Alexander Von Humboldt People Mentioned in Cape Cod

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD AND THE MAINE WOODS:

FRIEDRICH WILHELM KARL HEINRICH ALEXANDER,

FREIHERR VON HUMBOLDT1

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

1. NOTA BENE: Thoreauvian “wildness” relates to Humboldt’s “nature is the domain of liberty” in Cosmos. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

CAPE COD: Humboldt, speaking of Columbus approaching the New PEOPLE OF World, says: “The grateful coolness of the evening air, the CAPE COD ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of flowers, wafted to him by the land breeze, all led him to suppose (as we are told by Herrera, in the Decades) that he was approaching the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. The Orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers which, according to the venerable tradition of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise, to water and divide the surface of the earth, newly adorned with plants.” So even the expeditions for the discovery of El Dorado, and of the Fountain of Youth, led to real, if not compensatory discoveries.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

THE MAINE WOODS: Humboldt has written an interesting chapter on the primitive forest, but no one has yet described for me the difference between that wild forest which once occupied our oldest townships, and the tame one which I find there to-day. It is a difference which would be worth attending to. The civilized man not only clears the land permanently to a great extent, and cultivates open fields, but he tames and cultivates to a certain extent the forest itself. By his mere presence, almost, he changes the nature of the trees as no other creature does. The sun and air, and perhaps fire, have been introduced, and grain raised where it stands. It has lost its wild, damp, and shaggy look, the countless fallen and decaying trees are gone, and consequently that thick coat of moss which lived on them is gone too. The earth is comparatively bare and smooth and dry. The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea. The surface of the ground in the Maine woods is everywhere spongy and saturated with moisture. I noticed that the plants which cover the forest floor there are such as are commonly confined to swamps with us, — the Clintonia borealis, orchises, creeping snowberry, and others; and the prevailing aster there is the Aster acuminatus, which with us grows in damp and shady woods. The asters cordifolius and macrophyllus also are common, asters of little or no color, and sometimes without petals. I saw no soft, spreading, second-growth white-pines, with smooth bark, acknowledging the presence of the wood-chopper, but even the young white-pines were all tall and slender rough-barked trees.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

“A YANKEE IN CANADA”: It is but a few years since Bouchette declared that the country ten leagues north of the British capital of North America was as little known as the middle of Africa.... Humboldt, speaking of the Orinoco, says that this name is unknown in the interior of the country; so likewise the tribes that dwell about the sources of the St. Lawrence have never heard the name which it bears in the lower part of its course. It rises near another father of waters, –the Mississippi,– issuing from a remarkable spring far up in the woods, called Lake Superior, fifteen hundred miles in circumference; and several other springs there are thereabouts which feed it. It makes such a noise in its tumbling down at one place as is heard all round the world. Bouchette, the Surveyor- General of the Canadas, calls it “the most splendid river on the globe”; says that it is two thousand statute miles long (more recent geographers make it four or five hundred miles longer); that at the Rivière du Sud it is eleven miles wide; at the Traverse thirteen; at the Paps of Matane, twenty-five; at the Seven Islands, seventy-three; and at its mouth, from Cape Rosier to the Mingan Settlements in Labrador, near one hundred and five miles wide.... Humboldt says that the river Plate, which has the broadest estuary of the South American rivers, is ninety-two geographical miles wide at its mouth; also he found the Orinoco to be more than three miles wide at five hundred and sixty miles from its mouth, but he does not tell us that ships of six hundred tons can sail up it so far, as they can up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, — an equal distance. If he had described a fleet of such ships at anchor in a city’s port so far inland, we should have got a very different idea of the Orinoco.... We have not yet the data for a minute comparison of the St. Lawrence with the South American rivers; but it is obvious that, taking it in connection with its lakes, its estuary, and its falls, it easily bears off the palm from all the rivers on the globe; for though, as Bouchette observes, it may not carry to the ocean a greater volume of water than the Amazon and Mississippi, its surface and cubic mass are far greater than theirs.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

A WALK TO WACHUSETT: The needles of the pine, All to the west incline. Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travelers; whether with Homer, on a spring morning, we sat down on the many-peaked Olympus, or with Virgil and his compeers roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, or with Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and Teneriffe. Thus we spoke our mind to them, standing on the Concord cliffs:— With frontier strength ye stand your ground, With grand content ye circle round, Tumultuous silence for all sound, Ye distant nursery of rills, Monadnock, and the Peterboro’ hills; ... Upholding heaven, holding down earth, Thy pastime from thy birth, Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other; May I approve myself thy worthy brother!

At length, like Rasselas, and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we resolved to scale the blue wall which bounded the western horizon, though not without misgivings that thereafter no visible fairyland would exist for us. But we will not leap at once to our journey’s end, though near, but imitate Homer, who conducts his reader over the plain, and along the resounding sea, though it be but to the tent of Achilles. In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where men go and come. The landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest traveled.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT

“WALKING”: The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT HOMER HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

“WALKING”: Where on the Globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our states, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe: in the United States there are more than 140 species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther — farther than I am ready to follow him, yet not when he says, “As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World.” “The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station, towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown Ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his foot prints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe and reinvigorated himself — “Then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” — So far Guyot.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT ARNOLD HENRI GUYOT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1769

September 14, Thursday: Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin.2

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Cape Cod and The Maine Woods 2. For commentary on this natural philosopher in relation to Henry Thoreau’s science, consult: Laura Dassow Walls. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1777

The father of Alexander von Humboldt and of his older brother Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt (who would not only become the next Freiherr von Humboldt, but also in his own right become a language scholar, philosopher, diplomat, and educational reformer) died when little Alex was only eight. His mother, who was a Huguenot, would have to raise the boys in a single-parent home. But no, this wasn’t in a basement flat in a Berlin tenement, it was at the family estate at Tegel.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Cape Cod and The Maine Woods HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1789

In Paris, Alexander von Humboldt was participating in the French Revolution. It would only be after this early political adventure that he would begin a scientific career as a geologist and mining engineer, and also study botany and art, and entertain literary ambitions. During this year, while both Humboldt and Bonaparte were 20 years of age, he would meet the man whose life and adventures would inspire his own — having joined his brother Wilhelm at the University of Göttingen, he there encountered Georg Forster.

July: Alexander von Humboldt went to Paris in order to participate in the French Revolution.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Cape Cod and The Maine Woods HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1790

Alexander von Humboldt left the University of Göttingen to travel down the Rhine with Georg Forster, and on to London.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Cape Cod and The Maine Woods HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

July 14, Wednesday: In France this was, of course, the 1st anniversary of Bastille Day. Alexander von Humboldt and Georg Forster were in Paris for the celebration. Humboldt would return to his studies. Forster would join the revolution and, four years later, die in disgrace and misery.

At some point during this year a federal grand jury, in its first session, returned an indictment of murder against James DeWolf (1764-1837) of Bristol, son of Captain Mark Anthony DeWolf (1726-1792), for having thrown

The Family Crest

a woman overboard when she exhibited symptoms of the small pox. The indictment read “James DeWolf, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil ... did feloniously, willfully and of his malice aforethought, with his hands clinch and seize in and upon the body of said Negro woman ... and did push, cast and throw her from out of said vessel into the Sea and waters of the Ocean, whereupon she then and there instantly sank, drowned and died.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

(The murderous James DeWolf, protected of course by his influential uncle Simeon Potter and other family members, would never be required to answer to this indictment.)

TRIANGULAR TRADER In Providence, Rhode Island, per Volume 22, page 290 of the town records, John T. Clark on behalf of the firm of Clark & Nightingale, distillers engaged in the Triangular Trade, manumitted “Quam a Negro Man late a Servant to us for life”:

^ÇÉã tÄÄ `xÇ àÉ ã{É à{xyx cÜxyxÇàá y{tÄÄ vÉÅx à{tà jx VÄtÜ~x 9a|z{à|ÇztÄx ÉycÜÉä|wxÇvx |Ç à{xVÉâÇàç ÉycÜÉä|wxÇvx`xÜv{tÇàá? yÉÜ9 |Ç VÉy|wxÜtà|ÉÇ Éy à{x fâÅ Éy Y|yàç fÑtÇ|y{ `|ÄÄxw WÉÄÄtÜá àÉ âá |Ç [tÇw Ñt|w uç dâtÅ t axzÜÉ `tÇ Ätàx t fxÜätÇà àÉ âá yÉÜ Ä|yx 9 yÉÜ w|äxÜá Éà{xÜ zÉÉw VÉÇy|wxÜtà|ÉÇá âá à{xÜxâÇàÉ ÅÉä|Çz? {täx ÅtÇâÅ|ààxw 9 áxà yÜxx? à{x át|w axzÜÉ `tÇ ÇtÅxw dâtÅ {xÜxuç yÉÜ âá 9 ÉâÜ [x|ÜáA exÄ|ÇÖâ|á{|Çz tÄÄ VÄt|Å ÉÜ g|àÄx àÉ à{x yt|w axzÜÉ `tÇ {|á áxÜä|vxá ÉÜ _tuÉâÜ yÉÜxäxÜ {xÜxtyàxÜ \Ç j|àÇxyá ã{xÜxÉy jx {täx {xÜxâÇàÉ áâuyáÜ|uxw ÉâÜ atÅxá tá à{x Y|ÜÅ Éy ÉâÜ [Éâyx à{|á yÉâÜàxxÇà{ Wtç Éy ]âÄç? |Ç à{x çxtÜ Éy ÉâÜ _ÉÜw bÇx à{ÉâytÇw fxäxÇ {âÇwÜxw 9 a|Çxàç‰‰ VÄtÜ~9a|z{à|ÇztÄx j|àÇxyá ftÅTÜÇÉÄw

SLAVERY We wonder at the magnificent gentility of these white folks engaged in the Triangular Trade, in setting free this man of color who was their servant for life, and we also wonder — how old might Quam have been at the point at which he was thus made free? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1794

Friedrich Schiller established a close friendship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Under Goethe’s influence, Schiller would quickly return to playwriting and, during the period that followed, would be composing WALLENSTEIN’S CAMP (1798), THE PICCOLOMINI (1799), WALLENSTEIN’S DEATH (1799), MARY STUART (1800), THE MAID OF ORLEANS (1801), and WILLIAM TELL (1804).

Upon joining the Weimar circle Alexander von Humboldt persuaded Goethe to begin his study of comparative anatomy, Goethe recommended his new friend Schiller for professor of history at the University of Jena, and Schiller authored his “Ode to Joy” (An die Freude) — which is now the union song of the new European Union.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Cape Cod and The Maine Woods HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1795

Friedrich Schiller was publishing his young friend and ally Alexander von Humboldt’s allegorical essay “The Vital Force: or, the Rhodian Genius” in the Die Hören journal he would be putting out from this point into 1797.

In this year Friedrich Schiller’s “The Veiled Statue at Sais” sponsored typical 18th-Century philosophical resignation of the “presume not to scan” variety. The poem is based upon a transcription from an Egyptian temple devoted to Isis at the dividing line on the Nile between upper and lower Egypt, at the city of Sais, in which there is an inscription warning against attempts to look upon divinity naked: “I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my peplum [this was a loosely draped body covering held by shoulder pins, a normal form of female attire] no mortal has withdrawn.” (In the divinity legend, Isis had veiled herself when she sneaked into the palace to reassemble the parts of her dismembered husband.) The moral that is drawn is that we are simply to admire the works of God, rather than have the presumption to suppose we might be able to understand them. This attitude taken by Schiller in this poem is congruent with the general attitude of German Romanticism, which he would adopt in his LETTERS ON AESTHETIC EDUCATION, in which he would berate philosophy and natural philosophy for their attempts to make rents in the necessary veil surrounding Truth. This, we will find, is noncongruent with the attitude that Alexander von Humboldt, and Henry Thoreau, would take toward the lifting of the veil of Isis:

WALDEN: With a little more deliberation in the choice of their PEOPLE OF pursuits, all men would perhaps become students and observers, WALDEN for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

ISIS EGYPT

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Cape Cod and The Maine Woods HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1796

The death of the mother of the brothers Humboldt (Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt) brought them the freedom of their inheritance. Whereupon Alexander set out to discover “the harmony in nature.”

ECOLOGY

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Cape Cod and The Maine Woods HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1797

Alexander von Humboldt reviewed a series of experiments he had been conducting with muscle tissue and electricity and concluded that he needed to give up on the conviction, common among the German Naturphilosophen, that a vital force or soul inhabited all organic matter and that therefore if nature could be comprehended this must be “apriori, by means of the intuition only, without scientific methodology.”3

This caused much Sturm und Drang in Humboldt’s relationship with Friedrich Schiller, who had published his young friend and ally’s allegorical essay “The Vital Force: or, the Rhodian Genius” in his Hören in 1795. Ever afterward, Humboldt would be deeply critical of the “neglect of available factual data in preference to wide speculation”4 exhibited by the German transcendentalists.

