THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
“Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest fly? ANACREON There were ears for these sounds in Greece long ago, as Anacreon’s ode will show” — Henry Thoreau “Natural History of Massachusetts” July 1842 issue of The Dial1
“There is as much to be discovered and to astonish in magnifying an insect as a star.” — Dr. Thaddeus William Harris
1. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn reported that “one of Harvard College’s natural historians” (we may presume this to have been Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, Thoreau’s teacher in natural science in his senior year) had remarked to Bronson Alcott that “if Emerson had not spoiled him, Thoreau would have made a good entomologist.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Say and Thoreau’s Entomology HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1690
8mo 5-31: Friend William Say and Friend Mary Guest (daughter of the widow Guest) posted their bans and became a married couple in the Burlington, New Jersey monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, across the river from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Friend William was working as a sawyer.
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Say and Thoreau’s Entomology HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1709
December 16, Friday (Old Style): Friend Thomas Say was born near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He would be educated at the Quaker school and his father, Friend William Say, would apprentice him to a saddler, but he would become an apothecary. While a young man, he would suppose that in a trance he had visited Heaven.
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Say and Thoreau’s Entomology HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1755
August 28, Thursday: Friend Benjamin Say was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was Friend Thomas Say, an apothecary, and after an education in Quaker schools he would become a physician.
Sir William Johnson, together with his force of 1,500 troops and native Americans, reached the Southern shore of Lake Saint Sacrement. He promptly renamed the lake as Lake George in honor of his Sovereign, King George II. Sir William started work on another fortress, which he named Fort William Henry after the son of George II.
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 Thomas Say and Thoreau’s Entomology HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1774
William Mentz published “The Visions of a certain Thomas Say, of the City of Philadelphia, which he saw in a Trance.” (This was not a recent trance, but something that had happened to Friend Thomas while he was yet a young man, in perhaps the 1730s or 1740s. This publication was unauthorized.)
March: Friend Thomas Say had it printed in the Pennsylvania Journal, that “Whereas a certain William Mentz has printed for sale, without my knowledge or consent, ‘The Vision of Thomas Say,’ which is but an incorrect and imperfect part of what I propose to make public. And as I never intended what I had wrote on that head to be published during my life, all persons are desired not to encourage the said Mentz in such wrong proceeding.”
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Say and Thoreau’s Entomology HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1776
Late in the year, the conscription practices of the Massachusetts General Court were amended to exclude Quaker conscientious objectors who had been members before April 19, 1775.
OHNE MICH!
Some Quakers, however, terming themselves “Free Quakers,” affiliated themselves with the conflict, and there are some records of Friends in the Boston Meeting being accused of an unspecified “misconduct” which was probably the bearing of arms on one side or the other of the insurrection. The sympathies of some Friends lay with the revolutionaries, and the sympathies of others lay with the authorities. During the hostilities, for HDT WHAT? INDEX
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instance, one Boston merchant, Friend Daniel Silsbe or Silsbury, emigrated to London. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
During the Revolutionary War, Friend Benjamin Say of Philadelphia would disregard the Quaker Peace Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends and serve in uniform in the Continental Army:
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Say and Thoreau’s Entomology HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1780
Friend Benjamin Say received the degree of M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He would practice as a physician in Philadelphia.
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Say and Thoreau’s Entomology HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1781
Friend John Dalton’s early years had been heavily influenced by Friend Elihu Robinson, an instrument maker and meteorologist. At the age of 15, Friend John joined his older brother Jonathan in running a Quaker school at Kendal, near the family home in Cumberland, England.
The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends held in London, this year considered it necessary once again to emphasize that the Quaker Peace Testimony was incompatible with any Quaker vessel being armed: It is recommended to the several quarterly and monthly meetings, that all concerned in armed vessels be dealt with according to the minute of 1744; and it is recommended to Friends everywhere, to take into their serious consideration the inconsistency of any under our profession suffering their temporal interest to induce them in any manner to contribute to the purposes of war.
Friend Benjamin Say, a physician of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was among those known as the “fighting Quakers,” who upon being disowned by the Religious Society of Friends on account of their disregard of the Quaker Peace Testimony, initiated the formation of the society entitled “The Monthly Meeting of Friends, railed by some Free Quakers, distinguishing us from the brethren who have disowned us.”2
Friend Samuel Wetherill wrote these words upon being disowned by Philadelphia Monthly Meeting: We wish only to be freed from every species of ecclesiastical tyranny, and mean to pay a due regard to the principles of our forefathers, and to their rules and regulations so far as they apply to our circumstances, and hope, thereby, to preserve decency and to secure equal liberty to all. We have no design to form creeds or confessions of faith, but humbly to confide in those sacred lessons of wisdom and benevolence, which have been left us by Christ and His apostles, contained in the holy scriptures; and appealing to that divine principle breathed by the breath of God into the hearts of all, to leave every man to think and judge for himself, according to the abilities received, and to answer for his faith and opinions to him, who “seeth the secrets of all hearts,” the sole Judge and sovereign Lord of conscience.3
2. There’s this jest, that a Free Quaker was someone who was free of Quakerism. This wasn’t the way they thought of themselves, of course, but we don’t have a record that any of these people came back to Quakerism when the bloodshedding came to be over and the Ten Commandments reasserted themselves as guides to our conduct. 3. “An Address to those of the People called Quakers, who have been disowned for Matters Religious and Civil” HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1787
June 27, Wednesday: Credentials of the members of the Federal Convention: State of New Hampshire.
Thomas Say was born in Philadelphia, son of the disowned “Free Quaker” physician, Dr. Benjamin Say, who in this year was co-founding the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.4 THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
4. Thomas was a great-grandson of Friend John Bartram, and during his boyhood would frequently take his butterfly and beetle specimens to his great-uncle Friend William Bartram. Refer to Harry B. Weiss and Grace M. Ziebler’s THOMAS SAY: EARLY AMERICAN NATURALIST (Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois and Baltimore, Maryland, 1931) or Patricia Tyson Stroud’s THOMAS SAY: NEW WORLD NATURALIST (U of Pennsylvania P, Philadelphia, 1992). HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1790
In England, the jurist Jeremy Bentham was developing a scheme of control through visuality and information which he would term the “panopticon”: a prison architecturally designed to minimize personal privacy while maximizing the convenience of constant surveillance of all prisoners by a minimal set of guards.
It would be in this decade, also, that the Irishman Robert Barker would be pioneering a scheme of information through visuality and surveillance which he would term the “panorama,” displayed in a specially designed “rotunda” space. Since these panoramas could be rolled up and carried around from town to town in a cart, and since they could be unrolled at one end while being rolled up at the other end for the benefit of a stationary viewing audience, they functioned as a sort of low-tech moving picture show.
Get this: movie-goers and prison-guards were being constructed as engaging in the same sort of activity!
The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons helped in the creation of the first penitentiary, a “Penitentiary House,” with a capacity of 16 single cells, an experiment with day and night solitary confinement (Block D in a wing of the old Walnut Street Jail). The name of the organization would be changed at its first centennial to The Pennsylvania Prison Society, and the organization continues to have a strong influence in the Pennsylvania Correctional scene. Designated members of the Society continue, by law, to be official visitors to all state and county prisons throughout the Commonwealth. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Say and Thoreau’s Entomology HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1792
Dr. Benjamin Say of Philadelphia published “Spasmodic Affections of the Eye.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1793
The yellow fever, carried by French refugees from the epidemic in the Caribbean, struck this capital city. I approached a house before which stood a hearse. Presently a coffin borne by two men issued from the house.
Several of Philadelphia’s doctors fled to the Poconos for their own safety, but Dr. Benjamin Rush cared too much for his patients to imitate their personal cowardice.
Because white people were tending to pay no attention at all when a person of color died, people of color of course being of no particular importance, at this point in time there was a very prevalent myth that African blacks were quite immune to the yellow fever. Also, at this point in time, the system of human enslavement was being phased out of operation in Pennsylvania. The consequence of these two factoids was that there was a 2,500-member black American community living in the vicinity of Philadelphia as it went through its epidemic of the yellow fever in this year, and these people were free but were living in abject poverty. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen had a few years before formed in this community the 1st self-help group HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
to be organized by black Americans, and one of the principal white doctors dealing with this epidemic, Dr. Benjamin Rush, was an abolitionist. Are you beginning to get the picture? –What developed was that the Philadelphia blacks were being organized as a cheapo nursing service for sick whites, while in fact this nursing staff was itself dying in similar proportion as these whites who were being attended. Even black convicts were being released, from the Walnut Street prison, in order to assist at the emergency “contagion hospital” set up on Bush Hill for sick white people.5
Parents desert their children as soon as they are infected, and in every room you enter you see no person but a solitary black man or woman near the sick. Many people thrust their parents into the streets as soon as they complain of a headache.
The epidemic would die down in the early winter, as frost killed the female Culicidae Aëdes aegypti stowaways which had brought the virus up from the Caribbean with the race-war refugees. A count of fresh graves in cemeteries near Philadelphia reached a total of 4,041, which would seem to indicate that in our nation’s capital at least 5,000 had died out of a total population of about 45,000. Within four months the population had been “decimated” (a technical term meaning that fewer than nine out of ten remained living).
Ann Bonsall Say, wife of Dr. Benjamin Say of Philadelphia and mother of the child Thomas Say, died (although whether she died of the yellow fever or of some other cause I do not know).
On the following screen is the manner in which John F. Watson’s ANNALS OF PHILADELPHIA AND 6 PENNSYLVANIA would summarize the epidemic:
5. Afterward of course these black nurses would be accused not only of extorting exorbitant fees for their services to the white community during the white community’s emergency, but also of pilfering the property of the dead and dying. –Which only goes to show how difficult it can become, psychically, when one needs to feel gratitude toward one’s social inferiors! 6. Watson, John Fanning. WATSON’S ANNALS OF PHILADELPHIA AND PENNSYLVANIA, A COLLECTION OF MEMOIRS, ANECDOTES, AND INCIDENTS OF THE CITY AND ITS INHABITANTS AND OF THE EARLIEST SETTLEMENTS OF THE INLAND PART OF PENNSYLVANIA FROM THE DAYS OF THE FOUNDERS INTENDED TO PRESERVE THE RECOLLECTIONS OF OLDEN TIME, AND TO EXHIBIT SOCIETY IN ITS CHANGES OF MANNERS AND CUSTOMS, AND THE CITY AND COUNTRY IN THEIR LOCAL CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS. Written between 1830 and 1850, published 1857 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
The need for a place to examine, detain, and quarantine travelers by ship into the United States via Philadelphia was recognized almost immediately during and following this epidemic. Circumstances surrounding the epidemic –including the arrival of potential revolutionaries, malcontents, and shiploads of slaves from exploding San Domingue (Haiti)– caused a panic in the capital city to repel unwanted foreigners who might infect the nation with French infidelity, revolutionary ideas, or rampaging tropical diseases. While the exact cause of the yellow fever was unknown at the time, the devastating disease was associated with the ships arriving from the Caribbean in ports such as Charleston, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, Baltimore, Maryland, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, etc. Debates in Philadelphia on how to treat those inflicted with the disease splintered whites and blacks, French and Americans, slaves and free blacks into warring parties. Some physicians in Philadelphia favored bleeding and purging; others prescribed passive treatments of rest, liquids, and cool sponges to reduce the fevers. Fears of the unknown was causing Americans to repel foreigners and potential foreign threats in much the same manner as we saw in the immediate wake of 9-11. A “lazaretto” was established near Philadelphia through the collaboration of the US federal government, the government of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the city government itself, to insure that dangerous, unwanted, or potentially infected immigrants or travelers to the United States could be halted, detained, or excluded from entry to nation through that port. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
No history of Philadelphia would be complete, which should overlook the eventful period of 1793, when the fatal yellow fever made its ravages there. It is an event which should never be forgotten; because, whether we regard it as a natural or a spiritual scourge, (effected by the divine power) it is a calamity which may revisit us and which, therefore, should be duly considered, or we suffer it to lose its proper moral influence. The medical histories and official accounts of that disastrous period are in print before the public, and in general terms, give the statement of the rise, progress, and termination of the disease, and the lists of the weekly, monthly, and total deaths: but the ideas of the reader are too generalized to be properly affected with the measure of individual sufferings; therefore, the facts which I have preserved on that memorable occasion, are calculated to supply that defect, and to bring the whole home to people’s interests and bosoms. Let the reader think of a desolation which shut up nearly all the usual churches; their pastors generally fled, and their congregations scattered; the few that still assembled in small circles for religious exercises, not without just fears that their assembling might communicate the disease from one to the other. No light and careless hearers then appeared, and no flippant preaching to indulge itching ears: all, all was solemn and impressive. They then felt and thought they should not all meet again on a like occasion; death, judgment, and eternity then possessed the minds of all who so assembled. Look, then, in which way you would through the streets, and you saw the exposed coffins on chair-wheels, either in quick motion, or you saw the wheels drawn before houses to receive their pestilential charge. Then family, friends, or mourners scarcely ever accompanied them; and no coffins were adorned to please the eye; but coarse, stained wood of hasty fabric received them all. The graves were not dug singly, but pits which might receive many before entire filling up, were opened. In the streets you met no cheerful, heedless faces, but pensive downcast eyes and hurried steps, hastening to the necessary calls of the sick. Then the haunts of vice were shut up; drunkenness and revelling found no companions; tavern doors grew rusty on their hinges; the lewd or merry song was hushed; lewdness perished or was banished, and men generally called upon God. Men saluted each other as if doubting to be met again, and their conversation for the moment was about their several losses and sufferings. The facts of “moving incidents” in individual cases, prepared for the present article, have been necessarily excluded from lack of room, but may hereafter be consulted on pages 210 to 213 in my MS Annals in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1795
Professor William Dandridge Peck (1763-1834) of Harvard College published his “The Description and History of the Canker Worm” about the spring cankerworm Phalaena vernata. (Professor Peck would teach the entomologist Thaddeus William Harris, who would be David Henry Thoreau’s entomology and botany teacher in his Senior year at Harvard.) NEW “HARVARD MEN”
Sylvestre François Lacroix’s ÉLÉMENTS DE GÉOMÉTRIE DESCRIPTIVE: ESSAI DE GÉOMÉTRIE SUR LES PLANS ET LES SURFACES COURBES (Paris: impr. Fuchs). HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1796
Thomas Say died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Upon his death his son, Dr. Benjamin Say, issued an account of the vision his father had had as a young man, in “A Short Compilation of the Extraordinary Life and Writings of Thomas Say, copied from his Manuscripts.” He was said to have been a man of noted benevolence, a zealous promoter of education, and for many years had served as the treasurer of the Society for the Instruction of Blacks. He had helped to found the Pennsylvania Hospital, and was one of the founders of its House of Employment. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1803
To escape persecution and in protest against the rationalism of German Lutherans, “Father” Johann Georg Rapp, an ascetic linen weaver and lay preacher who had founded a sect of Pietists living in communes, with his son, emigrated to the USA. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1805
Some 600 of the followers of “Father” Johann Georg Rapp established their initial “Community of Equality” at a place in Pennsylvania they decided to designate “Harmony” (the name “Concord” already being in use, in that state, as the name of a town). HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1808
Walter Channing was studying medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
During this year and the following one, Dr. Benjamin Say of Philadelphia would represent Pennsylvania’s 1st District in the US House of Representatives. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1809
February 24, Friday: Asa Fitch, America’s first fulltime entomologist, was born in Salem, New York, to doctor and judge Asa Fitch and Abigail Martin Fitch. (The Fitches were descended from the Brewsters of Plymouth — which is neither here nor there.) First and second report on the noxious, beneficial and other insects of the State of New York: made to the state agricultural society, pursuant to an appropriation for this purpose from the legislature of the state (C. Van Benthuysen)
Richard Brinsley Sheridan sat with a glass at a nearby London coffee house as his new Drury Lane Theatre burned to the ground: “A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.”
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6 day 24 of 2 M / A friend (R M) called to see me to converse on some occurences that took place at meeting yesterday our views were correspondent & I hope the matter well be helped, love & unity is a very desirable object but there are two friends among us that are wide from it - Set the eveng at home & read The History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade by T Clarkson, he is a wonderful man & worthy of praise for his able & zealous activity in promoting the object RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1810
William Bartram began mentoring Thomas Say, his nephew, who would prepare America’s first book of entomology.
THE SCIENCE OF 1810
Pierre Huber’s RECHERCHES SUR LES MOEURS DES FOURMIS INDIGENES, in Chapter V, provided an account of a battle of the ants. Partly blind from his youth like E.O. Wilson, Huber “witnessed” insect behavior with the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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assistance of his wife and his son.
