According to Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge), Horace Lunt was a linguist in Slavic Studies who lived from 1918 until 2010. Unfortunately, that does not explain how he managed to publish a book of New Hampshire nature essays in 1888. Hence the problem. While trying to gain information about this author, every site I visited invariably led to the wrong Horace Lunt. Finally, I stumbled upon a scan of a book on the Lunt family of New England, which included a paragraph about the right Horace. What I learned only made him more mysterious to me. Horace was born on March 17, 1838. He worked as a house servant before joining a local militia company in 1861 and then a Maine infantry regiment a year and a half later. His regiment fought in many battles during the Civil War, including Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and Appomattox. He was one of the few members of his regiment to survive the war, although one of his legs was severely impaired due to the long marches and other hardships. After the war, he became a nature writer, publishing three books; Across Lots was the first. He died in 1911. I could not find an image of his grave, let alone of him.
So I fill in the blanks as best I can. What happened to him between 1865 and the publication of his first book? Did he try his hand at other careers along the way? Did he have the 19th Century equivalent of PTSD? (How could he have possibly endured so many horrific battles psychologically unscathed?) Did he perhaps seek solace in nature, a calming presence to soothe his troubled memories? I don’t know. I did notice the presence of his past, in terms of how frequently he would use military images to describe natural scenes in his essays. Here is how the first essay, “A March Ramble,” opens:
March, in New England, is the disputable month between the seasons spring and winter; the space, as it were, between the picket lines of both armies, where many battles are fought for the mastery and power of governing the land. Winter commands Boreas to station his wind batteries on the bleak northern hills to belch forth a storm of snow and hail, and a general frigid icicle charge is ordered along the whole line until not a vestige of spring is seen. Then the frost army, wearied with its fierce onslaught, sleeps, and the vernal force, driven far southward, turns again its face toward the foe, insidiously creeps along the flank, and takes the gray old general in his fancied stronghold by surprise… Winter wakes again and marshals his strength, but his front is not so vigorous. He sullenly retires before the genial commander of the other side, that moves slowly and steadily forward to the vernal equinox.
Equinox? Appomatox? They practically rhyme. Only, in this version of the story, the South ultimately wins (for the spring, at least).
I truly wanted to enjoy Lunt’s work. His essays are vivid, and his emulation of Thoreau is uncanny. He captures a couple of Thoreau’s mannerisms from his journals, including a tendency to interrupt description to declare something fervently and his frequent addition of questions without answers. However, he lavishes the most praise on John Burroughs, “whose writings have the true sylvan ring — to read them is next to walking in the woods.” And that, I suppose, is what Lunt is chiefly after in his book — using text to evoke a virtual reality through which the reader can travel, as if out of doors. Lunt keeps his own musings to a minimum and eschews references to literature and history. Reading his descriptive passages, I feel like I am there with him — roaming the woods, gazing down into a pond, following a half-tumbled-down wall. Consider this delightful passage on autumnal plants and how they disperse their seeds:
As I walk across-lots, I am struck with the varied and ingenious methods the different plants have used to scatter their seeds. Here is an army of goldenrods and asters, milk-weeds and epilobiums, holding aloft on their wand-like stems millions of seeds, to which are attached balloons, parachutes and wings, that the wind at the proper time may carry them miles away. I wave one of these wands when, as if by magic, hundreds of the winged grains go sailing through the air like the flight of insects. Here, too, are hooks, barbs, and prickles that cling to the dress of passers-by or to the hairs of cattle, and thus are carried away to be rubbed off and deposited in some other locality. Other seeds artfully hide themselves in lucious, brilliant wrappings that the birds may be attracted to them. Strawberries, raspberries, and the early drupes have scattered their seeds by this process; but the various cornels, honeysuckles, greenberries, rose and spice bushes, the bright red fruit clusters of the winter-berry, the purple panicles of the prim, that feast the eyes of the autumn rambler, are still waiting patiently for the snows to put an embargo on other supplies near the ground.
Here I chose a botanical passage. But Lunt’s observational skills were far-ranging. He emphasized birds the most (meticulously describing their color patterns, as if the poor reader could ever remember them in a book devoid of illustrations). But he also wrote about snakes, turtles, small mammals, insects, and even microscopic pond life. While his command of animal behavior was perhaps average for nature writers of the time, his skills in identifying and describing organisms were prodigious. And yet I struggled with feeling that the book was missing something vital — without which it simply could not stand alongside Thoreau. After reading one of the last passages from the final essay, “Cross-cut Views of Winter,” I finally figured it out.
I note the tracks of various prowlers in the woods. A rabbit has lately passed along, making indentations in the snow at regular intervals, as if he had been surveying or pacing off a certain portion of the lot for himself. Further on the lines appear more numerous; cross and re-cross each other, and are tangled in such a knot that it would be a hopeless task to find the creatures’ homes. They seem to have gone everywhere, and arrived at no particular place.
Thank you, Horace! That is precisely what I mean. Your book goes everywhere (within your New Hampshire woodland domain) and arrives at no particular place. There is no point to your essays — or rather, the point of your essays is the ramble itself. Unless I include your understandable fascination with war imagery, there are no connection to anything larger than the moment and the walk and the things you discover along the way. There is no destination. A reader could pick up the book and begin anywhere — could probably even read the paragraphs in backward order, and it wouldn’t matter. Across Lots is intended as a vehicle for virtual experience at a time long before the coffee-table photography book, video, and virtual reality headsets. And as such, it can end equally at any point, such as here.
For my latest book, I have chosen Volume 4 from The Riverside Library for Young People, Up and Down Brooks by Mary E. Bamford. At a bit smaller than five by seven inches, this little tome invites smaller hands or perhaps the pocket of a knapsack. The book itself is a carefree romp with a quirky, playful, scholarly “self-named “bug-hunter” as she makes her way up and down brooks, armed with a cloth dredger and a bucket, collecting water beetles and anything else she can find in the streams of Alameda County, California. Along the way, at an (and every) opportunity, she makes some sort of connection to classical or medieval history, culture, and literature. The result is, well, exhausting. Perhaps her literary allusions were common to readers at the time (maybe even younger ones), but most of them were entirely lost on me. As a guidebook for how to study streams, the book also fails. The reader is halfway through the text (of over 200 pages) before mention is made of how to make a dredger of one’s own. And there are few common names for insects; instead, Bamford resolutely names them by genera. Thus, a hellgrammite becomes “larva of horned Corydalus,” and the adult dobson-fly is simply “Horned Corydalus.” Who are her readers, then? How many children would have a clue what her various insect names signify? At the same time, some of her playful passages definitely seem best suited to a child (or childlike adult). Consider her experiences with a captive predacious water stick-insect, Ranatra (again, the genus name):
I think Ranatra had no music in his soul, and he probably never missed the bird-twitterings of his native brook. As a personal favor and a reminder of the days when he lived in the creek, I sometimes took a flute and played “Way down upon the Swanee River” close to his jar. But the calmness with which he received the serenade was only equal to that with which he usually surveyed the world when no music was going on. Neither the “growly” nor the “squeeky” parts of the piano affected his nerves, even when his bottle was placed touching the instrument next the keys.
A page later, Bamford reports on Ranatra’s unexpected death:
Peace to his ashes. I never did know how I loved him until he died. Never did I part from a bug with such regret… The jar looked lonely without him, he had lived in it so long, and I felt half inclined to that, in spite of his having dwelt with them so securely for so long a time, he had at last fallen a victim to those cowardly cousins of his, the scorpion-bugs. They rushed about as usual, evidently caring nothing for the death of the bug that was worth twenty of them.
As the reader can plainly observe, Bamford does not hold back on her feelings about the various organisms she encounters. There is a whimsy to her descriptions and even sometimes abject silliness. Her many failed attempts to raise a tiger beetle larva to adulthood in captivity included the following individuals (forever immortalized in her prose): Conqueror of Coffee-Pot-Lid Lake; Conqueror II; The Hesitator; Larva of Yeast-Powder-Lid Lake; Scarer of Soapdish-Lid-Lake; Triumpher of Tin-Pan Lake; Monarch of Mortar Lake; “The Last”; Oliver; Frightener of Flower-Pot Lake; and “The Last-But-One.” Yet beneath all the craziness and the random references to obscure etymologies and myths, there is also an observant and patient scientist noting the minutiae of lives mostly overlooked at the time. Consider her assessment of a snail’s lot:
Yet the fact of the matter is that there is not much character to a pond-snail. To slip out of a mass of jelly with one’s house on one’s back, to float on the surface of the pond, to dine on leaves or confervae, to rest when weary and to journey when so disposed, to retreat into one’s house when in danger, to pass along through life in a somewhat humdrum fashion with small spirit or vim in one, to cleanse the pool what little one may, and finally to drop down through the water and whiten with one’s lifeless shell the scum of the pond, to have that slime close at last over one’s shell and leave one buried in oblivion while all the pond-life goes on above one still, — this is the snail’s life. Devoid of fighting instincts, not gifted with ambition to soar like the beetles, or to be ever in sight like the skaters, treating all the pond-neighbors with quiet reserve, going one’s own way and doing much good in the world, such is the pond-snail. If he is not brilliant, he is good, and what more could be asked of him?