Friedrich Schlegel, in the first of his “Ideas,” disagreed with Schiller by suggesting “that the veil of Isis be torn, that the secrets be made public. He who cannot endure the sight of the goddess must flee or perish.” (“Die Foderungen und Spuren einer Moral, die mehr wäre als der praktische Teil der Philosophie, werden immer lauter und deutlicher. Sogar von Religion is schon die Rede. Es ist Zeit den Schleier der Isis zu zerreen, und das Geheime zu offenbaren. Wer den Anblick der Göttin nicht ertragen kann fliehe oder verderbe.”)

3. Nelkin 20. 4. Van Dusen 53. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Here is the Isis statue at the Vatican — and notice how she is attired: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1799

In this year Friedrich Schiller took up residence in Weimar, where he and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would collaborate to make the Weimar Theatre one of the most prestigious theatrical houses in Germany. He was creating his play THE PICCOLOMINI. The German playwright again, as he had in 1795 in his poem “The Veiled Statue at Sais,” asserted, in his THE WORDS OF ILLUSION, that “no mortal hand will lift the veil of truth.” This was typical Germano-Romantic philosophical resignation of the “presume not to scan” variety: we are simply to admire the works of God, rather than have the presumption to attempt to understand them. Philosophy and natural philosophy are simply wrong in their attempts to make rents in the necessary veil surrounding Truth. Needless to say, this was very much at odds with what we will find to be the attitude that Alexander von Humboldt, and Henry Thoreau, would take toward the lifting of the veil of Isis:

ISIS EGYPT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt named the Jurassic System, after the Jura Mountains.

This time period will later be identified as the “middle period” for the dinosaurs (hence the name for the movie, “Jurassic Park,” the dinosaurs represented in which actually lived during quite other periods). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

June: After being frustrated in his plans several times by wartime blockades of Europe, Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was exploring what to him and to other Europeans such as his lover and traveling companion Aimé Bonpland was an entire New World.

The task would continue into 1804. This is the voyage he would describe in the 1820s in his RELATION HISTORIQUE or PERSONAL NARRATIVE, the three published volumes of which would appear in French in 1814, 1819, and 1825 (he would destroy the fourth volume of his manuscript), and the first PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS OF THE NEW CONTINENT DURING THE YEARS 1799-1804 (London: Longman et al., 1822). First he traced the waterway of the Orinoco in Venezuela, and he was the first of the explorers who have penetrated deep inland in that area, mapping and collecting.

I shall collect plants and fossils, and with the best of instruments make astronomic observations. Yet this is not the main purpose of my journey. I shall endeavor to find out how nature’s forces act upon one another, and in what manner the geographic environment exerts its influence on animals and plants. In short, I must find out about the harmony of nature. (Kellner 233)

BOTANIZING HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1800

Alexander von Humboldt, traveling in Cuba and the West Indies, noted that whites there represented but 17% of the human population. He would warn that the “great mass of the planters of the West Indies” were harboring an illusion of invincibility, whereas inevitably “the political preponderance will pass into the hands of those who have strength to labour, will to be free, and courage to endure long privations.” His warnings, as thus belatedly published, had been heeded by the British but not by the French.

Bear in mind that C.L.R. James, in THE BLACK JACOBINS: TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE AND THE SAN DOMINGO REVOLUTION (New York: Vintage, 1963, 2d Edition revised) has said, of this “Pearl of the Antilles” colony at the end of the 18th Century, that “On no portion of the globe did its surface in proportion to its dimensions yield so much wealth as the colony of St. Domingo.” Haiti simply was not, in this period, the sorry, sordid place we now see. Or, at least, it was not so for a very privileged group of white and mulatto persons. For them, it was a mansion in which they indulged themselves in extravagant wealth and privilege. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1801

In this year and the following one, Alexander von Humboldt would be exploring in the region which would become Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1802

By scaling Mt. Chimborazo’s 20,561 feet to the elevation of 19,280 feet and describing what we now know to be oxygen deprivation, Alexander von Humboldt became the first white man to get so high, an enviable distinction which he would retain for nearly the next three decades. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1803

March: Alexander von Humboldt sailed from the northern coast of South America to Acapulco in Central America and then journeyed through Mexico City to Vera Cruz. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1804

Word was out that being an American was a virtual passport into the presence of the great man Alexander von Humboldt, brother of the great man Wilhelm, Freiherr von Humboldt.

From this year into 1806, Washington Irving was touring in Europe. As we might have anticipated, he was one of the earliest American visitors to collect this specimen. Did he solicit the autograph? –Did he proffer a blank check? –Did he press the actual flesh?

In Rome, Irving met Washington Allston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

March: Alexander von Humboldt sailed from Vera Cruz on the Mexican coast to Havana, Cuba, and on to Philadelphia during the month of May. To do this was to brave the British naval blockade of the coast of the US, of course, but in the event Humboldt had more trouble with the weather: he came close to losing everything, in a shipwreck off the coast of Georgia.

May: For Alexander von Humboldt to have taken a detour into continent of North America, on his way home from his five-year expedition into South and Central America and the islands of the Caribbean, he took risks that have been described as astounding: over and above nearly losing everything in a hurricane and shipwreck off the Georgia coast), Humboldt was gambling with the British fleet, which he knew to be blockading the US coast. In his letter of introduction to President of the United States Thomas Jefferson, Humboldt had offered that he “could not resist the moral obligation to see the United States and enjoy the consoling aspects of a people who understand the precious gift of Liberty.” But in addition to witnessing the American experiment in democracy in point of comparison with the political systems of New Spain, Humboldt said he wished to pay his respects because Jefferson’s writings, actions, and liberal ideas had “inspired me from my earliest youth.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

May 23, Wednesday: Alexander von Humboldt arrived in Philadelphia and received a reply to his letter to President Thomas Jefferson. Yes, the American president who had just purchased the Louisiana territory and sent out the explorers Lewis and Clark did have a “lively desire” for an audience with the renowned German explorer of South and Central America.

Here is how Professor Laura Dassow Walls has described the social whirl of Boswash, the best accounts of HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

which in English, she points out, have been provided by Helmut De Terra:5 But before Jefferson could satisfy his “lively desire” to hear Humboldt’s information, it was Philadelphia’s turn. Charles Willson Peale and the American Philosophical Society treated Humboldt and his companions, Aimé Bonpland and Don Carlos Montúfar, to a round of visits with the area’s leading scientists and intellectuals: Alexander Wilson, the Bartrams, John Bachman, and others. Peale and two other members of the American Philosophical Society accompanied the party to Washington DC, where Peale had arranged the social agenda. Humboldt stayed with Jefferson in Monticello for some days; in Washington he began friendships as well with Albert Gallatin (the Secretary of State) and James Madison (Secretary of the Treasury), among others. Upon Humboldt’s return to Philadelphia, Peale had him sit for a hurried portrait. By late June, Humboldt was back at the dockside, waiting to sail to Bordeaux; the ship, delayed one week, finally sailed on July 6. Thus Humboldt’s visit to the United States lasted only six weeks. WILLIAM BARTRAM Humboldt would spend the remainder of his life, and the remainder of his fortune, in publishing the results of his expedition, including a popular account, translated as PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS (1814, 1819, 1825).

August: Alexander von Humboldt and his companion Aimé Bonpland arrived back in Paris after their travels in the New World. Over the succeeding 32 years Humboldt would publish 30 volumes in regards to the scholarly investigations he had conducted during this expedition, entirely depleting his share of the family fortune.

5. “Alexander von Humboldt’s Correspondence with Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103(1959): 783-806; “Studies of the Documentation of Alexander von Humboldt.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102(1958): 136-41, 560-89. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1805

In this year the first of 30 volumes of the “Voyages of Humboldt and Bonpland” was going through a press in Germany. These volumes would include the 1st accurate maps and records of climate, geology, and measurements of the earth’s magnetic field, pertaining to the western hemisphere. THE SCIENCE OF 1805

Humboldt’s personal observations of many different plant habitats resulted in his important generalizations about the relationships of plants to their native climates. He is probably best known for making ecological correlations between the different plant habitats observed with rising elevation and the changing habitats seen when traveling from the tropics to arctic regions. Publication of his ESSAI SUR LA GÉOGRAPHIE DES PLANTES... may be considered the beginning of the science of ecology. PLANTS

At some point during this year of a battle at Trafalgar, which was a British naval victory, and one at Austerlitz, which was a victory of the Napoleonic army over Austro-Russian forces, Napoléon Bonaparte met this scientist Alexander von Humboldt (or vice versa). The words he dropped on him were with regard to the interests of Josefina Tascher Bonaparte, who was a mulatto from the Caribbean region:

You are interested in botany? So is my wife.

This is a response very similar to the response which another ruler who ruled by ruling, President Richard Milhouse Nixon, would generate when he was warned by a visiting delegation of computer scientists that there would be a problem with computer dates as of the end of the millennium — unless something was promptly done to correct the Pentagon’s computer code. Our leader responded:

Something’s wrong with my TV. Can you fix it?

This may be an opportune point at which to introduce a fabled exchange between the First Consul and Pierre- Simon Laplace, because it was in this year that Laplace completed the 4th volume of his MÉCHANIQUE CÉLESTE and so presumably it would have been at this point that he presented this astronomical work. Napoléon asked some question about the role of deity in the universe, such as whether he needed to presume as Newton had presumed that God would from time to time adjust the machinery of the heavens to keep everything running HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

in synch with everything. Laplace’s famous response went something like this: “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”

During this year Napoleon not only crowned himself as King of Italy but also abandoned the French revolutionary calendar — which might have offered our visiting delegation of computer scientists a hint as to what to do in regard to our Y2K situation but in fact did not.

The peak of the Sumatra/Salem pepper traffic; exports alone totaled 7,000,000 pounds in one year. It was at about this point that the body of a sailor was brought back home curing in the pepper, and upon arrival was uncovered as still looking “very natural.” SPICE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1806

Winter: During this grim winter in Berlin, Alexander von Humboldt was delivering the series of lectures which would become, in 1808, ANSICHEN DER NATUR, “views” or portraits of regions which he had experienced during his travels. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1807

New Jersey women were deprived of their right to vote, with this repeal being sponsored by a male politician who, a decade earlier, had been voted against by a female voting block. FEMINISM

A most interesting illustration appeared in this year as the frontispiece of the 1st volume of Alexander von 6 Humboldt’s AL. VON HUMBOLDT UND AIMÉ BONPLAND’S REISE. According to Alexander Gode-von Aesch’s NATURAL SCIENCE IN GERMAN ROMANTICISM (NY: Columbia UP, 1941; reprint NY: AMS Press, 1966, pages 97-108), this naked male carrying a lyre is a period illustration of the spirit of poetry, and we notice that Mr. Naked Guy is raising a cloth covering which had been draped over a statue representing the feminine mystery of nature. The figure used in this period illustration in order to represent the spirit of poetry happens to be

Bertel Thorwaldsen’s (1770-1844) “Genius of Poetry” statue. The figure used in this illustration for the goddess of nature is the famous statue of the cult of Diana of Ephesus, in which the female figure’s upper torso is completely covered with lumps very suggestive of female breasts (actually, to the ancient Greek worshipers at this shrine, the lumps on the upper torso of the statue represented not the breasts of a human female but the testicles of sacrificed bulls, ostensibly hung around the goddess’s neck as an offering, but this may well have been being misunderstood in the early 19th Century). A cloth drape is carefully positioned over Mr. Naked Guy’s genitals so that we don’t have to preoccupy ourselves with whether he is being adequately sexually

6. This 1st volume was Humboldt’s IDEEN ZU EINER GEOGRAPHIE DER PFLANZEN NEBST EINEM NATURGEMÄLDE DER TROPENLÄNDER,... (Tübingen, bey F.G. Cotta; Paris, bey F. Schœll, 1807), offered in homage to Göthe’s 1790 METAMORPHOSIS DER PFLANZEN (which, as you can see, figures in the illustration — I have artificially heightened the contrast of the lettering so that you can make it out). BOTANIZING HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

aroused at that upon which he is gazing.

ISIS EGYPT

THE SCIENCE OF 1807

1808 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Alexander von Humboldt’s series of Berlin winter lectures about the regions which he had experienced in his travels was published as ANSICHTEN DER NATUR.