WALDEN: Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have PEOPLE OF long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they WALDEN say that Huber is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. “Æneas Sylvius,” say they, “after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,” adds that “‘This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.’ A similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden.” The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the POLK passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill. WEBSTER
KIRBY AND SPENCE
WILLIAM KIRBY WILLIAM SPENCE
François Huber (1750-1831, the father) had studied bees: NOUVELLES OBSERVATIONS SUR LES ABEILLES: ADRESSEES A M. CHARLES BONNET. Geneve: Barde, Manget, 1792; NEW OBSERVATIONS ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF BEES translated from the original, 1806 (Edinburgh: A. Smellie); 2d ed. Edinburgh, printed for J. Anderson, 1808; 3d ed. Edinburgh, printed for W. & C. Tait and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, London, 1821; NOUVELLES OBSERVATIONS SUR LES ABEILLES. 2. ed., rev., corr. et considerablement augm. Paris, J.J. Paschoud, 1814; OBSERVATIONS ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF BEES. A new edition, with a memoir of the author, practical appendix, and analytical index. London, printed for T. Tegg, 1841.
Pierre Huber (1777-1840, the son) studied ants and would be praised by Darwin in ORIGIN OF SPECIES: RECHERCHES SUR LES MOEURS DES FOURMIS INDIGENES, 1810; THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ANTS. Tr. from the French, with additional notes, by J.R. Johnson. London, printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820. The types of ant which Thoreau observed warring most likely were Camponotus and Monomorium: • typical carpenter ants of southern New England, often red and having a minor form 1 1 about /4'' in length and a major form about /2'' in length: Camponotus castaneus, Camponotus ferrugineus or ferruginus, Camponotus herculeanus, Camponotus nearcticus, or Camponotus novoboracensis or noveboracensis 1 • typical black ants of southern New England, about /16'' in length: Monomorium (Monomorium) pharaonis (Carolus Linnæus) which would nest only in buildings, or Monomorium (Monomorium) viride or viridum peninsulatum if nesting outdoors HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
WALDEN: I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two reds ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle- field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary’s front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was Conquer or die. In the mean while there came along a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar, –for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red,– he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick, –“Fire! for God’s sake fire!”– and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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WALDEN: ... There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least. I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near foreleg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breast-plate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer’s eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddlebow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them; which at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. “Æneas Sylvius,” say they, “after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,” adds that “This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.” A similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden.” The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill.
ANTS KIRBY AND SPENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1812
At the age of 25, an apothecary, Thomas Say as a self-taught naturalist became a charter member of the newly forming Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Living frugally in the Academy building, Say would care for its museum and become a friend of William Maclure (1763-1840), President of the Academy from 1817 to 1840.
THE SCIENCE OF 1812 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1813
April 23, Friday: In Philadelphia, Benjamin Say died.
Stephen Douglas, the “Little Giant” who would debate Lincoln, was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1814
The Rappites/Harmonists of Harmony, Pennsylvania, now totaling a “Harmony Society” of some 800, relocated to a riverbank settlement in the lower Wabash Valley of southern Indiana which they named Harmonie. (They were preparing for the imminent 2d coming of Christ by devoting themselves to self-sacrifice and hard work. This would prove to be one of the most successful communes ever attempted. By 1824, when they would sell out and go back to Pennsylvania, their accomplishments in manufacturing and trade would have created considerable wellbeing. Robert Owen (1771-1858), the British industrialist and socialist theorist, would purchase the Indiana assets and rename the place “New Harmony” — the name which now appears on your map. It would be Owen’s worldly ambition to perfect human society through free education, the abolition of social classes, and renunciation of personal wealth.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1816
Thomas Say met Charles Alexandre Lesueur (1778-1846), a French naturalist, malacologist, and ichthyologist who joined the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and became its curator. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1817
William Maclure (1763-1840), Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778-1846), Gerard Troost (1776-1850), and Thomas Say went on a research expedition into northern Florida. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1818
Thomas Say accompanied his friend William Maclure (1763-1840), president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (1817-1840), the geologist Gerard Troost (1776-1850), and others scientists on an expedition to the offshore islands of Georgia and Florida.
Say would have occasion to notice the US federal government to be engaging in “most cruel and inhuman war” against swamp dwellers, “these poor wretches whom we call savages.” This was our 1st attempt at a final solution7 of the problem presented by the “Black Seminole.” General Andrew “Long Knife” Jackson was establishing that he had a perfect right to be hanged, or to be President of the United States of America — or Der Führer or something. Our hero was riding through the Spanish territories exterminating entire villages of women and children (and at night he wrote home to describe the villages as “Sodom and Gomorrah” to his beloved wife Rachel on their slave plantation — we find no response in which the beloved Rachel wrote “Well, I’m glad to hear you’re behaving yourself”). To close out the 1st Seminole War after the loss of Pensacola and St. Marks, and to obtain US assurances about Spain’s claim to Texas, Spain would cede Florida and the Oregon Territory to the United States.
7. In the German language, Auflösung is used for the answer to a word problem in algebra. Although its meaning is “final solution,” it is not exactly the same as the Endlösung or “genocide” which our favorite general was seeking. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1819
During this year and the following one, Major Long would be leading an expedition of exploration to the region of the Rocky Mountains, with the naturalist Thomas Say as zoologist. Say would find the ten-line burweed beetle Leptinotarsa in the Great Plains and write it up as a feeder upon Mexican burweed.8 THE SCIENCE OF 1819
At the age of nine Robert Purvis was brought by his father William Purvis to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where despite his mixed race he would be able to attend the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s Clarkson School.
Nicholas Marcellus Hentz became a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
The 1st steamboat to enter the Missouri River was the Independence, but it was quickly followed by Major Stephen Harriman Long (1784-1864) of the US Corps of Topographical Engineers’s United States Steam Boat Western Engineer –which was a stern-wheeler– and by five other steamboats commissioned by the US federal government for transporting troops. The Western Engineer was, however, the only one of these steamboats to be able to make it up the river as far as the original Council Bluffs, which was just north of today’s Omaha, Nebraska.
Here is the Western Engineer as portrayed by Titian R. Peale:
8. In a related piece of news, no indigenous word has been found, in any of the 8,000 Native American languages of California, for the common appliance known as the shoe, evidently due in part to the fact that prior to the period of contact with Mexico there had been no burs in the grasslands of California for any bare foot to step upon. (NOTE: this problem of the burweed beetle that eventually would attack potato crops has nothing whatever to do with the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852. It is a completely different infestation problem dating to a completely separate era.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
The expedition had been sent out to complete the expedition of Captain Richard Sparks, which had failed to locate the source of the Red River. However, the Long party would get onto the wrong stream and would be deceived by a local native tribe as to where exactly they were, and then three members of the party, overcome by the hardship of the journey, would sneak away with a number of the expedition’s horses. Unfortunately, in the saddlebags of those horses happened to be the records of the trip to that point, and the deserters would never be apprehended and those records would never be recovered. It would not be until the expedition got to within three days’ journey of their completion point, a frontier outpost, Ft. Smith in the Arkansas territory, that they would figure out that they had been deceived and that the stream that they had been following was the South Canadian River rather than the Red River to which they had been assigned by the federal government.
However, Thomas Say would be the first white man to describe the coyote, swift fox, western kingbird, band- tailed pigeon, Say’s phoebe, rock wren, lesser goldfinch, lark sparrow, lazuli bunting, and orange-crowned warbler. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
(Being first, being a white man, and having a job that involves interesting travel — tell me about hitting the Trifecta.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
Here is the map the Long expedition would generate for its report, of the Great American Desert — a locale described as “frequented by roving bands of Indians who have no fixed places of residence but roam from place to place in quest of game”:
(On this map, you may notice that what we today designate as “Pike’s Peak” because it was trod upon by Captain Zebulon Montgomery Pike on June 22, 1808, is identified instead as “James’ Peak.”)9
9. The narrative of the expedition would be written up in Philadelphia in 1823 by Edwin James, after whom this highest peak was hopefully to be named, as ACCOUNT OF AN EXPEDITION FROM PITTSBURGH TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, PERFORMED IN THE YEARS 1819 AND ’20...UNDER THE COMMAND OF MAJOR STEPHEN H. LONG. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1820
After having been engaged for a period as a tutor in the family of Mr. Marshall, a wealthy planter on Sullivan’s Island near Charleston, South Carolina, Nicholas Marcellus Hentz enrolled as a medical student at Harvard College (he would soon abandon these studies).
Thaddeus William Harris received his MD degree from Harvard Medical School. He would find himself unable to make a comfortable living as a physician. However, he already had begun, in connection with his medical studies, his careful study of the habits of certain insects and plants.
The father of this new Dr. Harris, the Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris, a Congregationalist minister, in this year was preparing his THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BIBLE. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1823
Dr. Thaddeus William Harris’s 1st economic/entomological paper, “Upon the Natural History of the Salt Marsh Caterpillar.” (At Harvard College in 1837, Harris would be teaching Entomology and Botany to David Henry Thoreau during his final year of formal schooling.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
Thomas Say served as zoologist in Major Stephen H. Long’s expedition to the sources of the Minnesota River and Red River in the north, and to the US/Canada boundary west of the Great Lakes.
November 10, Monday: Thomas Say wrote Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, that “entomology, which had so long been condemned in this country as a frivolous pursuit, seems now to be almost able to command that attention which its importance demands, & the formidable depredations of the insect race upon the vitals of the agricultural interest, compel the farmer to devote much attention to their manners and habits which he would not otherwise have deigned to bestow. This may be said to be the triumph of Entomology over the prejudices of the selfish.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1824
The beginning of publication of the three volumes of Thomas Say’s AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGY, OR DESCRIPTIONS OF THE INSECTS OF NORTH AMERICA, which would not be complete until 1828. According to Patricia Tyson Stroud, there was a deep connection between the intellectual effort that was put into this project, and a general American desire for us to mark ourselves as distinct from general European intellectual culture.
THE SCIENCE OF 1824 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1825
The Rappites/Harmonists of Harmonie, Indiana moved back east and founded Economy, Pennsylvania.
Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877) resolved to establish a community in America based on the socialist ideas he had developed over the years. He purchased the Harmonie colony’s land in southern Indiana for £30,000. He put one of his sons, also named Robert Owen, in charge of New Lanark and another one, William Owen (1802- 1842), in charge of the New World experiment, which would become known as New Harmony. Here is New Harmony on the Wabash River as depicted by a follower of Karl Bodmer in 1841:
(This painting is at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.) COMMUNITARIANISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
March: Fanny Wright visited New Harmony, Indiana. At this time most of the inhabitants were still Rappites but they were in the process of moving to a new commune, called Economy, north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Fanny then visited Albion, where she met George Flower.
COMMUNITARIANISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1826
Volumes III and IV of the Reverend William Kirby’s and William Spence, Esq.’s AN INTRODUCTION TO ENTOMOLOGY; OR ELEMENTS OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF INSECTS. ILLUSTRATED WITH COLOURED PLATES (London: Printed for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, Paternoster Row).
INTRODUCTION TO ENTOM... INTRODUCTION TO ENTOM...
Henry Thoreau would borrow the four volumes of the 1846 Philadelphia edition from the library of the Society HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of Natural History in Boston, and eventually would come to have in his personal library an 1856 one-volume fine-print (unabridged) London 7th edition. THOREAU’S 7TH EDITION
Between this year and 1849, Dr. Thaddeus William Harris and Catherine Holbrook Harris would be having like a dozen children, one of whom would die in infancy. In Cambridge, this family resided on Dunster Street, then on Linden Street, then on Holyoke Place. Contact with William Dandridge Peck would be leading Dr. Harris toward an interest in natural history — particularly, Entomology.
January: Thomas Say traveled on the famous “Boatload of Knowledge” (the Philanthropist, a keelboat) to Mount Vernon, Indiana, and then continued overland to the utopian society experiment, the “New Harmony Settlement,” a venture of Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877). One of the passengers was Lucy Way Sistare, whom Say would marry secretly near New Harmony on January 4, 1827. She was an artist and illustrator of specimens (such as in Say’s AMERICAN CONCHOLOGY) and would become the first female member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. He was accompanied by William Maclure (1763-1840), the artist and naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778-1846), and the Pestalozzian educators Marie Duclos Fretageot (1783-1833) and Dr. William S. Phiquepal D’Arusmont. They would soon be joined in New Harmony by Gerard Troost (1776-1850) and Francis Joseph Nicholas Neef (1770-1854). There he would later meet another naturalist, Samuel Constantine Rafinesque.
Late Spring: As usual, the swarming of the 17-year New England cicadas Magicicada septendecim.
In later years Henry Thoreau will make no mention of remembering the hearing of this din. (That’s because the swarm did not reach all the way over to eastern Massachusetts, its eastmost point being in central Connecticut.) NEW ENGLAND HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1827
Having disengaged himself from the textile business of New Lanark, Scotland that had been the source of his fortune, Robert Dale Owen had sold his interests in that business and he, his four sons, and one of his daughters, Jane, had moved to New Harmony, Indiana with the intention of making it their permanent home — but in this year he bethought himself, and determined that he would return to England to spend the remainder of his life assisting different reform groups there. This included supporting organizations attempting to obtain factory reform, adult suffrage, and the development of successful trade unions. He would express his views in his own journals, The Crisis and The New Moral World.
COMMUNITARIANISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
January 4, Thursday: Thomas Say and Lucy Way Sistare10 secretly married in a civil ceremony at the courthouse of Mt. Vernon, Indiana. The only persons in attendance were witnesses Virginia Dupalais and Louisa Neef.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 4th of 1st M / Our meeting was about as large as usual Father Rodman appeard in a good & I thought well authorized testimony - after which T Carr said a few words - & then Father Rodman said a few words again — It was a season of mixture of feelings. - The forepart of it unusually good & the latter part of no small trial. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
10. Lucy had been born on November 28, 1800 in New London, Connecticut. Neither her father was Joseph Sistare (1774-1829) nor her mother Nancy Way Sistare (1775-1829) were Quakers. She was an artist and illustrator of specimens (such as in Say’s AMERICAN CONCHOLOGY) who had been with him on the “Boatload of Knowledge” keelbarge to the New Harmony commune in the previous year. Later she would become the 1st female member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. She would die of pneumonia on November 15, 1886 in Lexington, Massachusetts and be buried in New York City (her sister lived on Staten Island). HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1828
While living in New Harmony, Indiana, Thomas Say had been teaching natural history, in Community Building #5.
In this year publication was completed there of his AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGY, OR DESCRIPTIONS OF THE INSECTS OF NORTH AMERICA, a series of volumes which had begun in 1824. According to Patricia Tyson Stroud, there was a deep connection between the intellectual effort that was put into this project, and a general American desire for us to mark ourselves as distinct from general European intellectual culture.
THE SCIENCE OF 1828 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1829
May 17, Sunday: Former US Supreme Court chief justice and New York governor John Jay died in his Bedford home at the age of 80.
According to an almanac of the period, “A French minister, M. Bresson, arrives, and is presented to the Colombian government at Bogota,” “A body of Turkish troops, 5000 in number, defeated and driven into Silistria, by the Russian army under General Diebitsch, after a severe action, with heavy losses on both sides. Silistria completely invested by the Russians the same day,” and “Severe battle near Pravadia, between the Russian army under General Roth, and the Turkish army commanded by the Grand Vizier in person. The Turks are said to have lost 2000, and the Russians 1000 men. The Russian army maintained their ground; but no important advantage gained by either party.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
Bronson Alcott, in Boston: “I have perused the New Harmony Gazette for 1827-8 within the last month, and am pleased with many articles which its pages contain.... The objection which I have to it is chiefly in reference to its open attack upon the Christian religion, or rather to the disrespect which its editors pay to religious opinions, or rather to the disrespect which its editors pay to religious opinions generally. I fear they are not fully imbued with the spirit of liberality, that spirit which induces its possessors to treat the opinions of all with respect and to acknowledge frankly the truth contained in all.”
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 17 of 5 M / Our Meetings were both silent & to me Seasons of life & favour for which I desire to be thankful, as death & dullness has been my lot & portion for a long time & particularly in Meeting —After Meeting in the PM We recd a letter from John — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1830
Uneasy about the numbers of new USers settling within Mexico, Mexican officials attempted to curb the number of newcomers, including enslaved Americans. It was decreed that foreigners could not cross the border into the Tejas Territory from the United States without obtaining a passport issued by Mexican agents. The Mexican government would, however, be generally ineffectual in enforcing this law and it would be largely ignored.
In the decade of the 1830s the boll weevil Anthonomus grandis, which would devastate American cottonfields in the early 20th Century and cause bank failures, was first collected and made known to entomologists, in fields near Vera Cruz, Mexico. At this time it was feeding on wild cotton and other members of the plant family Malvacaea and was not observed in domestic crops. (In 1892 it would cross the Rio Grande.)