The respect Bamford grants many f the insects she encounters is not always expressed toward the many local residents, particularly children, who see her with dredger in hand and assume she is trying to catch fish. All too few of them, she complains more than once, have any interest in insects — like this teen who disrupts her work:
“What are you catching? Fish?” demands a voice, and I look up to see the yellow head of an inquisitive foureen-year-old youth peering over the bank.
“Water-beetles,” and I hold up my pail to show the contents.
“What are they good for?” proceeds the utilitarian.
I hesitate a moment. Shall I tell him of the decaying leaves that these numerous Hydrophilidae devour, assisted by these pond-snails; of the yearly plague of frogs from which we are delivered by the disappearance of the juices of the polliwogs through the proboscides of these water-boatmen; of the multitudes of mosquitoes who never have a chance to bite us, because as wigglers they have met their fates under the masks of these dragon-fly larvae? I excuse myself from this lesson on zoology, and make answer, “I take them home and keep them, and study their habits.”
What motivates Bamford to make such a study of stream life, especially insects? At one point in her ramblings, she shares this early memory with her readers, offering a window into her motivations:
I remember the day when the idea first entered my brain that other creatures than human have interesting lives. I must have been about eight or nine years old. I had been taking a walk in a little mining town among the Sierra Nevada foothills. A minister was with me, and he had a hand-microscope or glass in his pocket.
We sat down under the trees on a hill somewhere back of a church, and he showed me through the glass a multitude of little creatures living in the heart of a yellow flower… I remember that as a very wonderful day, one on which I did not see half enough through that glass to suit me, but still one on which I obtained a glimpse of a world very different from that in which I usually lived.
Indeed, it is a world with very different rules. Toward the book’s close, Bamford remarks on “how hard-hearted the insects are toward one another! In all the time I have watched them, I do not recollect ever having seen an act of compassion performed by any kind of insect for another.” She then proceeds to describe her experiences waiting for a caterpillar to pupate, only for many parasitic flies to emerge instead, having fed upon the caterpillar’s body. Yet through this all, she ultimately conveys a sense of wonder and delight in this foreign world beneath the water’s surface.
And so the traveler beside this brook and over these hills may learn, if he looks, that man is not the only creature who builds houses and is disappointed about living in them. There is material here for a fine sermon after all, take the brook through and through. Here are fightings and murders and thefts and trickeries, the semblance of death, the awakening from slumber, the rising to new life, the change from the grovelling on the earth to the soaring of wings in the sunshine.
And the ultimate point of the sermon? Here, Banford slips back into a comfortable corner within Nineteenth-Century American Christianity, declaring fervently that “The majority of people scarcely pause to realize that the different kinds of creatures represent so many of God’s different thoughts and that it might possibly be worth while to glance at the things that He has deigned to place on earth.”
Mary Bamford’s grave, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland
And what of Mary Ellen Bamford? She was born to a pioneer settler couple in Healdsburg, California, in 1857. After attending public school in Oakland, she worked for four years as an assistant in the Oakland Free Public Library. After that, she became a full-time writer, producing over a dozen books, including several titles for the American Baptist Publishing Society. She was a prohibitionist and advocate for Asian immigration into the US. She died in 1946 at the age of 88.
My first (only) edition of this book was previously in the collections of the Reed Free Library in Surrey, New Hampshire.
The book is quite literally falling apart. The pages are browned and foxed, the cover fabric (sporting a gilt impression of a moth) is pulling loose from the spine, the binding disintegrating. It feels like an old book. And it is. B. (Benedict) Jaeger’s volume on North American Insects predates the Civil War. It is the oldest book I have read for this blog so far, taking us back toward the beginnings of the late 19th Century’s fascination with nature. My volume is copyright 1859, though the book was published five years earlier, in a more limited edition that included five color plates (and costs considerably more today than this one). And 1859 was — as diehard natural historians likely know — the year that Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species”. Jaeger’s writing offers a window into the foreign and intriguing world of natural history before evolution revolutionized it. Terms and concepts that evoke a kind of proto-ecology jostle on the page with paeans to God’s handiwork, in a book that at times is as much a religious text as a biological one. And through it all, the rambling voice of Benedict Jaeger, world traveler, natural philosopher, and bane of editors.
Who was Jaeger? The title page of the book notes that he was a “late Professor of Zoology and Botany for the College of New Jersey.” According to Bugguide.net, a catalog of his papers at Princeton University notes that he was a professor of natural history and modern languages at Princeton from 1832 until 1843. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1789, and died in Brooklyn, New York in 1869. He supposedly wrote many books on insects. And that is all I was able to find out about him, besides what might be gleaned from his travel stories scattered throughout this book.
Given the year the book was published, and the fact that Henry David Thoreau lived until 1861, could he have read this book, or at least glanced at it? For all that it is unknown today, Jaeger’s rather slender tome was the first general book on North American insects ever published. Though far from a field guide as we know it today (relatively few insects are covered at the species level, and amounts of information on different types of insects vary widely), the book was still a landmark in American entomology. So I like to imagine Thoreau thumbing through it (and possibly frowning at some of its more extreme anthropocentric declarations). And, in fact, he probably did. The Concord Library website includes a listing of books from the library of Edwin Way Teale (scholar of Thoreau and a nature writer to boot). The list includes the following item:
Jaeger, Benedict. The Life of North American Insects. By B. Jaeger … Assisted by H.C. Preston, M.D. With Numerous Illustrations from Specimens in the Cabinet of the Author. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859.
319 pages. Illustrated. 19.5 cm.
Inscription in ink on front free endpaper: A duplicate of one / of the insect books / that Thoreau used. / For the Teales from / the Walter Hardings. / Hampton, Conn., August / 20th, 1963.
A few marginal markings in pencil.
How exciting! That said, I am quite confident that Jaeger’s outlook on nature was not one that Thoreau shared. And as a tool for insect identification, it was definitely wanting.
“Philosophy,” Jaeger declares in his opening line, “has invested even the commonest objects of Nature with charms unknown to the uneducated.” But why study insects, in particular? Ultimately, because insects are useful:
It is time that our people in general, and particularly our youth, should be made acquainted with a class of animals which everywhere surround us, day and night, and which furnish us amusements, food, coloring substances, and medicines, in order that they may be able to distinguish the useful from the injurous ones, the harmless from the noxious, and to discover those which may furnish new articles for manufacture, commerce, and domestic industry.
There is a deeper reason, though (cue choir of heavenly angels). Learning about insects opens the door to “…a more general knowledge of Natural History, and a deeper admiration of the ten thousand sublime and beautiful creatures that, in one common song of praise, pour out their gratitude and proclaim their dependence upon one common Father.” In this image, Jaeger evokes spiritual unity — there is a whole to nature because nature is holy. And that implies that the individual constituents of the natural world (living and nonliving) must interact and function as one great system. Here, he was inspired in part by Alexander Humboldt, whose first volume of Cosmos was published in 1845:
…we find all these different varieties of the three natural kingdoms [plant, animal, mineral] united under one general law; all dependent upon one another, as component parts of one great universal whole, aand we are forced, with he great philosopher Humboldt, to exclaim, “Nature is the unity in variety.”
Intriguingly, going down this path leads Jaeger to affirm principles that would years later be echoed in rudimentary ecology. Since nature is a system created by God, there cannot be any part that is irrelevant or without purpose: “…none of the works of nature are so insignificant as to be wholly without use in the great plan of economy.” How does that plan work? Consider the caterpillars, Jaeger suggests, who feed on plants and therefore pose a threat to agriculture. The obvious choice would be to kill them all, to safeguard our crops and flowers. But that would be unwise, Jaeger cautions:
…were we to annihilate caterpillars, our gardens, wods, and fields would be abandoned by the whole feathered tribe who feed on them, and melancholy sadness shroud the abodes of man. Ardently, then, would bwe long for the return of the oxious Caterpillars, and with them the joyous songsters of the forest. …so beautifully is the doctrine of compensation illustrated throughout the Animal Kingdom, as well as in all the objects of Nature.
Elsewhere, Jaeger refers to this same principle as the law of antagonization instead:
[Insects] afford a constant evidence of the working of Nature’s great law of antagonization — the one undoing wha the other does; the injuries which one species would infliec upon man are checked by other species, which prevent their superabundance and keep an even balance in the scale of being.
Carrying capacity, anyone? Ironically, this law does not prevent Jaeger from declaring firmly a few pages later that herbivorous beetles “are noxious and should be destroyed wherever encountered.” There appears to be a disconnect between Jaeger’s pre-ecological mindset and practical reality.
Lest we extoll this pre-Darwinian model of the Cosmos as brilliant and ahead of its time, while Nature may be a system created by God, it is still a hierarchical one. And guess who is at the top?
It is more than wonderful, it is sublime, to view atom after atom of the whole creation unceasingly changing place, that man, the lord of creation, may be abundantly supplied with all his comforts and his luxuries.; to see the lilies of the field, and the insects of the earth and air, living and dying for man, yielding up their lives for man’s sustenance and adornment.
To rework a line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All living things are significant, but some are more significant than others.” “The great plan of economy,” is clearly under man’s rule. At least one can find a bit of solace, though, in the fact that women are not entirely forgotten: “I write also for the young ladies,” Jaeger announces midway through his book.
