie actor; specializes in morally intense roles

John Burroughs Nature lover and naturalist; biographer and close friend of Walt Whitman

John Caldwell Calhoun American statesman of the early 19th century; favored states’ rights

Charles Darwin English naturalist, author of ORIGIN OF SPECIES

Erasmus Darwin English botanist and physician, grandfather of Charles

Charles Dickens Novelist

Frederick Douglass Abolitionist

Charles W. Eliot President of Harvard for over 40 years

Waldo Emerson American philosopher and author

Edward Everett Politician, minister, Harvard president

Benjamin Franklin American writer, statesman, and inventor

Mahatma Gandhi Nationalist leader, Hindu, organizer of non-violent resistance

William Lloyd Garrison Abolitionist HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Freethinkers

William Godwin English philosopher

Horace Greeley Founder of the New-York Tribune

Oliver Wendell Holmes American physician and author

Julia Ward Howe Abolitionist and Suffragist

Thomas Jefferson US President, lawyer, statesman, diplomat, philosopher

Immanuel Kant german philosopher, considered by some to be one of the greatest of modern thinkers

John Locke English philosopher

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow American Poet

James Madison President and youngest of the Founding Fathers; helped bring about ratification of the Constitution and passage of the Bill of Rights

Horace Mann American educator

Florence Nightingale English nurse, philanthropist

Thomas Paine Writer and political theorist. The mind behind the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence

Benjamin Pierce Mathematician, astronomer

Jean Jacques Rousseau French publisher and author

Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher

Percy Bysshe Shelley English romantic poet, wrote THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft

B.F. Skinner Behaviorist, psychologist, signed 1973 Humanist Manifesto

Herbert Spencer Philosopher, psychologist, sociologist

Mark Twain American author, humorist

Catherine Vogel Burned in 1539 for being a Unitarian

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe German poet

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz German philosopher

Alfred Russel Wallace naturalist, devoted life to scientific entomology

Walt Whitman American poet, true inheritor of Emersonian principles

Mary Wollstonecraft Wrote VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN, friend of Thomas Paine, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

2000

December 5, Tuesday: On the television show WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE, a contestant who had already won $250,000 and was going for half a million was asked: “Published in 1999, this book entitled WILD FRUITS is a collection of previously lost writings by this author:

a) Colette b) Charles Darwin c) Albert Einstein d) Henry David Thoreau

(The contestant didn’t know the answer.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

2001

The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (Human Genome Project)’s initial sequence and analysis of the human genome in Nature. Celera Genomics simultaneously published a draft human genome sequence in Science.

Joshua Smith and collaborators described a giant sauropod from Egypt, possibly the largest Cretaceous sauropod yet reported. It was considered a possible food source for 3 large carnivorous dinosaur species discovered decades earlier by Ernst Stromer. PALEONTOLOGY

Luann Becker and collaborators described carbon fullerenes (buckyballs) at the Permo-Triassic boundary in China, Japan, and Hungary. Because these can originate in meteorites, the fullerenes were cited as evidence for a meteorite impact at the end of the Permian. Other scientists would however have difficulty reproducing their results, so the hypothesis remains controversial.

Chris Henshilwood and collaborators discovered and described 77,000-year-old artwork: stones carved with lines and triangles in Blombos Cave on the Southern Cape coast of Africa. Three years later Henshilwood and collaborators would describe more Blombos artifacts: tiny snail shells apparently pierced and worn as jewelry about 76,000 years ago (a few years later another research team would find in Israel and Algeria similar shell beads at least 100,000 years old).

Odin and Néraudeau published a description of a Neanderthal flint tool found in southwestern France having on one side a fossil sea urchin. THE SCIENCE OF 2001 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Peter Raby’s ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE: A LIFE (Princeton MD: Princeton UP/London: Chatto & Windus). Although one of the greatest scientific minds in Victorian Britain, bedecked during his lifetime with honors such as the Royal Medal of the Linnaean Society and the Order of Merit, he has by now slipped into relative obscurity within the giant shadow of Charles Darwin. We think of Wallace as an adventurer, collector, naturalist and biogeographer and kindly pass by the fact that the actual man was also a spiritualist.