His brother Wilhelm von Humboldt began to organize a new university in Berlin, that would be known initially as Universität zu Berlin and then as Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität and then as Universität unter den Linden and now as Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Philip Karl Buttmann of Joachimsthalsche Gymnasium in Berlin was selected to be a professor at this new university (he would soon be selected also as classics tutor for the prince royal, successor to the throne). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1814

The 1st volume of Alexander von Humboldt’s RELATION HISTORIQUE or PERSONAL NARRATIVE, the next two published volumes of which would appear in French in 1819 and 1825 (he would destroy the 4th volume of his manuscript), and the 1st English version of which would appear in 1822 as the well-known radical Helen Maria Williams’s PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS OF THE NEW CONTINENT DURING THE YEARS 1799-1804 (London: Longman et al.).

THE SCIENCE OF 1814

Patrick Syme’s revised version of Abraham Gottlob Werner’s 1774 VON DEN ÄUßERLICHEN KENNZEICHEN DER FOßILIEN (ON THE EXTERNAL CHARACTERS OF FOSSILS, OR OF MINERALS), entitled WERNER’S NOMENCLATURE OF COLOURS, WITH ADDITIONS, ARRANGED SO AS TO RENDER IT USEFUL TO THE ARTS AND SCIENCES. ABRAHAM G. WERNER HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1817

Edward Everett was the first American to receive the PhD of a German university. This was Göttingen, at which Alexander von Humboldt had studied.

Karl Theodor Christian Friedrich Follen was a primary organizer of the 1st Wartburgfest at the Schloss Wartburg near Eisenach, Germany. He did not himself attend the student festival, but was the author of political essays, poems, and patriotic songs espousing violence –up to and including tyrannicide– for the preservation of our freedoms. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1819

Publication of the 2nd volume of Alexander von Humboldt’s RELATION HISTORIQUE or PERSONAL NARRATIVE, the 1st published volume of which had appeared in French in 1814 and the 3rd published volume of which would appear in 1825 (he would destroy the 4th volume of his manuscript), and the 1st English version of which would appear in 1822 as the well-known radical Helen Maria Williams’s 2-volume PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS OF THE NEW CONTINENT DURING THE YEARS 1799-1804 (London: Longman et al., 1822). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1821

Since Waldo Emerson began reading Alexander von Humboldt, and referring to him in his JOURNAL, at this point, it seems likely that he had been told of this explorer and author by his professor Edward Everett while at Harvard College.

Emerson would come to own many of Humboldt’s books and it is likely that it was in these volumes that Henry Thoreau first encountered the explorer (he would by 1853 have studied Humboldt’s major works).

Publication, in this year, by the firm of W. Allason etc., in London, of a new edition of the dozen volumes of Edward Gibbon’s THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (this is the edition that HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

would find its way into the personal library of Emerson). GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL I GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL II GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL III GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL IV GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL V GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL VI GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL VII GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL VIII GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL IX GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL X GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL XI GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL XII At the end of the journal entries for 1820 and 1821, Emerson listed his recent readings in Oriental materials: “Cudworth (containing many quotations from the Neo-Platonists); Zendavesta (apud Gibbon).”

http://www.sacred-texts.com/zor/ ZOROASTER HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

As he completed his senior year, Waldo wrote a Bowdoin Prize essay “The Present State of Ethical Philosophy.” From this year into 1825, having acquired the status of college graduate, he would be teaching school. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1822

Publication of the English translation of the first two volumes of Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt’s RELATION HISTORIQUE or PERSONAL NARRATIVE 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). The first published volume of Humboldt’s narrative had appeared in French in 1814 and the second in 1819. (The third volume would appear in French in 1825 and he would destroy the fourth volume while still in manuscript.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1823

January: Although, before this date, Alexander von Humboldt was certainly known within scientific, political, and literary circles in the USA, for reviews of his work had been appearing in British magazines from at least 1810 and many of these, no doubt, were seen by American eyes, he seems not to have come into his own as a personage in the popular press until his COSMOS began appearing in English translation in 1845. An American who had followed the Edinburgh Review or the Quarterly Review (London) could have had an understanding of the nature of Humboldt’s writings and scientific theories without having glimpsed the volumes. Laura Dassow Walls has, however, been able to locate only one major article about Humboldt in the pre-COSMOS years in America, and it was an omnibus review of Humboldt’s works by Edward Everett in his North American Review of this date. In his review he took the tone of an educator introducing the American public

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW MASTER INDEX

to an important but hitherto little-known Continental writer. He acknowledged the unavailability of the volumes of Messrs. de Humboldt and Bonpland in America, “and few persons, who have not had occasion HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

particularly to inform themselves, are acquainted with the precise state of a series of works, not yet completed, which constitutes already an era in American history, natural and civil.” Works “so important to America” deserved “to be known and prized in this country”; accordingly, he offered an account of Humboldt’s travels and an enumeration of the principle works published to that date. Though billed as a review of the two latest volumes in the series covering the American explorations, VII and VIII, Everett apologized after twenty-five

pages for not having left himself room to do so and instead offered his readership a “specimen, instructive as well as amusing, of their contents.” Subsequently, in the years from 1845 through 1860, it would have been possible for an American to know who Humboldt was and what he stood for through reviews, accounts, gossip, biographies and memorials appearing not only in the North American Review and the New Englander but also such venues as the Methodist Quarterly and Godey’s Lady’s Book. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1825

Publication of the 3rd volume of Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt’s RELATION HISTORIQUE or PERSONAL NARRATIVE in French. The first two volumes, which had appeared in French in 1814 and 1819, had already been translated into English 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). Humboldt would destroy the 4th volume of this autobiographical account of travels while still in manuscript.

February 18, Friday: The Mendelssohn family purchased a new mansion in Berlin, at 3 Leipzigerstrasse. This would become a meeting place for the Mendelssohn circle, including Heinrich Heine, Professor G.W.F. Hegel, and Alexander von Humboldt. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1826

2d edition of Alexander von Humboldt’s ANSICHEN DER NATUR book of essays.

In the last volume of his unfinished PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS, Humboldt delivered himself of his radical political opinions in POLITICAL ESSAY ON THE ISLAND OF CUBA. In the following year his patron, King Frederick William III, would on account of this explosive radicalism force Humboldt to return from Paris to Berlin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1827

Because of the explosive radicalism of the POLITICAL ESSAY ON THE ISLAND OF CUBA of the previous year, Alexander von Humboldt’s patron, King Frederick William III, forced him to return from Paris to Berlin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1828

September 18, Thursday: Felix Mendelssohn’s cantata Begrussung for solo voices, male chorus, winds, timpani, cellos and basses to words of Rellstab was performed for the initial time, in Berlin (it had been commissioned by Alexander von Humboldt for performance at a meeting of natural scientists).

The following is a snippet from Charles Haskell’s REMINISCENCES OF NEW YORK BY AN OCTOGENARIAN: A traveller from Cincinnati reached here in the unprecedented time of seven days; so remarkable was this considered that it was noticed and commented upon in the papers....

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 18th of 9 M / Silent small but comfortable meeting Recd P [per?] Mail this Afternoon a very pleasant letter from our dear John — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1829

At the age of 22 Arnold Henri Guyot relocated from Neuchâtel to Berlin, where he would attend the lectures of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Johann August Wilhelm Neander, Eilhard Mitscherlich, Karl Ritter, Ernst Wilhelm Theodor Herrmann Hengstenberg, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Heinrik Steffens, and Heinrich Wilhelm Dove. Alexander von Humboldt would familiarize him with the Berlin Botanical Garden.

April 11, Saturday: According to an almanac of the period, “Unsuccessful attack upon a Russian position near Trato on the Danube, by the Turks.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

April 12, Sunday: Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber was elected a member of the Institut, replacing Francois Joseph Gossec.

Alexander von Humboldt began a scientific expedition into uncharted regions of Siberia.

According to an almanac of the period, “Capitulation of the city of Guatemala, after a long siege and some hard fighting, to the army of St. Salvador under General Morazan.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

April 13, Monday: Nicholas Chopin wrote to Minister Stanislas Grabowski and the Board of Administration for funds to allow his gifted son Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin to study abroad. Although the Minister favored the request, the Board was reluctant to “squander public funds to encourage such artists.”

In England, a Roman Catholic Relief Bill passed the House of Lords. Catholics would be relieved from certain political disabilities under which they had labored for many years: they would be allowed to vote, to sit in Parliament, and to hold (almost) any military, civil, and corporate office.7

Esther Hibner, who had murdered a child, had such strength even at the age of 61 that they needed to get her into a straight jacket in order to take her to the gallows.

7. A list of other categories of dissenters from the Church of England, excepting Papists and persons denying the Trinity, had been passed on May 24, 1689, and confirmed in 1711. The excepting of persons denying the Trinity had been repealed on July 21, 1813, leaving only the Papists to suffer these political disabilities. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

OTHER WOMEN HANGED IN ENGLAND DURING THE YEAR

Date Name Age Place of execution Crime

07/03 Jane Jameson Newcastle Matricide

22/07 Ann Chapman 28 Newgate Attempted Murder

17/08 Kezia Westcombe 32 Exeter Murder

19/08 Catherine Wright (Stewart) Edinburgh Murder (hanged with her husband) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1831

Charles Darwin embarked on the Beagle voyage around the globe, returning to London in 1836. THE SCIENCE OF 1831

With the help of Alexander von Humboldt, Louis Agassiz got his first professorship, the chair in natural history at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. (However, all his life Agassiz would insist that each species was a separate and distinct “thought of God” and that God repeatedly rethinks organic life on earth – a series of independent and special creations without hereditary continuity– each time it is destroyed in a natural cataclysm.) BIOLOGY EVOLUTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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).

October: William MacGillivray’s THE TRAVELS AND RESEARCHES OF ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT; BEING A CONDENSED NARRATIVE OF HIS JOURNEYS IN THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS OF AMERICA, AND IN ASIATIC RUSSIA: — TOGETHER WITH ANALYSES OF HIS MORE IMPORTANT INVESTIGATIONS. MACGILLIVRAY ON HUMBOLDT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1833

The publication of Alexander von Humboldt’s TRAVELS AND RESEARCHES, which Waldo Emerson would purchase and read. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1838

The project of exploration of the entire northern continent of the “New World” was one that necessitated an army, which it got in this year in a Corps of Topographical Engineers enabled by tax funding from Congress. 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”8 was being conducted by Army officers.

Lieutenant John Charles Frémont, a protégé of Alexander von Humboldt, led three of these expeditions across the western regions of the North American continent, but there were numerous others:

8. Goetzmann, William H. NEW LANDS, NEW MEN, AMERICA AND THE SECOND GREAT AGE OF DISCOVERY. NY: Viking, 1986. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

The United States Naval Exploring Expedition of Captain Charles Wilkes surveyed the Northwest coast in their global circumnavigation, from 1838 to 1842. Other military explorers were sent out to map the West, especially after the annexation of Texas in 1845, and the beginning of the war with Mexico in 1846. [FOOTNOTE: William H. Goetzmann singles out Lt. William H. Emory’s march to Santa Fe and California as the most spectacular work to come out of the war; the detailed report included the first accurate map of the Southwest and illustrations by the expedition artist John Mix Stanley. From 1848 to 1855, Emory supervised the Mexican Boundary Survey, which not only laid down the astronomically determined boundary and generated a new series of maps, but also included “a tremendous regional survey of the geology, flora, fauna, archaeology, and Indian tribes,” plus consideration of railroad routes.] In the largest concerted effort of all, beginning in 1853 the Army conducted a series of surveys of possible transcontinental railroad routes, which resulted in thirteen volumes of reports amounting to what Goetzmann calls “a very early ecological study, monumental in scope.” Indeed, all of the expeditions resulted in lavishly illustrated Congressional reports. Between 1840-60, sixty works were issued on the West, plus fifteen more on the global naval expeditions, the reports of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and others. Goetzmann estimates the cost to have been between one-quarter and one-third of the entire federal budget, in what amounted to an “incredible federal subsidy,” critical to the professionalization of American science, and unmatched since. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1840

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

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

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

American continent. Between 1840 and 1860, the US government published 60 enormously expensive multi- volume double-folio or oversize treatises on the American West, in addition to 15 treatises on global naval expeditions and uncounted reports of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Very little of our incessant contemporary dialog about the “free enterprise system” dates back to that era, and the cost of all this seems to have amounted 1 1 to from /4th to /3d of the annual federal budget without having in any way set off alarm bells in the minds of the ideologues of the right of the political spectrum!9 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

9. NASA, eat your heart out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

“Humboldt’s Children”:10 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.)