My copy is definitely in “fair” shape. For its considerable age, all I can say about the book’s past is that it was once owned by William Mansell (thank you, Kent, for your correction on my reading of this signature), who dated it August 18?9. (My guess is that the mysterious digit is a 5, as it could not be a 2. Given that the book was published in 1859, it is most likely that Maxwell obtained it then.) Efforts to find information about William Mansell online were unsuccessful. There are plenty of somewhat famous persons with this name, but none of them quite fit this time period.
So all nature awaits the return of Spring,. Whether it be the crow in his flock, the wasp in her sheltered cranny, the muskrat in its cave by the water, the rich thick sap in the root of the tree, or the stored up life in the bulb, they all await the one far-off divine event. For back of all Nature there lies a Power that has been and is and is to be. What, after all, do we mean by Nature but the sum total of all these manifestations of purpose, of foresight, of helpfulness, of striving for higher and ever higher levels?Why does evolution mean life more abounding , and degeneration mean atrophy and death, if there be not, pervading the universe, a power, a principle, a stimulus, a goal?
And shall we, as did the Hebrew tribes of old, falter to speak the ineffable name? Shall we not rather worship Him humbly as we see His power, thank Him gratefully that we have been permitted to think His thoughts after Him, look up to Him confidently for that we have come to see how He has infused us with Himself, and lovingly call him Father and God?
SO SOON AFTER MY ENCOUNTER WITH THE EXISTENTIAL STRUGGLES OF CHARLES MONTGOMERY SKINNER, IT WAS A BIT OF A SHOCK TO MEET HIS NEAR-POLAR OPPOSITE, SAMUEL CHRISTIAN SKINNER. This chemist, evolutionary biologist, Nature Study advocate, and theologian was Christian in more than middle name. Indeed, arriving at the passage above on the final pages of “Under the Open Sky”, the reader is tempted to conclude that, for Schmucker, getting close to Nature was primarily a vehicle for having a religious experience. While it is tempting to write him off as a Bible-thumper, in fact, Schmucker occupied an odd corner of the Biblical creationism / biological evolutionism controversy of the time. Viewing God as immanent in Nature, Schmucker was quite comfortable with speculating about the evolution of the hummingbird on one page, and then making a reference to the Hebrew Bible on the next one.
ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, HIS RELIGIOUS ZEAL LEFT HIM PRONE TO AN OVERLY ROSY OUTLOOK ON HUMAN PROGRESS AND ITS IMPACTS ON NATURE. In one early passage in this book (which explores nature from the conventional seasonal perspective so popular at the time), Schmucker even declared that “in the newness of the times we are growing back to a touch with nature; a tender, sympathetic, spiritual touch, closer than any of our forebears ever knew.” Perhaps humans had managed nearly to wipe out most of the larger mammals due to overhunting, but ultimately, humans are part of a larger purpose, allied with God in shaping nature. Consider a fruit orchard:
God set the plan for the fruit-trees and we have carried it out. Rarely has man worked better along lines laid down by the Creator. The original trees were doubtless hardier, but that was because they had to take care of themselves. We have relieved them of that necessity, and the new strain has responded to our kindness and rewarded most magnificently man’s skillful endeavor. So it comes that every little country home is glorified at each return of spring by the gorgeous beauty of the blossoming trees,
UGH. I confess it was tough getting through some of this. Schmucker’s natural world is nearly an Eden of human progress and prosperity. Consider the even-tempered tone of this passage, in which Schmucker contemplates how many larger mammals are mostly gone, while the smaller ones are thriving:
The whole rodent family, of which the squirrels are important members, is a striking example of the safety that lies in insignificance. There are more species of rodents than of all other fur-bearing animals combined. Man’s incursions into a neighborhood simply seem to relieve them of their enemies. Rabbits and squirrels are perhaps more abundant to-day than they were when the Indians roamed our forests. Certain it is that the advent of man in the Northwest increased the numbers of the Jack rabbits. This set of animals is unusually adaptable to all the varied possibilities of life…. So they have found for themselves a secure footing where the bear and the woolf, the deer and the bison have failed.
IF THE BISON “FAILED”, THEY WERE HELPED ALONG BY INCESSANT HUNTING FOR SPORT BY ANY WHITE MAN WITH A GUN WHO HAPPENED TO SEE THEM. But while I highlight these passages, it is not completely true that Schmucker has failed to see what humans have done to American nature. For instance, in writing about birds in the Middle Atlantic States, Schmucker acknowledges the Audubon Society and the Nature study movement in public schools as forces that have helped reduce hunting pressures and lead to a generation of birds less fearful of humans. But again, there is strangely little remorse about what has happened. If humans are merely tools of divine purpose, then perhaps it is simply a matter of divining the purpose as to why humans carried out such slaughter of animals for so long a time.
BEFORE I CLOSE, A FEW KINDER WORDS FOR SAMUEL CHRISTIAN SCHMUCKER ARE IN ORDER. This book certainly provides abundant information about aspects of nature for perhaps a middle school or high school reading audience, though it is hardly comprehensive. (It favors rural nature in fields, orchards, and yards over a wilder nature of forest, swamp, and mountainside.) It covers diverse species — mammals, birds, insects, reptiles. And most significantly, I think, it makes a case for organisms that were heavily disliked by most people then (and largely still are, today). For example, in keeping with Schmucker’s purpose-driven outlook on Nature, even the poison ivy has innate value:
[Fall] is perhaps the most tempting season of all the year for a walk, and a country lane beneath the trees is never more lovely. But there is a serpent in this Eden, in the form of a creeping, enticing, but trouble-breeding vine.
Poison Ivy is a bold bad plant. It seems so subtle in its attacks, so bitter in its hatred, that we can hardly help believing it our sworn enemy. But this is only our view of the matter, and plant lovers all know there must be another side to this story. From its own stand-point the plant surely is most ingenious. That it is successful is evident from its abundance. Unless relentlessly weeded out by man, it covers our fence-posts, climbs the trunks of our trees, and clambers about our road-sides.”
What follows is a lengthy section of text enumerating poison ivy’s good points: it has managed to make do with relatively little material in its stem (relying upon various trees for its support), and it provides white berries for birds to eat. These qualities, together with its poisonous oil, have helped insure that the plant is a winner “in life’s race”. The image below, along with many others throughout the book, was done by the author’s wife, Katherine Elizabeth Schmucker.
FINALLY, A FEW PARTING WORDS ABOUT MY COPY. I read a “first edition” from 1910, apparently in very good condition. Not only was it unmarked by earlier owners, but also many of its pages had not even been cut. The paper, however, has clearly deteriorated over time, and is brittle and tears exceedingly easily; one post-it tab I placed on a page, when lifted off, removed a piece of the page, too. The illustrations are quite pleasant, but apart from the title page, not overly inspiring. Even the cover, while colorfully decorated, strikes me as somewhat bland. I suppose the apparent newness of the volume from 1910, its abundance of illustrations, and the relatively unknown nature of the author (who does not have a Wikipedia page yet) left me hoping for great things. I am afraid I am walking away rather disappointed — though, unlike the original owner at least, I did read the book cover to cover. It just didn’t live up to the grace and beauty of its title page.
There is a nameless charm in the flatwoods, there is enchantment for the real love of nature in their very sameness. One feels a sense of their infinity as the forest stretches away into space beyond the limits of vision; they convey to the mind a feeling of boundless freedom. The soft, brilliant sunshine filters down through the needle-like leaves and falls in patches on the flower-covered floor; there is a low, humming sound, sometimes mimicking the patter of raindrops, as the warm southeast wind drifts through the trees; even the loneliness has an attraction. To me it all brings a spirit of peace, a feeling of contentment; within the forest nature rules supreme. The memory of all that is evil and annoying has fallen away like the burden of Christian at the foot of the cross; I am alone and utterly care free in the pine woods. I cast off all my troubles and discomforts of my daily existence, the strain and worry of civilization; I am happy as a child. I am at peace with the earth, the forest, the sky, the entire world. As I lie in the long, soft grass I feel that I do not care to go back to the dull, sordid routine of every day life again.