Part 1 of the 7 parts of Thomas Say’s AMERICAN CONCHOLOGY, OR DESCRIPTIONS OF THE SHELLS OF NORTH AMERICA ILLUSTRATED FROM COLOURED FIGURES FROM ORIGINAL DRAWINGS EXECUTED FROM NATURE was issued in New Harmony, Indiana (Part 6 would appear in 1834; Part 7 would be issued in Philadelphia in 1836). HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1831
Benjamin Peirce, Junior became a mathematics tutor at Harvard College.
After the death of Benjamin Peirce, Senior, Dr. Thaddeus William Harris became the next Librarian at Harvard Library. During this year he prepared a catalogue of insects for Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864)’s REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY, MINERALOGY, BOTANY, AND ZOOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS (Amherst MA: Press of J.S. and C. Adams, 1833). HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
June: The studies of Thomas Say were considerably impeded by his location in New Harmony, Indiana, where the sorts of scientific equipment he needed to use, and the sort of publications to which he needed to have access, were almost totally unavailable, and where personal correspondence was delivered only irregularly and with much delay — but this retiring soul was at least spared the intrigue and competition he would have been encountering in Philadelphia. William Maclure wrote to Reuben Haines, mentioning that “Mr. Say was eating, lodging, and fixed as a hermit in a corner of one of the academy’s rooms, working for their journal, and with all his industry could not keep it up so as to have a means of publishing his labours” and that although Charles- Alexandre Lesueur was essentially working for free at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the circulation of the Academy’s journal was probably less than that of New Harmony’s Disseminator. He characterized Say as “modest and unassuming, not well calculated for scrambling amongst the intrigue and forward ambition” of those in Philadelphia. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1832
Dr. Thaddeus William Harris of Harvard College completed a catalog of some 2,300 American insect species. (Waldo Emerson would complain that, bereft of any grand vision, such as for instance the sophisticated Naturphilosophes had in Europe, these American entomologists such as “Peck & Harris count the cilia & spines on a beetle’s wing.” — Not for Emerson any small view!) HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1834
Professor Richard Harlan’s most notable record of the fossil fauna of America was his “Critical Notices of Various Organic Remains Hitherto Discovered in North America,” published nearly simultaneously in Pennsylvania and Scotland.
Part 6 of Thomas Say’s AMERICAN CONCHOLOGY, OR DESCRIPTIONS OF THE SHELLS OF NORTH AMERICA ILLUSTRATED FROM COLOURED FIGURES FROM ORIGINAL DRAWINGS EXECUTED FROM NATURE was issued in New Harmony, Indiana (Part 1 had appeared in 1830; Part 7, the final part, would be issued in Philadelphia in 1836).
October 10, 7:00 PM, Friday: Thomas Say died in New Harmony, Indiana, evidently of typhoid fever. They would bury him in the garden behind the Owen/Maclure House on the corner of Main Street and Grainery Street. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1836
Publication of Thomas Say’s last paper, describing some of the common Hymenoptera of New Harmony, Indiana.
Part 7, the final volume of Thomas Say’s AMERICAN CONCHOLOGY, OR DESCRIPTIONS OF THE SHELLS OF NORTH AMERICA ILLUSTRATED FROM COLOURED FIGURES FROM ORIGINAL DRAWINGS EXECUTED FROM NATURE was printed in Philadelphia. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1837
The Reverend William Kirby’s ON THE POWER, WISDOM AND GOODNESS OF GOD AS MANIFESTED IN THE CREATION OF ANIMALS AND IN THEIR HISTORY, HABITS AND INSTINCTS; (Second American Edition. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard). ON THE POWER, WISDOM, ... ON THE POWER, WISDOM, ... HDT WHAT? INDEX
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A copy of this was gifted to Harvard College by the Class of 1837 on 31 July, 1837.
There had been hardly enough at Harvard during those years to set a student scheming about other worlds to interrogate. However, during this final year in college would be published John Pringle Nichol’s VIEWS OF THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE HEAVENS, the book that was currently inspiring Robert Chambers to begin the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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drafting of his phenomenal bestseller, VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION.
Soon Professor William Whewell, in his HISTORY OF THE INDUCTIVE SCIENCES, FROM THE EARLIEST TO THE PRESENT TIME, would be indicting a couple of guys who were clearly guilty of living in late Roman times, Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes, as guilty also of belief in a flat earth.
During the period of David Henry Thoreau’s residency in Harvard Yard, according to a later record made by Professor Joseph Lovering,
the College did not possess a single instrument which was adapted to making an astronomical observation which would have any scientific value.
HARVARD OBSERVATORY there having been merely one unreliable astronomical clock, one small and quite useless transit compass “far below the average of such instruments,” and three telescopes not appropriate to any “nice observation,” (61-inch reflecting telescope, 15-inch and 12-inch refracting telescopes) by which the students might gaze at HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the face of the moon, or at the current comet, or at the satellites of Jupiter, or the rings of Saturn.
(Whewell was determined that he was going to uncover evidence for such a belief, and thus produce grounds for his easy scorn toward “the flat earthers,” and he could discover this nowhere else: Aristotle, the venerable Bede, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, John Buriden, Nicholas Oresme, and all other reputable commentators had declared the earth, flatly, to be a globe.)
1 2
4 3 Photographic proof... (The four corners have been arbitrarily numbered clockwise.)
(It is to be noted that David Henry Thoreau was studying “Mathematics” and “Natural Philosophy” –which is to say, using the word that was at that time a neologism, “Science”– under this physicist and astronomer, Professor Joseph Lovering, and was studying Entomology and Botany under Dr. Thaddeus William Harris.)
From this year into 1842, during the vacancy of the natural history professorship, Dr. Harris would be lecturing on natural history at Harvard. This was the sole course that Harvard had to offer on the general topic of natural history, and it was taken as Thoreau took it, at the end of the senior year. Harris also was teaching a private class on Entomology and in this year prepared A REPORT ON THE INSECTS OF MASSACHUSETTS, INJURIOUS TO VEGETATION. He would be building up a carefully described and arranged insect collection, while compiling painstaking indexes to major works on entomology, and over the course of his life would publish something like a hundred articles on insects and insect-related diseases. He was hoping against hope that he would be appointed as the college’s professor of natural history — but that would be a recognition which he would never be granted. When Thoreau took this course, it was in the first year in which it was being offered and consisted of 17 of Harris’s lectures on Botany. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1838
The Reverend William Ingraham Kip became rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Albany, New York.
The Union Theological Seminary conferred its D.D. degree upon Chester Dewey.
In New York, the Scottsville and Le Roy Railroad was built at the cost of $40,0000, using wooden rails. It only reached from Scottsville to Caledonia.
Asa Fitch decided to start studying agriculture and entomology. He began to collect and study insects for New York state.
The formative meeting of the American Association of Geologists took place at the home of Ebenezer Emmons in Albany, New York (this organization was the predecessor of the American Association for the HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
Advancement of Science). In this year he named the Adirondack region of mountains.
THE SCIENCE OF 1838 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
December: Henry Thoreau was definitely aware of the existence of the Magicicada cicada swarms, for in his manuscript for “Moonlight,” after the comments “Every melodious sound is the ally of Silence — a help and not a hindrance to abstraction and “Certain sounds more than others have found favor with the poets only as foils to silence.,” he inserted Henri Estienne II’s “Anacreon’s Ode to the Cicada” from CARMINUM POETARUM NOUEM, published in 1554.11 Anacreon’s Ode to the Cicada
We pronounce thee happy, cicada, For on the tops of the trees, Sipping a little dew Like any king thou singest. For thine are they all, Whatever thou seest in the fields, And whatever the woods bear. Thou art the friend of the husbandmen. In no respect injuring any one; And thou art honored among men, Sweet prophet of summer. The muses love thee, And Phoebus himself loves thee, And has given thee a shrill song; Age does not wrack thee, Thou skilful – earth-born – song-loving, Unsuffering – bloodless one; Almost thou art like the gods.
11. An inclusion Thoreau would suppress either because he had transferred it to NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS as a comment on insects or while he was in the process of transforming this into the ending of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. This is the person in the same generation of the Genevan publishing family Étienne who had published, in 1572, the TLG which would have been utilized by Thoreau and which would still be in use into the 19th Century. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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You will note that he would not have been doing this because he had been listening to the cicadas, because this is the wrong season of the year for the cicada swarm and also because he hasn’t heard the singing of the 17- year cicada since the late spring of 1826, at which point he had been but 8 years old. He never mentions that he remembers having heard it then, and, when this phenomenal New England swarming occurs again in the late spring of 1843, he still makes no entry in his journal. I’ve been trying to figure out why Thoreau, who as a 1st-order approximation seems always to have been interested in anything and everything, didn’t pay particular attention to this every-17th-year swarming of the cicada. These swarm years have of course been being documented, since they were already regular like clockwork in the days of the Pilgrims. It seems to be some sort of neural circuit in the cicada nymph’s subesophageal ganglion that ticks off the cycles of warmth and cold until it reaches 17 seasons. Then a different system, perhaps partly based on temperature and partly on pheromones, kicks in to determine the precise day and hour of the venturing aboveground for purposes of mating. The reproductive strategy followed here, of course, is that of overwhelming predatory birds with food, so that they are already gorged and so that there are still a plenty of insects left to attract one another through their fiddling, and mate, and drop the eggs that will create the next generation of nymphs to spend 17 years sucking on their tree roots. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1842
April 10, Sunday: Frederick Douglass spoke in Bellingham, Massachusetts.
When Joseph Smith, Jr. put his moves on Nancy Rigdon, she repulsed him.
Waldo Emerson assigned Henry Thoreau to review, for THE DIAL, a series of scientific surveys he had picked up in New-York, of the fauna and flora of Massachusetts — a series that happened to consider these life forms primarily as “resources,” for their exploitability. It would be up to Henry to supply a soul-corrective, a rebuke to the spread-poison-and-kill-em-all Entomology with which we are so familiar: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest fly? ANACREON There were ears for these sounds in Greece long ago, as Anacreon’s ode will show” — Henry David Thoreau “Natural History of Massachusetts” July 1842 issue of The Dial12
July: Henry Thoreau contributed poems and NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS to THE DIAL. Nathaniel Hawthorne liked this review of the nature literature — but Waldo Emerson disliked it. Cruickshank commentary Professor of Geology Robert M. Thorson of the University of Connecticut has indicated on pages 34-5 of his WALDEN’S SHORE: HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE why it is that the dust jacket of that history-of-science text published by Harvard University Press happens to be decorated with a photograph of a granite pebble containing a sparkling vein of quartz. The granite is intended to represent the Andover Granite bedrock far underneath the glacial detritus within which the waters of Walden Pond are situated. The pebble’s quartz vein presents the “frost-work of a longer night” of which Thoreau wrote in his essay for THE DIAL “NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS” –it is an emblem of Thoreau’s affiliation with Vulcan rather than Neptune, Plutonism rather than Neptunism in the history of the development of scientific understanding – and the regular ovoid shape of the specimen would be indicative of its subsequent tumbling down a streambed of time. The one thing of which we are not informed in this text is whether or no this particular photographed pebble is one of those Henry himself picked out for the mineral collection he kept in his attic room in the Concord boardinghouse, a mineral collection that is now in storage at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts (and perhaps this would be something that matters only to me): Being a big fan of Vulcan made Thoreau an easy mark for the plutonist school of thought, despite his formal education during the neptunian era. He sensed beneath Concord the presence of a great “subterranean fire,” one responsible for creating gemlike crystals of quartz within the veins of the Andover Granite. These, he collected for his specimen cabinet. These he interpreted as the “frost-work of a longer night.” This six-word snippet of prose-poetry densely abstracts three Huttonian 12. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn reported that “one of Harvard College’s natural historians” (we may presume this to have been Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, Thoreau’s teacher in natural science in his senior year) had remarked to Bronson Alcott that “if Emerson had not spoiled him, Thoreau would have made a good entomologist.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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verities. Crystals of water-ice and silica-ice were indeed both hexagonal “frosts” originating from fluids, whether vapor or liquid. Freezing quartz requires a “longer night” than freezing water. And these respective nights have different causes. In Playfair’s words, the “revolutions within the earth are independent of revolutions within the celestial spheres.” Thoreau correctly envisioned planet Earth emerging from an initially molten state under darkened skies. “Mornings of creation, I call them ... A morning which carries us back beyond the Mosaic creation, where crystallizations are fresh and unmelted. It is the poet’s hour.” This passage was inspired by a Promethean scene coming from a Concord field on a moonless night. From a distance, Henry saw a burning “heap of stumps half covered with earth,” a “phosphorescence ... a strange, Titanic thing this Fire, this Vulcan.... within are fiery caverns, incrusted with fire as a cave with saltpetre ... the glass men are nearer the truth than the men of science.” This last clause offered playful support for the plutonists who, as “glass men,” invoked a molten origin for local rock. Conversely, it was a dig at the neptunist thrall for their aqueous version of creation. “Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest fly? ANACREON There were ears for these sounds in Greece long ago, as Anacreon’s ode will show” — Henry Thoreau “Natural History of Massachusetts” July 1842 issue of The Dial13
13. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn reported that “one of Harvard College’s natural historians” (we may presume this to have been Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, Thoreau’s teacher in natural science in his senior year) had remarked to Bronson Alcott that “if Emerson had not spoiled him, Thoreau would have made a good entomologist.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Anacreon’s Ode to the Cicada
We pronounce thee happy, cicada, For on the tops of the trees, Sipping a little dew Like any king thou singest. For thine are they all, Whatever thou seest in the fields, And whatever the woods bear. Thou art the friend of the husbandmen. In no respect injuring any one; And thou art honored among men, Sweet prophet of summer. The muses love thee, And Phoebus himself loves thee, And has given thee a shrill song; Age does not wrack thee, Thou skilful – earth-born – song-loving, Unsuffering – bloodless one; Almost thou art like the gods. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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NUTTALL ARISTOTLE
NUTTALL
In this issue of THE DIAL appeared Thoreau’s translation of one of Anacreon’s odes in CARMINUM POETARUM NOUEM, under the title “Return of Spring”: “the works of men shine,” etc.
In this issue of THE DIAL, in the context of an article “Prayers” by Waldo, a poem appeared in quotation without any attribution and without title. We suspect this sarcastic comment in the form of a prayer to have been contributed by Thoreau: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself, That in my action I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye. And next in value, which thy kindness lends, That I may greatly disappoint my friends, Howe’er they think or hope that it may be, They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me. That my weak hand may equal my firm faith, And my life practice what my tongue saith; That my low conduct may not show, Nor my relenting lines, That I thy purpose did not know, Or overrated thy designs.
This issue of THE DIAL also contained portions selected by Waldo out of Sir William Jones’s and Charles Wilkins’s translations of the THE HEETOPADES OF VEESHNOO-SARMA, IN A SERIES OF CONNECTED FABLES, 14 INTERSPERSED WITH MORAL, PRUDENTIAL, AND POLITICAL MAXIMS.
A WEEK: It is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense in very old books, as the Heetopades of Veeshnoo HITOPADESA Sarma; a playful wisdom which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself.
WALDEN: Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a HITOPADESA world? Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this ÆSOP crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals to their XENOPHANES best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. PEOPLE OF WALDEN THE DIAL, JULY 1842
We commence in the present number the printing of a series of selections from the oldest ethical and religious writings of men, exclusive of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Each nation has its bible more or less pure; none has yet been willing or able in a wise and devout spirit to collate its own with those of other nations, and sinking the civil-historical and the ritual portions to bring together the grand expressions of the moral sentiment in different ages and races, the rules for the 14. The HITOPADESA or “Salutary Instructions” is a very ancient collection and is also familiarly known to us as “THE FABLES OF PILPAY.” Many of these tales are condensations of material to be found in the PANCHATANTRA, which consists of five apologues recited by a Brahmin teacher name of Vishnu Sarma for the instruction of his class of Indian princes in the principles of their princeship. Since this collection emphasizes worldly-wiseness, it has been exceedingly popular, indeed even more popular than Machiavelli’s THE PRINCE: we presently know of over 200 different editions in at least 50 languages around the world. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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guidance of life, the bursts of piety and of abandonment to the Invisible and Eternal; — a work inevitable sooner or later, and which we hope is to be done by religion and not by literature. The following sentences are taken from Charles Wilkins's translation of the Heetopades or Amicable Instructions of Veeshnoo Sarma, according to Sir William Jones, the most beautiful, if not the most ancient collection of apologues in the world, and the original source of the book, which passes in the modern languages of Europe and America, under the false name of Pilpay.
EXTRACTS FROM THE HEETOPADES OF VEESHNOO SARMA.