10. Goetzmann, William H. NEW LANDS, NEW MEN, AMERICA AND THE SECOND GREAT AGE OF DISCOVERY. NY: Viking, 1986 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

(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 CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1841

The Russians sold their Fort Ross near Bodega Bay on the west coast of the North American continent to Johann August Sutter. Lieutenant John Charles Frémont, a protégé of Alexander von Humboldt and not a lover of colored people, arrived at Sutter’s Fort on the western coast of the continent. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1842

July 19, Tuesday-22, Friday On July 19th, Henry Thoreau and Margaret Fuller’s brother Richard F. Fuller began a hike from Concord to Mount Wachusett “who like me / standest alone without society,” between Worcester and Fitchburg, via Princeton, studying Virgil’s GEORGICS along the way so Richard would be ready for his matriculation exams that fall at Harvard College, and while on his way back home on July 22d, after parting from his walking companion, he passed the sites on the Nashua and the North Nashua streams of Lancaster (now part of Leominster State Forest) at which the ransom of Mistress Mary Rowlandson by John Hoar of Concord had occurred on May 3, 1676. CAPTIVITY AND RESTAURATION

Later he would write about this, as “A WALK TO WACHUSETT”.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

For a detailed description of that walking trip, consult William Howarth’s commentary, which is merely excerpted here.

On July 19, 1842, Thoreau left Concord with Richard Fuller, a Harvard undergraduate and the brother of Margaret Fuller, Thoreau’s editor at The Dial. The hikers had knapsacks, some provisions, and a tent. The tent was heavy, so they took turns carrying it. Starting before dawn, they marched over twenty-five miles to a village (now West Sterling) on the Stillwater River. In the morning, they ascended Wachusett and camped there overnight, enjoying a fine sunrise view on July 21. Then they descended and walked to Harvard, where they spent the night. On July 22 they parted company, Fuller going home to Groton and Thoreau back to Concord....

Howarth has reconstructed the jaunt for those who do not understand that this is history and are therefore condemned to repeat it: the two young men left Concord on Lexington Road, which is now MA2A, and went down Main Street, which is now MA62, to the Concord Turnpike, which is now MA2, to Acton (MA111) to Willow Street, took West Acton Road to Stow, walked via MA117 to Bolton, via MA62 through Sterling, via MA140 to West Sterling, via MA140 to Wachusett Mountain State Reservation, on the Bolton Pond Trail to Old Indian Trail, and to the summit. Thence they walked via MA140 to Sterling, via MA62 to Still River, via MA110 to Harvard, and Thoreau continued via MA2 to Concord while Fuller went home to Groton. But as the TV stunt person says, don’t you try this without expert assistance:

For instance, Helen Gere Cruickshank has commented: Though the climb to the summit of Wachusett Mountain is popular today, few would care to walk from Concord to the base of the mountain as Thoreau did. The unpaved road which made a pleasant footpath a century ago is now paved and congested with roaring cars. But once on the mountain trails, Red-eyed Vireos, Phoebes, Robins, and Cuckoos can be heard in spring and summer. From the summit, the surrounding country looks like a relief map and the climber sees many of the landmarks which birds must note as they travel above them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

The hour of departure on July 19 was early; Fuller said they were underway “about quarter to five.” The small stream where they rested ... is Great Brook, which crosses MA 117 just east of Meadow Road. Fuller said they cut the walking staves in a woods “between Concord and Stowe.” Their hilltop view of Wachusett ... was possibly from Wataquadock Hill (600').... Wachusett Reservation is a year-round state park, replete with Visitor Center (maps and displays) and auto road. Carriage roads first appeared here in the 1850s; today’s paved surface is a two-mile, one-way loop. The road is free, easy to “climb,” and just two hours’ driving time from greater Boston. Hence, Wachusett is one of the busiest mountains in North America. A quarter of a million visitors ascend each year; ten thousand a day come during the fall foliage season. Not all of them leave behind “the gross products of plains and valleys.” Near the lower gate a sign reads: NO SKATEBOARDING ON ROAD. Walking time via Thoreau’s route, the Bolton Pond and Old Indian trails, is about forty-five minutes. Changes in mountain vegetation since his visit reflect the species succession that occurs on undisturbed land. The sugar maples he saw have given way to hemlocks, part of the climax forest. Fallen hemlock needles, rich in tannin, create an acidic “duff” or humus for evergreen shrubs like mountain laurel and rhododendron. This soil is thick and damp, but easily eroded by rain and hikers. Along the path, most tree roots are exposed, making dark gnarled shapes against the gray-green lichens on rock shelves and ledges. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

The trail is steep and wet, but at intervals it crosses flat shoulders open to the sky. These “benches” are forested or farmed patches where trees were cleared early in the twentieth century. Recovery is slow at this elevation: the new growth is small and wind-stunted. At 1,200 feet, the trail enters a large artificial clearing, the West and Long John ski trails. Both trails form long slashes of meadow, attracting flowers and birds, but also human traffic. New trails and chair lifts are planned, enough to accommodate 1,900 skiers an hour. The exact elevations of Wachusett (2,006’) and Princeton (1,175') differ from Thoreau’s figures. Wachusett is not above the normal tree line, yet its summit is bare. Three hundred years of erosion, partially induced by fires and storms, have removed the thin topsoil and exposed sandstone, shale, and gray-banded gneiss. On the same observatory foundation that Thoreau climbed, Harvard University built a weather station in the 1850s. A long succession of summit houses (offering meals and beds) ensued; last in this line was a refreshment stand, now [1982] boarded up. A fire tower and microwave antenna are the main structures today. Monadnock (3,165') is twenty- eight miles northwest.... Camping is no longer permitted on Wachusett, but the auto road is open at sunrise and sunset, when low-angled light provides the best views. Thoreau’s cold, windy night in July was no exaggeration. Evening temperatures can drop to 50 degrees, and gusts of 20 m.p.h. will produce a wind- chill equivalent of 32 degrees. The “immense landscape” Thoreau saw after sunrise ... was about forty-five miles in diameter. Maximum visibility attained has been 120 miles, but today’s hazy, polluted air usually reduces the view to twenty or thirty miles. To the east is Boston, with its prominent Hancock tower; north and west are Monadnock and Hoosac, where Thoreau was to travel in 1844. He was mistaken to think of these mountains as parts of a common ... “range,” but accurate in describing their similar configurations.... If America’s subsequent history has not confirmed this optimism, Wachusett still poses the alternatives Thoreau saw. East of the mountain are Fitchburg and Lowell, once thriving industrial centers but now fallen into decay. West and southwest are many acres of forest and wildlife sanctuary, a protected land where “progress” may never come. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1845

Publication of Volume I of Alexander von Humboldt’s KOSMOS, which would fill the final years of his life. The German edition of Volume I sold out in two months and the work was immediately translated into almost all the European languages. By 1851, Humboldt could record that 80,000 copies had been sold. In this series he was attempting to present for the general reader a view of the Cosmos as it was understood by contemporary science, and for Humboldt this included as most important portions not only 1.) the history of humankind’s relationship with nature, but also 2.) the history of humankind’s portrayal of nature. The undertaking would fill five volumes initially published from 1845 through 1862. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Portland was founded near the junction of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers, in the Oregon territory. The area was named after the city of Portland, Maine, which had been established for more than two centuries.

Brevet Captain John Charles Frémont published his report on his trip to Oregon territory, REPORT OF THE EXPLORING EXPEDITION TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS IN THE YEAR 1842, AND TO OREGON AND NORTH CALIFORNIA IN THE YEARS 1843-’44 (Washington: Blair and Rives), about the wild, wild West where nature reigned supreme:

He then turned toward California, again with Kit Carson as his scout.

Henry Thoreau read this newly published adventure of Alexander von Humboldt’s protégé, printed by the US government at enormous expense in an edition of 10,000 copies — and would confess in WALDEN that it had made him ashamed of himself: “I asked where it was then that I lived.”

WALDEN: My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, PEOPLE OF but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was WALDEN beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast, “Being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.” I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.

MÎR CAMAR UDDÎN MAST JOHN CHARLES FRÉMONT HOMER HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1846

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

“one of the DDs”

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

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1847

Publication of Alexander von Humboldt’s KOSMOS, which Waldo Emerson would purchase and read. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1848

The bereaved Edgar Allan Poe, his life falling apart, wrote the poems “Ulalume” and “Annabel Lee,” and the story “Hop-Frog,” and began a long prose poem entitled EUREKA in which he was going to unite his consciousness with the cosmos, or, at least, with the KOSMOS of Alexander von Humboldt — to whom “with very profound respect” he would dedicate this work. Our poet was one guy who was going to hold it together if it could possibly be held together! As a study on the nature and origin of the universe this 150-page prose poem on what today we would term “cosmology” was remarkably prescient regardless of its author’s personal lack of qualifications to engage in scientific research. The conventional understanding of that day notwithstanding –that the universe was static and eternal– Poe depicted it as something that had exploded into being out of a “primordial particle” in “one instantaneous flash” (this, of course, is the Big Bang theory, that would not become received wisdom until the 1960s). The universe was held to be expanding, and the prospect was offered that it might one day collapse (this is the inference that Alexander Friedmann would in 1922 derive from Albert Einstein’s equations). Poe toyed with the idea of something like black holes. He provided a correct appreciation of Olbers Paradox, the issue of why the sky is dark at night rather than suffused with light: the universe is finite both in space and in time. For more of an appreciation of Poe’s musings, consult Tom Siegfried’s STRANGER MATTERS: UNDISCOVERED IDEAS ON THE FRONTIERS OF SPACE AND TIME (Joseph Henry Press, 2002). Poe wrote to a friend during this year that

“What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science. I say this calmly — but I say it.”

A rich and well-connected and middle-aged Providence, Rhode Island widow and poet, Friend Sarah Helen Power Whitman, addressed a Valentine’s Day poem to this eligible widower poet cosmologist, whom she was unaware that she had met three years earlier — and he replied with his poem “To Helen” and they became engaged on condition that he stop drinking. Sarah’s mother, who had been burned by the behavior of Sarah’s father, insisted that her daughter protect herself by obtaining from Poe a prenuptial agreement turning her property over to her mother. Scandalous stories were at the time in circulation about the behavior of the poet, who, apparently, in the middle of all this, staged a suicide gesture. (This was the year in which he coined our term “normality,” evidently as an oppositional term to whatever it was that he personally was representing.) Poe continued to drink (in fact the photo above was taken on Winchester Street in Providence on the day after a binge), so Sarah called off the wedding. Poe would level accusations against her family and, less than a year later, would attempt another such marriage, this time with Sarah Elmira Royster — and would shortly thereafter be found unconscious in Baltimore and would die. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1849

Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos: SKETCH OF A PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE UNIVERSE (London: Printed for Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, Paternoster Row; and John Murray, Albemarle Street). COSMOS: SKETCH OF... COSMOS: SKETCH OF...

His ASPECTS OF NATURE, IN DIFFERENT LANDS AND DIFFERENT CLIMATES; WITH SCIENTIFIC ELUCIDATIONS. 11 TRANSLATED BY MRS. SABINE (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard). ASPECTS OF NATURE

At some point during this year or the next, Henry Thoreau would be reading the E.C. Otté translation of COSMOS and taking notes in his Literary Notebook. From this point forward he would study, as it was published, everything by Humboldt and virtually everything written about him, avoiding only the early summaries and waiting only for the publication of full versions where necessary. The E.C. Otté and Henry G. Bohn translation of Humboldt’s ANSICHTEN DER NATUR book of essays began to appear in London at this point, as VIEWS OF NATURE, OR CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE SUBLIME PHENOMENA OF CREATION, WITH SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS (H.G. Bohn would complete this edition in January 1850). The 3rd German edition, much enlarged, of ANSICHTEN DER NATUR would occasion a translation, in London, by Longman, Brown, Green and Longman’s, and by John Murray, by Mrs. Sabine, titled ASPECTS OF NATURE, IN DIFFERENT LANDS AND DIFFERENT CLIMATES; WITH SCIENTIFIC ELUCIDATIONS. This would be the edition which Waldo Emerson would purchase and read, although the translation by Mrs. Sabine would be republished for the American audience in Philadelphia in the following year, by Lea and Blanchard.

11. These printings made available electronically by Google Books may not be precisely the imprints that Sattelmeyer alleges were studied by Thoreau — but I have noticed cases in which Sattelmeyer’s tabulation of these printings has seemed simplistic. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

March: Sometime prior to April, Waldo Emerson put the following into his JOURNAL:

Now that the man was ready, the horse was brought. the TELEGRAPHY timeliness of this invention of the locomotive must be conceded. To us Americans, it seems to have fallen as a political aid. We could not else have held the vast North America together, which now we engage to do. It was strange, too, that when it was time to build a road across to the Pacific —a railroad, a shiproad, a telegraph, & in short a perfect communication in every manner for all nations— ’twas strange to see how it is secured. The good World-Soul understands us well. How simple the means. Suddenly California soil is spangled with a little gold dust here & there, in a mill race, in a mountain cleft, an Indian picks up a little, a farmer, & a hunter, & a soldier, each a little; the news flies here and there, to New York, to Maine, to London, and an army of a hundred thousand picked volunteers, the ablest & keenest & boldest that could be collected instantly organize & embark for this desart bringing tools, instruments, books, & framed houses, with them. Such a well appointed Colony as never was planted before arrive with the speed of sail & steam on these remote shores, bringing with them the necessity that their government shall instantly proceed to make the road which they themselves are all intimately engaged to assist.