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7109.html

Gillian Beer, DARWIN’S PLOTS: EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE IN DARWIN, GEORGE ELIOT AND NINETEENTH- CENTURY FICTION (2d edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Interviewed for H-Ideas by Johann W.N. Tempelhoff ([email protected]), School of Basic Sciences, Potchefstroomse Universiteit vir Christelike Hoër Onderwys, South Africa. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN The divide between science and fiction is infinitesimally small in the realm of the written word. Fiction attempts to present a sense of awareness about a human condition. Scientific discoveries usually are the result of the demand for innovation in a society where the public realm is conducive to human creativity and change. It is after all a matter of the “presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear” that assures us of the world and ourselves.1 But scientific theories, unlike fictional constructs, are not necessarily taken for granted outright. At the start of DARWIN’S PLOTS: EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE IN DARWIN, GEORGE ELIOT AND NINETEENTH- CENTURY FICTION Dame Gillian Beer offers an explanation for this state of affairs. “Most major scientific theories,” she states, “rebuff common sense. They call on evidence beyond the reach of our senses and overturn the observable world. They disturb assumed relationships and shift what has been substantial into metaphor... Such major theories tax, affront, and exhilarate those who first encounter them, although in fifty years or so they will be taken for granted... When it is first advanced theory is at most fictive. The awkwardness of fit between the natural world as it is currently perceived and as it is hypothetically imagined holds the theory itself for a time within a provisional scope akin to that of fiction” (p. 1). In this well-written and thoroughly contemplated intellectual history of nineteenth century literature, which has been published for a second time since 1983, the accent is on Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and the effect his scientific observations had on writers of fiction. Darwin had set himself the task of understanding the roots of a past in which humankind hardly featured. Many scientific thinkers of his time felt as he did about the matter. He was however the one - in concert with the perceptions of many of his contemporaries - to outline one of the major theories of modern science. The fact that it had been absorbed into literary thinking is an interesting barometer for determining precisely how and when his theories started finding their home in popular and intellectual thinking. Beer’s work is an intellectual history of the cultural environment in which Darwin found himself in the 1860’s and the 1870’s. Her knowledge of the literature of the period enables the reader to come to a better understanding of how the craft of writing was progressing under conditions of creative construction. Apart from the language (written and spoken) there are numerous discussions of devices used by authors in their work. They were writing at a time when ideas were being shaped by thoughts about observations on things beyond the shores of the British Isles. It was an environment conducive to addressing universal tendencies. The nineteenth-century author made use of specific strategies in the process of writing. In fiction the plot is a radical form of interpretation: it fixes the relations between phenomena. “It projects the future and then gives real form to its own predictions. It is to that extent self-verifying: its solutions confirm the validity of the clues proposed” (p. 151). Much the same could be said of Darwin’s style of writing. He was however far removed from the sophisticated craft of writing fiction. Yet this man who was to change the course of development in science had to construct his own metaphorical fiction in order to access the life of every day thinking in Victorian Britain. Reading science and understanding it requires of the historian of literature clarity on precisely what the process of reading implies. Beer gives an indication of this ability early in the work (pp. 4, 27). The reader is then made aware of Darwin’s reading tastes. Malthus and Milton had an impact on him. In his youth Darwin had an interest in fiction. Later it went into decline. It could quite well have been as a result of what George Elliot considered his preoccupation with expressing “life” (p. 34). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN The reader is informed there was a driving force behind Darwin the writer to realize his objective of controverting attempts to distinguish meaning from matter. Meaning for him, Beer explains, inheres in all activity and in interrelations (p. 36). It has a bearing on the way in which he perceives the world around him and turns matter into an image of relevance. His sense of material implies a wide variety of meaning. It is a materialism that is sensuously grounded as a response to the world of forms and life. It is not an abstracting force (p. 37). Beer points out that in Darwin’s thought there is always a repetition of one movement: “the impulse to substantiate metaphor particularly to find a real place in the natural order for older mythological expressions” (p. 74). In the process he reminds the reader of the mysterious, explains the fact and discloses the marvelous (pp. 74-5). There are considerations of a psycho-historical nature that deserve consideration if we want to understand Darwin the writer. Beer lets him come across as a somewhat enigmatic figure, the subject of what the written world of his youth and his maturity had to offer him. He was the creator of his own world in which a comprehensive theory of scientific reality was in the process of taking shape. According to Beer, Darwin’s heuristic inclinations - the eagerness to discover - goes back to his youth. We take note of the child who had the habit of telling lies (fictionalizing) suggesting a hidden interest in power. It was one of the contributing factors in making Darwin the architect of ideas that profoundly unsettled the received relationships between fiction, metaphor and the material world. Ultimately that sense of power was nurtured by his omnivorous and powerful reading (p 27). But what was he trying to accomplish? “Darwin was seeking to create a story of the world - a fiction - which would not entirely rely upon the scope of man’s reason nor upon the infinitesimally small powers of observation he possesses, as they act within the world spread all about him, and as they enclose him through the shortness of his time span. Yet Darwin was not seeking a covertly metaphysical world not attempting an enthusiasm which would not extend the material into a form of mysticism. Throughout his use of metaphor and analogy one can feel the double stress - the attempt to create exact predictions and the attempt to press upon the boundaries of the knowable within a human order” (p. 92). As a historian of literature Beer draws the interesting conclusion that her text is in fact an “extensive fiction” intent on exploring the boundaries of that which is literally unthinkable. What is accomplished in the process is the awareness that the absoluteness of man’s power of reason as an instrument of measuring the world is displaced once and for all. The problem Darwin faced was to describe in words a process that he was convinced had been going on for a long time. Consequently he in turn had to be creative. In the process of creating a test he was “creating an argument.” It was an argument aimed at emphasizing production. He could not fully rely only on a fully experimental method. Thus he was obliged to work within the terms of an “experimental history” (p. 95). In the process he became a creative artist, outside the confines of Baconian induction. His creative energy was dedicated to authenticating his account of the way species formed. In a comprehensive discussion of Darwin’s myths, Beer explains Darwin was still deeply under the influence of the Christian inheritance. The manifold contradictions he perceived in the natural world, the interplay between life and death and more, were integrated into forms representing controlling powers of opposites. It also included the concepts of “artificial” and “natural” selection. The powerful was always the more benign. Within this framework she perceives the influence of Christian tradition. Darwin’s description of the “survival of the fittest” at first appears to be one of the single direction stories in evolutionary thought. Its tautological structure however, makes of it a satire on organicism. Beer notes: “The survival of the fittest means simply the survival of those most fitted to survive; this implies not distinction, nor fullest development, but aptness to the current demands of their environment - and these demands may be for deviousness, blueness, aggression, passivity, long arms, or some other random quality. So chance reenters the potentially determinist organisation of evolutionary narrative” (p. 109). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Between 1850 and the end of the 1870’s ideas of degeneration and development were common in arguments about myth and language. Mythographers and anthropologists were well informed on evolution and natural selection. Language was considered a crucial distinguishing feature between humankind and animals. Darwin himself instead emphasized the ability of animals to communicate (pp. 111-2). Of necessity class, race and discrimination became an issue. Writing with a suggestive hint of post-colonial consciousness, Beer notes the “brutal ignorance” of Victorian writers on what constitutes “real culture” and “savage culture.” It was generally considered that the decline of language was an indication of the degeneration of humankind. The anthropologist E.B. Tylor used the example of THE WATER-BABIES by Charles Kingsley - an evolutionist thinker with interesting insights - to project an impression of decline. Beer comes to the conclusion: “The idea of development harboured a paternalistic assumption once it was transferred exclusively to human beings, since it was presumed that the observer was at the summit of development, looking back over a past, struggling to reach the present high moment. The European was taken as the type of achieved developmental pre-eminence, and other races studied were seen as further back on the chart of growth. The image of growth was again misplaced from the single life cycle, so that whole races were seen as being part of the ‘childhood of man’, to be protected, led, and corrected like children” (p. 111). Central to these assumptions were the conceptions of the development of language and the corresponding awareness of myth. E.B. Tylor and Max Müller, the Sanskrit scholar, were active in propagating a debate on the development of language. Müller studied the phenomenon of myth from the perspective of the organization and roots of language. Tylor in turn concentrated on the “’stiffening of metaphor by the mistaken realisation of words’" (p. 112). Müller, like Darwin, was a monogenist, who believed in the common stock of all races of the world. He argued in favor of the common origins in the “roots” of the Indo-Germanic languages. His premises were: the major divide between the brute and man was language; second, he argued language had a common origin. He was a convinced supporter of Darwin and used the term “natural elimination” instead of “natural selection” to emphasize why some languages were able