GOING BACK THROUGH THIS BOOK AFTER RELUCTANTLY FINISHING IT, I KNEW RIGHT AWAY WHAT PASSAGE TO CHOOSE TO OPEN MY POST. No matter that Simpson was in his mid-70s when he wrote this book (he lived nearly another decade after this) — his childlike nature is everywhere on these pages. Wandering the Florida Keys, he gleefully recalls all the times he was mistaken for a tramp and (literally) left out in the rain by residents who looked askance at him. In pursuit of his beloved tree snails, he nearly died from mosquito bites (more to follow on that) and was constantly in the mud or struggling through greenbriars and thorny cacti. Yet he was also a keen scientist, one who used his tree snail collection to assemble a history of the environmental changes South Florida had undergone in the previous thousands of years. His writing is a delight, albeit a costly one (more about that later, also). He speaks of nature with religious rapture on one page, then recounts tales of Cuban rum-runners he knew that managed to evade the law by various creative means. I will save the humor and pathos of his collecting adventures for the second half of this post; first, though, some more passages that place him firmly in the company of religious naturalists. This one is from an account of a visit to Paradise Key in the Everglades:
We ventured a little way into the glades but the rains had made the mud very soft and after getting a backward view of the forest in which some fifteen great royals [royal palms] showed themselves, we started in on our return along the trail. Before reaching the road I left my companions and went back into the hammock. Leaving the trail I worked my way out into the dense, tangled growth, and as I sat down at the foot of a great tree and gazed around and upward it seemed as though the spirit of the forest took possession of me. On the ground was a carpet of dead leaves, for in such places they are falling all the time, and over this the few rays of the sun that came through the dense foliage seemed to be almost filtered. Near me several young palms, twelve to fifteen feet high, stood like graceful forest nymphs, their long leaves arching upward and outward with indescribable beauty. Around me on every hand were countless trunks of other trees varying from a few inches to several feet in diameter, erect, leaning or nearly prostrate, those of the live oaks almost black from the wetting by the rain, the gumbo limbos coppery, the poison tree brown, the West Indian cherry reticulated and variegated while the lancewoods and Ilex were white. Some were clothed with vivid green from several feet from the ground, a mantle spread over them by the abundant mosses, and immense lianes were carelessly thrown over all. Close by was the smooth, straight trunk of a big royal, pushed far up, its crown lost in the greenery above, but not far away stood another and through an opening in the leaves I could see its great head restlessly swinging in the strong wind, not a breath of which reached the ground where I sat. Not the slightest sound disturbed me; in fact one of the charms of the great forest is its stillness. I sat and fairly drank in the wonderful silence and loneliness of the hammock. In such a place one must be alone to enjoy the full beauty and sweetness of it all. Even the presence of the most congenial friend or lover of nature is distracting and in a sense a disturbing element. Alone with uncovered head I bared my life, my all to the Great Power of the Universe, call it Nature, God, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma or whatever you will, and reverently worshipped.
In his very next essay, The Vagaries of Vegetation, he shares his thoughts about intelligence in nature, coming to a conclusion as to where his religious outlook lies:
There is no chance, no haphazard; nothing happens. The universe is governed by law; no power can change or set it aside for a moment. Whenever and wherever life can fit itself to its domination it will survive and flourish; if it does not it perishes and becomes extinct.
I cannot believe either in a loving or hating deity who sits on a throne somewhere in the universe and watches over his creatures, who listens to and answers prayers, who orders the suns and planets on their courses, who make the rains , the wind storms and earthquakes. Yet I cannot be a mere materialist. I am sure there is not only matter and law but that there is intelligence, spirit. I constantly find the lower forms of life doing just what I would do with their environment, sometimes with less intelligence, sometimes with more. I can only believe that in a way these things think. I believe I must be, to some extent, a Pantheist.
LEST WE CONSIGN SIMPSON TOO QUICKLY TO THE ROLE OF MOUNTAINTOP (OR TREETOP) SAGE, THERE IS ANOTHER, HIGHLY COMICAL AND SELF-DEPRECATING SIDE TO HIM WHICH I ENJOYED IMMENSELY. His first essay in the book, Down the West Coast, chronicles an 1885 boat trip along the southwest coast of Florida that kindled his zoological cravings:
Not very far away [from the ruin of a coastal home] there was some fine hammock and on searching through it I came across the first specimens of the large, handsome arboreal snails called Liguus I ever collected. I was overjoyed to find them and from that day to the present time I have been completely daft about them, having tramped and traveled thousands of miles in lower Florida, Cuba and Haiti in an effort to collect and study them.
These wanderings led to some challenging moments for our author-protagonist, to say the least. Lest the reader every contemplate a trip to the Florida Keys, here is Simpson’s tale of his quest for Liguus specimens on Lower Matecumbe Key, long before the highway 1A was built (though after the Keys were connected by railroad):
The island of Lower Matecumbe is about three miles long and shaped something like a kidney with the concave side toward the mainland. The southwest end is largely a buttonwood swamp, but the other end is higher and contains a good deal of very dense, gangled scrub hammock. There are probably sixty or more species of native trees on the island, all tropical unless it is the cabbage palmetto, and the forest nowhere rises to a height of over thirty-five feet. A large part of the trees and vines are thorny, and I counted a full dozen species of these as I worked by way into it, twelve apostles of villainy, the worst of all being the dreadful Cereus pentagonus [triangle cactus]. There were three other cacti, the terrible pull-and-haul-back, a toothache tree, a Pithecolobium which bears the appropriate common name of “cat’s claw”, a couple of rampant vines, (Guilandina or nicker beans) which are covered with spines even to the seed pods, tw hateful Smilax [green briar] and a dwarf century plant. In such scrub the rocky floor is more or less covered with decaying tinder and as one of the natives once observed, “Them thorns stays right thar an’ is ready for bizness after the wood is all rotted an’ gone.”
In places the forest was so dense I had t get down and crawl and in others I was obliged to turn back and get out at the spot where I entered. I have seen mosquitoes worse, but not very often, and it seemed to me that most of the space not occupied by them was filled with sand flies, though there was sufficient room left for all to work freely. Between them they kept my hands and face covered, the bit of the latter feeling like the burn of a coal of fire. Though outside the hammock the wind was strong not a breath was felt where I worked and I was literally in a sweat bath. Every small tree and shrub I touched threw down a shower of water on me and my shoes were soon full. However, it was an ideal time for my business for snails are very active during wet weather, though they hid away when it is dry….
Before I had been in five minutes I ran into one of the curious wasps’ nests which are common in Lower Florida. They are hung to a twig by a slender stem and consist of a single series, or sometimes two, of papery cells whose sides are so glued to each other that they run diagonally to the direction of the whole. The wasps are small but make up in ferocity what they lack in size; they are regular dynamos of condensed villainy. A little later I ran into another and shortly before leaving the hammock I stumbled and partly fell, striking my hand against a third. In attempting to run from the wasps I stepped into a depression and fell full length into a bed of the dreadful cactus (Cereus pentagonus). Finally my face swelled so from the stings that I could scarcely see, and I determined to leave the hammock. On account of the cloudiness I could not tell which direction to take, but fortunately a train came along and I was soon out on the right of way. In climbing up the embankment I stumbled and fell, dropping my little sack and stepping on it. When I got to the track and turned out the contents I found every precious shell crushed to atmos. I was not merely angry, I was furious. I said that any man, especially at my age, who would come to such an inferno to collect was an idiot. I declared that I would at once go back to camp, pack up and flag the first train for home, that I would never come to the Florida Keys again. After tramping a quarter of a mile the strong wind and rain which blew in my face cooled alike my temper and temperature. I began to think that one of the chief objects of my coming to the Keys was to visit this island and work out certain important problems in distribution and evolution, that if I went home without doing this my trip would be largely wasted and that I might never come again. Why should I be so foolish as to be driven out by a few hardships? Then I wavered, stopped, turned back and went into the inferno again.
But it was on another trip, this time to Big Pine Key, where Simpson nearly died from all the mosquitoes attacking him:
Between the heel or point of Big Pine where the railroad coming from the north enters and the main island is a strip of swamp about two miles long. Over this the track was grown up thickly with grass and weeds to a height of a foot or so and in this the mosquitoes were packed almost solid. Although the atmosphere was full of them yet as I walked along I stirred them up by uncounted millions. The swarms were so dense at times that when I looked downward I could not distinguish the tracks or vegetation, nothing but a confused brownish green cloud and above they dimmed the light of the sun, they actually darkened the air. I have had a good deal of experience with mosquitoes…but I believe I can honestly say that fr numbers and fierceness as well as for a long continued siege what I saw and endured that day exceeded anything I have ever known before or since. I constantly broke off branches from the scrub along the road and brushed them off as well as I could, but they covered the exposed parts of my body until they were gray, and whenever I wiped them from my face, neck or hands the blood dripped on the ground.
The effect of the stings of such a swarm soon became something like that of morphine, producing a stupid, drowsy sensation, and in addition to this my cheeks and eyelids swelled until it was difficult to see. I began to grow weak, my legs tottered, and I realized that I could only last a limited time. Things swayed around me as if I was on a rolling vessel, and again and again I said: “Can I ever get through?” Twice I went to the side of the track and dropped down and gave up, but had I remained there I would have been dead in ten minutes. As often by a supreme effort I dragged myself on to my feet and staggered on half out of my mind for what seemed like hours. Finally I reached the main part of the island and realized that my tormenters were becoming less numerous. I passed through the village and on to where I was stopping, but could not eat and sleep and was sick all night.
Not all Simpson’s misadventures involved insects. He captured one such experience on film for posterity. First, his description of the event, his attempt to step out of a boat onto terra not-so-firma; note that he calls himself “the old man” in this narrative:
Running along the canal [near Moore Haven, Florida] the Doctor [J.K. Small] saw a rather inviting field for plants and the boat came in to the edge of it. There seemed to be some delay about finding a suitable place to land and as there was a fine lot of freshwater mussels in sight and the bank was fully three feet high and looked dry and firm the old man [Simpson] got his collecting outfit and made a flying leap out on to it. When he finally settled into place he careened over and his entire right arm and leg were buried in the soft mud of which the deceptive shore was composed. At once the entire gang aboard fell over and laughed until they cried, and when at last the Doctor was able to sit up, he declared that it was simply a scientific calamity that he couldn’t have had the camera ready and taken a photo of the performance. He said so much about it that the old man, rather than being a disaster to the cause of science went to where he had alighted and fitted himself into the mud again and was photographed. The episode was referred to afterwards as “The Landing of the Pilgrim Father.”
