PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN THERE WAS SOME RISK OF CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN’S 1 TURNING OUT AN IDLE MAN “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY 1. In the year that the Beagle sailed, Darwin was regarded as a budding geologist. His geology mentor, Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge Adam Sedgwick, would write while this young protégé was sailing around the world that: [He] is doing admirable work in South America, and has already sent home a collection above all price.... There was some risk of his turning out an idle man, but his character will now be fixed, and if God spares his life he will have a great name among the naturalists of Europe. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN “WALKING”: A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man — a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art compared with a fine, dark green one growing vigorously in the open fields.” Ben Jonson exclaims,— “How near to good is what is fair!” So I would say— How near to good is what is wild! Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees. CHARLES DARWIN BEN JONSON VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE II LOVE FREED FROM IGNOR ... [For commentary on this scientist: Professor Laura Dassow Walls] It is interesting how Henry Thoreau deploys the elements of the biological thinking of his day, such as the “Great Chain of Being” concept, in such a manner as to make linguistic use of them while at the same time resisting any deployment which would work to contradict the Darwinian theory when it would be published in America in 1860. In WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE W OODS, where he says for instance that “The perch swallows the grubworm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled,” it is clear that the metaphor he is deploying is that of the Great Scale of Being, the one that is available to him, and yet he does not go on to any of the usual aberrations of that metaphor, so common in his era, such as the superiority of the human over the animal or such as the superiority of the civilized over the primitive. Where he provides a more complex analysis, such as at IX 459 in the JOURNAL, also, there is this apparent reluctance to push the metaphor in any manner which will prove later to be inconsistent with Darwinism. At IV 186 the ocean was a “vast morgue.” At XVI 435 the land, with its HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN predator and its victim, is a battlefield and a “Golgotha.” At XX 331 he speaks of the “wonderful greediness” with which each organism contends for possession of the earth. However, Victor Carl Friesen seems prepared to suppose that “Thoreau would also probably be predisposed to accept Charles Darwin’s later views because of the Transcendental notion of progress,” and cites not only the place in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS at which Thoreau says that nature “has perfected herself by an eternity of practice” but also a passage in the JOURNAL in which he speaks of the “steady onward progress of the universe” (VIII 391) in justification of this supposition. We can dismiss such an idea by considering that if Thoreau’s attitude had come merely from “the Transcendental notion of progress,” then Waldo Emerson should have been in agreement with Thoreau in regard to Darwinism in 1860 rather than standing with Professor Louis Agassiz, aghast in horror at this new theory. Also, my reading of the two proof texts offered by Friesen is that he has not detected, in these passages, Thoreau’s irony at work. The examples Thoreau offers demonstrate his irony. He is speaking of change, and yet the cricket of which he speaks has been chirping in this manner for aeons. The stream’s gurgling is a constant, as is the sound of wind rushing among the trees. To be encouraged by such sounds is to be encouraged by constancies, not by the improvements, the “progress,” of which Thoreau is pretending to speak. The reason why evolution has perfected the species is not because, over an extremely long period, the species have been getting better and better, but because there is no outside standard by comparison with which life may be said to be imperfect. Thus, at every point in the evolutionary struggle, life is perfect and complete precisely in the manner in which it lives and moves and has its being at that point. Thoreau is not saying that by looking back we can see that life has developed, and therefore before now it was not perfected. In fact, he is saying the opposite of this, he is saying that although we can look back and see that life before now was different, it specifically does not follow that in some sense it was imperfect or inferior, and that although we can look forward and see that life in the future will be different from the way it is now, it specifically does not follow that we should regard our present life as in any sense inadequate. These are points at which he disagrees with Emerson and his racist scientist buddy Agassiz, and if the mantle of the “Transcendental notion of progress” is to be worn by somebody, it must be worn by the Sage of Concord and it must be recognized that Thoreau disdained to attempt to put on such a mantle. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1719 William Stukeley’s “An Account of the Impreffion of the almoft Entire Sceleton of a large Animal in a very hard Stone” (these remains they were presuming to be an ancient crocodile or porpoise, noticed on the underside of a slab of rock by Charles Darwin’s great-grandfather the barrister Robert Darwin, was in fact a plesiosaur and the 1st-known fossil of a Jurassic reptile). ALMOFT ENTIRE SCELETON PALEONTOLOGY With the planet Mars in opposition to the sun, and therefore at its brightest, many were taking it to be a red comet representing calamity. Observations at the Paris Observatory, however, were establishing on the basis of the appearance and disappearance of surface features that the planet’s rotation period was approximately 24 hours, 40 minutes. They were able at this point to identify not only Syrtis Major but also a darkish swath from Mare Sirenum to Mare Tyrrhenum, and to verify that Mars, like Earth, had two noticeably whitish polar spots. ASTRONOMY THE SCIENCE OF 1719 HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1755 Jean-Jacques Rousseau submitted a 2nd DISCOURSE in response to another contest proposed by the Academy of Dijon: “What is the origin of the inequality among men and is it justified by natural law?” In response to this challenge he produced an argument which amounted to speculative anthropology, following on the success of his 1st DISCOURSE by adding the concept that humankind was naturally good and by tracing the putative successive stages by which unneeded luxuries and their concomitant social divisiveness might have caused us to descend from our originary or primitive innocence into our current corrupted sophistication. To this argument he assigned the title DISCOURS SUR L’ORIGINE ET LES FONDEMENTS DE L’INÉGALITÉ PARMI LES HOMMES (DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN OF INEQUALITY): Luxury is a remedy far worse than the evil it means to cure; or rather it is itself the worst of all evils in any state, however large or small it may be, and which, in order to feed the hoards of lackeys and wretches it has produced, crushes and runs the laborer and the citizen — like those scorching south winds that, by covering grass and greenery with devouring insects, take sustenance away from useful animals, and bring scarcity and death to all the places where they make themselves felt. The comparison text would of course be from WALDEN: WALDEN: But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found, that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and “silent poor”. The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. EGYPT HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Rousseau began this new DISCOURSE by the creation of a distinction between an essential inequality arising out of natural differences in strength, intelligence, etc., versus an accidental inequality arising from time to time and from place to place out of the merely artificial cultural happenstance conventions of local quotidian human society.