to make progress and others were subject to decline. The deterioration of language, he argued, is subject to the deterioration of metaphor and myth. Müller argued that myth was able to corrupt the relationship between language and thought. The changing nature of language, as a result of the agency of metaphor to act as agent of decomposition, represented for Müller the essence of the process of selection and elimination. The remnants of highly developed systems of myths in cultures were seated in what remained in the legends and fairy tales. Darwin’s descriptions of nature were more concerned with productivity than congress. It considered generation rather than sexual desire. His was a tendency to give another dimension to Victorian romanticism - this was a dimension that manifested in Virginia Woolf’s characterization of fertility. Beer explains that in the idea of evolution there was an abundance of life, a profusion of multitudes. At the same time there was an awareness of the potential effect of over-abundance. Is it possible that many authors missed what Darwin was driving at? The almost distanced perception of sexuality as an essential component of continuation is a romantic figment of the imagination. Beer explains: “The physical is prolonged through generations. In the methodology of life proposed by Darwin, production, growth and decay are equally needed for the continuance of life on earth” (p. 116). For Darwin development in great profusion was first and foremost a manifest reality that permeated everything he perceived. It was influenced by the awareness instilled by Wilhelm von Humboldt who accentuated the essential importance of human development. The appropriation of Darwin’s theory in children’s literature is well described. Beer gives extensive consideration to Margaret Gatty and the Charles Kingsley (1819-75) children’s classic, THE WATER-BABIES (1863), in which a somewhat stark social comment is presented on the evolutionary process. Kingsley uses the theory to comment on the Malthusian order of things in which the identity and imaginary world, to which children are entitled, is dwarfed in the interest of progress. Beer explains that Kingsley wants to read the world with the transforming eye of the child. She sees in THE WATER-BABIES a richness of rebirth, an alteration to the human cycle of development. There are indications of an oceanic richness of pre-Freudian storytelling. Kingsley, a theologian and writer of fiction was a friend of Charles Lyell. He corresponded with Darwin and Huxley. It was an intellectual environment conducive to the creation of THE WATER-BABIES. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN The presence of George Eliot in Beer’s book is ubiquitous. It is perhaps here that the reader is made most aware of the impact Darwin had on nineteenth-century fiction. Eliot’s concern with Darwin and his theories were addressed in two of her major works MIDDLEMARCH and DANIEL DERONDA. Her first reading of Darwin’s ORIGIN did not impress Eliot. Yet it gradually started asserting an influence. MIDDLEMARCH starts with scientific experiments aimed at studying the history of man. “Experimental” becomes a free-ranging, exploratory, innovatory project without any fixed conclusion. In science this stands to reason, but in art it has a bearing on the experimental novel and/or theatre. It is also here where it becomes evident that scientific and artistic concerns are closely related. During the 1860’s and 1870’s the movement in scientific thinking was from description to narrative. It became an inherent part of theory. “This brings the objective insights of the scientist into accord with the procedure of the fiction writer and offers another kind of authentication” (p. 150). The emergence of fixed laws to explain the natural environment also had an impact on the artist. Law was in fact “the last fixed thing remaining in ‘the theatre of reiterated change’" (p. 150). The novelist therefore had to explore an organization in which man’s experience is traversed by laws, which took no account of humankind’s presence. The methodology of the scientist created new opportunities for the organization of fiction. In her references to the ‘history of man’ Eliot by implication refers to natural history. Middlemarch ostensibly deals with the ‘web of affinities’ determining the relations within a specific time and space. A sense of creation is present, of everything being knowable and eventually being subject to becoming known (p. 154). In Victorian times the word “web” was associated with woven fabric. The web as woven cloth expressed the process of coming to knowledge. In the case of Eliot’s work: “The web exists not only as an interconnection in space but as succession in time. This was the aspect of the image emphasised by Darwin in his genealogical ordering” (p. 157). The web is different from the chain, also from the tree. It has a comprehensiveness and a presence of interactivity in an environment of post- 90’s thinking. It constitutes an immediate response to knowledge and the art of knowing. In DANIEL DERONDA (1871) Eliot is concerned with the future - a project she had been contemplating for a long time. The link-up with Darwin is to be found in his THE DESCENT OF MAN and particularly the concept of selection in relation to sex, which shifted the evolutionary debate towards humankind’s specific inheritance and future. Eliot, who had lost faith in the survival of the individual, now looked at the development of the race, culture and the mind. The latter, Beer states, was a favorite occupation in the 1870’s. The development of the mind was considered as the possibility of exploring a better future - with generalized laws and perceptions of self as part of a greater pattern of things. Evolutionary theory had brought along with it a sense of being able to shape the future. However it is Eliot the novelist who is faced with the problematic situation of moral and emotional awareness. The eugenics of Francis Galton proposed to create an environment where it would be possible to predict the nature and the quality of the offspring to come. Social planning, the thought of being in a position to predict the shape of the future and its people, suggested in Darwin’s work that it was possible to go somewhat beyond the randomness of moral selection. The interaction between Galton and Darwin in the work of Eliot, Beer suggests, is that Galton in his eugenics applied evolutionary theory to the future. In THE DESCENT OF MAN Darwin accentuates acts of choice and will in sexual selection. “In DANIEL DERONDA past and future are dubiously intercalated: the order of telling and the order of experience are confused and can never be thoroughly rearranged. The work brings to the centre of our attention the idea of a future life” (p. 173). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Beer notes that in all Eliot’s previous novels time is end-stopped. In DANIEL DERONDA there is the prospect of a future, a tomorrow. Cause and effect and prediction are brought into play. For Eliot it meant a lot. There is no longer a critical unwritten gap of time between material and author. The fascination of many Victorian writers with race was in fact actually with class. Race and class raise identical questions of descent, genealogy, mobility, the possibility of development and transformation. According to Beer Darwin adopted the genealogical metaphor in heraldic terms in THE ORIGIN. In DANIEL DERONDA, Eliot took into consideration the peculiarity of the Jews and their place in British society. They were a wandering tribe, came from Asia and were not like the Homo asiatica. The Jews were also a favored nation.52 In both Darwinian and biblical terms they occupied a special position in the struggle for life. The recognition in Jewish culture that the principle of growth is situated in human choice makes the divine principle action, choice and resolved memory. It is these elements that Beer explores in Eliot’s DANIEL DERONDA. They are then applied in an evolutionary sense. She explains: “The relationship of will and choice to change, the confusion between change and necessary progress, are issues much of whose intensity comes from their urgent testing of evolutionary ideas in their possible application to human life” (p. 193). Eliot did not rely exclusively on Darwin for her insights. She had already read Hegel in the 1840s. She was also aware of Schopenhauer and Fichte. In the 1850s she read Lamarck and Spencer. By the 1870s she had changed the content of the anthropological debate in her works. There was the challenging relativism and the pessimism about the possibility of advance in English national life. The debate that influenced her was concerned with race and class. It had been sparked off by THE DESCENT OF MAN. Eliot chose to explore further the relations between men and women, thereby responding to Darwin’s views on sexual selection. By the 1870s Darwinist theories were contemplated within the context of their psychological and social implications. In particular it had a bearing on relations between men and women. In THE ORIGIN Darwin was of the opinion that true classification was of a genealogical nature. It is true that succession within the natural order of things had an egalitarian character. In human society it was however inheritance that organized society and sustained hegemony. It was however in THE DESCENT OF MAN (1871) and THE EXPRESSION OF THE EMOTIONS IN MAN AND ANIMALS (1872) that Darwin brought humankind squarely within the debate of evolution. The accent now fell, not only on natural selection, but also on sexual selection. Questions were now being asked with a bearing on what emotions values reflect. Actions could help the individual and race to survive. In the process medical theory became integrated with social and psychological theory. In his interpretation of Schopenhauer, Darwin came to the conclusion that the process of sexual selection had a bearing on the anticipation of the future generation - the future human race. The male was however intended to dominate in the matter of choice. Physically the male is more dominant. In a savage state of existence the female is kept in greater bondage than would otherwise be the case. The emphasis is on beauty generation, in itself a debate in the domain of aesthetics with reference to the process of sexual selection. In bio-political discourse by the late twentieth century this awareness suggested the re-translation of individuality, authenticity by repainting and remodeling the self.3 In Chapter 7 Beer gives attention to the role portrayed by the female in DANIEL DERONDA. She chooses the long route to come to that essence - perhaps the result of caution in an Eighties’ intellectual environment. First there is the focus on Deronda’s mother. Then follows the acknowledgement that the famous opera singer does not conform to the Darwinist conception of the female deriving her status from her genetic role. Elsewhere in the work there are very interesting insights. For example, what Darwin had done was to intensify the unsettled and long-used themes in relations between men and women by placing courtship, sensibility, the making of matches, women’s beauty, men’s dominance and inheritance in all its forms, squarely into the arena of a new set of problems. The consequence was that authors like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy started with the rereading of traditional fictional topics. This process was constructive in the sense that it led to a new fictional energy. It also paved the way for new perceptions of the art of writing fiction.

52. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Beer points out that in her last three works i.e., FELIX HOLT, MIDDLEMARCH and DANIEL DERONDA Eliot took the phenomenon of sexual selection and the role of the woman to its full extent. The role of the woman in these works included that of the vessel of continuity. They bear children and thereby pass on the inheritance of the race. At the same time women also represent a critique of culture. George Eliot was aware of the manner in which sexual selection became an instrument of oppression in a strong patriarchal order.

DARWIN’S PLOTS is an excellent work of great depth and significance for readers in a variety of disciplines. For historians it can open new insights in narrative, fiction and the construction of historical identity. For the student of literature it offers a unique insight into the Darwinian impact on nineteenth-century literature. Even for the scientist it would be interesting to take note how theory can influence the thinking of laypeople in a world where the exciting features of scientific discovery frequently become the material of interesting fiction. Ultimately the study makes the reader aware of dimensions where fiction and science share the stage. Together they light up a world in which contrasts are too frequently diminished because readers of science and readers of fiction too seldom care to indulge in new journeys of exploration. 1. H. Arendt, THE HUMAN CONDITION (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958), p. 50. 2. For interesting insights on the Jewish experience in nineteenth century Britain, see H. Arendt, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM (Meridian Books, Clevelands and Ohio, 1958), pp. 68-79. 3. See P. György, “The order of bodies” in A. Heller and S.P. Riekmann (Eds.) BIOPOLITICS: THE POLITICS OF THE BODY, RACE AND NATURE (Avebury, Aldershot, 1996), pp. 42-3. Copyright 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected] net.msu.edu. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

2002

David Spooner is the founder of Butterfly Conservation East Scotland. He has lived in Dunfermline, Scotland for 25 years with his wife Marion O’Neil, who is the Archaeological Illustrator with the National Museums of Scotland. He has served on the National Biodiversity Committee for Scotland, and was recently an adviser to the US Fish & Wildlife Service in the rescue of the El Segundo Blue Butterfly at the dunes near LAX (the Los Angeles International Airport). His fascination with lepidoptery, which has lasted a quarter of a century, was arrived at by rather an unusual route — through literature and the insect’s role in various cultures. One of the things he is trying to do is reveal how it is that “insect processes –particularly metamorphosis– are much more crucial than evolutionary theorists have accepted up to now.” He is interested in the manner in which the metamorphic principle of the insect world has influenced our music, painting, and literature. His 1995 THE METAPHYSICS OF INSECT LIFE drew on artistic works to view homo sapiens as “dangling between ape and insect,” and his 1999 THE POEM AND THE INSECT: ASPECTS OF TWENTIETH CENTURY HISPANIC CULTURE applied this viewpoint specifically to 20th-Century Hispanic literature. This most recent work THOREAU`S 53 VISION OF INSECTS & THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGY is an account of Thoreau`s observations of insects in America and the place of insects in his creative work. He has put the first chapter online: Just as Henry Thoreau was starting out as a naturalist and published writer with his “Natural History of Massachusetts” in 1842, Charles Darwin was sketching some preliminary manuscript essays. Indeed even earlier in spring 1837, Darwin had been formulating ideas on geographic speciation and evolution by common descent. So when as early as December 1837 Thoreau remarked “How indispensable to a correct study of nature is a perception of her true meaning — The fact will one day flower out into a truth” (PJ1:19), he was more prescient than he imagined. While Thoreau looked for nature’s “true meaning” to emerge organically from his living laboratory in the fields around Concord, Darwin was formulating a theory based upon his fact-collecting voyages that could explain the processes of evolutionary change. Even as outdoor research was reaching its apogee with Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s work, science

53. David Spooner. THOREAU`S VISION OF INSECTS & THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGY. 2002 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