Whatsoever cometh to pass, either good or evil, is the consequence of a man's own actions, and descendeth from the power of the Supreme Ruler. Our lives are for the purposes of religion, labor, love, and salvation. If these are destroyed, what is not lost? If these are preserved, what is not preserves? A wise man should relinquish both his wealth and his life for another. All is to be surrendered for a just man when he is reduced to the brink of destruction. Why dost thou hesitate over this perishable body composed of flesh, bones, and excrements? O my friend, [my body,] support my reputation! If constancy is to be obtained by inconstancy, purity by impurity, reputation by the body, then what is there which may not be obtained? The difference between the body and the qualities is infinite; the body is a thing to be destroyed in a moment, whilst the qualities endure to the end of the creation. Is this one of us, or is he a stranger is the enumeration of the ungenerous; but to those by whom liberality is practised, the whole world is but as one family. Fortune attendeth that lion amongst men who exerteth himself. They are weak men who declare Fate the sole cause. It is said, Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a former state of existence; wherefore it behoveth a man vigilantly to exert the powers he is possessed of. The stranger, who turneth away from a house with disappointed hopes, leaveth there his own offences and departeth, taking with him all the good actions of the owner. Hospitality is to be exercised even towards an enemy when he cometh to thine house. The tree does not withdraw its shade even from the wood-cutter. Of all men thy guest is the superior. The mind of a good man does not alter when he is in distress; the waters of the ocean are not to be heated by a torch of straw. Nor bathing with cool water, nor a necklace of pearls, nor anointing with sanders, yieldeth such comfort to the body oppressed with heat, as the language of a good man cheerfully uttered doth to the mind. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Good men extend their pity even unto the most despicable animals. The moon doth not withhold the light, even from the cottage of a Chandala. Those who have forsaken the killing of all; those who are helpmates to all; those who are a sanctuary to all; those men are in the way of heaven. Behold the difference between the one who eateth flesh, and him to whom it belonged. The first hath a momentary enjoyment, whilst the latter is deprived of existence. Who would commit so great a crime against a poor animal, who is fed only by the herbs which grow wild in the woods, and whose belly is burnt up with hunger? Every book of knowledge, which is known to Oosana or to Vreehaspatee, is by nature planted in the understanding of women. The beauty of the Kokeela is his voice; the beauty of a wife is constancy to her husband; the beauty of the ill-favored is science; the beauty of the penitent is patience. What is too great a load for those who have strength? What is distance to the indefatigable? What is a foreign country to those who have science? Who is a stranger to those who have the habit of speaking kindly? Time drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action, which ought to be performed and is delayed in the execution. When Nature is forsaken by her lord, be she ever so great, she doth not survive. Suppose thyself a river, and a holy pilgrimage in the land of Bharata, of which truth is the water, good actions the banks, and compassion the current; and then, O son of Pandoo, wash thyself therein, for the inward soul is not to be purified by common water. As frogs to the pool, as birds to a lake full of water, so doth every species of wealth flow to the hands of him who exerteth himself. If we are rich with the riches which we neither give nor enjoy, we are rich with the riches which are buried in the caverns of the earth. He whose mind is at ease is possessed of all riches. is it not the same to one whose foot is enclosed in a shoe, as if the whole surface of the earth were covered with leather? Where have they, who are running here and there in search of riches, such happiness as those placid spirits enjoy who are gratified at the immortal fountain of happiness? All hath been read, all hath been heard, and all hath been followed by him who, having put hope behind him, dependeth not upon expectation. What is religion? Compassion for all things which have life. What is happiness? To animals in this world, health. What is kindness? A principle in the goode. What is philosophy? An entire separation from the world. To a hero of sound mind, what is his own, and what a foreign country? Wherever he halteth, that place is acquired by the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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splendor of his arms. When pleasure is arrived, it is worthy of attention; when trouble presenteth itself, the same; pains and pleasures have their revolutions like a wheel. One, although not possessed of a mine of gold, may find the offspring of his own nature, that noble ardor which hath for its object the accomplishment of the whole assemblage of virtues. Man should not be over-anxious for a subsistence, for it is provided by the Creator. The infant no sooner droppeth from the womb, than the breasts of the mother begin to stream. He, by whom geese were made white, parrots are stained green, and peacocks painted of various hues, — even he will provide for their support. He, whose inclination turneth away from an object, may be said to have obtained it.
[Wilkins, Sir Charles. THE BHAGVAT-GETA, transl. 1785. THE HEETOPADES, transl. Bath, 1787. THE STORY OF … SAKOONTALA, TRANSL. FROM THE MAHÄBHÄRATA. 1795. GRAMMAR OF THE SANSKRITA LANGUAGE. 1808.
Horace Hayman Wilson. THE MÉGHA DUTA: OR, CLOUD MESSENGER: A POEM IN THE SANSKRIT LANGUAGE BY KALIDASA, WITH TRANSL. IN ENGLISH VERSE. Calcutta, 1814, etc. SANSCRIT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY. Calcutta, 1819; 2nd edn., 1832. HINDU THEATRE. 3 vols. Calcutta, 1827, etc. THE VISHNU PURANA, transl. 1840; new edn., 1867-1870. ARIANA ANTIQUA, A DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT OF THE ANTIQUITIES AND COINS OF AFGHANISTAN. 1841. INTRODUCTION TO SANSKRIT GRAMMAR. 1841. RIG-VEDA SANHITA, translated: Volume 1, 1850; New Edition, 1868, II, 1854, III, 1857; completed by E.B. Cowell; IV, 1866, V-VI, 1870. Collective edn. of WORKS. 12 vols. 1862-1871] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1843
June 13, Tuesday: Specimens of the 17-year swarm of cicadas (Magicicada septendecim) were being collected in the vicinity of New Haven, Connecticut by Cornelia Lawrence Hillhouse, a privileged daughter-in-law of the early city planner James Hillhouse. The samples she collected near West Rock eventually would become the oldest specimens in the Peabody Museum’s vaunted collection of more than 1.5 million New England dead bodies. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1846
This was the year in which the Reverend William Kirby’s and William Spence, Esq.’s AN INTRODUCTION TO HDT WHAT? INDEX
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ENTOMOLOGY was republished, in Philadelphia. Henry Thoreau would extract material from page 258:
WALDEN: I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to PEOPLE OF preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has WALDEN been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that “some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them;” and they lay it down as “a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvæ. The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly,” ... “and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly,” content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva. This is the tid-bit which tempts his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.
KIRBY AND SPENCE
WILLIAM KIRBY WILLIAM SPENCE
WALDEN: Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have PEOPLE OF long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they WALDEN say that Huber is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. “Æneas Sylvius,” say they, “after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,” adds that “‘This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.’ A similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden.” The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the POLK passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill. WEBSTER
KIRBY AND SPENCE
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THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
1852
January 21, Wednesday: Note that in Henry Thoreau’s journal entry for this January day, he does not say that he had just witnessed this battle of the ants, and that it is clearly a warm-weather observation. He was merely writing it up as of this day, anent the visit by Lajos Kossuth. Thoreau may have witnessed this insect social behavior during the presidency of James Knox Polk, which was from 1845 to 1849, perhaps while he was staying at Walden Pond:
January 21, Wednesday: One day when I went out to my wood-pile or rather my pile of stumps – I observed two ants on the chips – the one red, the other much larger & black, fiercely contending with one another, and rolling over on the chips. It was evidently a struggle for life & death which had grown out of a serious feud. Having once got hold they never let go of each other – but struggled & wrestled & rolled on the chips – each retaining his hold with mastiff-like pertinacity. Looking further I found to my astonishment that the chips were covered with such combatants – that it was not a duellum but a bellum, a war between two races of ants – the red always pitted against the black – & frequently two red ones to one black. It was the only war I have ever witnessed – the only battle field I ever trod while the battle was raging.– internecine war.– The red republicans & the black despots or imperialists. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat yet without any noise that I could hear – and never soldiers fought so resolutely. I watched a couple in a little sunny valley amid the chips – that were fast locked in each others embraces – now at noon day prepared to fight till the sun went down. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversaries front – & through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board – while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side & as I saw on looking nearer had divested him of several of his members. None manifested a disposition to retreat from the combat equal or unequal. It was evident that their battle cry was conquer or die. They fought like mastiffs or bull dogs, who will not let go though all their legs are cut off. In the mean while their came along a single red ant on the side hill of this valley – evidently full of excitement – who had either despatched his foe. or had not yet taken part in the battles– The latter the most probable for he had lost none of his limbs. He saw this unequal combat from afar – for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red. He drew near with rapid pace – till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants – then watching his opportunity he sprang upon the black warrior & commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg leaving the other to select among his own members– And so there were 3 united for life & death apparently. United for life – until death. As if a new kind of attraction had been invented, which put all other locks & cements to shame.– I should not wonder more if they had their respective musical bands stationed on some chip & playing their national airs the while to cheer the dying combatants.– (Whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it) I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men– The more you think of it – the less the difference. And certainly there is no other fight recorded in Concord that will bear a moments comparison with this. I have no doubt they had as just a cause – one or even both parties as our forefathers – & that the results will be as important & memorable– And there was far more patriotism & heroism– For numbers & for blood it was an Austerlitz – or Dresden. I saw no disposition to retreat I took up the chip on which the 3 I have particularly described were struggling carried it into my house & placed it under a tumbler on my window sill, wishing to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first mentioned red ant – I saw that though he was assiduously gnawing at the near foreleg of his enemy having severed his remaining feeler his own breast was all torn away exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior – whose own breastplate was apparently too thick for him – and the dark carbuncles of his eyes shone with ferocity such as wars only could excite. They strugled for half an hour longer under the tumbler and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies & the former were hanging on either side of him still apparently as firmly fastened as ever – and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles – being without feelers & with only one or two legs – & I know not how many other wounds – to divest himself of them which at length after half an hour more he had accomplished I raised the tumbler & he went off over the window sill in that crippled state– Whether he finally survived that combat & had a pension settled on him I do not know. But I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. Which party was victorious I never learned nor the cause of the war. But I felt for the rest of that day as if I had HDT WHAT? INDEX
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had my feelings harrowed & excited by witnessing the struggle the ferocity & carnage of a human-battle before my door. To record truths which shall have the same relation & value to the next world. i.e. the world of thought & of the soul – that political news has to this. This winter they are cutting down our woods more seriously than ever – Fair Haven Hill – Walden – Linnaea Borealis wood &c &c Thank God they cannot cut down the clouds. History used to be the history of successive kings – or their reigns the Williams – Henries – Johns Richards &c &c all of them great in somebody’s estimations– But we have altered that considerably– Hereafter it is to be to a greater extent the history of peoples. You do not hear some King Louis or Edward – or Leopold – referred to now by sensible men with much respect. Heard Higginson lecture tonight on Mohammed– Why did I not like it better? Can I deny that it was good? Perhaps I am bound to account to myself at least for any lurking dislike for what others admire & I am not prepared to find fault with. Well I did not like it then, because it did not make me like – it – it did not carry me away captive. He is not simple enough. For the most part the manner overbore choked off & stifled – put out of sight & hearing the matter. I was inclined to forget that he was speaking – conveying ideas – thought there had been an intermission Never endeavor consciously to supply the tone which you think proper for certain sentences. It is as if a man whose mind was at ease should supply the tones & gestures for a man in distress who found only the words As when one makes a speech & another behind him makes gestures.– Then he reminded me of Emerson – & I could not afford to be reminded of Christ himself. Yet who can deny that it was good? But it was that intelligence – that way of viewing things (combined with much peculiar talent) which is the common property of this generation– A man does best when he is most himself. I never realized so distinctly as this moment that I am peacefully parting company with the best friend I ever had, by each pursuing his proper path. I perceive that it is possible that we may have a better understanding now than when we were more at one. Not expecting such essential agreement as before. Simply our paths diverge–
It is interesting that in the above, which would find its way into WALDEN, Thoreau says that the ant war was “not a duellum but a bellum,” because later on, in a letter to H.G.O. Blake, Thoreau would attribute both these DUELING things to the sort of desperation that derives either from fearfulness or a sense that one’s own life is a life not worth leading:
“To be active, well, happy, implies courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.” — Henry Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX
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WALDEN: I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two reds ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary’s front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was Conquer or die. In the mean while there came along a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar, –for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red,– he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick, –“Fire! for God’s sake fire!”– and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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WALDEN: ... There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least. I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first- mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near foreleg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breast-plate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer’s eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddlebow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them; which at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. “Æneas Sylvius,” say they, “after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,” adds that “This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.” A similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden.” The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill.
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January 22, Thursday: Lajos Kossuth visited Washington DC. Horace Greeley’s Tribune was fulminating that Europe had to choose between the “black despots” and the “red republicans” (refer to the journal entry “the red republicans & the black despots or imperialists”).
January 22, Thursday: Having occasion to get up & light a lamp in the middle of a sultry night I observed a stream of large black ants passing up and down one of the bare corner posts – those descending having their large white eggs or larva in their mouths – the others making haste up for another load. I supposed that they had found the heat so great just under the roof as to compel them to remove their progeny to a cooler place by night. They had evidently taken & communicated the resolution to improve the coolness of the night to remove their young to a cooler & safer locality. One stream running up another down with great industry. But Why I changed – ? Why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back – I do not know any better how I ever came to go there – . Perhaps it is none of my business – even if it is your’s. Perhaps I wanted a change – There was a little stagnation it may be – about 2 o’clock in the afternoon the world’s axle – creaked as if it needed greasing – as if the oxen labored – & could hardly get their load over the ridge of the day – Perhaps if I lived there much longer I might live there forever – One would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms – A ticket to Heaven must include tickets to Limbo – Purgatory – & Hell. Your ticket to the boxes admits you to the pit also. And if you take a cabin-passage you can smoke at least forward of the engine. – You have the liberty of the whole boat. But no I do not wish for a ticket to the boxes – nor to take a cabin passage. I will rather go before the mast & on the deck of the world. I have no desire to go “abaft the engine” What is it that I see from a mile to a mile & a half & 2 miles distant in the horizon on all sides of our villages – the woods. – which still almost without exception encircle the towns. – They at least bound almost every view. They have been driven off only so far. Where still wild creatures haunt. How long will these last.? Is this a universal and permanent feature? Is it not an interesting, an important question whether these are decreasing or not. Have the oldest countries retained it? Look out what window I will my eyes rest in the distance on a forest! Is this fact of no significance – Is this circumstance of no value? Why such pains in old countries to plant gardens & parks? – A certain sample of wild nature – a certain primitiveness. One man proposed – a book in which visitors should write their names – said he would be at the expense of it!!! Did he consider what the expense of it would be? As if it were of any use when a man had failed to make any memorable impression on you – for him to leave his name. But it may be that he writes a good hand. – who had not left any fame. No! I kept a book to put their fames in – I was at the expense of it. The milk man is now filling his ice-house. The towns thus bordered – with a fringed & tasselled border – each has its preserves. Methinks the town should have more supervision & control over its parks than it has. It concerns us all whether these proprietors – choose to cut down all the woods this winter or not. I must say that I do not know what made me leave the pond – I left it as unaccountably as I went to it. To speak sincerely, I went there because I had got ready to go – I left it for the same reason. How much botany is indebted to the Arabians – a great part of our common names of plants would appear to be Arabic WALDEN’S RICE Was it not fit that I should live on rice mainly – who loved so well to read the philosophy of India? The pleasures of the intellect are permanent – the pleasures of the heart are transitory. My friend invites me to read my papers to him. Gladly would I read – if he would hear. He must not hear coarsely but finely – suffering not the least to pass through. – the sieve of hearing. To associate with one for years with joy – who never met your thought with thought! An overflowing sympathy while yet there is no intellectual communion. Could we not meet on higher ground with the same heartiness? It is dull work reading to one who does not apprehend you. How can it go on? I will still abide by the truth in my converse and intercourse with my friends whether I am so brought nearer to or removed further from them. I shall not be the less your friend for answering you truly though coldly. Even the estrangement of friends is a fact to be serenely contemplated, as in the course of nature. It is of no use to lie either by word or action. Is not the everlasting truth agreeable to you? To set down such choice experiences that my own writings may inspire me. – and at last I may make wholes of parts. Certainly it is a distinct profession to rescue from oblivion & to fix the sentiments & thoughts which visit all men more or less generally. That the contemplation of the unfinished picture may suggest its harmonious completion. Associate reverently, and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts. Each thought that is HDT WHAT? INDEX
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welcomed and recorded is a nest egg – by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame – in which more may be developed – & exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing – of keeping a journal. That so we remember our best hours – & stimulate ourselves. My thoughts are my company – They have a certain individuality & separate existence – aye personality. Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition – they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor & to think. Thought begat thought. 1 The mother o’ pearl tint is common in the winter sky /2 hour before sundown. BRISTER’S HILL I love to look at Ebby Hubbards oaks & pines on the hill-side from Brister’s Hill. Am thankful that there is one old miser who will not sell nor cut his woods though it is said that they are wasting. It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. It is a sharp cutting cold day stiffening the face. Thermometers have lately sunk to 20.. When a man asks me a question I look him in the face. If I do not see any inquiry there – I cannot answer it. A man asked me about the coldness of this winter compared with others last night – I looked at him. His face expressed no more curiosity or relationship to me than a custard pudding. I made him a random answer. I put him off till he was in earnest. He wanted to make conversation. The surface of the snow in the fields is that of pretty large waves on a sea over which a summer breeze is sweeping. That in the preaching or mission of the Jesuits in Canada which converted the Indians was their sincerity. They could not be suspected of sinister motives. The savages were not poor observers & reasoners. The priests were therefore sure of success – for they had paid the price of it. We resist no true invitations – they are irresistible. When my friend asks me to stay & I do not – unless I have another engagement – it is because I do not find myself invited. It is not in his will to invite me. We should deal with the real mood of our friends. I visited my friend constantly for many years – & he postponed our friendship to trivial engagements – so that I saw him not at all. When in after years he had leisure to meet me – I did not find myself invited to go to him. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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October 3, Sunday: Brigham Young “got married with” Eliza Burgess.