This was the month the proof sheets of AWEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS arrived. TIMELINE OF A WEEK

The following has been discovered in a fragmentary notebook of Henry Thoreau that dates to this period, and clearly is a first draft of a composition rather than an ordinary journal entry:

I sometimes discovered a miniature water wheel –a saw or grist mill –where the whole volume of water in some tiny rill was conducted through a junk bottle, in at the open bottom & out at the nose –where some country boy whose house was not easy to be seen –some Arkwright or Rennie –was making his first essay in mechanics –some little trip hammer in operation mimicking the regular din of a factory — where the wild weeds & huckleberry bushes hang unmolested over the stream as the pines still do at Manchester and Lawrence. It was the work of a fabulous, farmer boy such as I never saw. To come upon such unquestionable traces of a boy when I doubted if any were lingering still in this vicinity, as when you discover the trail of an otter. One Sunday afternoon in March when the earth which had once been bare was again covered with a few inches of snow rapidly melting in the rain, as I was walking in a retired crossroad away from the town, at a distance from any farm house — I heard suddenly wafted over the meadow a faint tink-tink, tink-tink, as of a cow bell amidst the birches & huckleberry bushes, but I considered that it was quite too early in the season for cows to be turned out to pasture, the ground being covered with snow & it was not time to think of new-butter — and the cow bells were all safely put away in the cupboard or the till of a chest in the farm chamber. It made me think of the days when I went huckleberrying a long time ago & heard the distant tinkling of some cow’s bell who was not yet mired in the swamp — from association I know of no more sweet & wild sound than this piece of copper yields, though it may not be compounded with much art. Well, still the sound came over the meadow louder & louder as I walked on –tink tink tink –too regular for a cowbell –and I conjectured that it was a man drilling a hole in a rock –and this was the sound of his sledge on the drill. But it was Sunday & what Concord farmer could be drilling stone! I referred the mystery to the woods beyond the meadow where alone as I thought it could be concealed — and began to think it was produced by HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

some owl or other bird under peculiar circumstances. So, getting over the fence, I directed my steps through the meadow toward the wood. But as I advanced, the sound seemed gradually to sink into the earth, while it grew louder & louder till finally it proceeded from the open meadow ground itself –and I thought of muskrats –minks & otters & expected to make a discovery in natural history. I stepped eagerly over the quaking ground — a peeping hyla & there in a little rill not more than a foot wide but as deep as wide, swollen by the melting snows, was a small water mill and at each revolution [of] the wheel its crank raised a small hammer which as often fell on a tongueless cowbell which was nailed down on a board. A loud tinkling gurgle as of water leaking out of the meadow. The little rill itself seemed delighted with the din & rushed over the miniature dam & fell on the water wheel eagerly as if delighted at & proud of this loud tinkling, fast by a pilgrim’s cup the bell all spattered with mist from the fall above, & when I had walked half a mile away a favorable wind wafted to me in a hollow among the hills — its faint tink-tink-tink-tink. Just a fortnight after –when a new snow had fallen, I walked near enough to this meadow to hear the steady fink tink from the water wheel away there in the outskirts of the town — & what is stranger than all, that very evening when I came home from a neighbor’s through the village far in the night – to my astonishment I heard from far over the meadows toward the woods more than a mile off in a direct line the distinct tink tink tink of [the] trip hammer. And I called the family to the window in the village to hear the sound of the boy’s trip hammer in Nut Meadow Brook –a distant & solitary place which most of them had never seen –& they all heard it distinctly, even some old ears which ordinarily could not hear the birds sing –and were greatly astonished –which I had told them of a fortnight before as of a thing far away. The sound was wafted over the water, for the meadows were flooded, a peculiar state or atmosphere. Before I had thought how unlike this to all the village sounds, how remote from them as the tinkling of the rill itself –as the golden age –the village boys know not of it. It lies [as] far back in the outskirting meadows as the first invention of the water mill in history –& now this evening it was the one sound which possessed all the village street –& no doubt many a villager heard it but knew not from what remoteness as of antiquity it proceeded –borne on the gale of time from a simpler age. When the sound of every artisan was hushed — no flail, no tinkling anvil was heard. There was the still spring night — the slumbering village & for all sound the boy’s water wheel. In a remote walk a mile and a half by the road –& a straight line one mile distant over the water –the meadows being overflown. Humboldt says that the roar of the cataracts of the Orinoco “was three times as great by night as by day,” and that the same phenomenon is observed in other waterfalls — & is owing “probably to ascending currents of warm air, which producing an unequal density of the elastic medium, obstruct the propagation of sound by displacing its waves; causes which cease after the nocturnal cooling of the earth’s surface.” It seemed that nature sympathised with his experiments. When it had got to be April I heard it last. It was simply the regulated & increased tinkling of a brook –as the history of simpler ages –as the memory of early days comes over a man — so this sound of a night. It sounded like a sentence of Herodotus. It was an incident worthy to be recorded by the father of History –away in Nut Meadow –by Jenny Dugan’s — beyond the Jimmy Miles place –as if it were an alto singer among the bitterns, some ardea. It was news, a wind from Scythia. It was the dream or reminiscence of a primitive age coming over the modern life –as night veils the day — as the dews of evening succeed the sultry sun. The next day I went out & listened by broad daylight — but no sound of the water wheel in Nut Meadow Brook could be heard more than the domestic sounds of the early ages. You could not hear it — you could not remember it. And yet the fit ear could hear it ever — the ear of the boy who made it. The busy & bustling village heard it not — yet the sound of the boy’s water wheel mingled with the din of its streets & at night was heard above the slumberous breathing when other sounds were hushed. Where the skunk cabbage grew — making music for the meadow mice. & I could not believe that it still agitated with its waves of sound the atmosphere of the village — that it was still echoing thro’ the streets. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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.12 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

12.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 CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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.

Beginning around the middle of the 18th Century, European and American literary figures had drawn increasing attention to the importance of nature. By the midpoint of the 19th Century, travel literature in periodicals and books had joined with this Romantic literary legacy to stimulate a broad popular movement of “nature appreciation.” In this year the 3d edition of the TABLE ROCK ALBUM AND SKETCHES OF THE FALLS AND SCENERY ADJACENT, which consisted of notations made by tourists in an album at Niagara Falls, provided a unique glimpse into the responses of mid-19th-Century Americans to spectacular natural beauty. Citing the observations of Alexander von Humboldt and others on the effects of deforestation, Thomas Ewbank, the United States Commissioner of Patents, warned in his two-volume REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF PATENTS, FOR THE YEAR 1849 (House of Representatives Executive Document No. 20) that “the waste of valuable timber in the United States, to say nothing of firewood, will hardly begin to be appreciated until our population reaches fifty millions. Then the folly and shortsightedness of this age will meet with a degree of censure and reproach not pleasant to contemplate.” Ewbank also warned that “the vast multitudes of bisons slain yearly, the ceaseless war carried on against them, if continued, threatens their extermination, and must hereafter cause deep regret;” especially in view of “their great strength and docility, when tamed, and their capacity for being drilled to the yoke,... it should never be said that the noblest of American indigenous ruminants have become extinct.” (Articles on the long-term harm produced by forest HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

destruction would appear in the reports of the commissioners of patents and of agriculture in this decade and during the 1860s. Throughout the remaining decades of the century, the “nature essay” would be burgeoning as an American literary genre. Throughout the last half of the 19th Century and into the early 20th Century, popular interest in ornithology would be proliferating through books, articles, and local clubs, providing a grass-roots base for support of many aspects of conservation. Prints, lithographs, and engravings of American scenery, especially in the West, would be receiving wide popular distribution between this decade and the turn of the century, stimulating broad interest in and appreciation for the special qualities of the American landscape, including its wilderness. In particular, Francis Parkman would begin publishing his landmark histories of America, in which American identity would be celebrated in terms of the presence of the wilderness.)13

13. 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 CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Publication of Susan Fenimore Cooper’s journal of scenes of country life from Spring 1848-Spring 1849. This anonymous writing, titled RURAL HOURS, BY A LADY, would receive good reviews and go through at least four editions: The scenery described so charmingly is that surrounding her own fair home in Cooperstown: out of these simple materials Miss Cooper has formed one of the most interesting volumes of the day, displaying powers of mind of a high order. — Mrs. Hale: WOMAN’S RECORD

An admirable portraiture of American out-door life, just as it is, with no colouring but that which every object necessarily receives in passing through a contemplative and cultivated mind.... Miss Cooper has an observant eye, and a happy faculty of making her descriptions interesting by selecting the right objects, instead of the too common method of extravagant embellishment. She never gets into ecstasies, and sees nothing which anybody else might not see who walked through the same fields after her. — Professor Hart: FEMALE PROSE WRITERS OF AMERICA

A very pleasant book — the result of the combined effort of good sense and good feeling, an observant mind, and a real, honest, unaffected appreciation of the countless minor beauties that Nature exhibits to her assiduous lovers. — Albion HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

On page 10 Miss Cooper included an account of loon diving rather similar to the one which Henry Thoreau had found in a newspaper and inserted into his WALDEN ms. She reported:

“Not long since we saw one of those birds, loons of usual size ... it had been caught in Seneca Lake on the hook of what fishermen call a set-line, dropped to the depth of ninety-five feet, the birds having dived that distance to reach the bait. Several others have been caught in the same manner in Seneca Lake upon lines sunk from eighty to one hundred feet.”

WALDEN: As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before. He manœuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your adversary’s checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. [concluded on following screen] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

WALDEN: ...Sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, having apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was he and so unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the 8oct52_looning2.mp3 surface, with hooks set for trout, –though Walden is deeper than that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and instantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where he would rise; for again and again, when I was straining my eyes over the surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did not his white breast enough betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly hear the plash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly and swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning, –perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not hear him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Miss Cooper’s RURAL HOURS, BY A LADY is said by Lawrence Buell to have amounted to “the first and still the most ambitious seasonal compendium published by an American author”: It was Cooper, not Thoreau, who among all antebellum writers wrote the most comprehensive short treatise on the history of environmental consciousness in world cultures from ancient times to the present. More even than he, she deserves the title of attorney for the indigenous plants, on whose displacement by invading species she continually remarks.

Professor Buell refers to this as “the nineteenth-century American literary season book that comes closest to rivaling Thoreau,” and acknowledges that its author made “specific recommendations about the conservation of trees before Thoreau did.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

January: John Stuart Mill responded to the “The Negro Question” piece that Thomas Carlyle had written for the December 1st issue of Fraser’s Magazine (which Carlyle would retitle in 1852 in its pamphlet form in reaction to Mill, precisely in order to exacerbate its outrage, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question”) by averring that although blacks were clearly inferior, they were yet capable, by being allowed to share in the benefits of civilization, of being improved.14

THOMAS CARLYLE

Mill did deliver himself here of some remarkably Thoreauvian and wide-marginish sentiments: “In opposition to the ‘gospel of work,’ I would assert the gospel of leisure, and maintain that human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labour.”

In London, H.G. Bohn published E.C. Otté and Henry G. Bohn’s translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s ANSICHEN DER NATUR book of essays as VIEWS OF NATURE, OR CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE SUBLIME PHENOMENA OF CREATION, WITH SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS.

Edward Damon, son of the mill owner Calvin Carver Damon, was working in the cotton room of his father’s factory in Concord, “tending drawing” — that is, he was a child card-tender. If he were nominally being paid the same wage as poorer children of necessity consigned by their families to such activities, he was receiving $2.50 the week. However, it is unlikely that his father would have insisted that he be at work the usual 6 days a week, for that would have kept his heir Edward like the other child labor away from school. Edward’s 1 testimony was that a normal workday for such a working child in 1850 amounted to 11 /2 hours of tending the demanding, constantly spinning machinery:

14. Gee, thanks, Mr Mill, that’s mighty white of you. With kind and thoughtful people like you for friends, a person of color truly doesn’t have need any enemies such as Mr Carlyle! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

It is very clean work for the factory. I go to work at seven and work half an hour, then half an hour for breakfast, then work again from eight o’clock and work until half-past twelve. Commence again at one o’clock and work until half-past seven. I like it very well.