was beginning to shift, so that by mid-century the focus was moving from botany and geology to physics and chemistry. And natural history was breaking up to become biology and zoology so that the individual was already acquiring the ambiguous modern status of object and subject in one — observer of the self as well as scientific observer of nature. One analyst has declared that the Darwinian theory of evolution by way of natural selection “surpassed even the astronomical revolution ushered in by Copernicus in the significance of its implications for our understanding of the nature of the universe and of our place in it.” It was as a result of John Gould’s observation in March 1837 that the mockingbirds collected by Darwin from three different islands on the Galapagos were three different species that Darwin first grasped the process of geographic speciation. There was not a unique saltation, but an evolution on three separate islands. Soon, by the publication in 1859 of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, there became available a comprehensively new theory of nature. Thoreau lived and wrote at this point of intersection. No longer was change and adaptation to imply intended progress, still less to end in perfection. Even so remnants of earlier thought-systems survive in Darwin. The phrase “natural selection” retains a sense of an external originator and was not Darwin’s favored term, and is today often replaced by the entirely non-committal “differential reproduction.” And it was still some decades before species were comprehensively defined in terms of gene pools and the necessary reproductive isolation. Yet Darwin’s work continues to represent the greatest rupture in the perceived status of human life in the order of things. As Ernst Mayr puts it: “It is almost impossible for a modern person to project back to the early half of the nineteenth century and reconstruct the thinking of this pre-Darwinian period, so great has been the impact of Darwinism on our views.” Thoreau, like Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists, approached scientific method, initially at least, from the residual insights of religion. Basically transcendentalism projected a unity that was lost after the seventeenth century. Perhaps it could acquire such vigor in America because of its lack of a medieval period as a clear cut- off point. What Crollius wrote in 1624 could have been adopted by Emerson and Bronson Alcott: “Is it not true that all herbs, plants, trees and other things issuing from the bowels of the earth are so many magic books and signs?” Indeed the Puritan Jonathan Edwards edges towards scientific method, not only with his famed youthful observations on spiders, but with projections such as: Any dullard with the help of a little logic can argue a priori; any scholar can repeat the argument from design, and all men can read or hear the BIBLE. But to see visible symbols of His presence ... this seeing is the supreme act of humanity. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Robert Milder, though, draws the distinction between the Calvinist together with “his secular descendant, the visionary Romantic” who are “dependent on what Emerson called “more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternals,” “as against Thoreau who “is spiritually a self-starter able to think or write himself into renewal so long as he has the glimmering of an interest or idea to prompt him.” Thoreau will move from the analogism of his early observations, the search for correspondence between human growth and growth in prehuman nature —that is “first nature” in G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx’s term— to the objectivism of the post-1851 entries in his JOURNAL. Indeed the final eleven years of Thoreau’s work are now seen by many as his most vital, confirming as they do Darwin’s terrible truth that the human species suffers transcendent egotism and illusory control over nature. Today, the peripheral status of the species has been exacerbated by a range of intractable problems: crises within societal organization, pollution and subsequent atmospheric deterioration, enforced single-crop emphasis, and impoverishment leading to the diminution of sources of oxygen from the tropical forests. Simon Schama addresses the Thoreauvian microcosm with the question: “But what did Walden do to Walden?” Especially the later writings of Thoreau struck a great blow against human arrogance towards other species, while Darwin’s opus revealed that natural selection works randomly and manifests itself in the universal will to survive. Thoreau read ORIGIN on its first appearance in America, acquiring it from the Town Library early in 1860, and immediately gave it his assent. This was no foregone expectation. It required characteristic Thoreau boldness and courage since Emerson’s circle included the main proponent of “special creation,” Louis Agassiz, who had the prestige of Harvard College, which he was involved in expanding, behind him. Prior to his reading of ORIGIN, Thoreau had become interested in Darwin’s JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES ... DURING THE VOYAGE OF HMS BEAGLE (1839), which was a talisman of his travels around Concord, and Thoreau’s “copious notes attest to his extraordinary prescient sympathy with many of Darwin’s interests, including his minutely detailed observational techniques, his fascination with change in nature, even his writing style and the formal construction of the book, which was half travelogue and half naturalist’s journal.” Indeed Thoreau’s method in his JOURNAL of accumulating facts, piling instance upon observed instance, is Darwin’s method, even if it takes on rather a holistic pragmatic character. The current of sympathy in his reading of Darwin would be strengthened, Robert D. Richardson, Jr. argues, by virtue of the Englishman’s self- description as “a person fond of natural history” rather than as “scientist” “like the self-important Agassiz.” Donald Worster in NATURE’S ECONOMY insists we recognize Thoreau’s acceptance of natural selection itself, and not just “transformations of nature” or “evolutionary development of species.” In fact it was far from a question of passive acceptance on Thoreau’s part, for HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN he needs Darwinian natural selection and adaptation to make sense of his own observations. In a JOURNAL entry for December 24, 1853, he describes one of his great insect loves — the cocoons of the Cecropia moth, Hyalophora cecropia: In Weston’s field, in springy land on the edge of a swamp, I counted thirty-three or four of those large silvery-brown cocoons within a rod or two, and probably there are many more about a foot from the ground, commonly on the main stem —though sometimes on a branch close to the stem— of the alder, sweet-fern, brake, etc., etc. The largest are four inches long by two and a half, bag-shaped and wrinkled and partly concealed by dry leaves, —alders, ferns, etc.,— attached as if sprinkled over them. This evidence of cunning in so humble a creature is affecting, for I am not ready to refer it to an intelligence which the creature does not share, as much as we do the prerogatives of reason. This radiation of the brain. The bare silvery cocoons would otherwise be too obvious. The worm has obviously said to itself: “Man or some other creature may come by and see my casket. I will disguise it, will hang a screen before it.” Thoreau gives some of the finest accounts in literature of the interrelation between plant and insects outside of Rachel Carson. Only Samuel Taylor Coleridge is comparable among literary writers. They are a product and vindication of the integrity of Thoreau’s observations, and in this he anticipates the development of evolutionary ecology in the 1960s and 1970s when the charge of his deterioration into diffuseness after WALDEN began to be laid to rest. Thoreau is the only American writer other than the very different (and neglected) John Dos Passos, and the more subtle Hart Crane and Nabokov, who would experience the full force of Freud’s dictum that “science betokens the most complete renunciation of the pleasure-principle of which our minds are capable.” Indeed, Thoreau’s writing, like Walt Whitman’s, is shot through with the fertile, if from a national standpoint double-edged, Emersonian dialectic whereby “the common things in American nature could be realized as American only when turned to use as representative instances in a universal prospect.” Rather like Alice, we are deemed now to have come out the other side of objectivism. Quantum evolution has all but dissolved even the palpable world of nature, at least theoretically, although we do continue to eat in order to sustain our incorporating carapace. More transformatory than Galileo’s revolution, quantum mechanics has elevated the minuscule —derived from Planck’s constant h— into the apotheosis of the infinitesimal. Matter and its shadow anti-matter ultimately dwell in a twilight asymmetric world of quarks and anti-quarks, even muons and taus. I hope by the end of this study to have shown that the organically relatively minute Insecta play a similar and hitherto underestimated role in the Thoreau opus. And then travelling with the author in the spirit of “The HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Concord nights are stranger than the Arabian nights” (PJ1:37), I will argue that a reading of the full length of Thoreau, for so long obstructed by hang-overs from the lop-sided literary concentration on WALDEN, suggests a destabilizing of scientific and philosophical writ parallel to Planck’s transformation of the minuscule. Because Thoreau worked from the nub of the human in its natural historical habitat, overthrowing history in its species specific sense, he touched a pulse that connects science with the more subjective arenas without being plain either. In 1860, largely due to the efforts of Louis Agassiz, the Museum of Comparative Zoology was opened at Harvard. He was the main proponent of American opposition to Darwin, maintaining the immediate intervention of an intelligent Creator, and arguing that although there was no organic progress, yet all creations of God were not simultaneous. His training in continental idealist philosophy during his education in Switzerland meant that, like the German zoologists, he was unable to solve the fundamental problems of evolutionary theory, despite his remarkable advances in the collection of data. Herbert Hovenkamp summarizes Louis Agassiz’s and Georges Cuvier’s concept: During each new geologic epoch, God created a new set of species to replace a previous set that had died off or been destroyed. Each new creations consisted of organisms more sophisticated than those in the previous creation. Bonnet, a far greater prose writer than Cuvier, put matters in terms that Thoreau up until at least 1854 could have identified with, primarily in its metamorphic aspect: “Who could deny that the Great Power had inscribed in the first Germ of each animal the succession of corresponding Germs released in the diverse Revolutions the planet subsequently underwent? ... Our world appeared in the form of a larva or caterpillar: it is at present a chrysalis; the final Revolution will remake it in the form of a butterfly.” Nevertheless Louis Agassiz’s theory of “special creation” left space for progress in evolution —though not for natural selection— so that his pioneering fieldwork was not impeded by theoretic reservations but carried forward by his interest in the habits of animals. Not least this was because, as Agassiz wrote in AN ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION: “Species, genera, families, etc. exist as thoughts, individuals as facts.” His great specialism, embryology, was carried into his concept of evolution as the unfolding of already present characteristics. The totality of empirical data was, for Agassiz, the externalization, or uncovering, of preformed ideas. Facts were real enough, but development was an illusion. Changes were simply a manifestation of an original type, not anything new. Darwinian method and what today is known as population thinking turn this upside down, so that only individual phenomena have reality while the type is an a priori imposition. His biographer writes, “In an era of transition in the interpretation of HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