While Henry Thoreau was at the Society of Natural History Library in Boston on this day, he borrowed Volume I of William Kirby’s and William Spence’s AN INTRODUCTION TO ENTOMOLOGY: OR ELEMENTS OF THE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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NATURAL HISTORY OF INSECTS: WITH PLATES (1815), and purchased his own copy of a book he had frequently
been consulting, FAUNA AMERICANA; BEING A DESCRIPTION OF THE MAMMIFEROUS ANIMALS INHABITING NORTH AMERICA, by Richard Harlan, M.D. (published in 1825 in Philadelphia by the firm of A. Finley). Notes from this source would be placed in the Fact Book and in the Indian Notebook #6. FAUNA AMERICANA
Oct. 3. P.M. — To Flint’s Pond. I hear a hylodes (?) from time to time. Shrub oaks are red, some of them. Hear the loud laughing of a loon on Flint’s, apparently alone in the middle. A wild sound, heard far and suited to the wildest lake. Many acorns strew the ground, and have fallen into the water. Collected a parcel of grass (?) balls, some washed up high and dry, — part of the shore-line consists of the same material, — from a half-inch to four inches diameter. The sand indicates that they are formed on the sandy shore. The partly decomposed rushes composed of similar fibres. [A Scirpus?] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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From Heywood’s Peak at Walden, the shore is now more beautifully painted. The most prominent are the red maples and the yellowish aspens. The Aster undulatus is common and fresh, also the Solidago nemoralis of Gray. The pine fall, i.e. change, is commenced, and the trees are mottled green and yellowish.
November 11, Thursday: Having already perused the volumes for the years 1633 and 1634, Henry Thoreau checked 15 out, from Harvard Library, the JESUIT RELATION volumes for the years 1635 and 1636.
http://www.canadiana.org
He also checked out Volume II of William Kirby’s and William Spence’s AN INTRODUCTION TO ENTOMOLOGY: OR ELEMENTS OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF INSECTS: WITH PLATES.
15. Thoreau presumably read each and every volume of the JESUIT RELATIONS that was available in the stacks at the Harvard Library. We know due to extensive extracts in his Indian Notebooks #7 and #8 that between 1852 and 1857 he did withdraw or consult all the volumes for the years between 1633 and 1672. Thoreau took notes in particular in regard to the reports by Father Jean de Brébeuf, Father Jacques Buteux, Father Claude Dablon, Father Jérôme Lallemant, Father Paul Le Jeune, Father François Le Mercier, Father Julien Perrault, Father Jean de Quens, Father Paul Ragueneau, and Father Barthélemy Vimont. Cramoisy, Sebastian (ed.). RELATION DE CE QUI S’EST PASSÉ EN LA NOUVELLE FRANCE IN L’ANNÉE 1636: ENVOYÉE AU R. PERE PROVINCIAL DE LA COMPAGNIE DE JESUS EN LA PROVINCE DE FRANCE, PAR LE P. P AUL LE JEUNE DE LA MESME COMPAGNIE, SUPERIEUR DE LA RESIDENCE DE KÉBEC. A Paris: Chez Sebastian Cramoisy..., 1637 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1853
January 1, Saturday: Henry Thoreau recorded in his journal that Professor Louis Agassiz considered Dr. Thaddeus William Harris to be the greatest entomologist:
January 1, Saturday, 1853: This morning we have something between ice & frost on the trees, &c. The whole earth as last night but much more is encased in ice, which on the plowed fields makes a singular icy coat a quarter of an inch or more in thickness. About 9 o’clock Am I go to Lees via Hubbards wood & Holdens Swamp & the river side – for the middle is open. The stones & cow dung & the walls too are all cased in ice on the north side– The latter look like alum rocks. This – not frozen mist or frost but frozen drizzle collected around the slightest cores gives prominence to the least withered herbs & grasses– Where yesterday was a plain smooth field appears now a teeming crop of fat icy herbage. The stems of the herbs on their north sides are enlarge from 10 to 100 times. The addition is so universally on the north side that a traveller could not lose the points of compass today though it should never so dark – for every blade of grass would serve to guide him – telling from which side the storm came yesterday. Mere straight stems of grasses stand up like white batons or scepters and make conspicuous foreground to the landscape, – from 6 inches to 3 feet high. C. thought that these fat icy branches on the withered grass & herbs had no nucleus but looking closer I showed him the fine black wiry threads on which they impinged – which made him laugh with surprise.– The very cowdung is incrusted & the clover & sorrel send up a dull green gleam through their icy coat like strange plants– The pebbles in the ploughed land are seen as through a transparent coating of gum. Some weeds bear the ice in masses – some like the trumpet weed & tansy in balls for each dried flower. What a crash of jewells as you walk. The most careless walker who never deigned to look at these humble weeds before cannot help observing them now. This is why the the herbage is left to stand dry in the fields all winter. Upon a solid foundation of ice stand out pointing in all directions between NW & NE or within the limits of 90 degrees little spicula or crystalized points half an inch or more in length. Upon the dark glazed plowed ground where a mere wiry stem rises its north side is thickly clad with these snow white spears like some Indian’s head dress as if it had attracted all the frost. I saw a Prinos bush full of large berries by the wall in Hubbards field– Standing on the west side the contrast of the red berries with their white incrustation or prolongation on the north – was admirable. I thought I had never seen the berries so dazzlingly bright. The whole north side of the bush berries & stock was beautifully incrusted. And when I went round to the N side the redness of the berries came softend through & tinging the allied snow white bush – like an evening sky beyond. These adjoined snow or ice berries being beset within the limits of 90 degrees on the N with those icy prickles or spicula between which the red glow & some times the clear red itself appeared gave it the appearance of a raspberry bush full of over ripe fruit. Standing on the north side of a bush – or tree looking against the sky – you see only a white ghost of a tree without a mote of earthiness, but as you go round it the dark core comes into view. It makes all the odds imaginable whether you are travelling N or S.– The drooping birches along the edges of woods are the most feathery fairy-like ostrich plumes of the trees, and the color of their trunks increases the delusion. The weight of the ice gives to the pines the forms which northern trees like the firs constantly wear. Bending & twisting the branches – for the twigs & plumes of the pines being frozen remain as the wind held them–& new portions of the trunk are exposed. Seen from the N. there is no greenness in the pines–& the character of the tree is changed. The willows along the edge of the river look like sedge in meadows. The sky is overcast and a fine snowy hail & rain is falling–& these ghostlike trees make a scenery which reminds you of Spitzbergen. I see now the beauty of the causeway by the bridge – alders below swelling into the road overtopped by willows & maples. The fine grasses & shrubs in the meadow rise to meet & mingle with the drooping willows & the whole make an indistinct impression like a mist & between this the road runs toward those white ice-clad ghostly or fairy trees in the distance – toward spirit-land. The pines are as white as a counterpane with raised embroidery & white tassels & fringes. Each fascicle of leaves or needles is held apart by an icy club surrounded by a little snowy or icy ball. Finer than the saxon arch is this path running under the pines roofed not with crossing boughs but drooping ice-covered twigs in irregular confusion. See in the midst of this stately pine towering like the solemn ghost of a tree – the white ice-clad boughs of other trees appearing, of a dif. character Sometimes oaks with leaves –incrusted– or fine sprayed maples or walnuts. But finer than HDT WHAT? INDEX
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all this red oak – its leaves incrusted like shields 1/4 of an inch thick–& a thousand fine spicula like long serrations at right angles with their planes upon their edges. It has an indescribably rich effect – with color of the leaf coming softened through the ice a delicate fawn color.–of many shades. Where the plumes of the pitch pines are short & spreading close upon the trunk – sometimes perfect cups or rays are formed. Pitch pines present rough massy grenadier plumes – with each a darker spot or cavity in the end where you look in to the buds. I listen to the booming of the pond as if it were a reasonable creature. I return at last in a rain and am coated with a glaze like the fields. Being at Cambridge day before yesterday – Sibley told me that Agassiz told him that Harris was the greatest entomologist in the world, and gave him permission to repeat his remark. As I stood on the top of a ladder he came along with his hand full of papers–& inquired do you value autographs? – No, I do not, I answered slowly & gravely.– Oh – I didn’t know but you did– I had some of Governor Dunlap.–said he retreating After talking with uncle Charles the other night about the worthies of this country Webster & the rest as usual considering who were geniuses & who not – I showed him up to bed & when I had got into bed myself I heard his chamber door opened – after 11 ’oclock – and he called out in an earnest stenterian voice loud enough to wake the whole house– “Henry! Was John Quincy Adams a genius”? – No, I think not” was my reply– Well I did n’t think he was answered he. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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October 31, Monday: Henry Thoreau made reference to William Kirby’s and William Spence’s AN INTRODUCTION TO ENTOMOLOGY: OR ELEMENTS OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF INSECTS: WITH PLATES.
Oct 31st 7 Am by river to Nawshawtuct Owing to the rain of the 28th added to that of the 23d the river has risen now prob more than 3 feet above where it was a week ago — yet wider over the meadows. Just at the edge, where it is mixed with grass and leaves, it is stiffened slightly this morning. On the trill, I see flocks of robins, flitting from tree to tree and peeping. It is a clear, cool, Novemberish morning, reminding me of those peculiarly pleasant mornings in winter when there is a slight vapor in the atmosphere. The same without snow or ice. There is a fine vapor, twice as high as a house, over the flooded meadows, through which I see the whiter dense smoke columns or streaks from the chimneys of the village, a cheerful scene. Methinks I see, far away toward the woods, a frozen mist suspended against
their sides. What was that very heavy or thick, though not very large, hawk that sailed away from a hickory? The Hemlock seeds are apparently ready to drop from their cones. The cones are mostly open. Now appears to be the very time for walnuts. I knock down showers with a stick, but all do not come out of the shells. I believe I have not bathed since Cattle Show– It has been rather too cold– & I have had a cold withal.
PM By boat with Sophia to my grapes laid down in front of Fair Haven. It is a beautiful, warm and calm Indian- summer afternoon. The river is so high over the meadows, and the pads and other low weeds so deeply buried, and the water is so smooth and glassy withal, that I am reminded of a calm April day during the freshets. The coarse withered grass, and the willows, and button- bushes with their myriad balls, and whatever else stands on the brink, are reflected with wonderful distinctness. This shore, thus seen from the boat, is like the ornamented frame of a mirror. The buttonballs, etc., are more distinct in the reflection, if I remember, because they have there for background the reflected sky, but the actual ones are seen against the russet meadow. I even see houses a mile off, distinctly reflected in the meadow flood. The cocks crow in barn-yards as if with new lustiness. They seem to appreciate the day. The river is three feet and more above the summer level. I see many pickerel dart away, as I push my boat over the meadows. They lie up there now, and fishing is over, except spearing. You can no longer stand oil the true banks to fish, and the fish are too widely dispersed over the grassybottomed and shallow meadow. The flood and wind have washed up great quantities of cranberries loosened by the rake, which now line the shore, mixed with the wrecked grass and weeds. We gathered five quarts, partly frost-bitten. There are already myriads of snow-fleas on the water next the shore, and on the cranberries we pick in the wreck, as if they were peppered. When we ripple the surface, the undulating light is reflected from the waves upon the bank and bushes and withered grass. Is not this already November, when the yellow and scarlet tints are gone from the forest? It is very pleasant to float along over the smooth meadow, where every weed and each HDT WHAT? INDEX
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stem of coarse grass that rises above the surface has another, answering to it and even more distinct, in the water beneath, making a rhyme to it, so that the most irregular form appears regular. A few scattered dry and clean (very light straw-colored) grasses are so cheap and simple a beauty thus reflected. I see this especially on Potter’s meadow. The bright hips of the meadow rose, which we brush against with our boat, — for with sallows & button-bushes it forms islands, — are handsomer thus seen than a closer inspection proves. Tansy lingers still by Hubbard’s Bridge. But methinks I he flowers are disappearing earlier this season than last. I slowly discover that this is a gossamer day. I first see the fine lines stretching from one weed or grass stem or rush to another, sometimes seven or eight feet distant, Horizontally and only four or five inches above the water. When I look further, I find that they are everywhere and on everything, sometimes forming conspicuous fine white gossamer webs on the heads of grasses, or suggesting an Indian bat. They are so abundant that they seem
to have been suddenly produced in the atmosphere by some chemistry, — spun out of air, — I know not for what purpose. I remember that in Kirby and Spence it is not allowed that the spider can walk on the water to carry his web across from rush to rush, but here I see myriads of spiders on the water, making some kind of progress, and one at least with a line attached to him. True they do not appear to walk well, but they stand up high and dry on the tips of their toes, and are blown along quite fast. They are of various sizes and colors, though mostly a greenish-brown or else black; some very small. These gossamer lines are not visible unless between you and the sun. We pass some black willows, now of course quite leafless, and when they are between us and the sun they are so completely covered with these fine cobweb’s or lines, mainly parallel to one another, that they make one solid woof, a misty woof, against the sun. They are not drawn taut, but curved downward in the middle, like the rigging of vessels, —the ropes which stretch from mast to mast, — as if the fleets of a thousand Lilliputian nations were collected one behind another under bare poles. But when we have floated a few feet further, and thrown the willow out of the sun’s range, not a tin-can can be seen on it. I landed and walked up and down the causeway and found it the same there, the gossamer reaching across the causeway, though not necessarily supported on the other side. They streamed southward with the slight zephyr. As if the year were weaving her shroud out of light. It seemed only necessary that the insect have a point d’appui; and then, wherever you stood and brought the leeward side of its resting-place between you and the sun, this magic appeared. They were streaming in like manner southward from the railing of the bridge, parallel waving threads of light, producing a sort of flashing in the air. You saw five or six feet in length from one position, but when I moved one side I saw as much more, and found that a great many, at least, reached quite across the bridge from side to side, though it was mere accident whether they caught there, —though they were continually broken by unconscious travellers. Most, indeed, were slanted slightly upward, rising about one foot in going four, end, in like manner, they were streaming from the south rail over the water, I know not how far. And there were the spiders on the rail that produced them, similar to those on the water. Fifteen rods off, up the road, beyond the bridge, they looked like a shimmering in the air in the bare tree-tops, the finest, thinnest gossamer veil to the sun, a dim wall. I ann at a loss to say what purpose they serve, and am inclined to think that they are to some extent attached to objects as they float through the atmosphere; for I noticed, before I had gone far, that my grape-vines in a basket in the boat had got similar lines stretching from one twig to another, a foot or two, having undoubtedly caught them as we paddled along. It might well be an electric phenomenon. The air appeared crowded with them. It was a wonder they did not get into the mouth and nostrils, or that we did not feel them on our faces, or continually going and coming amid them did not whiten our clothes more. And yet one with his back to the sun, walking the other way, would observe nothing of all this. Only stand so as to bring the south side of any tree, bush, fence, or other object between you and the sun. Methinks it is only on these very finest days late in autumn that this phenomenon is seen, as if that fine vapor of the morning were spun into these webs. According to Kirby and Spence, “in Germany these flights of gossamer appear so constantly in autumn that they are there metaphorically called ‘Der fliegender Sommer’ (the flying or departing summer).” What can possess these spiders thus to run all at once to every the least elevation, and let off this wonderful stream? Harris tells me he does not know what it means. Sophia thought that thus at last they emptied themselves and wound up, or, I suggested, unwound, themselves, — cast off their mortal coil. It looks like a mere frolic spending and wasting of themselves, of their vigor, now that there is no further use for it, their prey, perchance, being killed or banished by the frost. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1854
Asa Fitch became the first professional entomologist of the New York State Agricultural Society (commissioned by the State of New York).
This made him the very 1st it’s-my-day-job entomologist in the US of A (many of his notebooks are now at the Smithsonian Institution). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Benedict Jaeger, assisted by H.C. Preston, M.D., produced a “valuable ornament for the parlor table” (that’s how he described it) entitled THE LIFE OF NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS ILLUSTRATED BY NUMEROUS COLORED ENGRAVINGS AND NARRATIVES (Published for the Author. Providence: Sayles, Miller and Simons, Printers).
NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS This was initially issued in parts, six in all, each with a colored plate of insect illustrations prepared by Dr. Washington Hoppin, and prefaced with a thumbnail biography of Sir Hans Sloane, M.D., who had founded the British Museum:
Afterward the six parts were offered bound together as a book. What Henry Thoreau had in his personal library may have been this initial printing in six separate parts (and it would seem, out of good judgment or whatever, that he never made notes from this questionable source, in any of his Commonplace books or Indian notebooks, etc.). John D. Sherman’s “Catalog 10 of Books on Insects” has characterized Professor Jaeger’s HDT WHAT? INDEX
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volume as “famous as the most worthless of all American Insect books,” presumably due to its lack of organization, lack of detailed information, egregious blunders, and “semi-philosophical meanderings.” Now it is a fact that during my twenty-two years’ residence in this country not a single summer has passed without my seeing some of these red-eyed Cicadas in one or other of the States, and hence I must maintain that the name “Seventeen-years Locust” is neither correct nor proper.
At some point Thoreau would check out, from the New Bedford, Massachusetts library, a volume published in this year, Ebenezer Emmons’s INSECTS OF NEW-YORK.
June 27, Tuesday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked through Hubbard meadow to the Cliffs. He was being written to from Cambridge by the entomologist Thaddeus William Harris, about the cicada. Cambridge, Mass. June 27. 1854. Mr. Henry D. Thoreau. Dear Sir. Your letter of the 25th, the books, and the Cicada came to hand this evening, — and I am much obliged to you for all of them; — for the books, — because I am very busy with putting the Library in order for examination, & want every book to be in its place; — for the letter, because it gives me interesting facts HDT WHAT? INDEX
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concerning Cicadas; and for the specimen because it is new to me, as a species or as a variety. The Cicada seems to be a female, and of course when living could not make the noise peculiar to the other sex. It differs from my specimens of Cicada septem- decim (& indeed still more from all the other species in my collection). It is not so large as the C. 17; it has more orange about its thorax; the wing- veins are not so vividly stained with orange, and the dusky zigzag on the ante- rior or upper wings, which is very distinct in the C. 17, is hardly visible in this specimen. It has much the same form as the female C. 17; but I must see the male in order to determine positively whether it be merely a variety or a differ- ent species. I should be very glad to get more specimens and of both sexes. Will you try for them? Your much obliged Thaddeus William Harris. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1855
Mary Howitt’s BIRDS AND FLOWERS AND OTHER COUNTRY THINGS and THE PICTURE BOOK FOR THE YOUNG.
Publication by Ticknor & Fields in Boston of William Howitt’s LAND, LABOUR, AND GOLD; OR TWO YEARS IN VICTORIA WITH VISITS TO SYDNEY AND VAN DIEMAN’S LAND, which would come to be available at the Concord Public Library and from which Henry Thoreau would learn of the gold-diggings at Ballarat and Bendigo in Australia — diggings about which he would wax sarcastic in “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE”. LAND, LABOUR, AND GOLD I LAND, LABOUR, AND GOLD II After reading Howitt’s account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening, I had in my mind’s eye, all night, the numerous valleys, with their streams, all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet deep, and half a dozen feet across, as close as they can be dug, and partly filled with water –the locality to which men furiously rush to probe for their fortunes, –uncertain where they shall break ground, –not knowing but the gold is under their camp itself, –sometimes digging one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then missing it by a foot, –turned into demons, and regardless of each other’s rights, in their thirst for riches –whole valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly honey-combed by the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are drowned in them, –standing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they work night and day, dying of exposure and disease. Having read this, and partly forgotten it, I was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do; and with that vision of the diggings still before me, I asked myself, why I might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles, –why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine. There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for you, –what though it were a Sulky Gully? At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence. Where-ever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across-lots will turn out the higher way of the two. Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful. Is not our native soil auriferous? Does not a stream from the golden mountains flow through our native valley? and has not this for more than geologic ages been bringing down the shining particles and forming the nuggets for us? Yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal away, prospecting for this true gold, into the unexplored solitudes around us, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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there is no danger that any will dog his steps, and endeavor to supplant him. He may claim and undermine the whole valley even, both the cultivated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. They will not mind his cradles or his toms. He is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at Ballarat, but may mine anywhere, and wash the whole wide world in his tom. Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed twenty- eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Australia: –“He soon began to drink; got a horse and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was ‘the bloody wretch that had found the nugget.’ At last he rode full speed against a tree, and I think however nearly knocked his brains out.” I think, however, there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget. Howitt adds, “He is a hopelessly ruined man.” But he is a type of the class. They are all fast men. Hear some of the names of the places where they dig: – “Jackass Flat,” –“Sheep’s-Head Gully,” –“Murderer’s Bar,” etc.
William Howitt’s book amounted to a collection of the letters he had written to his wife, Mary Howitt, and contemporaries in England.
The well-traveled author was intent to dispel much of the “rose water romancing” that Australian newspapers used to describe their new gold rich colony. “All this sludge and filth and confusion, swarms of people, many of them gentlemen of birth and education, all labouring as for life.” Of Bendigo he wrote that “There is an appearance of a more thorough mining population here than I have seen at any other digging ... huts and people all busy among the hills, reminding you a good deal of the lead mines of Derbyshire.” “We diggers are horribly destructive of the picturesque.” “Neither the snows of Canada or the heats of India present any obstacles to them.” “Others had nothing but a pick and shovel. These you see are rough fellows, who can live any how, and who can lie out of doors in winter pretty much like horses and cows. The lighter they travel the faster they go.” “Drunkenness therefore goes on in reality on the diggings uncontrolled ... you can not avoid running your heads against crowds of drunken diggers, your noses against the fumes of vile rum and your ears against the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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din and uproar of dozens of the dens of debauch.” “One of them [the “hairy hairystocracy” of the suddenly rich] the other day asked the fare for a cab for the day. ‘Perhaps more than you like’ said the Jarvie, for the digger was a very common looking fellow. ‘What is it?’ asked the digger. ‘Seven pounds for the day,’ ‘There is ten,’ said the fellow; ‘you can light your pipe with the difference’.” “A gentleman high in government, told me the other day that he was about to take one of these carriages for some distance; but the man said ‘We don’t drive the likes of you now ’a days’. ‘Well but what is the fare? My money is as good as another’s I suppose’, ‘oh!’ replied the fellow hesitating ‘I don’t know — in fact we don’t drive the likes of you now!’ And that was all he could get out of him.”
Thoreau transcribed a section from volume two of the book that surely must have reminded him of his own epic about the ant battle: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1856
Asa Fitch, M.D., Entomologist of the N.Y. State Agricultural Society; Member of the Entomological Society of France, of Pennsylvania, etc.’s FIRST AND SECOND REPORT ON THE NOXIOUS, BENEFICIAL, AND OTHER INSECTS, OF THE STATE OF NEW-YORK. MADE TO THE STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY, PURSUANT TO AN APPROPRIATE FOR THIS PURPOSE FROM THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE (Albany: C. van Benthuysen, Printer to the Legislature. No. 407 Broadway).
(This would be in the personal library of Henry Thoreau.) INSECTS OF NEW-YORK HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In this year Dr. Fitch provided the 1st description of the Rodent Bot Fly Cuterebra emasculator.16
16. During my boyhood in Indiana, my little sister and I needed to tease one of these out from under the breastbone of our white cat Snowball. Yuck! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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William Kirby’s and William Spence’s AN INTRODUCTION TO ENTOMOLOGY, which Henry Thoreau had been utilizing in its Philadelphia edition of 1846, was republished in London. Thoreau would come to own a copy of this new small-print unabridged London 7th edition.
THOREAU’S 7TH EDITION
January 18, 1856: Observed some of those little hard galls on the high blueberry, pecked or eaten into by some bird (or possibly mouse), for the little white grubs which lie curled up in them. What entomologists the birds are! Most men do not suspect that there are grubs in them, and how secure the latter seem under these thick dry shells! Yet there is no secret but is confided to some one. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1858
The complete writings of Thomas Say on the conchology of the United States as edited by William O. Birney were republished in New-York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1859
The entomological writings of Thomas Say were made readily accessible in reprinted form in Dr. John L. Le Conte’s THE COMPLETE WRITINGS OF THOMAS SAY ON THE ENTOMOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA (two volumes, NY: Baillière Brothers, with a memoir by George Ord).17
17. This would be reprinted in 1978 in New York by Arno Press. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1860
Late Spring: Swarming of the 17-year New England cicadas Magicicada septendecim. Again Thoreau made no mention in his written materials about the swarm, nor comment on having also heard it in 1826 and in 1843. NEW ENGLAND HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1867
Léopold Trouvelot, a Massachusetts researcher associated with Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard College, was experimenting with various silk-producing moths including the “European” gypsy moth Porthetrea dispar or Lymantria dispar.18 The investigator reported that he had put five acres of woodland in Medford, Massachusetts within an 8-foot fence, and covered this area over with nets adequate to keep out all birds in order to experiment with these silk-producing moths.19 He was intending to breed a disease-resistant silkworm (and do good and do well). He would accidentally release a very small number of European gypsy moths into the vacant lot next door, which is to say, into the ecosystem. Oops.20
TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS Dr. Samuel Kneeland, Jr. began to serve as an instructor in zoology and physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An avid collector, he would venture on collection expeditions to Brazil, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Iceland (he does not seem to have brought back with him anything quite as devastating as the gypsy moth). He would contribute over 1,000 articles, mostly on zoological and medical subjects, to APPLETON’S AMERICAN CYCLOPÆDIA. THE SCIENCE OF 1867
18. “Dispar” referred to the fact that the males and females are of different colors. 19. This risk was entirely unnecessary as it was run due to the fact that at that time the “European” gypsy moth (which actually had originated in Japan) was incorrectly being classified by entomologists and taxonomists as in the same genus with the silkworm Bombyx mori. No, it was all a stupid Harvard mistake, folks, and we’re sure embarrassed about that. 20. We may well note that there is no monument in Medford, Massachusetts to mark the “Forefathers Tree” in which the progenitors of the gypsy moths of America “stepped ashore” in 1867 or 1868 in this New World. Is this or is this not discrimination between one kind of intrusive, highly honored, and another kind, decidedly unwanted? –And why do we continue so gratuitously to insult Gypsies, after we have learned that it is so very wrong to insult Jews? HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1879
April 8, Tuesday: Asa Fitch, America’s first “fulltime” (it had been his day job) entomologist, died at his home in Salem, New York, at the age of 70. HIS NOTEBOOKS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1931
Professor J.J. Davis of Purdue University delivered the “President’s Address” to the Indiana Academy of Sciences (Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science 41, pages 43-70), spoke on the topic “Entomologists and Entomology in Indiana.” What follows is his summary of the entomological contributions of Thomas Say: Say was a taxonomist, as were most of the early entomologists, and he described considerably more than 1,000 new species of beetles and over 400 insects of other orders, including species in every important insect order. A hasty check of his writings shows 404 new species definitely listed from Indiana, including eight orders, as follows: 205 Hymenoptera [e.g., bees, wasps, ants] 111 Diptera [e.g., flies, mosquitos] 17 Coleoptera [beetles] 38 Hemiptera [e.g., squash bug, stink bug] 11 Homoptera [e.g., cicadas] 1 Neuroptera [e.g., lacewings] 5 Ephemerida [e.g., mayflies] 16 Odonata [e.g., dragonfiles, damselflies] Economically Important Insects First Described by Thomas Say: Melanotus fissilis Say (common wireworm) Solenopsis molesta Say (thief ant) Diabrotica longicornis Say (northern corn rootworm) Blissus leucopterus Say (chinch bug) Eleodes opaca Say (false wireworm) Eleodes suturalis Say (false wireworm) Phytophaga destructor Say (Hessian fly) Dolerus arvensis Say (wheat strawworm) Leptinotarsa decimlineata Say (Colorado potato beetle) Trichobaris trinotata Say (potato stalk borer) Cassida bivittata Say (striped sweet potato beetle) Epicaerus imbricatus Say (imbricated snout beetle) Orchestes pallicornis Say (apple flea weevil) Anthonomus quadrigibbus Say (apple curculio) Aegeria exitiosa Say (peach tree borer) Erythroneura comes Say (grape leaf hopper) Anthonomus signatus Say (strawberry weevil) Saperda calcarata Say (poplar borer) Lixus concavus Say (rhubarb curculio) Mylabris obtectus Say (common bean weevil) Scolytus quadrispinosus Say (hickory bark beetle) Anopheles quadrimaculatus Say (malarial mosquito) Anopheles punctipennis Say (malarial mosquito) Culex quinquefasciatus Say (common tropical mosquito) Melanoplus bivittatus Say (two-striped HDT WHAT? INDEX
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grasshopper) Systena taeniata Say (pale striped flea beetle) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2002
David Spooner is the founder of Butterfly Conservation East Scotland. He has lived in Dunfermline, Scotland for 25 years with his wife Marion O’Neil, who is the Archaeological Illustrator with the National Museums of Scotland. He has served on the National Biodiversity Committee for Scotland, and was recently an adviser to the US Fish & Wildlife Service in the rescue of the El Segundo Blue Butterfly at the dunes near LAX (the Los Angeles International Airport). His fascination with lepidoptery, which has lasted a quarter of a century, was arrived at by rather an unusual route — through literature and the insect’s role in various cultures. One of the things he is trying to do is reveal how it is that “insect processes –particularly metamorphosis– are much more crucial than evolutionary theorists have accepted up to now.” He is interested in the manner in which the metamorphic principle of the insect world has influenced our music, painting, and literature. His 1995 THE METAPHYSICS OF INSECT LIFE drew on artistic works to view homo sapiens as “dangling between ape and insect,” and his 1999 THE POEM AND THE INSECT: ASPECTS OF TWENTIETH CENTURY HISPANIC CULTURE applied this viewpoint specifically to 20th-Century Hispanic literature. This most recent work THOREAU`S VISION OF INSECTS & THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGY21 is an account of Thoreau`s observations of insects in America and the place of insects in his creative work. He has put the first chapter online: Just as Henry Thoreau was starting out as a naturalist and published writer with his “Natural History of Massachusetts” in 1842, Charles Darwin was sketching some preliminary manuscript essays. Indeed even earlier in spring 1837, Darwin had been formulating ideas on geographic speciation and evolution by common descent. So when as early as December 1837 Thoreau remarked “How indispensable to a correct study of nature is a perception of her true meaning — The fact will one day flower out into a truth” (PJ1:19), he was more prescient than he imagined. While Thoreau looked for nature’s “true meaning” to emerge organically from his living laboratory in the fields around Concord, Darwin was formulating a theory based upon his fact-collecting voyages that could explain the processes of evolutionary change. Even as outdoor research was reaching its apogee with Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s work, science was beginning to shift, so that by mid-century the focus was 21. David Spooner. THOREAU`S VISION OF INSECTS & THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGY. 2002 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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moving from botany and geology to physics and chemistry. And natural history was breaking up to become biology and zoology so that the individual was already acquiring the ambiguous modern status of object and subject in one — observer of the self as well as scientific observer of nature. One analyst has declared that the Darwinian theory of evolution by way of natural selection “surpassed even the astronomical revolution ushered in by Copernicus in the significance of its implications for our understanding of the nature of the universe and of our place in it.” It was as a result of John Gould’s observation in March 1837 that the mockingbirds collected by Darwin from three different islands on the Galapagos were three different species that Darwin first grasped the process of geographic speciation. There was not a unique saltation, but an evolution on three separate islands. Soon, by the publication in 1859 of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, there became available a comprehensively new theory of nature. Thoreau lived and wrote at this point of intersection. No longer was change and adaptation to imply intended progress, still less to end in perfection. Even so remnants of earlier thought-systems survive in Darwin. The phrase “natural selection” retains a sense of an external originator and was not Darwin’s favored term, and is today often replaced by the entirely non-committal “differential reproduction.” And it was still some decades before species were comprehensively defined in terms of gene pools and the necessary reproductive isolation. Yet Darwin’s work continues to represent the greatest rupture in the perceived status of human life in the order of things. As Ernst Mayr puts it: “It is almost impossible for a modern person to project back to the early half of the nineteenth century and reconstruct the thinking of this pre-Darwinian period, so great has been the impact of Darwinism on our views.” Thoreau, like Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists, approached scientific method, initially at least, from the residual insights of religion. Basically transcendentalism projected a unity that was lost after the seventeenth century. Perhaps it could acquire such vigor in America because of its lack of a medieval period as a clear cut- off point. What Crollius wrote in 1624 could have been adopted by Emerson and Bronson Alcott: “Is it not true that all herbs, plants, trees and other things issuing from the bowels of the earth are so many magic books and signs?” Indeed the Puritan Jonathan Edwards edges towards scientific method, not only with his famed youthful observations on spiders, but with projections such as: Any dullard with the help of a little logic can argue a priori; any scholar can repeat the argument from design, and all men can read or hear the BIBLE. But to see visible symbols of His presence ... this seeing is