Finally, to close out this post, I will include a picture (literally) of what lengths (or heights) Simpson went to in quest of his snails. This episode, which took place during a visit to Lignumvitae Key:
As I went along I saw at some distance high on a slender tree something which looked like a white Liguus, but it seemed to be altogether too large, I hastened back and found to my astonishment that it was an enormous specimen which, although it was more than thirty feet above me, I was sure was the largest I had ever seen. I at once set my wits to work to secure it…..
It looked so large and handsome that I determined I would try to shin up to it. Shining a tree is pretty good exercise for a young fellow, but for a man nearly seventy-three and weighing more than a hundred and seventy-five pounds it is a good deal like hard work. However, I slowly pulled myself up and whenever I was completely exhausted I clung tightly to the tree and rested. The slender trunk swayed over so that I feared it would break, and once I made up my mind I would not attempt to go any further but the sight of the great, glittering jewel above me tempted me to go on and risk it. At last by reaching out as far as possible I could just touch it with the tip of my finger; then one more tremendous effort and I held it in my hand. I carefully loosened it, put it in my overalls pocket and in about the time it takes to tell of it I slid to the foot of the tree. Then I took it out; I fairly shouted and capered about like a happy boy; I rubbed it against my cheek and lovingly patted it; I talked. foolishly to it. No miser ever gloated over his gold as I did over that magnificent snail.
THIS BOOK HAS BEEN A DELIGHT TO READ — AT TERMS INSPIRING AND AMUSING. Simpson evokes a Florida before development took so much of it, though quite a bit of the degradation actually happened in the author’s lifetime. For instance, here is his account of how much damage had already befallen Lake Okeechobee, including his prediction for its future that is frightfully accurate:
All the glamor and mystery which once surrounded the great lake, all the wildness and loneliness, its beauty and grandeur, its peace and holiness are fast disappearing before the advance of the white man’s civilization and soon it will be only a sheet of dirty water surrounded by truck gardens and having winter homes on its eastern shore. Its rare birds and other wild fauna are gone forever, even the fish which once swarmed its waters are far less abundant than formerly. Its splendid forests are a thing of the past and in their place we will have a lot of cheap bungalows and atrocious plantings of exotics. It should have been preserved as a state or government reservation where its rare flora and rich wild fauna, its mystery and beauty could have been kept forever.
Sadly, it is virtually impossible to find a copy of Simpson’s book nowadays. Until 2017, no printed work newer than 1922 could be scanned for online reading, or published as low-cost on-demand printed paperbacks. (This has supposedly now changed, as this article reports; however, I expect it will be a considerable time before the largely volunteer world of book scanners catches up.) For Out of Doors in Florida, this meant that my only options were to find one in a university library, or purchase one online for a small fortune. Even if I could locate a library copy, I would be stuck in the library for a couple of days, reading it and writing my post. Because that was unrealistic given my daily work demands, I took the latter route, and I have to say this is the most I ever paid for a book (and it was supposedly on a one-week sale on eBay). Suffice it to say that I am delighted that my copy includes Simpson’s complete autograph (he usually signed his letters Chas. T. Simpson).
In terms of the volume’s history, it was formerly the property of the Park East Mobile Home Club, on the Tamiami Trail in Sarasota. One reader/owner filled half the inside back cover with listings of native plants, both common and Latin names, in pencil. I think Simpson would have been pleased to see the book put to such use.
A native royal palm rises 125 feet above the ground of Paradise Key, the Everglades.
In the fifty-two short essays of this volume I have presented familiar objects from unusual points of view. Birds-eye glances and insect’s eye glances, at the nature of our woods and fields, will reveal beauties which are wholly invisible from the usual human view-point, five feet or more above the ground.
Who follows the lines must expect to find moods as varying as the seasons; to face storm and night and cold, and all other delights of what wildness still remains to us upon the earth.
WITH THESE WORDS, THE EXPLORER-NATURALIST WILLIAM BEEBE SETS THE READER ON A JOURNEY THROUGH THE FAMILIAR WILDS OF THE NORTHEAST COAST,FROM JANUARY TO DECEMBER. Clearly inspired by John Burroughs, Beebe intended his first book to be another of many volumes published at the time tracing out seasonal changes in New England and environs (in this case, near New York City). His format: a weekly entry about nearby wildlife, especially birds, capped off with a bit of nature poetry as a nod to the temperment of the age. But at this project, Beebe largely failed. Yes, there are a number of brief pieces about looking at the familiar in new ways, such as studying pond life with a microscope or getting down close to the ground to see the winter world of tunneling mice close-up. But there are a number of chapters — his finest writing in the book, in my estimation — that seek out wilder places such as swamps and marshes or, better still, the open ocean. Indeed, the book’s longest chapter, at twenty-four pages, is Secrets of the Ocean. There is wanderlust in these pages — a world adventurer constrained, for a time, to a single place, seeking to make the most of it. In fact, at one point he celebrates the love of home as a source of abiding connection with the birds he so keenly observes:
This love of home, of birthplace, bridges over a thousand physical differences between feathered creatures and ourselves. We forget their expressionless masks of horn, their scaly toes, and looking deep into their clear, bright eyes, we know and feel a kinship, a sympathy of spirit, which binds us all together, and we are glad.
Clearly, though, while he may appreciate a sense of home, what he truly yearns for instead is wilder places, where humans have not ventured. In wetlands he found an approximation that was temporarily satisfying:
To many, a swamp or marsh brings only that very practical thought of whether it can be readily drained. Let us rejoice, however, that many marshes cannot be thus easily wiped out of existence, and hence they remain as isolated bits of primeval wilderness, hedged about by farms and furrows. The water is the life-blood of the marsh, — drain it, and reed and rush, bird and batrachian, perish or disappear. The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation, — melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man,
The ideal marsh is as far as one can go from civilization. The depths of a wood holds its undiscovered secrets; the mysterious call of the veery sends a wildness that even to-day has not ceased to pervade the old wood. There are spots overgrown with fern and carpeted with velvety wet moss; here also the skunk cabbage and cowslip grow rank among the alders. Surely man cannot live near this place — but the tinkle of a cowbell comes faintly on the gentle stirring breeze — and our illusion is dispelled, the charm is broken.
But even to-day, when we push the punt through the reeds from the clear river into the narrow, tortuous channel of the marsh, we have left civilization behind us. The great ranks of the cattails shut out all view of the outside world; the distant sounds of civilization serve only to accentuate the isolation….
The marsh has remained unchanged since the days when the Mohican Indians speared fish there. We are living in a bygone time. A little green heron flies across the water. How wild he is; nothing has tamed him. He also is the same now as always.
The chapter continues, and night settles in. Beebe revels in the wild sounds and presences all around him, until at least compelled to depart:
All sounds have ceased save the booming of the frogs, which but emphasizes the loneliness of it all. A distant whistle of a locomotive dispels the idea that all the world is wilderness. The firefly lams glow along the margin of the rushes. The frogs are now in full chorus, the great bulls beating their tim-toms and the small fry filling in the chinks with shriller cries. How remote the scene and how melancholy the chorus!….
The moon rises over the hills. The mosquitoes have become savage. The marsh has tolerated us as long as it cares to, and we beat our retreat….
A water snake glides across the channel, leaving a silver wake in the moonlight. The frogs plunk into the water as we push past. A night heron rises from the margin of the river and slowly flops away. The bittern booms again as we row down the peaceful river, and we leave the marshland to its ancient and rightful owners.
ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, IT IS TRUE WILDERNESS HE YEARNS FOR. A microscope or a canoe may carry him out of the familiar for a time, until “the charm is broken”, but the open ocean is far wilder, far more remote, and it calls to him:
We are often held spellbound by the majesty of mountains, and indeed a lofty peak forever capped with snow, or pouring forth smoke and ashes, is impressive beyond all terrestrial things. But the ocean yields to nothing in its grandeur, in its age, in its ceaseless movement, and the question remains forever unanswered, “Who shall sound the mysteries of the sea?” Before the most ancient of mountains rose from the heart of the earth, the waves of the sea rolled as now, and though the edges of the continents shrink and expand, bend into bays or stretch out into capes, always through all the ages the sea follows and laps with ripples or booms with breakers unceasingly upon the shore.
The oceans, too, set a boundary for human destructiveness, or so it seemed to Beebe over a hundred years ago, long before the invention of plastic:
The time is not far distant when the bottom of the sea will be the only place where primeval wildness will not have been defiled or destroyed by man. He may sail his ships above, he may peer downward, even dare to descent a few feet in a suit of rubber or a submarine boat, or he may scratch a tiny furrow for a few yards with a dredge: but that is all.
Alas, Beebe failed to predict so much, from commercial trawler fishing operations to single-use plastic grocery bags…. But in 1906, many years and journeys lay still ahead for him, around the world and into the ocean deeps. He would even return, almost half a century later, to another visit with the commonplace, publishing in 1953 “The Unseen Life of New York” As a Naturalist Sees It”. But for the moment, I will close with one last glimpse of the wilds of a marsh — in this case, a cypress swamp somewhere in the coastal plain of the American Southeast:
…in the mysterious depths of our southern swamps we find the strangely picturesque cypresses, which defy the waters about them. One cannot say where trunk ends and root begins, but up from the stagnant slime rise great arched buttresses, so that the tree seems to be supported on giant six- or eight-legged stools between the arches of which the water flows and finds no chance to use its power. Here, in these lonely solitudes, — heron-haunted, snake-infested, — the hanging moss and orchids search out every dead limb and cover it with an unnatural greenness. Here, great lichens grow and a myriad tropical insects bore and tunnel their way from bark to heart of tree and back again,. Here, in the blackness of night, when the air is heavy with hot, swampy odours, and only the occasional squawk of a heron or cry of some animal is heard, a rending, grinding, crashing, breaks suddenly upon the stillness, a distant boom and splash, awakening every creature. Then the silence again closes down and we know that a cypress, perhaps linking a trio of centuries, has yielded up its life.
FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. Not being overly drawn to costlier first editions, I purchased a 1927 copy of Beebe’s work. The book is without a mark, though the pages are considerably browned with age. Alas, apart from the wintertime scene frontispiece shown above (by Walter King Stone), the book is unillustrated.
So the study of trees in winter leads us directly into other fields of knowledge, — the great world of insects that live upon the trunk and branches, the parasitic fungi that develop in the bark, the birds that search for winter insects. For in nature, nothing lives by itself alone: it is related in a thousand ways to other living things. To this is largely due the fascination of the outdoor world: when you really become acquainted with the nearest tree, you find yourself on speaking terms with a large part of the universe.
FOR AN HISTORICAL BIOLOGIST WITHOUT EVEN A WIKIPEDIA PAGE TO HIS NAME, CLARENCE M. WEED OFFERS THE READER MANY MOMENTS OF WONDER AND INSIGHT. I am baffled as to why he is so unknown; his knowledge of botany and ecology is impressive and seems at moments ahead of its time (or at least, quite up to date for 1913). (To be accurate, these is, in fact, a Wikipedia page for Clarence Weed; but that is for Clarence R. Weed, a football and basketball coach of the same time period.) Having read just one of Weed’s books (the naturalist, not the coach) and ordered a second one, I am quite convinced that he could have gained renown as an author; I will endeavor to convince readers of that with this post. “Seeing Nature First” begins as a guide for teens and adults into how to perceive and interpret natural phenomena throughout the seasons. The first several chapters, set in springtime, include numerous examples of fascinating facts about plants and insects (Weed was an entomologist by profession.). I learned new things, myself. For instance, have known for ages that skunk cabbage flowers, which often emerge while snow still covers the ground, actually heat the air around them, attracting early insect pollinators seeking warmth. What I never knew was how this trick was done. According to Weed, “the hoods [of skunk cabbage flowers] not only furnish protection from the elements, but the purplish tissues of which they are composed oxidize so rapidly that the temperature within is raised above that of the air outside.” I was amazed to find this fact was already known over 100 years ago.
ULTIMATELY, HOWEVER, THE BOOK IS UNEVEN; CHAPTERS THAT FASCINATE ARE MIXED WITH ONES THAT ELICIT ONLY TEDIUM. At times, I even wonder if Weed didn’t simply sweep every paper on his desk into a pile, sort it by seasons (affording some sense of structure) and sending the whole mess off to the publisher. The audience varies, too. Most “chapters” are only a few pages in length. The best ones, in my opinion, are geared toward a lay audience of potential Nature enthusiasts. Other articles seem more like abstracts of reports on efforts to keep various insect pests under control. Then there is an article about frogs changing colors — admittedly a worthy topic — that consists of several pages of dry details about different captive frogs in different enclosures on various days and differing hours on those days. As field notes for a short essay, they work well. As flowing text to engage the reader, they are a disaster.
THEN ANOTHER PAGE OR PASSAGE POPS OUT AT THE READER, AND HE OR SHE IS LEFT IN AWE. Did you know, for instance, that early season flowers pollinated by bumblebees. such as the columbine, tend to be quite large, because they attract the queens? Then, by midsummer, the bumblebee-pollinated flowers are noticeably smaller, because the worker bees have joined her in the colony? Or have you ever been curious about how a closed gentian flower gets pollinated? (John Burroughs even speculated that it lacks a pollinator.) According to Weed, “the worker bumblebees…have learned how to pry open the mouth of the blossom and enter for the nectar at its base, where they circle around the flower in a way to come in contact with both stamens and pistil. And they can tell from the color of the blossom whether it is young and nectar-bearing.” Wow.
IN A COUPLE OF SPOTS IN HIS WORK, WEED POINTS TO THE ECOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE OF THE BALANCE OF NATURE. I know little about the early days of ecological study, but at very least this concept was relatively new at the time. In a chapter on the ichneumon flies, Weed notes that “There are numberless ways in which nature keeps that balance of life which renders human existence upon the earth possible.” In the case of these parasitic flies that prey on caterpillars, Weed notes that they perform a necessary function, keeping those caterpillar species in check. Without them, Weed acknowledges, the caterpillars would likely “cause untold damage to forests and cultivated crops.” Indeed, in one of his drier chapters, Weed discusses efforts to control an invasive caterpillar species through use of a natural predator insect. Eventually, Weed explains, such invasive species can be made subject to the Balance of Nature: “This is the condition of most injurious insects that have been present in a given region for a long time. There are periods of scarcity and of abundance, due largely to the fluctuations in the numbers of natural enemies.”
WHAT MOST STANDS OUT TO ME ABOUT WEED’S BOOK, HOWEVER, IS THE INVITATION IT OFFERS US — PARTICULARLY THOSE OF US LIVING IN NEW ENGLAND — TO GET OUTDOORS AND MAKE NEW DISCOVERIES. The ultimate result of our time in nature is the fashioning of stories — tales that tell of the complexity and interconnectedness of the natural world. To close, here is a passage from Weed, extolling the virtues of exploring the woods in wintertime:
There is much more to be learned in the winter woods than merely to become acquainted with the different kinds of trees. Desirable as it is, such acquaintance should be but the beginning of one’s knowledge. Every tree has many stories to tell to one who will look with the seeing eye and the active mind. Such stories relate to the age of the tree, to the relations it has established with the sunlight, to its battles with its enemies, to its cooperation with its friends. Stories of all these and many other mysteries of plant life are mutely waiting interpreters in every winter landscape.
AS A POSTSCRIPT, I SHOULD MENTION BOTH THE BOOK’S ILLUSTRATOR AND A BIT ABOUT MY COPY. The illustrator is W. I. Beecroft, and his stunning, almost three-dimensional drawings are another highlight of the book. (In fact, they are considerably more impressive than the scattered black and white photographs also included.) Beecroft authored and illustrated short field guides to ferns and wildflowers, too.
My copy of this book appears to be a first edition (though there may never have been a second one). It was published in April of 1913. There is no bookseller’s stamp, but there is an inscription to Emily Mills Page, 87 High Street, Newburyport, Massachusetts, from Mother, on February 20, 1915. (I was even able to find the home on Google Maps.) The most noteworthy feature of my book, though, is its elegant though somewhat worn green-and-gilt cover. The metallic portion is actually gold, but it looks much more silvery in the image below.
As the tendency of mankind to crowd into towns grows stronger, the joys of country life and the workings of Nature are more and more excluded from the daily experience of humanity. In a few the primal love of the wild is too strong for suppression, and turning from the hot and noisy streets they find it a refreshment of spirit to meet our little brothers of earth and air in the wider spaces of their own territory.
IN A WORK EVOCATIVE OF MARY TREAT’S ESSAYS, THE PECKHAMS SET OUT, IN THIS VOLUME, TO SHARE THEIR RESEARCH INTO THE BEHAVIOR OF SOLITARY AND SOCIAL WASPS. The result, like that of Mary Treat’s own essays, is a book that both impressed me for the painstaking observations of the authors (spending days in midsummer watching a single insect) and eventually numbed me somewhat with all of the data provided. It seems the Peckhams watched hundreds of wasps belonging to dozens of species as they all went about their daily routines, most involving building nesting chambers, paralyzing or killing prey species (caterpillars, grasshoppers, spiders, and others), and bringing the prey back to the nests for the young larvae to feed upon. (Ironically, despite the opening reference to “little brothers”, nearly all the Peckham’s studies focused on the females of their species.) Nowadays, research into the behaviors of individuals would be agglomerated and presented that way to the reader; but in this book, one is regaled with a myriad of life stories of wasps, some intelligent, some daring, some shy, and some clumsy. Writing about the mud dauber wasps, for example, the Peckhams remark:
All animated by the same compelling instinct, they are still individuals, and the character of each enters into her work. One picks up the first spider she sees, no matter how tiny it may be, and makes twenty-five or thirty journeys before her cell is filled, while another seems to have a calculating term of mind, using four or five big spiders instead of a quantity of small ones. Has she made a note of the calibre of her cell, and determined to save herself trouble by looking farther and selecting the largest ones that will go in?
AND HERE, THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION OF THE BOOK REVEALS ITSELF. As echoed by the title of the book’s final essay, Instinct and Intelligence, the book sets out to answer whether members of a species all behave identically (evidence for instinct at work) or uniquely (evidence for varying degrees of intelligence). As a legacy of Rene Descartes, animals were assumed to be the equivalents of machines, acting entirely by instinct What the Peckhams and other naturalists revealed at the time is a very different story. To do this, however, necessitates trying to see the world through a wasp’s eyes, in a form of “wasp psychology”:
The necessity of interpreting the actions of animals in terms of our own consciousness must be always with us. To interpret them at all we must consider what our own mental states would be under similar circumstances, our safeguard being to keep always before us the progressive weakening of the evidence as we apply it to animals whose structure is less and less like our own.