nature, Agassiz lived as a man who provided basic insights for the new framework of natural history.” Thoreau himself not only collected for Agassiz, but he read Agassiz’s PRINCIPLES OF ZOOLOGY, taking it out of the library for three months in 1851. There were four principal phases of expansion of American zoology: • Descriptive natural history prior to 1847, including early studies on the classification of the habits of animals, characteristic of zoological work up to the arrival of Agassiz in 1846. During this period the Smithsonian and Yale Scientific School were founded, and Scientific American began publication. The root of zoology in the Americas, though, lies with two Hispanics —Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478-1557) and the Jesuit, Joseph de Acosta (1540-1600)— along with the report on Walter Raleigh’s expedition by Thomas Hariot in A BRIEFE AND TRUE REPORT OF THE NEW FOUND LAND OF VIRGINIA. • 1846-1870: Agassiz’s work on the structure and developmental history of animals. This was the heyday of morphology and embryology. • By 1873, Agassiz had retreated considerably before Darwin, though long before this his colleague, the botanist Asa Gray, was working with Darwin. As Robert V. Bruce succinctly summed up the expansion of these years: “in egalitarian and republican America, scientists knew that the common man also had to be reached in order to get money.” So during the 1870s, natural selection was taken on board. But it is worth recalling that as early as the 40s Gray’s studies of the plants of the Galapagos and the Hawaiian Islands had suggested to him that one species might edge into another by minute variation. Later, Darwin’s method encouraged Gray to apply statistics to the study of plant distribution leading in turn to the naturalist’s letter to Gray in September 1857 that was later evidence in confirming his priority over Alfred Russel Wallace in developing the theory of natural selection. And it was the stimulus from Darwin that “set Gray upon the track of his greatest scientific accomplishment — the identification of elements of the flora of eastern North America and those of Japan as a single flora stretching around the earth in the Arctic regions in the period before the Ice Age.” Indeed Asa Gray was a key figure in ensuring there was not the general opposition to Darwin in America such as occurred in France. It took the most influential scientist of the 1840s and 1850s, James Dwight Dana, until 1870 to accept Darwin, while Agassiz signaled his retreat with “Evolution and Permanence of Type” in 1873. Dana was “one of the few evangelicals who would, in a single lifetime, run the entire gamut from Agassiz to Darwin, going through a nervous breakdown in the process and finally HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN concluding sometime in the 1870s that even natural selection could be consistent with divine cosmogony.” By the 1870s the situation was prepared for the establishment of Entomology as a separate discipline. • 1890 onwards. Experimental biology and the advance in knowledge of organisms through experiment became the core of Zoology. Thoreau, then, was coming into being as a writer, after Emerson’s prompting, at a time of formation in those sciences that touch on what remained in the first part of the nineteenth century, Natural History. Coleridge’s distinction between reason and understanding was a crux for all natural historians. Where understanding concerned itself with the collection of empirical data through observation, reason was a faculty for divining the spiritual in the factual, an organ of the mind similar to those of sight and hearing. This reason or intuition could therefore hold its own with those fields of knowledge thrown up by the fragmentation of natural history taking place by mid-century with the rise of geology, chemistry and biology which were seeking out the “`imponderables’ such as heat, light and electricity,” together with the inner functioning of the human body. The Mendelian revolution and the role of genetics were not available until 1866, so the observer of nature was largely on his or her own. But even at an early stage of his growth as writer there are important parallels between Thoreau’s emphasis on detached, minute observation and Darwin’s field methods. For whereas Louis Agassiz and Dana saw ontogeny (individual development) recapitulating phylogeny (species development), the evolutionists argued that ontogeny programmed phylogeny. As Hovenkamp encapsulates this difference: “the individual in other words, determined the history of his species through his own variations above and beyond the final development of his ancestors.” Emerson summed up the freedom of the observer to capture the ontogenetic detail in his “Humanity of Science” in 1836 immediately prior to Thoreau’s emergence as a writer when he wrote a touch optimistically — “Our microscopes are not necessary. They are a pretty toy for chamber philosophers, but nature has brought every fact within reach of the unarmed eye somewhere.” However Thoreau was to forge a very fruitful relationship with an early American entomologist who also transformed the library at Harvard College — Thaddeus William Harris. Thomas Say’s AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGY, published from Philadelphia between 1824 and 1828 was the first accurate account of the insect species of North America. Say’s biographer, Patricia Tyson Stroud, explains the impetus driving this massive project An important effect of the War of 1812 was stimulation of the evolving sense of American identity. Say and most of his peers in the natural sciences in Philadelphia felt this incitement acutely and would demand that dependence on European savants give way to American expertise in establishing American science. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN The phase of Thomas Say’s brief dominance in American entomology was characterized by a development of a broader system of classification than the Linnaean, and included naturalists such as Thomas Nuttall. However the growth of the universities led to the subject’s gradual integration as a discipline, though even as late as the 1840s the only formal course on offer was a single term of natural history, taken at the end of a senior year. It was taught by Thaddeus Harris at Harvard, and consisted of 17 lectures on botany. Thoreau was fortunate enough to take the course in the first year it was offered. Already Harris had taken steps to further entomology by making it useful to farmers and other agriculturalists. The state of Massachusetts published his manual on insect pests in 1841, REPORT ON THE INSECTS OF MASSACHUSETTS INJURIOUS TO VEGETATION. As a result of this he became the first paid entomologist in American, and a revised edition appeared in 1852, with a further re-issue in a special edition in 1862 with splendid woodcuts. So Harris balanced between the utilitarian lines on which entomology was to develop, and a genuine natural historical concern with the subject. The first full-time appointment went to Asa Fitch, the New York state entomologist from 1853. Townend Glover at the Bureau of Agriculture held the first federal position between 1854 and 1878. As Bruce puts it: “Beyond the work of Harris, Fitch, and Glover, little more was done in applied entomology during the antebellum period.” Harris himself complained that his work suffered from the relative poverty of his collection of insects, but meantime the Smithsonian through the efforts of the Pennsylvanian zoologist, Spencer F. Baird, had developed a fine collection from scratch by 1853. Much later John Henry Comstock founded Cornell entomology which would provide the base for the greatest of all literary entomologists — Vladimir Nabokov. The classification of species was now beginning to separate the professionals from the amateur naturalists. The initial practitioners were first and foremost classifiers concerned with the adult of the insect species, and not with their life histories. As Leland Howard says: “When the economic entomologist began to appear he was frowned down upon by the systematic worker and considered on the whole to be an unscientific dabbler of the farmer class.” (The “economic entomologist” is the American equivalent of the British “applied entomologist,” both concerned with the application of insect studies to agricultural improvement). The process of specialization begins in earnest in mid-century. The word “scientist” is only coined while Thoreau was in college, while the word “ecologist” is introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. There was now not only the theory of Darwin to consider, but the issue of methods of classification and indeed collection, together with the development of the instruments of observation. Natural History, though, was one of the last studies to be incorporated into bureaucratic systematization, allowing some space for the autodidact polymath. Thoreau would concur with Whitman’s reservations about “the love of the precise, the exact, the methodical” which “is characteristic of the age of HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN machinery, of a commercial and industrial age like ours.” For Concord was becoming a suburb of Boston during Thoreau’s lifetime: Concord was a commercially thriving agricultural community and regional crossroads in which cows and chickens greatly outnumbered native wildlife and meadows overwhelmed forests. Massachusetts was leading a national and global revolution in industrialization and social change. So “the emerging world was no community at all but a riot of impersonal forces (those of the literary market included) in which a dissenting voice was not even met with disapproval because it went unheard.” This social revolution paradoxically provided the favorable conditions for insects around Walden. At this time, the landscape was a patchwork thanks to “selective Indian burning [which] thus promoted the mosaic quality of New England ecosystems, creating forests in many different states of ecological succession.” Later New England became more afforested, and the annual cuttings which had served as a type of coppicing —what Thoreau called sproutlands— and had been favorable to the dappled sunshine and shade together with forest rides beloved of lepidoptera and other insects, were abandoned. The early colonists had little trouble from injurious insects, so had no cause to make systematic strides in this field. Nonetheless in the TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY for 1771 — a Society derided by later Natural History Societies as non-specialist — Colonel Landon Carter of Virginia produced “Observations concerning the Fly Weevil, that Destroys the Wheat, with Some Useful Discoveries and Conclusions regarding the Propagation and Progress of that Pernicious Insect, and the Methods to be Used to Prevent the Destruction of the Grain by It.” In 1789 William Bartram read “Observations on the Pea Fly or Beetle, and Fruit Curculio” to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture.” (The Curculio is a type of firefly). And in 1810 he encouraged his great-nephew, Thomas Say, to begin collecting beetles and butterflies, essential of course at this phase of the evolution of entomology, not least because Harris would find his lack of a European collection a great hindrance for comparative work. Bartram on ephemerae is, as will become clear, in the Thoreau tradition of insect writing if a touch more rapturous: The importance of the existence of these beautiful and delicately formed little creatures, whose frame and organization are equally wonderful, more delicate, and perhaps as complicated as those of the most perfect human being, is well worth a few moments contemplation. The effect of science as a whole upon Thoreau’s writing is similar to that in Whitman as described by John Burroughs: “Science fed Whitman’s imagination and made him bold; its effects were moral and spiritual.” Later, Thaddeus Harris was to attend the lectures of Professor William Dandridge Peck (1763-1834) at Harvard College. Peck’s pioneering entomological HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN article was “The Description and History of the Canker Worm” (1795), describing the species as Phalaena vernata, the spring cankerworm. So a considerable body of preparatory work had been done before the Revolutionary War of 1812. And in 1812, the Academy of Natural Sciences was founded at Philadelphia. This was overtaken a little later by the Boston Society of Natural History, though “even in Boston the rise of Harvard, which helped societies in the short run overshadowed and so diminished them in the long run.” Thoreau became a corresponding member of the Society in 1850, and when he died his occupation was given not as “Writer,” but “Natural