the supreme act of humanity. Robert Milder, though, draws the distinction between the Calvinist together with “his secular descendant, the visionary HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Romantic” who are “dependent on what Emerson called “more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternals,” “as against Thoreau who “is spiritually a self-starter able to think or write himself into renewal so long as he has the glimmering of an interest or idea to prompt him.” Thoreau will move from the analogism of his early observations, the search for correspondence between human growth and growth in prehuman nature —that is “first nature” in G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx’s term— to the objectivism of the post-1851 entries in his JOURNAL. Indeed the final eleven years of Thoreau’s work are now seen by many as his most vital, confirming as they do Darwin’s terrible truth that the human species suffers transcendent egotism and illusory control over nature. Today, the peripheral status of the species has been exacerbated by a range of intractable problems: crises within societal organization, pollution and subsequent atmospheric deterioration, enforced single-crop emphasis, and impoverishment leading to the diminution of sources of oxygen from the tropical forests. Simon Schama addresses the Thoreauvian microcosm with the question: “But what did Walden do to Walden?” Especially the later writings of Thoreau struck a great blow against human arrogance towards other species, while Darwin’s opus revealed that natural selection works randomly and manifests itself in the universal will to survive. Thoreau read ORIGIN on its first appearance in America, acquiring it from the Town Library early in 1860, and immediately gave it his assent. This was no foregone expectation. It required characteristic Thoreau boldness and courage since Emerson’s circle included the main proponent of “special creation,” Louis Agassiz, who had the prestige of Harvard College, which he was involved in expanding, behind him. Prior to his reading of ORIGIN, Thoreau had become interested in Darwin’s JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES ... DURING THE VOYAGE OF HMS BEAGLE (1839), which was a talisman of his travels around Concord, and Thoreau’s “copious notes attest to his extraordinary prescient sympathy with many of Darwin’s interests, including his minutely detailed observational techniques, his fascination with change in nature, even his writing style and the formal construction of the book, which was half travelogue and half naturalist’s journal.” Indeed Thoreau’s method in his JOURNAL of accumulating facts, piling instance upon observed instance, is Darwin’s method, even if it takes on rather a holistic pragmatic character. The current of sympathy in his reading of Darwin would be strengthened, Robert D. Richardson, Jr. argues, by virtue of the Englishman’s self- description as “a person fond of natural history” rather than as “scientist” “like the self-important Agassiz.” Donald Worster in NATURE’S ECONOMY insists we recognize Thoreau’s acceptance of natural selection itself, and not just “transformations of nature” or “evolutionary development of species.” In fact it was far from a question of passive acceptance on Thoreau’s part, for he needs Darwinian natural selection and adaptation to make sense of his own observations. In a JOURNAL entry for December HDT WHAT? INDEX
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24, 1853, he describes one of his great insect loves — the cocoons of the Cecropia moth, Hyalophora cecropia: In Weston’s field, in springy land on the edge of a swamp, I counted thirty-three or four of those large silvery-brown cocoons within a rod or two, and probably there are many more about a foot from the ground, commonly on the main stem —though sometimes on a branch close to the stem— of the alder, sweet-fern, brake, etc., etc. The largest are four inches long by two and a half, bag-shaped and wrinkled and partly concealed by dry leaves, —alders, ferns, etc.,— attached as if sprinkled over them. This evidence of cunning in so humble a creature is affecting, for I am not ready to refer it to an intelligence which the creature does not share, as much as we do the prerogatives of reason. This radiation of the brain. The bare silvery cocoons would otherwise be too obvious. The worm has obviously said to itself: “Man or some other creature may come by and see my casket. I will disguise it, will hang a screen before it.” Thoreau gives some of the finest accounts in literature of the interrelation between plant and insects outside of Rachel Carson. Only Samuel Taylor Coleridge is comparable among literary writers. They are a product and vindication of the integrity of Thoreau’s observations, and in this he anticipates the development of evolutionary ecology in the 1960s and 1970s when the charge of his deterioration into diffuseness after WALDEN began to be laid to rest. Thoreau is the only American writer other than the very different (and neglected) John Dos Passos, and the more subtle Hart Crane and Nabokov, who would experience the full force of Freud’s dictum that “science betokens the most complete renunciation of the pleasure-principle of which our minds are capable.” Indeed, Thoreau’s writing, like Walt Whitman’s, is shot through with the fertile, if from a national standpoint double-edged, Emersonian dialectic whereby “the common things in American nature could be realized as American only when turned to use as representative instances in a universal prospect.” Rather like Alice, we are deemed now to have come out the other side of objectivism. Quantum evolution has all but dissolved even the palpable world of nature, at least theoretically, although we do continue to eat in order to sustain our incorporating carapace. More transformatory than Galileo’s revolution, quantum mechanics has elevated the minuscule —derived from Planck’s constant h— into the apotheosis of the infinitesimal. Matter and its shadow anti-matter ultimately dwell in a twilight asymmetric world of quarks and anti-quarks, even muons and taus. I hope by the end of this study to have shown that the organically relatively minute Insecta play a similar and hitherto underestimated role in the Thoreau opus. And then travelling with the author in the spirit of “The HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Concord nights are stranger than the Arabian nights” (PJ1:37), I will argue that a reading of the full length of Thoreau, for so long obstructed by hang-overs from the lop-sided literary concentration on WALDEN, suggests a destabilizing of scientific and philosophical writ parallel to Planck’s transformation of the minuscule. Because Thoreau worked from the nub of the human in its natural historical habitat, overthrowing history in its species specific sense, he touched a pulse that connects science with the more subjective arenas without being plain either. In 1860, largely due to the efforts of Louis Agassiz, the Museum of Comparative Zoology was opened at Harvard. He was the main proponent of American opposition to Darwin, maintaining the immediate intervention of an intelligent Creator, and arguing that although there was no organic progress, yet all creations of God were not simultaneous. His training in continental idealist philosophy during his education in Switzerland meant that, like the German zoologists, he was unable to solve the fundamental problems of evolutionary theory, despite his remarkable advances in the collection of data. Herbert Hovenkamp summarizes Louis Agassiz’s and Georges Cuvier’s concept: During each new geologic epoch, God created a new set of species to replace a previous set that had died off or been destroyed. Each new creations consisted of organisms more sophisticated than those in the previous creation. Bonnet, a far greater prose writer than Cuvier, put matters in terms that Thoreau up until at least 1854 could have identified with, primarily in its metamorphic aspect: “Who could deny that the Great Power had inscribed in the first Germ of each animal the succession of corresponding Germs released in the diverse Revolutions the planet subsequently underwent? ... Our world appeared in the form of a larva or caterpillar: it is at present a chrysalis; the final Revolution will remake it in the form of a butterfly.” Nevertheless Louis Agassiz’s theory of “special creation” left space for progress in evolution —though not for natural selection— so that his pioneering fieldwork was not impeded by theoretic reservations but carried forward by his interest in the habits of animals. Not least this was because, as Agassiz wrote in AN ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION: “Species, genera, families, etc. exist as thoughts, individuals as facts.” His great specialism, embryology, was carried into his concept of evolution as the unfolding of already present characteristics. The totality of empirical data was, for Agassiz, the externalization, or uncovering, of preformed ideas. Facts were real enough, but development was an illusion. Changes were simply a manifestation of an original type, not anything new. Darwinian method and what today is known as population thinking turn this upside down, so that only individual phenomena have reality while the type is an a priori imposition. His biographer writes, “In an era of transition in the interpretation of nature, Agassiz lived as a man who provided basic insights for HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the new framework of natural history.” Thoreau himself not only collected for Agassiz, but he read Agassiz’s PRINCIPLES OF ZOOLOGY, taking it out of the library for three months in 1851. There were four principal phases of expansion of American zoology: • Descriptive natural history prior to 1847, including early studies on the classification of the habits of animals, characteristic of zoological work up to the arrival of Agassiz in 1846. During this period the Smithsonian and Yale Scientific School were founded, and Scientific American began publication. The root of zoology in the Americas, though, lies with two Hispanics —Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478-1557) and the Jesuit, Joseph de Acosta (1540-1600)— along with the report on Walter Raleigh’s expedition by Thomas Hariot in A BRIEFE AND TRUE REPORT OF THE NEW FOUND LAND OF VIRGINIA. • 1846-1870: Agassiz’s work on the structure and developmental history of animals. This was the heyday of morphology and embryology. • By 1873, Agassiz had retreated considerably before Darwin, though long before this his colleague, the botanist Asa Gray, was working with Darwin. As Robert V. Bruce succinctly summed up the expansion of these years: “in egalitarian and republican America, scientists knew that the common man also had to be reached in order to get money.” So during the 1870s, natural selection was taken on board. But it is worth recalling that as early as the 40s Gray’s studies of the plants of the Galapagos and the Hawaiian Islands had suggested to him that one species might edge into another by minute variation. Later, Darwin’s method encouraged Gray to apply statistics to the study of plant distribution leading in turn to the naturalist’s letter to Gray in September 1857 that was later evidence in confirming his priority over Alfred Russel Wallace in developing the theory of natural selection. And it was the stimulus from Darwin that “set Gray upon the track of his greatest scientific accomplishment — the identification of elements of the flora of eastern North America and those of Japan as a single flora stretching around the earth in the Arctic regions in the period before the Ice Age.” Indeed Asa Gray was a key figure in ensuring there was not the general opposition to Darwin in America such as occurred in France. It took the most influential scientist of the 1840s and 1850s, James Dwight Dana, until 1870 to accept Darwin, while Agassiz signaled his retreat with “Evolution and Permanence of Type” in 1873. Dana was “one of the few evangelicals who would, in a single lifetime, run the entire gamut from Agassiz to Darwin, going through a nervous breakdown in the process and finally concluding sometime in the 1870s that even natural selection could be consistent with divine cosmogony.” By the 1870s the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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situation was prepared for the establishment of Entomology as a separate discipline. • 1890 onwards. Experimental biology and the advance in knowledge of organisms through experiment became the core of Zoology. Thoreau, then, was coming into being as a writer, after Emerson’s prompting, at a time of formation in those sciences that touch on what remained in the first part of the nineteenth century, Natural History. Coleridge’s distinction between reason and understanding was a crux for all natural historians. Where understanding concerned itself with the collection of empirical data through observation, reason was a faculty for divining the spiritual in the factual, an organ of the mind similar to those of sight and hearing. This reason or intuition could therefore hold its own with those fields of knowledge thrown up by the fragmentation of natural history taking place by mid-century with the rise of geology, chemistry and biology which were seeking out the “`imponderables’ such as heat, light and electricity,” together with the inner functioning of the human body. The Mendelian revolution and the role of genetics were not available until 1866, so the observer of nature was largely on his or her own. But even at an early stage of his growth as writer there are important parallels between Thoreau’s emphasis on detached, minute observation and Darwin’s field methods. For whereas Louis Agassiz and Dana saw ontogeny (individual development) recapitulating phylogeny (species development), the evolutionists argued that ontogeny programmed phylogeny. As Hovenkamp encapsulates this difference: “the individual in other words, determined the history of his species through his own variations above and beyond the final development of his ancestors.” Emerson summed up the freedom of the observer to capture the ontogenetic detail in his “Humanity of Science” in 1836 immediately prior to Thoreau’s emergence as a writer when he wrote a touch optimistically — “Our microscopes are not necessary. They are a pretty toy for chamber philosophers, but nature has brought every fact within reach of the unarmed eye somewhere.” However Thoreau was to forge a very fruitful relationship with an early American entomologist who also transformed the library at Harvard College — Thaddeus William Harris. Thomas Say’s AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGY, published from Philadelphia between 1824 and 1828 was the first accurate account of the insect species of North America. Say’s biographer, Patricia Tyson Stroud, explains the impetus driving this massive project An important effect of the War of 1812 was stimulation of the evolving sense of American identity. Say and most of his peers in the natural sciences in Philadelphia felt this incitement acutely and would demand that dependence on European savants give way to American expertise in establishing American science. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The phase of Thomas Say’s brief dominance in American entomology was characterized by a development of a broader system of classification than the Linnaean, and included naturalists such as Thomas Nuttall. However the growth of the universities led to the subject’s gradual integration as a discipline, though even as late as the 1840s the only formal course on offer was a single term of natural history, taken at the end of a senior year. It was taught by Thaddeus Harris at Harvard, and consisted of 17 lectures on botany. Thoreau was fortunate enough to take the course in the first year it was offered. Already Harris had taken steps to further entomology by making it useful to farmers and other agriculturalists. The state of Massachusetts published his manual on insect pests in 1841, REPORT ON THE INSECTS OF MASSACHUSETTS INJURIOUS TO VEGETATION. As a result of this he became the first paid entomologist in American, and a revised edition appeared in 1852, with a further re-issue in a special edition in 1862 with splendid woodcuts. So Harris balanced between the utilitarian lines on which entomology was to develop, and a genuine natural historical concern with the subject. The first full-time appointment went to Asa Fitch, the New York state entomologist from 1853. Townend Glover at the Bureau of Agriculture held the first federal position between 1854 and 1878. As Bruce puts it: “Beyond the work of Harris, Fitch, and Glover, little more was done in applied entomology during the antebellum period.” Harris himself complained that his work suffered from the relative poverty of his collection of insects, but meantime the Smithsonian through the efforts of the Pennsylvanian zoologist, Spencer F. Baird, had developed a fine collection from scratch by 1853. Much later John Henry Comstock founded Cornell entomology which would provide the base for the greatest of all literary entomologists — Vladimir Nabokov. The classification of species was now beginning to separate the professionals from the amateur naturalists. The initial practitioners were first and foremost classifiers concerned with the adult of the insect species, and not with their life histories. As Leland Howard says: “When the economic entomologist began to appear he was frowned down upon by the systematic worker and considered on the whole to be an unscientific dabbler of the farmer class.” (The “economic entomologist” is the American equivalent of the British “applied entomologist,” both concerned with the application of insect studies to agricultural improvement). The process of specialization begins in earnest in mid-century. The word “scientist” is only coined while Thoreau was in college, while the word “ecologist” is introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. There was now not only the theory of Darwin to consider, but the issue of methods of classification and indeed collection, together with the development of the instruments of observation. Natural History, though, was one of the last studies to be incorporated into bureaucratic systematization, allowing some space for the autodidact polymath. Thoreau would concur with Whitman’s reservations about “the love of the precise, the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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exact, the methodical” which “is characteristic of the age of machinery, of a commercial and industrial age like ours.” For Concord was becoming a suburb of Boston during Thoreau’s lifetime: Concord was a commercially thriving agricultural community and regional crossroads in which cows and chickens greatly outnumbered native wildlife and meadows overwhelmed forests. Massachusetts was leading a national and global revolution in industrialization and social change. So “the emerging world was no community at all but a riot of impersonal forces (those of the literary market included) in which a dissenting voice was not even met with disapproval because it went unheard.” This social revolution paradoxically provided the favorable conditions for insects around Walden. At this time, the landscape was a patchwork thanks to “selective Indian burning [which] thus promoted the mosaic quality of New England ecosystems, creating forests in many different states of ecological succession.” Later New England became more afforested, and the annual cuttings which had served as a type of coppicing —what Thoreau called sproutlands— and had been favorable to the dappled sunshine and shade together with forest rides beloved of lepidoptera and other insects, were abandoned. The early colonists had little trouble from injurious insects, so had no cause to make systematic strides in this field. Nonetheless in the TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY for 1771 — a Society derided by later Natural History Societies as non-specialist — Colonel Landon Carter of Virginia produced “Observations concerning the Fly Weevil, that Destroys the Wheat, with Some Useful Discoveries and Conclusions regarding the Propagation and Progress of that Pernicious Insect, and the Methods to be Used to Prevent the Destruction of the Grain by It.” In 1789 William Bartram read “Observations on the Pea Fly or Beetle, and Fruit Curculio” to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture.” (The Curculio is a type of firefly). And in 1810 he encouraged his great-nephew, Thomas Say, to begin collecting beetles and butterflies, essential of course at this phase of the evolution of entomology, not least because Harris would find his lack of a European collection a great hindrance for comparative work. Bartram on ephemerae is, as will become clear, in the Thoreau tradition of insect writing if a touch more rapturous: The importance of the existence of these beautiful and delicately formed little creatures, whose frame and organization are equally wonderful, more delicate, and perhaps as complicated as those of the most perfect human being, is well worth a few moments contemplation. The effect of science as a whole upon Thoreau’s writing is similar to that in Whitman as described by John Burroughs: “Science fed Whitman’s imagination and made him bold; its HDT WHAT? INDEX