Here is one such interpretation, a short story with a wasp as protagonist:
When we went to the garden at eight o’clock on the following morning…, [Pompilus] scelestus was still sound asleep in her leafy bower. We thought it best to awaken her, for a large spider had spread its web just below, and if the wasp should drop upon it nothing could save her. We therefore aroused her gently, whereupon she crept slowly up the stem and, taking her stand on the highest point, surveyed the world. Then, after stretching herself sleepily, she made her toilet, cleaning off her wings and legs, and washing her face with her feet like a cat. When these duties were finished she walked slowly about for an hour, visiting her nest every now and then. Suddenly, at half past nine o’clock, her whole manner changed, and seeming very much excited she ran rapidly along, parallel with the fence, for fifteen or twenty feet and then, rising on her wings, flew far away into the woods. She had evidently gone hunting at last, and we watched eagerly for her return. She was not successful at once, however, for at half past ten she came back without anything, stayed at the nest for a few minutes, and then flew to the woods again with the same excited manner as before. Perhaps she had already caught her spider at some far distant spot, and was getting her bearings preparatory to bringing it home; but it was half past one when she suddenly appeared, five or six inches from the next, coming back through the fence, and dragging a large Lycosid [spider]. This she laid down close by, and began to bite at the legs…. Her movements were full of nervous excitement, in marked contrast to those of the previous day. Presently she went to look at her nest, and seemed to be struck with a thought that had already occurred to us — that it was decidedly too small to hold the spider. Back she went for another survey of her bulky victim, measured it with her eye, without touching it, drew her conclusions, and at once returned to the nest and began to make it larger….
THE RESULT IS A REMARKABLY DIFFERENT PORTRAIT OF THE LIFE OF A WASP THAN WHAT MOST OF US IMAGINE. Living in an age when invertebrates have been “othered” to the point that they seem akin to aliens, I found this account almost jarring. Consider the human characteristics this wasp exhibits, from her lazy morning stretch upon waking up to her careful problem-solving of the puzzle of the small nest hole and large spider. Through the Peckhams’ eyes, the wasps are another culture, yes, but one that merits our respect. Granted, at other moments the Peckhams behave more like conventional field scientists, digging up nest burrows to view their occupants or altering the landscape around a ground nest to see how a wasp responds to the changes. Somewhat comically, the scientists also express an awareness of the harm their research is causing some of the wasps:
We had not supposed that the digging up of her nest would much disturb our Sphex, since her connection with it was nearly at an end; but in this we were mistaken. When we returned to the garden about half an hour after we had done the deed, we heard her loud and anxious humming from a distance. She was searching far and wide for her treasure house, returning every few minutes to the same spot, although the upturned earth had entirely changed its appearance. She seemed unable to believe her eyes, and her persistent refusal to accept the fact that her nest had been destroyed was pathetic. She lingered about the garden all through the day, and made so many visits to us, getting under our umbrellas and thrusting her tremendous personality into our very faces, that we wondered if she were trying to question us as to the whereabouts of her property. Later we learned that we had wronged her more deeply than we knew. Had we not interfered she would have excavated several cells to the side of the main tunnel, storing a grasshopper in each. Who knows, but perhaps our Golden Digger, standing among the ruins of her home, or peering under our umbrella, said to herself: “Men are poor things: I don’t know why the world thinks so much of them.”
THAT LAST THOUGHT MAKES A SPLENDID CLOSURE TO THIS POST. In the end, I found this book highly captivating at first, though rather repetitive after the first few dozen pages, as the Peckhams shifted from one genus of wasp to another one. (Clearly the Peckhams were patient and highly devoted to their research subjects). From the standpoint of 2020, 115 years on, the authors led me into a truly foreign world — a quite different perception of wasps and their natures than what most of us have today. I also noticed the sheer number, and variety, of wasps the Peckhams encountered on a bit of rural land outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sadly, I suspect that repeating her project in the Eastern United States nowadays would be far more difficult. So many of our insects have been reduced dramatically in number. This book helps me see how much of a tragedy that loss really is — the diminution of other societies of beings, with their thoughts and plans and lives to lead.
BEFORE CLOSING, I OUGHT TO REMARK ON TWO OTHER FIGURES THAT ARE ASSOCIATED WITH THIS BOOK. The first is James Henry Emerton, the illustrator. His drawings are, in my humble opinion, stunning, though I will leave a more in-depth critique to others. According to Wikipedia, Emerton (1847-1931) was an arachnologist in addition to being an illustrator (and watercolor artist), who spent most of his life in Massachusetts. His magnum opus was Common Spiders of the United States, which was reprinted by Dover Books in 1961 with a sufficiently garish cover that I feel compelled to reproduce it below. The image is accompanied by a somewhat blurry image of Emerton himself, who probably would also have disapproved of the cover, or being associated with it in this way.
THE SECOND PERSON I NEED TO MENTION IS NONE OTHER THAN THE SAGE OF SLABSLIDES, JOHN BURROUGHS. Burroughs wrote an introduction to the book, no doubt contributing markedly to its sales in the process. He heaped considerable praise on the work, noting that
It is a wonderful world of patient, exact, and loving observation, which has all the interest of a romance. It opens up a world of Lilliput right at our feet, wherein the little people amuse and delight us with their curious human foibles and whimsicalities, and surprise us with their intelligence and individuality. Here I had been saying in print that I looked upon insects as perfect automata, and all of the same class as nearly alike as the leaves of the trees or the sands upon the beach. I had not reckoned with the Peckhams and their solitary wasps. The solitary ways of these insects seem to bring out their individual traits, and they differ one from another, more than any other wild creatures known to me….
I am free to confess that I have had more delight in reading this book than in reading any other nature book in a long time.
AT LAST, I HAVE QUITE A TALE TO TELL ABOUT THE JOURNEY MY COPY OF THIS BOOK HAS TAKEN. In fact, the book contains a nearly complete, and rather amazing, account of its journeys. In an amazing coincidence, this book comes from the homeland of another author from this time period — Frank Boles! First, I know that the book was published in 1905, and sold by W. B. Clarke Co. Booksellers. The purchaser identifies herself as Mrs. Edd Hallowell, who then gave the book to someone else (probably J.H. Bartlett) on August 15th, 1905. Some time after that, it passed “thence to the Chocorua Library”, a gift of J.H. Bartlett. Chocorua Library, in Chocorua, New Hampshire, is situated just a short distance south of Lake Chocorua and the summer country home of Frank Coles. It was volume number 2260 in the humble and nondescript Chocorua Public Library building, where it spent its days until quite recently. According to the stamp date on the back library card pocket, it was last due July 31st 2003. Soon after that, I assume that it was sold at a library book sale (one of those treats of northern New England summer weekends) and probably purchased there by Robert Purmort Books, Newport, New Hampshire, which sold the copy to me via ABE Books on 26 July of this year.
I permitted my eyes to scan the tiny patch of bare ground at my feet, and what I observed during a very few moments suggested the present article as a good piece of missionary work in the cause of nature, and a suggestive tribute to the glory of the commonplace.
IN MY OPINION, W. HAMILTON GIBSON WAS THE MOST INSPIRING OF THE FORGOTTEN NATURALISTS FROM THE GENERATION AFTER THOREAU. Nowadays, he claims a Wiki page and little else, though scanned copies of his books are easily obtained from online archives, along with his biography (even more forgotten) from 1901. Gibson was an amazingly talented artist and natural scientist, who harnessed those two interests to craft highly engaging vignettes revealing mysteries of the everyday world around his summer art studio in Washington, Connecticut. Even the most dull bit of bare earth held its share of secrets to him, and he worked wonders with flowers, teasing out the complex interplay of flower structure and pollinator species. “Pluck the first flower that you meet in your stroll to-morrow,” he wrote, “and it will tell you a new story.”
GIBSON LIVED A TRAGICALLY BRIEF LIFE, DYING OF A STROKE BROUGHT ON BY OVERWORK AT THE AGE OF 46. “My Studio Neighbors” was published posthumously. As such, it does not have the coherence of his more polished works (which I will read and report upon at a later date). Instead, it is composed of several essays about insects and their fascinating (and somewhat macabre) stories well-crafted to engage the general reader, and several botanical essays on flowers and their pollinators that seem pitched to a more scientific crowd. I suspect he may have had a book in mind, or possibly even two. I learned quite a bit from his botanical pieces about pollination; for instance, I did not know that all orchids are characterized by having both anther and stigma (male and female reproductive parts) on the same stalk, known as a column. I also found fascinating how he went about figuring out what pollinated each flower, sometimes by observation, sometimes by deduction, and sometimes by forcing an insect such as a bumblebee to enter a flower to pollinate it. He accompanies his explanations by drawings that indicate stages if a process. In the drawings below, a bumblebee is making her way out of a Cyprepedium orchid (left), a process that requires getting doused with pollen (center) before being able to force her way out through the top (right).