Historian.” There was a distinctly political edge to the growth of Entomology in ante-bellum America. Around Boston in the 1810s, injurious insects began to attract attention. The Hessian fly was particularly troublesome to wheat farming. And another species damaged squashes and pumpkins to such an extent that the Bostonians named it the Gage bug, after the much hated British general in charge of forces of occupation. Other introductions caused much annoyance and some agricultural damage, such as the black fly, which Thoreau missed when he returned from Maine to Concord as having disappeared with the moose. A domestic pest was the European cockroach, while it was as early as 1666 that the cankerworm had appeared. Colonial gardens brought “grasshoppers, garden fleas, maggots, and various species of ‘worms’ and ‘flies.’” Thoreau’s principal collaborator in identification of insects — and other creatures— at Concord was Thaddeus William Harris. Born at Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1795, Harris’s father (also Thaddeus Harris) had been a minister in the Congregationalist Church and, like his son after him, had been Librarian at Harvard College, albeit briefly. He wrote the technically exacting THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BIBLE, published in 1820. Here again the sciences grow organically from the religious foundations of America. Raymond Stearns points to the fact that it is Cotton Mather who “was the first native born colonial to advance beyond the status of a mere field agent for European scientists in the New World and to demonstrate a genuine philosophical approach to science, with scientific ideas and hypotheses of his own, in addition to the contribution of specimens and observations of natural phenomena.” But science for Mather remained a revelation of the splendor of God, as indeed was the case with Jonathan Edwards, often for Emerson and early on for Thoreau. Indeed the first full-time entomologist, Asa Fitch (1809-78) embodied this (apparent) paradox, the scientist who was at the same time a pious Christian. Doctor Fitch’s daughter recounted the incident when evening family prayers were interrupted by a moth attracted to the light. “Here was a dilemma. The spirit of the naturalist, however, overcame the religious feeling and in a somewhat shamefaced manner the entomologist reached out for his butterfly net and captured and bottled the specimen before finishing his chapter.” The specimen proved new to science. The MEMOIR OF THADDEUS WILLIAM HARRIS, M.D. by Edward D. Harris observes that “as early as 1820 he was closely studying the habits of certain insects and plants in connection with his medical pursuits.” On HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN November 10, 1823, Thomas Say — who named 1,500 new American insects — is writing to Harris: entomology, which had so long been condemned in this country as a frivolous pursuit, seems now to be almost able to command that attention which its importance demands, & the formidable depredations of the insect race upon the vitals of the agricultural interest, compel the farmer to devote much attention to their manners and habits which he would not otherwise have deigned to bestow. This may be said to be the triumph of Entomology over the prejudices of the selfish. Again in 1823 —and 1823 and 1824 seem to be key dates in entomology’s development in America— Harris published his first economic paper, “Upon the Natural History of the Salt Marsh Caterpillar.” In 1832 he put together a catalog of American insects that included some 2,300 species. As William and Mabel Smallwood summarize: “the large number of accurate descriptions of insects, and the emphasis upon their economic importance, opened up a field in which the natural scientist was to be replaced by the technical entomologist, a type which has continued to the present time.” His father’s work undoubtedly had a major influence upon Harris’s career in that as the Memoir remarks “both were men of untiring industry in their respective pursuits, of equal thoroughness, precision, and accuracy in their literary work.” Emerson, in thrall to Friedrich von Schelling’s Natur-Philosophie, pontificated — utilizing philosophical idealism to prop up snobbism — to the effect that while those under continental influence were comparing tribes and kingdoms, “Peck & Harris count the cilia & spines on a beetle’s wing.” It was, of course, such attention to detail that was crucial to Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s sketching of the theory of evolution by genetic variation and natural selection. Nevertheless by January 1853 Thoreau is writing in his Journal: “Being at Cambridge day before yesterday — Sibley told me that Agassiz told him that Harris was the greatest entomologist in the world, and gave him permission to repeat the remark” (PJ5:417). However Thoreau would bring to his records and observations of insects something lacking in all but the very greatest entomologists — vision. So much so that Franklin Benjamin Sanborn reports that one of Harvard’s natural historians —clearly Thaddeus William Harris— remarked to Bronson Alcott that “if Emerson had not spoiled him, Thoreau would have made a good entomologist.” As I hope will emerge from this study, in this respect alone Thoreau can be spoken of in the same breath as Nabokov who had the greatest understanding of natural phenomena in the sense that Laura Dassow Walls uses the term — facts as the crossroads of the objective and subjective. He would have understood entirely what Nabokov meant when he said “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.” Excerpts HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Thoreau read “Origin of the Species” on its first appearance in America, acquiring it from the Town Library early in 1860, and immediately gave it his assent. This was no foregone expectation. It required characteristic Thoreau boldness and courage since Emerson’s circle included the main proponent of ‘special creation,’ Louis Agassiz, who had the prestige of Harvard College, which he was involved in expanding, behind him. Prior to his reading of Origin, Thoreau had become interested in Darwin’s Journal of Researches during the Voyage of HMS Beagle (1839), which was a talisman of his travels around Concord, and Thoreau’s “copious notes attest to his extraordinary prescient sympathy with many of Darwin’s interests, including his minutely detailed observational techniques, his fascination with change in nature, even his writing style and the formal construction of the book, which was half travelogue and half naturalist’s journal.” In fact it was far from a question of passive acceptance on Thoreau’s part, for he needs Darwinian natural selection and adaptation to make sense of his own observations. In a Journal entry for December 24, 1853, he describes one of his great insect loves--the cocoons of the Cecropia moth, Hyalophora cecropia: “In Weston’s field, in springy land on the edge of a swamp, I counted thirty-three or four of those large silvery-brown cocoons within a rod or two, and probably there are many more about a foot from the ground, commonly on the main stem--though sometimes on a branch close to the stem--of the alder, sweet-fern, brake, etc., etc. The largest are four inches long by two and a half, bag-shaped and wrinkled and partly concealed by dry leaves,--alders, ferns, etc.,--attached as if sprinkled over them. This evidence of cunning in so humble a creature is affecting, for I am not ready to refer it to an intelligence which the creature does not share, as much as we do the prerogatives of reason. This radiation of the brain. The bare silvery cocoons would otherwise be too obvious. The worm has obviously said to itself: ‘Man or some other creature may come by and see my casket. I will disguise it, will hang a screen before it’” (J6:23). Thoreau gives some of the finest accounts in literature of the interrelation between plant and insects outside of Rachel Carson. Only Coleridge is comparable among literary writers. They are a product and vindication of the integrity of Thoreau’s observations, and in this he anticipates the development of evolutionary ecology in the 1960s and 1970s when the charge of his deterioration into diffuseness after Walden began to be laid to rest.In 1860, largely due to the efforts of Louis Agassiz, the Museum of Comparative Zoology was opened at Harvard. He was the main proponent of American opposition to Darwin, maintaining the immediate intervention of an intelligent Creator, and arguing that although there was no organic progress, yet all HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN creations of God were not simultaneous. His training in continental idealist philosophy during his education in Switzerland meant that, like the German zoologists, he was unable to solve the fundamental problems of evolutionary theory, despite his remarkable advances in the collection of data. Herbert Hovenkamp summarizes Agassiz’s and Cuvier’s concept: “During each new geologic epoch, God created a new set of species to replace a previous set that had died off or been destroyed. Each new creations consisted of organisms more sophisticated than those in the previous creation.” Bonnet put matters in terms that Thoreau up until at least 1854 could have identified with, primarily in its metamorphic aspect: “Who could deny that the Great Power had inscribed in the first Germ of each animal the succession of corresponding Germs released in the diverse Revolutions the planet subsequently underwent? ... Our world appeared in the form of a larva or caterpillar: it is at present a chrysalis; the final Revolution will remake it in the form of a butterfly.” The growth of the universities led to [Entomology’s] gradual integration as a discipline, though even as late as the 1840s the only formal course on offer was a single term of natural history, taken at the end of a senior year. It was taught by Thaddeus Harris at Harvard, and consisted of 17 lectures on botany. Thoreau was fortunate enough to take the course in the first year it was offered. Already Harris had taken steps to further entomology by making it useful to farmers and other agriculturalists. The state of Massachusetts published his manual on insect pests in 1841, Report on the Insects of Massachusetts Injurious to Vegetation. As a result of this he became the first paid entomologist in American, and a revised edition appeared in 1852, with a further re-issue in a special edition in 1862 with splendid woodcuts. So Harris balanced between the utilitarian lines on which entomology was to develop, and a genuine natural historical concern with the subject. The first full-time appointment went to Asa Fitch, the New York state entomologist from 1853. Townend Glover at the Bureau of Agriculture held the first federal position between 1854 and 1878. As Bruce puts it: “Beyond the work of Harris, Fitch, and Glover, little more was done in applied entomology during the antebellum period.” Harris himself complained that his work suffered from the relative poverty of his collection of insects, but meantime the Smithsonian through the efforts of the Pennsylvanian zoologist, Spencer F. Baird, had developed a fine collection from scratch by 1853. Much later John Henry Comstock founded Cornell entomology which would provide the base for the greatest of all literary entomologists — Vladimir Nabokov. in 1812, the Academy of Natural Sciences was founded at Philadelphia. This was overtaken a little later by the Boston Society of Natural History, though “even in Boston the rise of Harvard, which helped societies in the short run overshadowed and so diminished them in the long run.” Thoreau became a HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN corresponding member of the Society in 1850, and when he died his occupation was given not as “Writer,” but “Natural Historian.” It was, of course, such attention to detail that was crucial to Darwin’s and Wallace’s sketching of the theory of evolution by genetic variation and natural selection. Thoreau would bring to his records and observations of insects something lacking in all but the very greatest entomologists — vision. So much so that Franklin Benjamin Sanborn reports that one of Harvard’s natural historians –clearly Thaddeus Harris– remarked to Bronson Alcott that “if Emerson had not spoiled him, Thoreau would have made a good entomologist.” As I hope will emerge from this study, in this respect alone Thoreau can be spoken of in the same breath as Nabokov who had the greatest understanding of natural phenomena in the sense that Laura Dassow Walls uses the term — facts as the crossroads of the objective and subjective. He would have understood entirely what Nabokov meant when he said “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