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effects were moral and spiritual.” Later, Thaddeus Harris was to attend the lectures of Professor William Dandridge Peck (1763-1834) at Harvard College. Peck’s pioneering entomological article was “The Description and History of the Canker Worm” (1795), describing the species as Phalaena vernata, the spring cankerworm. So a considerable body of preparatory work had been done before the Revolutionary War of 1812. And in 1812, the Academy of Natural Sciences was founded at Philadelphia. This was overtaken a little later by the Boston Society of Natural History, though “even in Boston the rise of Harvard, which helped societies in the short run overshadowed and so diminished them in the long run.” Thoreau became a corresponding member of the Society in 1850, and when he died his occupation was given not as “Writer,” but “Natural Historian.” There was a distinctly political edge to the growth of Entomology in ante-bellum America. Around Boston in the 1810s, injurious insects began to attract attention. The Hessian fly was particularly troublesome to wheat farming. And another species damaged squashes and pumpkins to such an extent that the Bostonians named it the Gage bug, after the much hated British general in charge of forces of occupation. Other introductions caused much annoyance and some agricultural damage, such as the black fly, which Thoreau missed when he returned from Maine to Concord as having disappeared with the moose. A domestic pest was the European cockroach, while it was as early as 1666 that the cankerworm had appeared. Colonial gardens brought “grasshoppers, garden fleas, maggots, and various species of ‘worms’ and ‘flies.’” Thoreau’s principal collaborator in identification of insects — and other creatures— at Concord was Thaddeus William Harris. Born at Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1795, Harris’s father (also Thaddeus Harris) had been a minister in the Congregationalist Church and, like his son after him, had been Librarian at Harvard College, albeit briefly. He wrote the technically exacting THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BIBLE, published in 1820. Here again the sciences grow organically from the religious foundations of America. Raymond Stearns points to the fact that it is Cotton Mather who “was the first native born colonial to advance beyond the status of a mere field agent for European scientists in the New World and to demonstrate a genuine philosophical approach to science, with scientific ideas and hypotheses of his own, in addition to the contribution of specimens and observations of natural phenomena.” But science for Mather remained a revelation of the splendor of God, as indeed was the case with Jonathan Edwards, often for Emerson and early on for Thoreau. Indeed the first full-time entomologist, Asa Fitch (1809-78) embodied this (apparent) paradox, the scientist who was at the same time a pious Christian. Doctor Fitch’s daughter recounted the incident when evening family prayers were interrupted by a moth attracted to the light. “Here was a dilemma. The spirit of the naturalist, however, overcame the religious feeling and in a somewhat shamefaced manner the entomologist reached out for his butterfly net and captured and bottled the specimen before finishing his HDT WHAT? INDEX
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chapter.” The specimen proved new to science. The MEMOIR OF THADDEUS WILLIAM HARRIS, M.D. by Edward D. Harris observes that “as early as 1820 he was closely studying the habits of certain insects and plants in connection with his medical pursuits.” On November 10, 1823, Thomas Say — who named 1,500 new American insects — is writing to Harris: entomology, which had so long been condemned in this country as a frivolous pursuit, seems now to be almost able to command that attention which its importance demands, & the formidable depredations of the insect race upon the vitals of the agricultural interest, compel the farmer to devote much attention to their manners and habits which he would not otherwise have deigned to bestow. This may be said to be the triumph of Entomology over the prejudices of the selfish. Again in 1823 —and 1823 and 1824 seem to be key dates in entomology’s development in America— Harris published his first economic paper, “Upon the Natural History of the Salt Marsh Caterpillar.” In 1832 he put together a catalog of American insects that included some 2,300 species. As William and Mabel Smallwood summarize: “the large number of accurate descriptions of insects, and the emphasis upon their economic importance, opened up a field in which the natural scientist was to be replaced by the technical entomologist, a type which has continued to the present time.” His father’s work undoubtedly had a major influence upon Harris’s career in that as the Memoir remarks “both were men of untiring industry in their respective pursuits, of equal thoroughness, precision, and accuracy in their literary work.” Emerson, in thrall to Friedrich von Schelling’s Natur-Philosophie, pontificated — utilizing philosophical idealism to prop up snobbism — to the effect that while those under continental influence were comparing tribes and kingdoms, “Peck & Harris count the cilia & spines on a beetle’s wing.” It was, of course, such attention to detail that was crucial to Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s sketching of the theory of evolution by genetic variation and natural selection. Nevertheless by January 1853 Thoreau is writing in his Journal: “Being at Cambridge day before yesterday — Sibley told me that Agassiz told him that Harris was the greatest entomologist in the world, and gave him permission to repeat the remark” (PJ5:417). However Thoreau would bring to his records and observations of insects something lacking in all but the very greatest entomologists — vision. So much so that Franklin Benjamin Sanborn reports that one of Harvard’s natural historians —clearly Thaddeus William Harris— remarked to Bronson Alcott that “if Emerson had not spoiled him, Thoreau would have made a good entomologist.” As I hope will emerge from this study, in this respect alone Thoreau can be spoken of in the same breath as Nabokov who had the greatest understanding of natural phenomena in the sense that Laura Dassow Walls uses the term — facts as the crossroads of the objective and subjective. He HDT WHAT? INDEX
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would have understood entirely what Nabokov meant when he said “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.” Excerpts
Thoreau read “Origin of the Species” on its first appearance in America, acquiring it from the Town Library early in 1860, and immediately gave it his assent. This was no foregone expectation. It required characteristic Thoreau boldness and courage since Emerson’s circle included the main proponent of ‘special creation,’ Louis Agassiz, who had the prestige of Harvard College, which he was involved in expanding, behind him. Prior to his reading of Origin, Thoreau had become interested in Darwin’s Journal of Researches during the Voyage of HMS Beagle (1839), which was a talisman of his travels around Concord, and Thoreau’s “copious notes attest to his extraordinary prescient sympathy with many of Darwin’s interests, including his minutely detailed observational techniques, his fascination with change in nature, even his writing style and the formal construction of the book, which was half travelogue and half naturalist’s journal.” In fact it was far from a question of passive acceptance on Thoreau’s part, for he needs Darwinian natural selection and adaptation to make sense of his own observations. In a Journal entry for December 24, 1853, he describes one of his great insect loves--the cocoons of the Cecropia moth, Hyalophora cecropia: “In Weston’s field, in springy land on the edge of a swamp, I counted thirty-three or four of those large silvery-brown cocoons within a rod or two, and probably there are many more about a foot from the ground, commonly on the main stem--though sometimes on a branch close to the stem--of the alder, sweet-fern, brake, etc., etc. The largest are four inches long by two and a half, bag-shaped and wrinkled and partly concealed by dry leaves,--alders, ferns, etc.,--attached as if sprinkled over them. This evidence of cunning in so humble a creature is affecting, for I am not ready to refer it to an intelligence which the creature does not share, as much as we do the prerogatives of reason. This radiation of the brain. The bare silvery cocoons would otherwise be too obvious. The worm has obviously said to itself: ‘Man or some other creature may come by and see my casket. I will disguise it, will hang a screen before it’” (J6:23). Thoreau gives some of the finest accounts in literature of the interrelation between plant and insects outside of Rachel Carson. Only Coleridge is comparable among literary writers. They are a product and vindication of the integrity of Thoreau’s observations, and in this he anticipates the development of HDT WHAT? INDEX
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evolutionary ecology in the 1960s and 1970s when the charge of his deterioration into diffuseness after Walden began to be laid to rest. In 1860, largely due to the efforts of Louis Agassiz, the Museum of Comparative Zoology was opened at Harvard. He was the main proponent of American opposition to Darwin, maintaining the immediate intervention of an intelligent Creator, and arguing that although there was no organic progress, yet all creations of God were not simultaneous. His training in continental idealist philosophy during his education in Switzerland meant that, like the German zoologists, he was unable to solve the fundamental problems of evolutionary theory, despite his remarkable advances in the collection of data. Herbert Hovenkamp summarizes Agassiz’s and Cuvier’s concept: “During each new geologic epoch, God created a new set of species to replace a previous set that had died off or been destroyed. Each new creations consisted of organisms more sophisticated than those in the previous creation.” Bonnet put matters in terms that Thoreau up until at least 1854 could have identified with, primarily in its metamorphic aspect: “Who could deny that the Great Power had inscribed in the first Germ of each animal the succession of corresponding Germs released in the diverse Revolutions the planet subsequently underwent? ... Our world appeared in the form of a larva or caterpillar: it is at present a chrysalis; the final Revolution will remake it in the form of a butterfly.” The growth of the universities led to [Entomology’s] gradual integration as a discipline, though even as late as the 1840s the only formal course on offer was a single term of natural history, taken at the end of a senior year. It was taught by Thaddeus Harris at Harvard, and consisted of 17 lectures on botany. Thoreau was fortunate enough to take the course in the first year it was offered. Already Harris had taken steps to further entomology by making it useful to farmers and other agriculturalists. The state of Massachusetts published his manual on insect pests in 1841, Report on the Insects of Massachusetts Injurious to Vegetation. As a result of this he became the first paid entomologist in American, and a revised edition appeared in 1852, with a further re-issue in a special edition in 1862 with splendid woodcuts. So Harris balanced between the utilitarian lines on which entomology was to develop, and a genuine natural historical concern with the subject. The first full-time appointment went to Asa Fitch, the New York state entomologist from 1853. Townend Glover at the Bureau of Agriculture held the first federal position between 1854 and 1878. As Bruce puts it: “Beyond the work of Harris, Fitch, and Glover, little more was done in applied entomology during the antebellum period.” Harris himself complained that his work suffered from the relative poverty of his collection of insects, but meantime the Smithsonian through the efforts of the Pennsylvanian zoologist, Spencer F. Baird, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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had developed a fine collection from scratch by 1853. Much later John Henry Comstock founded Cornell entomology which would provide the base for the greatest of all literary entomologists — Vladimir Nabokov. in 1812, the Academy of Natural Sciences was founded at Philadelphia. This was overtaken a little later by the Boston Society of Natural History, though “even in Boston the rise of Harvard, which helped societies in the short run overshadowed and so diminished them in the long run.” Thoreau became a corresponding member of the Society in 1850, and when he died his occupation was given not as “Writer,” but “Natural Historian.” It was, of course, such attention to detail that was crucial to Darwin’s and Wallace’s sketching of the theory of evolution by genetic variation and natural selection. Thoreau would bring to his records and observations of insects something lacking in all but the very greatest entomologists — vision. So much so that Franklin Benjamin Sanborn reports that one of Harvard’s natural historians –clearly Thaddeus Harris– remarked to Bronson Alcott that “if Emerson had not spoiled him, Thoreau would have made a good entomologist.” As I hope will emerge from this study, in this respect alone Thoreau can be spoken of in the same breath as Nabokov who had the greatest understanding of natural phenomena in the sense that Laura Dassow Walls uses the term — facts as the crossroads of the objective and subjective. He would have understood entirely what Nabokov meant when he said “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2005
January 3, Monday: The Providence, Rhode Island newspaper, known locally as the “ProJo,” presented an article by Stanley M. Aronson, MD, dean of medicine emeritus at Brown University, about the early entomologist Thomas Say. Dr. Aronson supposes Say’s physician father to have been named “John B. Say” — and I have been unable to corroborate that the elder Say has ever been known in any way other than as Friend Benjamin Say (before he was disowned by the Religious Society of Friends for engaging in warfare), or as Dr. Benjamin Say. Dr. Aronson also supposes that Dr. Say founded the Pennsylvania Prison Society, and that also is quite false, for the founders of the predecessor society for the Pennsylvania Prison Society, named Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, had been Benjamin Rush, John Swanwick, John Morrison, Thomas Morrison, Tench Coxe, Zachariah Poulson, Thomas Lloyd, Joseph Moore, William Roger, John Haighn, James Whitehall, Richard Wells, Thomas Wistar, Jacob Shoemaker, Isaac Parrish, William Lane, Thomas Rogers, Samuel Griffiths, Francis Baily, Joseph James, Charles Marshall, John Olden, Caleb Lownes, Thomas Parkinson, John Morris, John Baker, Dr. George Duffield, James Reynolds, Benjamin Wynkoop, George Krebs, Dr. William White, Dr. Henry Helmuth, Dr. John Jones, Dr. William Shippen, Dr. Gerardus Clarkson, Jonathan Penrose, and Lawrence Sickle: The brief but productive life of Thomas Say THE NAME Thomas Say does not readily come to mind when one is recalling the eminent scientists enriching this nation’s early history. Indeed, other than Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), Benjamin Thompson (1753-1814), Louis Agassiz (1807-73), and perhaps a few others, there were none to match the intellectual stature, theorizations and discoveries of their European colleagues. The early decades of the 19th Century had not yet witnessed American institutions of higher learning capable of nurturing innovative scientific inquiry. Whatever was accomplished by American scientists in those formative years was undertaken through individual perseverance, without the benefit of nurturing mentors and supporting laboratories. Thomas Say (1787-1834) was born in Philadelphia, then America’s most prosperous city and the residence of America’s foremost scholars. Say’s great-grandfather was a Huguenot who had fled France in 1685 to escape religious oppression, following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His son, an apothecary- physician, established his practice in Philadelphia; and his grandson —Thomas Say’s father, John B. Say, a Quaker— was a prominent physician and co-founder of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. He founded the Pennsylvania Prison Society, which sought more merciful incarceration procedures. He was also an incorporator of the Humane Society, which advocated innovative medical procedures to diminish mortality rates from drowning, suffocation and heat stroke. Despite their small numbers, Quakers constituted a major force in the formative years of American medicine, co-founding the medical schools of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. Quaker physicians, on both sides of the Atlantic, included such 19th Century luminaries as John Fothergill, John HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Lettsom, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Waterhouse (of Rhode Island), Thomas Hodgkin and Joseph Lister. Young Thomas Say began his education as an apothecary-physician; but the death of his mother, financial reverses in his family, and later the death of his father forced him to seek employment. Yet his interests in the sciences persisted; and through his eager participation in the evening science lectures at the home of Dr. Caspar Wistar, young Say continued to nurture his scholarly enthusiasms, developing a lasting interest in botany and the physiology and classification of insects. He accepted an unsalaried post as museum curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences. In 1817 Say was invited to participate in an Academy-sponsored expedition to gather geological and botanical data in the wilderness of the Florida peninsula. Say’s collection and categorization of the flora of northern Florida were recognized by the Academy as outstanding, and they were immediately published. But Say also undertook to criticize the American government for its military campaigns against the Native Americans of Florida, for the “most cruel and inhuman war which our government is unrighteously and unconstitutionally waging against these poor wretches whom we call savages.” Despite his open opposition to the so-called Indian-pacification program of the government, the Monroe administration appointed him zoologist for yet another and even more ambitious expedition: to identify the sources of the Platte, Red and Arkansas rivers, branches of the Missouri. And on May 5, 1819, the group of scientists left Pittsburgh to descend the Ohio River on one of the earliest of steamboats. For more than a year, Say and his colleagues collected data on the flora, fauna and geology of the Midwest. Say’s text, The Account of the Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, became the standard advisory handbook for generations venturing beyond the Appalachians in search of farmland, routes for communication and transportation, and mining opportunities. Say was also responsible for establishing written vocabularies of the various Native American tongues that the expedition encountered. In the years that followed, Say wrote numerous textbooks on the ecology of the West, the classification of insects (entomology), and the embryology and taxonomy of creatures living in shells (conchology). In Europe, he came to be recognized as this nation’s leading naturalist. A great social experiment had been undertaken in an Indiana community under the spiritual direction of a British philosopher and philanthropist named Robert Owen. The Industrial Revolution, of the early 19th Century, had made Owen a wealthy man, but a man utterly dismayed by the price paid by the heavy hand of industry upon the working class. He was convinced that a harmonious, mutually assistive community could be established without the occupational abuses inherent in industry. Accordingly, in 1824 Owen purchased 30,000 acres in Indiana to create his utopian community, called New Harmony. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Owen then persuaded many of America’s most renowned scientists and naturalists, including Thomas Say, to join the “great humanitarian experiment.” The shy Say fit in nicely within this community, where cooperation rather than competition was encouraged. During his nine-year stay in Indiana, Say completed his monumental three-volume study of the insects of North America; but he also ventured forth on further botanical and entomological excursions, including a lengthy one to southern Mexico. After a few years, dissension broke out and New Harmony lost its air of civil tranquillity. Say was chosen to lead the community to its former state of serenity; but while he was a scrupulously honest scientist, he lacked skills in administrative leadership. Periodic dysentery -- his recurrent medical burden for years - - continued to weaken him; and in 1834, at 47, Thomas Say died. Say was buried in New Harmony; and for decades this dwindling community became a necessary visiting place for European zoologists and botanists paying homage to this modest scientist. Science needed reliable information before it could take flight in creating unifying theories. And scholars such as Say devoted their lives to gathering and interpreting such data. He was North America’s first and perhaps greatest archivist of this continent’s biota.
Schinia Thoreaui
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Say and Thoreau’s Entomology HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
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: December 9, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
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
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY
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
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX
THOMAS SAY AND THOREAU’S ENTOMOLOGY