This “very clean work for the factory,” you will understand, is what we now know produces the lifelong debilitating illness termed “cotton lung.” At the age of 17 young Edward would take over the managership of the factory from his father Calvin, and in May 1859 it would be he who would hire local surveyor Thoreau to check the boundaries and the placement of the buildings. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

March 30, Saturday: An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal: CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL ISSUE OF MARCH 30

Nathaniel Hawthorne prepared a brief new preface for the 2nd edition of his THE SCARLET LETTER: Much to the author’s surprise, and (if he may say so without additional offense) considerably to his amusement, he finds that his sketch of official life, introductory to THE SCARLET L ETTER, has created an unprecedented excitement in the respectable community immediately around him. It could hardly have been more violent, indeed, had he burned down the Custom-House, and quenched its last smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage, against whom he is supposed to cherish a peculiar malevolence [the Reverend Charles W. Upham of Salem, characterized by Senator Charles Sumner as “that smooth, smiling, oily man of God”]. As the public disapprobation would weigh very heavily on him, were he conscious of deserving it, the author begs leave to say, that he has carefully read over the introductory pages, with a purpose to alter or expunge whatever might be found amiss, and to make the best reparation in his power for the atrocities of which he has been adjudged guilty. But it appears to him, that the only remarkable features of the sketch are its frank and genuine good- humor, and the general accuracy with which he has conveyed his sincere impressions of the characters therein described. As to enmity, or ill-feeling of any kind, personal or political, he utterly disclaims such motives. The sketch might, perhaps, have been wholly omitted, without loss to the public, or detriment to the book; but, having undertaken to write it, he conceives that it could not have been done in a better or a kindlier spirit, nor, so far as his abilities availed, with a livelier effect of truth. The author is constrained, therefore, to republish his introductory sketch without the change of a word.

Concluding arguments of counsel in the case of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. John White Webster. The defense was still insisting that it hadn’t been the Professor but somebody else who had murdered the Doctor, that it might for instance have been the janitor who had keys to the rooms of the building and being a mere cleanup man was obviously a person of low character, but that if the Professor had been the one to do the deed, the deed would have had to have been manslaughter committed in a fit of passion rather than cold- HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

blooded murder for profit, and anyway, this defendant was such a jolly family man and of such exemplary character. At 5PM the defendant asked leave to address the courtroom, and made the complaint that his attorneys in their superior wisdom had neglected to present to the court the hundreds of pages of evidence and argument which he had prepared while waiting in his jail cell. He pointed out, utterly irrelevantly, that shortly after the time at which he was alleged to have committed the murder, he had purchased a copy of Alexander von Humboldt’s COSMOS and was studying this new volume over a mutton-chop supper in a restaurant in Cambridge, and he could prove this. For in fact when he paid his bill and departed from the restaurant, he forgot and left his new copy of COSMOS behind, and the keeper of the public house could so testify, and this was not the conduct of a man who had just committed a murder. The jury was charged and retired before 8PM. Boston went to its supper, and boys hired at $0.50 per hour stood in the street outside, ready to run bearing the news of the verdict, and to shout it in the various districts and hotels and taverns of the city. In the jury’s chambers, a verdict was reached in 40 minutes but the jury then spent two hours in silent prayer. At 10:30PM the jury returned to the courtroom with their verdict, “Guilty.” The accused was then heard to exclaim:

Take me away from this place so that I may not be looked on any longer.

The Illustrated London News published a new, and inaccurate, depiction of the Great Lisbon Earthquake of November 1, 1755: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Spring: At about this point in time Henry Thoreau was studying Alexander von Humboldt’s ASPECTS OF NATURE and KOSMOS (volumes of which had been appearing since 1845), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s HINTS TOWARD THE FORMATION OF A MORE COMPREHENSIVE THEORY OF LIFE. COLERIDGE’S HINTS

He surveyed for Jessie Hosmer. This farm was located near Barrett’s Mill Road and the present Route 2, at the foot of Annursnack Hill, and had belonged to the Cummings family very early. It contained more than a hundred acres, and shows the road leading to G. M. Barrett’s. Thoreau said: “First piece surveyed with my compass though with a tape.”

May: On some date during this month, Henry Thoreau lectured at Worcester, probably about Cape Cod. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

CAPE COD: Sometimes we met a wrecker with his cart and dog, –and his dog’s faint bark at us wayfarers, heard through the roaring of the surf, sounded ridiculously faint. To see a little trembling DOG dainty-footed cur stand on the margin of the ocean, and ineffectually bark at a beach-bird, amid the roar of the Atlantic! Come with design to bark at a whale, perchance! That sound will do for farmyards. All the dogs looked out of place there, naked and as if shuddering at the vastness; and I thought that they would not have been there had it not been for the countenance of their masters. Still less could you think of a cat bending her CAT steps that way, and shaking her wet foot over the Atlantic; yet even this happens sometimes, they tell me. In summer I saw the tender young of the Piping Plover, like chickens just hatched, mere pinches of down on two legs, running in troops, with a faint peep, along the edge of the waves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Thoreau took notes, not from Waldo Emerson’s copy of the Mrs. Sabine translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s ANSICHEN DER NATUR book of essays, published in the previous year, but from E.C. Otté and Henry G. Bohn’s new translation, titled VIEWS OF NATURE, OR CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE SUBLIME PHENOMENA OF CREATION, WITH SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS, just published in London. (Was there a great deal of difference among these editions?)

A gang under the direction of Isaiah Rynders disrupted meetings of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New-York. It was reported in the newspapers that an incident had occurred in New-York, involving Frederick Douglass. We can see from Douglass’s dignified reply in his own paper, The North Star, that in our land 142 years ago, a taunting assault on a non-white man minding his own business on the street could be followed by a taunting assault on that man in the newspapers:

Like most of the statements which emanate from the American press, this one (though partly true) is false in several particulars. It is not true that I walked down Broadway with two white females resting on my arm.... It is not true that the ladies in company with me placed themselves under the care of the gentleman (ruffian?) who assaulted me, nor any of the villainous party, nor of anybody else. It is not true that I sneered or spoke to the loafing assailants.... I felt no indignation toward the poor miserable wretches who committed the outrage. They were but executing upon me the behests of the proslavery church and the clergy of the land; doing the dirty work of the men who despise them, and who have no more respect for them in reality than they have for me.

After April: the spring–which the frost has loosened– It is old mortality {MS torn} it is fastening

After April: instantly dies. A page with as true & inevitable & deep a meaning as a hill-side. A book which nature shall own as her own flower her own leaves–with whose leaves her own shall rustle in sympathy imperishable & russet–which shall push out with the skunk cabbage in the spring I am not offended by the odor of the skunk in passing by sacred places–I am invigorated rather. It is a reminiscence of immortality borne on the gale O thou partial world, when wilt thou know God? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

I would as soon transplant this vegetable to Polynesia or to heaven with me as the violet. Shoes are commonly too narrow. If you should take off a gentleman’s shoes you would find that his foot was wider than his shoe. Think of his wearing such an engine–walking in it many miles year after year. A shoe which presses against the sides of the foot is to be condemned– To compress the foot like the Chinese is as bad as to compress the head–like the Flat heads–for the Head & the foot are one body. A sensible man will not follow fashion in this respect but reason. Better moccasins or Sandals or even bare feet, than a tight shoe. A wise man will wear a shoe wide & large enough shaped somewhat like the foot & tied with a leather string. & so go his way in peace letting his foot fall at every step. When your shoe chafes your feet put in a mullein leaf. When I ask for a garment of a particular form my tailoress tells me gravely `They do not make them so now,” and I find it difficult to get made what I want–simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say– It surpasses her credulity– Properly speaking my style is as fashionable as theirs. “They do not make them so now”! as if she quoted the Fates. I am for a moment absorbed in thought–thinking wondering who they are & where they live. It is some Oak Hall O Call– O K all correct establishment which she knows but I do not. Oliver Cromwell– I emphasize & in imagination italicize each word separately of that sentence to come at the meaning of it I conclude it is the French on either

After April: Or you may walk into the foreign land of Bedford–where not even yet after 4 or 5 or even 7 or 8 miles does the sky shut down–but the airy & crystal dome of heaven arches high over all–where you did not suspect that there was so much day light under its crystal dome–and from the hills eastward perchance see the small town of Bedford standing stately on the crest of a hill like some city of Belgrade with 150 000 inhabitants. I wonder if Mr Fitch lives there among them.

September: Henry Thoreau surveyed for a proposed new street near the Railroad Depot. Length 30" x Width 21". In 1844 when the railroad had been opened in Concord, he had been asked to suggest the route of a new street from the corner of Main and Sudbury Road to the Depot, and in fact he had drawn up several alternatives. The one chosen is the present Middle Street and required the moving of the Concord Academy Building from the spot where Academy Lane and Middle Street meet. This proposal is the present Middle Street from Academy Lane to Thoreau Lane. The old Concord Academy stood on the spot so it had to be moved to the south side of the new street. (The Academy building in which the Thoreau brothers had taught was made over into a double house for Ellery Channing. The Concord Free Public Library has several preserved sketches for this area. One shows the land of Wetherbee on Belknap Street which became the property on which the old Davis Store from Main Street came to rest, and was occupied by William Barrett from 1859 to 1898.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/24b.htm

Channing wrote in a letter complaining about Waldo Emerson: “a terrible man to deal with — one has to be armed at all points. He threshes you out very soon; is admirably skillful, able to go anywhere and do anything. Those nearest to him feel him hard and cold; no one knows even what he is doing or studying.... Nobody knows what his real philosophy is; his books do not tell it. I have known him for years intimately and have not found it out. Women do not like him: he cannot establish a personal relation with anyone, yet he can get on agreeably with everyone.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

At some point during the month Thoreau made an entry in his journal that he was later to copy into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:15

[Paragraph 52] A commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins, and makes slaves of its sailors for this purpose! I saw, the other day, a vessel which had been wrecked, and many lives lost, and her cargo of rags, juniper-berries, and bitter almonds were strewn along the shore. It seemed hardly worth the while to tempt the dangers of the sea between Leghorn and New York for the sake of a cargo of juniper-berries and bitter almonds. America sending to the Old World for her bitters! Is not the sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life go down here? Yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted commerce; and there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are so blind as to think that progress and civilization depend on precisely this kind of interchange and activity,—the activity of flies about a molasses-hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were oysters. And very well, answer I, if men were mosquitoes.

In Godey’s Lady’s Book, Henry T. Tuckerman characterized Alexander von Humboldt as “the Napoleon of science.” This title, although apparently innocuous, would soon be combined with our iniquitous lust for the conquest of nature, so that Humboldt would soon be being worshipped, and eventually would find himself condemned, as something he had simply not been: an exploiter. Professor Laura Dassow Walls points out that during Humboldt’s old age while “his voice was aging and distant,” his legacy would be seized upon by positivists such as Louis Agassiz even though he “could and did protest with every means at this disposal.” His name became synonymous with empire and with the exploitation of nature, while native American

15. Thoreau was referring to his experience at Fire Island in late July 1850. The American bark Elizabeth, with Margaret Fuller Ossoli, her husband, and their son aboard, had sailed from Italy on May 17, 1850, bound for New-York, but wrecked on the coast of Fire Island on July 19th. Thoreau was dispatched to the scene of the wreck to recover the bodies of the Ossolis and their belongings, and when he arrived he found the beach strewn with the unsalvageable portion of the cargo—heaps of rags, juniper- berries, and bitter almonds (see Kenneth Walter Cameron, “Thoreau’s Notes on the Shipwreck at Fire Island,” Emerson Society Quarterly 52 [3d Quarter 1968]: 97-99; and Paula Blanchard, MARGARET FULLER: FROM TRANSCENDENTALISM TO REVOLUTION [NY: Delacorte Press, 1978], pages 329-37). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

populations were being removed and ecological communities disrupted in the name of our Manifest Destiny. How ironic it is today that current approaches to science, which stress the role our own knowledge plays as part of the world we seek to understand, have lost sight of Humboldt’s work. Today, Humboldtian concepts like plant communities, isotherms, and magnetic storms are routine, the “ecology of ideas” is an exciting new concept — and Alexander von Humboldt’s once-glorious name has long since b id d i t th di ft l f th f t t ( 107) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1851

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

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 full16 –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 16. The moon would be full on the night of the 12th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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 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.17 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.18 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. 17. This appears to be Thoreau’s first mention of the mysterious night warbler. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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, 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 18. 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 CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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 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.

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] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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] 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.

DIFFERENT DRUMMER

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 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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. 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 CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1852

Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland’s PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS OF AMERICA, DURING THE YEAR 1799-1804 ... TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY THOMASINA ROSS (Three volumes; London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden — unfortunately, only volumes one and three have been scanned by Google Books). NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS

This edition would be available to Henry Thoreau at the Concord Public Library and he would make notes from it in his Fact Book.