2003

Charles Darwin, who had early in life read his grandfather’s long poem about evolution and been unconvinced, late in life had authored a short biography of his grandfather. That biography was in this year, for the first time, published in full: 54 Charles Darwin. THE LIFE OF ERASMUS DARWIN. First unabridged edition. Edited by Desmond King-Hele (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

54. Although the grandson, in the initial publication of THE LIFE OF ERASMUS DARWIN, was attempting to restore the reputation his grandfather had earned, his daughter Henrietta edited his manuscript and shortened it by some 16%, improving it in many respects but also censoring parts she considered too frank or too salacious for its Victorian audience. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

2009

September 8, Tuesday: A most interesting article by Carl Zimmer led off the “Science Times” section of The New York Times. The article was a report on research into the origins of flowering plants, driven both by the discovery of new fossils and by the development of a new field of research, paleobotany, one based upon genetic experiments in laboratories. In Henry Thoreau’s day, Charles Darwin hadn’t been able to understand flowers because the mechanics of genetics hadn’t yet been sufficiently worked out. The best available work in the field had been done in 1790 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his “Urpflanze” in VERSUCH DIE METAMORPHOSE DER PFLANZEN ZU ERKLÄREN (AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PLANTS). Well, guess who was greatly impressed by Goethe’s theorizing? —Henry. That was where Henry’s section on the sandbank, in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, came from. Goethe had formed the idea that nature creates the novelty of various apparently greatly different plant structures in a basically simple manner, and began to suspect that what we need to do, in order to understand this complexity of development, is recover that underlying simplicity of origin. His grand concept had been that all plant organs, including the various parts of the various flowers, all had started out as leaves. From first to last, the plant is nothing but a leaf.

Half a century later, while Darwin was still puzzling, Thoreau was incorporated Goethe’s insight into WALDEN. Thoreau’s version was: The maker of this earth but patented a leaf. http://www.nytimes.com/pages/science/

The newspaper article mentioned that Darwin had failed to grasp Goethe’s profound insight but –this goes without saying– it omitted to mention that a contemporary of Darwin, Thoreau, had not failed to grasp Goethe’s profound insight. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

WALDEN: Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the PEOPLE OF principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth WALDEN but patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls springs from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is “in full blast” within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, –not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS CHAMPOLLION GEOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

2012

Eric Rittmeyer and coauthors described Paedophryne amauensis, a 7.7-millimeter-long frog from New Guinea, as “the smallest known vertebrate species.” PALEONTOLOGY

After examining fossil feathers with an electron microscope and comparing them to modern feathers, a team of American and Chinese scientists announced that Microraptor, a 4-winged dinosaur from China, probably had an iridescent sheen to its feathers.

Frank Glaw and coauthors described several new species of miniature chameleons from Madagascar. Among the tiniest was Brookensia micra, with juveniles small enough to stand on the head of a match.

Chinese and Canadian researchers announced Yutyrannus huali, a distant T. rex relative in which the 1.5-ton adult sported long filamentous feathers.

Extrapolating from contemporary cows, a team of British scientists contended that sauropod flatulence, releasing the potent greenhouse gas methane, played a significant role in the Mesozoic’s warm, moist climate.

Walter Joyce and coauthors announced a new discovery in Germany’s Messel Pit, a famous Eocene fossil site. The discovery includes multiple pairs of fossil turtles, trapped in the act of copulation.

An international team indicated that aphids might be able to engage in a photosynthesis-like process, using carotenoids for the “capture of light energy.”

A team of British and US scientists describe the color mechanism of a brilliant iridescent blue African fruit, Pollia condensata. Like some beetle shells, butterfly wings, and bird feathers, the fruit gets its color from microscopic structures rather than from pigments — but the fruit’s coiled strands of cellulose are like nothing previously discovered in nature.

Clive Finlayson and coauthors argued that Neanderthals collected bird feathers for personal adornment.

Studies in Science and Nature described two groups of ancient tools from South Africa. One group, estimated to be about 71,000 years old, had small bladelets likely made from heat-treated stone, while the other group, estimated to be about 500,000 years old, had spear tips.

Gregory Retallack argued that Ediacaran fossils long thought to be marine animals were actually land-based, and were lichens. His argument pushed back the beginnings of land-based life by 65,000,000 years. Anticipating “sharp intakes of breath in the paleontological community,” Nature set up a comment forum.

While sorting and relocating the Cambridge Herbarium a university librarian found some fungi and seaweed wrapped up by Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle — in newspaper dated 1828. THE SCIENCE OF 2012 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

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

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

Prepared: February 21, 2014

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 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 WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

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

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