MY FAVORITE ESSAYS FROM THIS BOOK, THOUGH, EXPLORED BACKYARD NATURE MYSTERIES. Gibson was an engaging storyteller: he we describe the what he saw, then explain carefully to the reader how he went about solving the puzzle as to what was actually going on. His stories focus on everyday things, and in doing so, they have the effect of inspiring the reader to find similar wonders close to home. He opens his essay Doorstep Neighbors with this exhortation:
How little do we appreciate our opportunities for natural observation! Even under the most discouraging and commonplace environment, what a neglected harvest! A backyard city grass-plot, forsooth, what an invitation!
After these enthusiastic words, Gibson gets to work setting the stage for his tale:
The arena of the events which I am about to describe and picture comprised a spot of almost bare earth less than one yard square, which lay at the base of the stone step to my studio door in the country.
Against this humble backdrop, Gibson proceeds to share about the many holes he finds there, and the wandering insects that suddenly disappear into them. Clearly, there is a whole lot going on. Not content merely to watch, Gibson consigns a couple of victims to their fate:
A poor unfortunate green caterpillar, which, with a very little forcible persuasion in the interest of science, was induced to take a short-cut across this nice clean space of earth to the clover beyond, was the next martyr to my passion for original observation. He might have pursued his even course across the area unharmed, but he…persisted in trespassing, and suddenly was seen to transform from a slow creeping laggard into the liveliest acrobat, as he stood on his head and apparently dived precipitately into the hole which suddenly appeared beneath him.
Gibson continues his bemused explorations, trying to cover up the holes and the watching them cleared of debris as if by magic. Finally, using a long blade of Timothy grass as a fishing pole equivalent, Gibson inserted it into one of holes. A beetle grub lurking at the bottom (10 inches down) snapped at the grass and was brought to the surface for inspection. But this did not solve all of the mysteries, because meanwhile other holes were being excavated by various wasps, who would fly away only to reappear dragging the body of a spider or a caterpillar. This, too, let to some fascinating research using everyday materials:
Constructing a tiny pair of balances with a dead grass stalk, thread, and two disks of paper, I weighed the wasp, using small square pieces of paper of equal size as my weights. I found that the wasp exactly balanced four of the pieces. Removing the wasp and substituting the caterpillar, I proceeded to add piece after piece of the paper squares until I had reached a total of twenty-eight, or seven times the number required by the wasp, before the scales balanced. Similar experiments with the tiny black wasp and its spider victim showed precisely the same proportion….
IF I WERE GOING TO USE ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE GIBSON’S WORK, I THINK ‘CHARMING’ WOULD DO THE JOB WELL. Gibson would have been a delightful person to meet and talk with at length — though in my case, I fear we would soon get stuck on the topic of how overwhelmed we our by our respective work obligations. He never quite took himself too seriously, avoiding the pontificating that Blatchley sometimes fell prey to. He was both a highly talented artist and a keen naturalist, and I will undoubtedly write more of him and his other books in the future.
FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE COPY I READ. My copy is likely a second edition, published in 1898. A bit stained and weatherbeaten, it is still in fine fettle, with the binding in excellent condition. The outstanding feature of the book (apart, of course, from Gibson’s drawings and writings) is the spectacular cover. A ring of butterflies encircles the book title, against a background of olive green cloth. As for its history, all I have in this regard is a tiny stamp glued to the upper left corner of the inside of the front cover, with the name Amelia Stevenson printed on it.
W. S. Blatchley, 1859-1940 Unknown author / Public domain
Each pebble has a past; each tiny grain of clay and soil a future. The boulder on the hillside, how came it there and when? ‘Tis but an atom as compared with the bulk of the great round earth beneath, yet ’tis as worthy as a theme of thought.
THE TRANSITION FROM SIMPSON TO BLETCHLEY WAS JARRING. After the simple, straightforward sentences and comical scenes of Simpson’s Florida, Bletchley’s pontifications from north-central Indiana were tough going, like climbing the face of a sand dune in steel-toed hiking boots. Blatchley’s book is far more introspective and sullen. Written almost entirely as diary entries composed in fountain pen ink while the author was resting on a boulder in a wooded pasture, the book is an admixture of observations of the close-at-hand (mostly insects and flowers), ponderings on time’s passage (deep time and human transience), and occasional brow-beatings of his own supposed inability to make better use of his hours. (Given that he published a couple of dozen scientific monographs and books over his lifetime, I find that line unconvincing.) The language is frequently affected, and sometimes he gushes forth in lines that feel like fortune cookie clichés, even now, over 100 years later:
Possess thyself in patience, O my soul! Let seconds be as days unto thy reckoning. Do well the little things which come thy way. Think well the thoughts thou wouldst impress upon the table of eternity.
At one point, Blatchley describes the debris in a rural brook after a flood in these words:
Often-times in the bends of the stream are bunches of drift composed of logs, chips, pieces of bark, limbs, rails, boards, dead weeds and leaves, flotsam and jetsam of the freshet days, all heterogeneously mingled….
What an apt description of this book! There are images and ideas to be mined here, but there is also much to be, well, waded through. Part of it falls on the author’s book design — snippets of reflections from a boulder and along a nearby stream, mostly in the summer months, spanning several years. What could have been a fascinating study of place in nature over the course of a year (one that would have fit in well with many another nature book of the time) is lost due to the many missing months. Blatchley says little about himself (and his Wikipedia bio is fairly minimal), but I get the sense that he is writing from a summer retreat in the country (he mentions a city home at one point). By framing the book as reveries, he opened the door to saying pretty much whatever he felt like saying. It isn’t quite a nature book, or a book of philosophy, or of poetry. Unfortunately, for all that there are some intriguing passages, I cannot even find it possible to point to a page and say, “If only the rest of the book were like this.” Still, there are gems here, and let us explore them.
MY FAVORITE ASPECTS OF BLATCHLEY’S BOOK ARE HIS CONTEMPLATIONS OF ELEMENTAL FORCES AND DEEP TIME. He writes, for instance, about how matter and energy are united in living beings. He speaks of the forces of nature, and how glaciers have shaped the Indiana countryside. And always there is the presence of time — both human time (the time between entries, the span of person’s life) and deep time (the time it took for rocks to form and land be shaped). Consider this passage, in which Blatchley finds a bit of quartz and visualizes its story:
Stooping I pick up a piece of semi-transparent quartz; pure white, vitreous, and in outline roughly angular; yet worn by abrasion until its sharp edges and corners are rounded. How came it here? Go back through the centuries to the ice sheet, four hundred feet and more in thickness, which once covered this spot. Follow that sheet northward to some deep ravine whose edges are clothed with fir and pine, and there, in the dense Canadian wilderness, will you find the mother ledge of quartz, gleaming pure and white, from which this piece was broken. Cold, hard, and durable enough to withstand all elements of the present, it harks back to that age when ice was its master, bearing it onward in vise-like grip to be dropped on or near its present resting place. One fragment of matter, without life, thought or motion, has, after a lapse of thousands of centuries, met another endowed with these, and has been connected, at least in thought, with the ledge of which it was once a part.
OCCASIONALLY, TOO, BLATCHLEY WROTE ABOUT FLOWS IN NATURE, IN A MANNER THAT HINTED, AT LEAST, AT ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS THINKING. Here is one of his finest (in my opinion) forays into the topic — in this case, the flow from plant sap to aphid honey to ant nourishment:
…I noted by the pathway a clump of curled dock on the stems of which were hundreds of dark, leaden-gray plant-lice, or aphids, their bodies swelling with the juices that they had imbibed or rather sucked, from the soft succulent stems. Over the dock there crawled rapidly numerous large, black ants which, as they moved, were waving their antennae swiftly to and fro as if in search of something lost. As I looked, an ant approached closely one of the thicker-bodied of the lice, when the latter turned its abdomen upward and exuded therefrom a drop of liquid, clear as crystal . With a single lap the ant swallowed the morsel of “honey-dew.” Thus is the juice of the dock transmitted through the body of the aphis into the stomach of the ant, undergoing, doubtless, on the way a chemical change which renders it sweet and to the especial liking of that insect. Wonderful is the relationship thus existing between the organic matter in the soil, the plant and the two insects. Interesting the process by which that inorganic matter is fitted for the food of the higher form, the ant. Varied the changes which matter must undergo as a part of the earth and the dwellers thereon during its unceasing round of existence.
AS AN ENTOMOLOGIST, BLATCHLEY APPRECIATED, AND CELEBRATED, THE SMALL AND OVERLOOKED, AND HOW THOSE THINGS INTO A LARGER STORY. That could be a piece of quartz, or an aphid on a dock plant. Everything in nature belonged, and existed in some sort of relationship with other objects and beings. But I will stop here, lest I begin to put words and ideas into Blatchley’s book that he never quite managed to express. I will close with this thought about observing natural relationships:
To a true naturalist nothing in nature is lowly, nothing is isolated. An inter-relationship, and inter-dependence, is everywhere visible. However small, however stunted and ill shaped, nothing natural seems out of place.
FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE COPY OF THIS BOOK I READ. One thing I have noticed about all of W. S. Blatchley’s books is that they were published by the Nature Publishing Company and used a similar front cover design with title in gold at a jaunty angle. I strongly suspect that the Nature Publishing Company label was Blatchley’s own. According to a further note on the copyright page, it was printed by Wm. B. Burford of Indianapolis. It includes several black and white photographs of passable artistry, scattered throughout the pages. There is no writing on my copy, and therefore I can say nothing further of its history.