Thoreau copied material into his Fact Book from Professor Carl Adolph Agardh’s SYSTEMA ALGARUM, printed as part of John Claudius Loudon’s 1841 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PLANTS, COMPRISING THE DESCRIPTION, SPECIFIC CHARACTER, CULTURE, HISTORY, APPLICATION IN THE ARTS AND EVERY OTHER DESIRABLE PARTICULAR RESPECTING ALL THE PLANTS INDIGENOUS, OR CULTIVATED IN, OR INTRODUCED TO BRITAIN.

At about this point Thoreau copied from Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau’s TRAITÉ DES ARBRES ET ARBUSTES HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

QUI SE CULTIVENT EN FRANCE into his Indian Notebook #6.19

THE TREES OF FRANCE, I THE TREES OF FRANCE, II

19. The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

William Henry Harvey’s NEREIS BOREALI-AMERICANA: OR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF THE MARINE ALGAE OF NORTH AMERICA. PART II.— RHODOSPERMEÆ (Smithsonian Institution). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Thoreau would copy from this into his Fact Book, and refer to the material in CAPE COD:

CAPE COD: One species of kelp, according to Bory St. Vincent, has PEOPLE OF a stem fifteen hundred feet long, and hence is the longest CAPE COD vegetable known, and a brig’s crew spent two days to no purpose collecting the trunks of another kind cast ashore on the Falkland Islands, mistaking it for drift-wood. (See Harvey on Algæ.) This species looked almost edible, at least, I thought that if I were starving I would try it. One sailor told me that the cows ate it. It cut like cheese; for I took the earliest opportunity to sit down and deliberately whittle up a fathom or two of it, that I might become more intimately acquainted with it, see how it cut, and if it were hollow all the way through. The blade looked like a broad belt, whose edges had been quilled, or as if stretched by hammering, and it was also twisted spirally. The extremity was generally worn and ragged from the lashing of the waves. A piece of the stem which I carried home shrunk to one quarter of its size a week afterward, and was completely covered with crystals of salt like frost. The reader will excuse my greenness –though it is not sea-greenness, like his, perchance– for I live by a river shore, where this weed does not wash up. When we consider in what meadows it grew, and how it was raked, and in what kind of hay weather got in or out, we may well be curious about it. One who is weather- wise, has given the following account of the matter:–

“When descends on the Atlantic, The gigantic Storm-wind of the equinox, Landward in his wrath he scourges The toiling surges, Laden with sea-weed from the rocks. “From Bermuda’s reefs, from edges Of sunken ledges, On some far-off bright Azore; From Bahama and the dashing, Silver-flashing Surges of San Salvador; “From the tumbling surf that buries The Orkneyan Skerries, Answering the hoarse Hebrides; And from wrecks of ships and drifting Spars, uplifting On the desolate rainy seas; “Ever drifting, drifting, drifting On the shifting Currents of the restless main.”

WILLIAM HENRY HARVEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

But he was not thinking of this shore, when he added– “Till, in sheltered coves, and reaches Of sandy beaches, All have found repose again.”

These weeds were the symbols of those grotesque and fabulous thoughts which have not yet got into the sheltered coves of literature. “Ever drifting, drifting, drifting On the shifting Currents of the restless heart,” And not yet “in books recorded They, like hoarded Household words, no more depart.”

May 23, Sunday morning: Henry Thoreau read “Walking, or The Wild” at Plymouth. Evidently he lectured twice on this day (he also explored local ponds).20

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT ARNOLD HENRI GUYOT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

“WALKING”: In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice — take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance, — which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet. I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes — already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period. Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldly sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried Who! to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness, they move a side at a time, and Man by his machinery is meeting the horse and ox half way. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat CAT tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?

20. At some point Thoreau wrote in pencil on this reading draft, just below and to the right of the title “Walking, or The Wild,” the shattering remark “I regard this as a sort of introduction to all that I may write hereafter.” Bradley P. Dean infers that Thoreau must have written this pencilled sentence sometime during the fall of 1854, in the weeks after Walden was published. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1853

Publication of Juliette Bauer’s abridged translations of biographies of the famous brothers Alexander von Humboldt and Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt, LIVES OF THE BROTHERS HUMBOLDT, ALEXANDER AND WILLIAM, BY HERMANN KLENCKE, GUSTAV SCHLESIER, TRANSLATED BY JULIETTE BAUER (New-York: Harper & Brothers):

• ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT: A BIOGRAPHICAL MONUMENT. BY PROFESSOR [Dr. Philipp Friedrich Hermann] KLENCKE [January 16, 1813-October 11, 1881, Hanover]. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN [Alexander von Humboldt’s Leben und Wirken, Reisen und Wissen] BY JULIETTE BAUER BROTHER ALEXANDER •LIFE OF WILLIAM VON HUMBOLDT. TRANSLATED AND ABRIDGED FROM THE GERMAN OF [Gustav] SCHLESIER [Erinnerungen an Wilhelm von Humboldt] BY JULIETTE BAUER BROTHER WILLIAM

April 8, Friday: Marietta Alboni appeared as Leonora in Donizetti’s La Favorita.

Frederic E. Church embarked in New York harbor for the coast of Columbia and his tour of the Andes range. In the vicinity of Quito, Equador, he would lodge in the same home that had sheltered Alexander von Humboldt some half a century before. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

May 1, Sunday: Lucy Stone, the 1st woman from Massachusetts to complete a BA degree (from Oberlin College) got married with Henry Blackwell, a brother of the 1st woman in the United States to hold a medical diploma. The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, presiding, read off the couple’s protest “against the radical injustice of present laws” governing the relationship between husband and wife.

She would retain her own name, becoming Mrs. Lucy Stone instead of Mrs. Lucy Stone Blackwell (this was Unheard-Of and would be Much-Commented-Upon).

Argentina adopted a constitution.

The Reverend Frederic Dan Huntington (1819-1904) delivered a eulogy at his South Congregational Church of Boston in the memory of Manlius Stimson Clarke that would be printed as a 32-page pamphlet by Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 111 Washington Street, THE CHARACTER OF MANLIUS STIMSON CLARKE. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN THE SOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, MAY 1, 1853. BY F.D. HUNTINGTON. FREDERIC D. HUNTINGTON

May 1. Sunday. A cold northwest wind. Now, on my return to Concord, I am struck by the increased greenness of the country, or landscape. I find that since I left Concord, April 11th, there have blossomed here, probably nearly in the following order, these plants, including those I saw in Haverhill: dandelion, field horse-tail, Antennaria plantaginifolia, sweet-gale, epigæa, Populus grandidentata, Salix tristis, Viola ovata, (Ellen Emerson found it April 20th), Potentilla Canadensis, comptonia, Thalictrum anemonoides, Anemone nemorosa, V. blanda, P. balsamifera, Aquilegia Canadensis, Hedyotis cœrulea, andromeda, Fragaria Virginiana (?) (distinguished from the other species in fruit), Salix alba, benzoin, Amelanchier Canadensis var. Botryapium. Peach, cultivated cherry, and the following apparently just begun: Viola pedata, Ostrya Virginica, V. cucullata, (Ellen Emerson says she saw it the 30th ult.; it is to be looked for at Depot Field Brook). And Rumex Acetosella shows red and is eight inches high on Columbine Cliff. The expanding leaves of the sugar maples now make small crosses against the sky. Other conspicuous green leaves are the gooseberry, currant, elder, the willows just beginning, and alder, and apple trees and high blackberry, amelanchier, meadow-sweet, beside many herbaceous plants. Drosera (round-leaved) leaves now. Sedge-grass (early sedge) very abundant still. The Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum is just ready to bloom and also the vacillans nearly. These things observed on way— To Cliffs. The oak leaves on the plain are fallen. The colors are now: light blue above (where is my cyanometer? Saussure invented one, and Humboldt used it in his travels); landscape russet and greenish, spotted with fawn-colored plowed lands, with green pine and gray or reddish oak woods intermixed, and dark-blue or slate-colored water here and there. It is greenest in the meadows and where water has lately stood, and a strong, invigorating scent comes up from the fresh meadows. It is like the greenness of an apple faintly or dimly appearing through the russet. A ph[oe]be’s nest and one cream-colored white egg at the spring-house; nest of mud, lined with grass and edged with hypnum. Channing has seen a robin’s nest and eggs. I hear a black and white creeper at the Cliffs, and a chewink. The shrub oaks are well budded. The young ivy leaves are red on Cliffs. Oaks and hickory buds just ready to open. How aromatic the balm-of-Gilead buds now! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

The large woolly ferns and others stand up a foot on banks. The skunk-cabbage leaves green the warm, springy meads. Was it not the black and yellow or spotted warbler [Vide May 10th.] I saw by the Corner Spring? Apparently black, brown-striped, with a yellow rump and also yellow wing, shoulders, and sides of breast, with a large black spot on breast; size of ph[oe]be nearly; note somewhat like yellowbird. Yet I think it much too dark for the myrtle-bird. Columbine Cliff a place to look for early rue anemones and nemorosa and dandelions. The columbines have been out some days. How ornamental to these dark-colored perpendicular cliffs, nodding from the clefts and shelves! The barn swallow is about. Have we the Viola lanceolata? [Yes. Vide Hubbard’s meadow, by willows.] Is not the Botryapium our earliest variety of arnelanchier, and what difference in the fruit? Channing says he has heard the wood thrush, brown thrasher, and stake-driver (?), since I have been gone. This and last page for birds which I find come in the interval. Did I not see the oven-bird yesterday?

May 4. Cattle are going up country. Hear the tull-lull of the chickadee (?).21 The currant in bloom. The Canada plum just ready, probably to-day. [Not before the 7th.] 8 A.M. — To Walden and Cliffs. The sound of the oven-bird. Caterpillar nests two or three inches in diameter on wild cherries; caterpillars one third of an inch long. The Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum appeared yesterday. The vacillans, resinosum (?), and early high blueberry will bloom in a few days. Vide Cerasus pnm.ila by shanty path, and wild red ditto, as early. The white birch leaves are beginning to expand and are shining with soiree sticky matter. I must attend to their fragrance. In a warm place on the Cliffs one of their catkins shows its anthers, the golden pendant. The woods and paths next them [the Cliffs] now ring with the silver jingle of the field sparrow, the medley of the brown thrasher, the honest qui vive of the chewink, or his jingle from the top of a low copse tree, while his mate scratches in the dry leaves beneath: the black and white creeper is hopping along the oak boughs, head downward, pausing from time to time to utter its note like a fine delicate saw-sharpening; and ever and anon rises clear over all the smooth, rich melody of the wood thrush. Could that have been a jay? I think it was some large, uncommon woodpecker that uttered that very loud, strange, cackling note. The dry woods have the smell of fragrant everlasting. I am surprised by the cool drops which now, at 10 o’clock, drop from the flowers of the amelanchier, while other plants are dry, as if these had attracted more moisture. The white pines have started. The indigo-bird and mate; dark throat and light beneath, and white spot oil wings, which is not described; a hoarse note, and rapid the first two or three syllables, — twe twe twee, dwelling on the last, or twe twe twe-e, or as if an r in it, tre, etc., not musical. The myrtle-bird, which makes me think the more that I saw the black and yellow warbler on Sunday. I find apparently two varieties of the amelanchier, — the first I noticed, with smooth reddish delicate leaves and somewhat linear petals and loose racemes, petals somewhat pinkish; the second to-day, perhaps a little later than the first, leaves light-colored and downy and petals broader and perhaps not quite so long as the first, racemes more crowded. I am not sure that this is the variety oblongifolium of Gray.22 It is stated in the Life of Humboldt23 that he proved “that the expression, ‘the ocean reflects the sky,’ was a purely poetical, but not a scientifically correct one, as the sea is often blue when the sky is almost totally covered with light white clouds.” He used Saussure’s cyanometer even to measure the color of the sea. This might probably be used to measure the intensity of the color of blue flowers like lupines at a distance. Humboldt speaks of its having been proved that pine pollen falls from the atmosphere. 21. [The word “chickadee” is crossed out and “myrtle-bird” substituted, which latter is in turn crossed out and replaced by “white- throat sparrow.” The final correction would seem to have been made some years after the original entry, for in January, 1858, we find Thoreau netting what appears to be his first intimation as to the real authorship of this song (see Journal, vol. x.). In the manuscript notes of the excursion to the Maine Woods in 1857, the song of the white-throat is still attributed to the “myrtle-bird.”] 22. This appears to be the Pyrus ovalis or swamp pyrus of Bigelow and Willdeming. 23. In this year Harper & Brothers of New-York had published Juliette Bauer’s translation and abridgement LIVES OF THE BROTHERS HUMBOLDT, ALEXANDER AND WILLIAM, BY HERMANN KLENCKE, GUSTAV SCHLESIER. BROTHER ALEXANDER BROTHER WILLIAM HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

December 19, Monday: Sometime after the incident of the spading competition, Michael Flannery had quit working for Abiel H. Wheeler and become a field laborer instead for Elijah Wood. At this point he discussed this new job with Henry Thoreau and told of his continuing efforts to get his family from Ireland. That evening Thoreau wrote to H.G.O. Blake: An Irishman came to see me to-day, who is endeavoring to get his family out to this New World. He rises at half past four, milks twenty-eight cows (which has swollen the joints of his fingers), and eats his breakfast, without any milk in his tea or coffee, before six; and so on, day after day, for six and a half dollars a month; and thus he keeps his virtue in him, if he does not add to it; and he regards me as a gentleman able to assist him; but if I ever get to be a gentleman, it will be by working after my fashion harder than he does. THOREAU ON THE IRISH From this day into December 21st, Thoreau would be surveying a Corner Spring woodlot that James P. Brown was selling to William Wheeler, which was cut in 1853-1854. (Brown lived near Nut Meadow Brook, and according to the Concord Town Report for 1851-1852, Thoreau had laid out a town road near his house and had been paid $4.00 for this by the town.)

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

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/13.htm

Thoreau wrote to Spencer Fullerton Baird in regard to Louis Agassiz’s American Association for the Advancement of Science, to withdraw his name, pleading that he would be unable to attend meetings and explaining that the kind of science he was attracted to was the science of the Reverend Gilbert White’s

THE NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF SELBORNE

and Alexander von Humboldt’s

ASPECTS OF NATURE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

— as he understood very well that this was bound suitably to render him unattractive to them.24

In this letter Thoreau made reference to a poem that had been published anonymously in Punch, or the London Charivari, by Thomas Hood, entitled “The Song of the Shirt.”

In this letter, also, Thoreau made reference to pamphlet of 10 pages of blue paper just put out by the Smithsonian Institution that was going to become part of his personal library, Spencer Fullerton Baird’s DIRECTIONS FOR MAKING COLLECTIONS IN NATURAL HISTORY, PREPARED FOR THE USE OF THE PARTIES ENGAGED IN THE EXPLORATION OF A ROUTE FOR THE PACIFIC RAILROAD ALONG THE 49TH PARALLEL.

GOD IN CONCORD by Jane Langton © 1992 Penguin Books USA Inc. 38 If you are going into that line, —going to besiege the city of God, —you must not only be strong in engines, but prepared with provisions to starve out the garrison.

Viking Penguin Thoreau, Letter to Harrison Blake, December 19, 1853 Homer took his convictions about Pond View to Police Chief James Flower. ISBN 0-670-84260-5 — PS3562.A515G58

Concord Dec 19th 53 Mr Blake, My debt has accumulated so that I should have answered your last letter at once, if I had not been the subject of what is called a press of engagements, having a lecture to write for last Wednesday, and surveying more than usual besides. – It has been a kind of running fight with me – the enemy not always behind me, I trust. True, a man cannot lift himself by his own waist-bands, because he cannot get out of himself, but he can expand himself, (which is bet-

24. Harding and Bode, CORRESPONDENCE, pages 309-10. He gave quite a different reason for not becoming a member in his JOURNAL:“The fact is I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot.” Although it has been alleged many times that this reading had great influence on Henry Thoreau, quite frankly I have been unable myself to verify that Thoreau took this species of nature writing as Waldo Emerson had, with any seriousness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

ter, there being no up nor down in nature) and so split his waist- bands, being already within himself. You speak of doing & being – & the vanity real or apparent of much doing – The suckers, I think it is they, make nests in our river in the spring of more than a cart-load of small stones, amid which to de- posit their ova. The other day I opened a muskrats’ house. It was made of weeds, five feet broad at base & 3 feet high, and far and low within it was a little cavity, only a foot in diameter where the rat dwelt. It may seem trivial – this piling up of weeds, but so the race of muskrats is preserved. We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small diameter of being. – Is it not imperative on us that we do something – if we only work in a tread-mill? and, indeed, some sort of revolving is necessary to produce a centre & nucleus of being. What exercise is to the body – employment is to the mind & morals. Consider what an amount of drudgery must be performed – how much hum-drum & prosaic labor goes to any work of the least value. There are so many layers of mere white lime in every shell to that thin inner one so beautifully tinted. Let not the shell fish think to build his house of that alone; and pray what are its tints to him? Is it not his smooth close-fitting shirt merely? whose tints are not to him, being in the dark, but only when he is gone or dead, and his shell is heaved up to light a wreck upon the beach, do they appear. With him too it is a song of the shirt – “work – work – work” – & this work is not merely a police in the gross sense, but in the higher sense, a discipline. If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather ele- vating as a ladder – the means by which we are translated? How admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self culture by devotion to his art! The woodsawyer through his effort to do his work well, becomes not merely a better woodsawyer, but measure- ably a better man. Few are the men that can work on their navels – only some Brahmens that I have heard of. To the painter is given some paint & canvass instead. – to the Irishman a bog, – typical of himself. – In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong, – if it is only to make a better paste-blacking – and they are themselves so much the better morally for it. You say that you sit & aspire, but do not succeed much. Does it concern you enough that you do not? Do you work hard enough at it— Do you get the benefit of discipline out of it? If so, persevere. Is it a more serious thing than to walk a thousand miles in a thousand suc- cessive hours? Do you get any corns by it? Do you ever think of hanging yourself on account of failure? If you are going into that line – going to besiege the city of God – you must not only be strong in engines – but prepared with provisions to starve out the garrison. An Irishman came to see me today HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

who is endeavoring to get his family out to this New World. He rises at half past 4 & milks 28 cows – (which has swolen the joints of his fingers) & eats his breakfast, without any milk in his tea or coffee, before 6 – & so on day after day for six & a half dollars a month – & thus he keeps his virtue in him – if he does not add to it – & he regards me as a gentleman able to assist him – but if I ever get to be a gentleman, it will be by working after my fashion harder than he does – If my joints are not swolen, it must be because I deal with the teats of celestial cows before break-fast, (and the milker in this case is always allowed some of the milk for his breakfast) to say nothing of the flocks & herds of Admetus afterward. It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part. If the mark is high & far, you must not only aim aright, but draw the bow with all your might. You must qualify your self to use a bow which no humbler archer can bend. Work – work – work! Who shall know it for a bow? It is not of yew-tree. It is straighter than a ray of light – flexibility is not known for one of its qualities.

Dec 22nd So far I had got when I was called off to survey. – Pray read the Life of Haydon the painter – if you have not. It is a small revelation for these latter days – a great satisfaction to know that he has lived – though he is now dead. Have you met with the letter of a Turkish cadi at the end of Layard’s “Nineveh & Babylon” that also is re- freshing & a capital comment on the whole book which preceeds it – the oriental genius speaking through him. Those Brahmins put it through, they come off – or rather stand still, conquerors, with some withered arms or legs at least to show — & they are said to have cultivated the faculty of abstraction to a degree unknown to Europeans, – If we cannot sing of faith & triumph – we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls & there are night owls – and each is beautiful & even musical while about its business. Might you not find some positive work to do with your back to Church & State – letting your back do all the rejection of them? Can you not go upon your pilgrimage, Peter, along the winding mountain path whither you face? A step more will make those funereal church bells over your shoulder sound far and sweet as a natural sound Work – work – work! Why not make a very large mud pie & bake it in the sun! Only put no church nor state into it, nor upset any other pepper -box that way. – Dig out a wood-chuck for that has nothing to do with rotting institu- tions – Go ahead. Whether a man spends his day in an extacy or despondency – he HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

must do some work to show for it – even as there are flesh & bones to show for him. We are superior to the joy we experience. Your last 2 letters methinks have more nerve & will in them than usual – as if you had erected yourself more – Why are not they good work – if you only had a hundred correspondents to tax you? Make your failure tragical – by the earnestness & steadfastness of your endeavor – & then it will not differ from success – Prove it to be the inevitable fate of mortals – of one mortal – if you can. You said that you were writing on immortality – I wish you would communicate to me what you know about that – you are sure to live while that is your theme – Thus I write on some text which a sentence of your letters may have furnished. I think of coming to see you as soon as I get a new coat – if I have money enough left – I will write to you again about it. Henry D. Thoreau BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1856

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

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

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1857

Dr. Josiah Clark Nott left his medical practice in Mobile, Alabama and relocated to New Orleans to become chairman of the anatomy department of the medical school of the University of Louisiana.

Dr. Nott’s, George Robins Gliddon’s, and Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury’s INDIGENOUS RACES OF THE EARTH; OR, NEW CHAPTERS OF ETHNOLOGICAL INQUIRY; INCLUDING MONOGRAPHS ON SPECIAL DEPARTMENTS. THE SCIENCE OF 1857

Completion of publication (begun in the previous year) of Henry Hotze’s translation of Joseph Arthur, comte de Gobineau’s ESSAI SUR L’INEGALITÉ DES RACES HUMAINES, titled THE MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY OF RACES. Dr. Nott contributed an appendix “containing a Summary of the Latest Scientific Facts bearing upon the Question of Unity or Plurality of Species.” Each race of the human species, each one appropriate to each of the continents, had been created by God separately, as the same species but as a separate act of creation — and therefore these separate creations each appropriate to itself were not to be mingled except through human sinful interference with what obviously was God’s Plan For the World. The proper role of the white was to be master, the proper role of the black to be servant. It was the way they were created and it was the way things should be. It is what God requires of us, that we be racist (however, in this year a light mulatto, Richard Henry Green, was graduating at Yale College).25

Publication of Professor Louis Agassiz’s CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA began at this point, with the Boston firm of Little, Brown, & Company, in four quarto volumes, the most notable volume of which is the 2d, on the embryology of the turtle. The Concord library would come 25. Young Green may have been “passing” — there was of course no place to register a race identification on Yale’s forms, no image of him is available, he did not have any great difficulty in obtaining suitable employment, he married into a Vermont family commonly regarded as white, and we see in census records that he as well as his wife and children were presumed white. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

to own this, and from it Thoreau would copy in 1858 into his 2d commonplace book. ACALEPHS IN GENERAL CTENOPHORAE DISCOPHORAE HYDROIDAE HOMOLOGIES OF THE RADIATA

An utterly curious event occurred in 1857, in an utterly curious place, that will require some preamble. I have mentioned that all his life Professor Agassiz insisted regardless of any evidence brought before him that each species must be a separate and distinct “thought of God” –and that God must be repeatedly rethinking organic life in a series of independent and special creations without hereditary continuity– each time life on earth is destroyed by some natural cataclysm. Now the United States was building up toward a civil war over

Louis Agassiz using his head at Stanford HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

the issue of human slavery and Agassiz published his ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION, a “succinct and fervent” ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION

treatise on his theory of special creationism, the pseudoscientific account which gave his foul politics the authority of reality itself, conveniently legitimating, among other things he desired, this peculiar institution. Now, as one of the curiosities of history, although it had been Alexander von Humboldt who had helped this bigot Agassiz get the chair in natural history at the University of Neuchâtel, it was also von Humboldt who persuaded the King of Prussia –of all people, of all places– to proclaim during this very year that:

A slave who steps on Prussian soil is free. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1859

Richard Henry Stoddard’s THE LIFE, TIMES, AND BOOKS OF ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT was published in New-York.

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

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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.26 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.

June 5, Sunday: Waldo Emerson subscribed $5.00 to a fund for Harriet Tubman the slave stealer, and why not? In her peculiarly guiltfree way, she was getting rid of our black people, and didn’t all Americans want to rid themselves of the black people?

On this day and the following one, John Brown would be in New-York.

In Boston, the Reverend William Rounseville Alger delivered an discourse entitled “Lessons for mankind, from the life and death of Humboldt” at the Bulfinch Street Church. (This would soon be published in Cambridge by Welch, Bigelow, and Company as Pamphlet #7 in a series on Louis Agassiz, entitled LESSONS FOR MANKIND, FROM THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HUMBOLDT, A DISCOURSE, DELIVERED IN THE BULFINCH STREET CHURCH, JUNE 5, 1859. BY WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.)

June 5, Sunday: P.M.–To Ball’s Hill. Cat-briar in flower, how long? Allium not out. See several ducks, I think both summer and black. A yellowbird’s nest; four eggs, developed. Pigeon woodpecker’s nest in a hollow black willow over river; six eggs, almost hatched. The new white maple leaves look reddish, and at a distance brown, as if they had not put out yet.

26.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

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1863

Remember that John Charles Frémont had been recommended for the King of Prussia’s “Great Golden Medal of Progress in the Sciences” by his mentor Alexander von Humboldt in 1850, and had reciprocated this courtesy by naming much of Nevada after him? In 1863 we came close to naming this entire state “Humboldt” rather than “Nevada.” 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.27 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.

In this year, in California’s San Francisco, the romantic Cliff House was erected to serve the carriage trade:

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

27. 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 CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

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

Prepared: January 5, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

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

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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.