Because I was newly in the country I was constantly under the feeling of its past. Hither and thither I went in the region round about, listening at every turn, spying into every bush at the stirring of a leaf or the chirp of a bird; yet I had always with me the men of ’63, and felt always that I was on holy ground.
IN 1895 OR THEREABOUTS, THE BOSTON NATURE WRITER BRADFORD TORREY VACATIONED FOR SEVERAL WEEKS IN SOUTH-CENTRAL TENNESSEE. An avid birder and occasional appreciator of other animals or native plants, he spent most of his time roaming a Civil Warm landscape in search of birds. In that quest he is, at times, quite intense. The story opens with his arrival at Missionary Ridge, outside Chattanooga. The rail car he has taken was occupied by several Confederate veterans who invite him to join them in climbing a view tower at the site of General Braxton Bragg’s headquarters “where they would show me the whole battlefield and tell me about the fight.” Instead, distracted by a bird, Torrey remains on the ground. “I might have heard all about the battle from a man who was there,” he relates to his readers, “and instead I went off to listen to a sparrow singing in a bush.” And for the next several dozen pages, all Torrey writes about are the birds he encounters — the ones he sees and identifies, and the ones he only hears and wonders about. Meanwhile, in the background is the immense drama that unfolded there about thirty years before, including the Battle of Chickamauga, a Confederate victory that was not enough to turn the tide of war in the Rebels’ favor. In the 1890s, many Civil War veterans were still living, and would visit the battlefields to recall their past moments of glory and struggle. Residents of the area, too, carried memories of those fateful days in September of 1863.
Finally, the Civil War seeps into Torrey’s tale, displacing the endless litany of birds. While on Chickamauga battlefield, the author converses with a Confederate veteran of Vicksburg:
…he gave me a vivid description of his work in the trenches, as well as the surrender, and the happiness of the half-starved defenders of [Vicksburg], who were at once fed by their captors.
All his talk showed a lively sense of the horrors of war. He had seen enough of fighting, he confessed; but he could n’t keep away from a battlefield, if he came anywhere near one.
All around him, the landscape contained traces of its violent past, brought back to life by first-hand and second-hand memories of those terrible days of war:
From the hill it was but a few steps to the Snodgrass house, where a woman stood in the yard with a young girl, and answered all my inquiries with cheerful and easy politeness. None of the Snodgrass family now occupied the house, she said, though one of the daughters still lived just outside the reservation. The woman had heard her describe the terrible scenes on the days of the battle. The operating-table stood under this tree, and just there was a trench into which the amputated limbs were thrown. Yonder field, now grassy, was then planted with corn; and when the Federal troops were driven through it, they trod upon their own wounded, who begged piteously for water and assistance. A large tree in front of the house was famous, the woman said; and certainly it was well hacked. A picture of it had been in “The Century.” General Thomas was said to have rested under it; but an officer who had been there not long before to set up a granite monument near the gate told her that General Thomas did n’t rest under that tree, nor anywhere else. Two things he did, past all dispute: he saved the Federal army from destruction and made the Snodgrass farmhouse an American shrine.
After passing the home that had been General Rosencrans’ headquarters during the battle, Torrey relates to readers,
…I came to a diminutive body of water, — a sink-hole, — which I knew at once could be nothing but Bloody Pond. At the time of the fight it contained the only water to be had for a long distance,. It was fiercely contended for, therefore, and men and horses drank from it greedily, while other men and horses lay dead in it, having dropped while drinking….
…a chickadee gave out his long and quiet sound just behind me, and a…swallow dropped upon the water’s edge. The pond was of the smallest and meanest, — muddy shore, muddy bottom, and muddy water; but men fought and died for it in those awful September days of heat and dust and thirst. There was no better place on the field, perhaps, in which to realize the horrors of the battle, and I was glad to have the chickadee’s voice the last sound in my ears as I turned away.
Throughout much of his stay in that part of Tennessee, Torrey kept encountering veteran soldiers and older civilians who recalled events from the Civil War. At one point, he met up with an old Union soldier from Massachusetts who had been born in Canada but joined up with a Michigan regiment. Torrey explained to readers that he wasn’t certain how it came to pass that he learned this information, but “in that country, where so much history had been made, it was hard to keep the past out of one’s conversation.”
ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, IT WAS THE PROSPECT OF BIRDING THAT BROUGHT TORREY TO TENNESSEE, AND THE BOOK IS MOSTLY ABOUT THAT. I am sure there are avid birders out there that relish accounts of other’s efforts to augment their life lists, but I do not count myself among the number. After telling of his unexpected glimpse of a Cape May warbler on Cameron Hill in Chattanooga, Torrey explained why he kept searching for birds — an argument that ultimately led him to speak in defense of all naturalists and the lives they lead:
“What good does it do?” a prudent friend and advisor used to say to me, smiling at the fervor of my first ornithological enthusiasm. He thought he was asking me a poser; but I answered gaily, “It makes me happy;” and taking things as they run, happiness is a pretty substantial “good.” So was it now with the sight of this long-desired warbler. It taught me nothing; it put nothing into my pocket, but it made me happy, — happy enough to sing and shout , though I am ashamed to say I did neither….
It is one precious advantage of natural history studies that they afford endless opportunities for a man to enjoy himself in this sweetly childish spirit, while at the same time his occupation is dignified by a certain scientific atmosphere and relationship. He is a collector of insects, let us say. Whether he goes to the Adirondacks for the summer, or to Florida for the winter, he is surrounded with nets and cyanide bottles. He travels with them as another travels with packs of cards. Every day’s catch is part of the game; and once in a while, as happened to me on Cameron Hill, he gets a “great hand,” and in imagination, at least, sweeps the board. Commonplace people smile at him, no doubt; but that is only amusing, and he smiles in turn. He can tell many good stories under that head. He delights to be called a “crank.” It is all because of people’s ignorance. They have no idea that he is Mr. So-and-So, the entomologist; that he is in correspondence with learned men the country over; that he once discovered a new cockroach, and has had a grasshopper named after him; that he has written a book, or is going to write one. Happy man! a contributor to the world’s knowledge, but a pleasure-seeker; a little of the savant, and very much of a child; a favorite of Heaven, whose work is play. No wonder it is commonly said that natural historians are a cheerful set.
Now there’s a sentiment that George Torrey Simpson (no relation) would have agreed to with enthusiasm!
FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. A “first edition” (was there a second?) from 1896, its cover (show at the opening of this post) is its finest feature. Inside the front cover is the signed name of a previous owner, who was evidently the mother-in-law of the person who sold me the book on eBay: Marguerite Heloise Crownover. The other feature of this volume is a child’s cartoon on page 9, preserving for posterity the claim that “mrs. mader is crazy!” In some truly enlightened dialogue, the smaller stick figure says “she sure is!” while the taller ones, arms akimbo, declares that “everybody knows that”. It was news to me, at least. Below the drawing is a mysterious bit of writing involving b. b. and c. c. with a plus and the letters l, o, v, and e in the four quadrants. The identities of the two besotted youths have, alas, been lost to history.
The obvious question, then, is was this actually a classroom literature text? If so, I would have to agree with the artist that Mrs. Mader was indeed crazy.
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.
All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel, steep or slow they go up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes otherwhere must dip and cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of the hills open into each other, and the high meadows are often wide enough to be called valleys by courtesy; but one keeps this distinction in mind, — valleys are the sunken places of the earth, cañons are scored out by the glacier ploughs of God. They have a better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced open glades of pleasantness; they call them parks. Here and there in this hill country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high stony barriers. These head also for the heart of the mountains; their distinction is that they never get anywhere.
All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from the mid Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes not revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an intolerable thirst.
MARY AUSTIN’S “THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN” IS A LOVE POEM, IN PROSE, TO A LAND AND ITS INHABITANTS, HUMAN AND OTHERWISE. The landscape is the desolate country of eastern California, between the Sierras and Nevada. In Mary Austin’s words, the land is a living presence, evoked vividly and sensorially over the course of her slender tome. Her book is a work of nature writing inasmuch as nature is embedded in its pages, in the form of descriptions of landscapes, plants, and animals. Only once does Austin pause, at chapter’s end, to reflect on the human relationship to the natural world, and her pessimistic viewpoint is one I have encountered before in other writers from this time:
Man is the great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise. Being so much warned beforehand, it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one, that cannot keep safely hid. The cunningest hunter is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor.
EXTRACTING FROM THIS WORK IS A DIFFICULT TASK. It is of one fabric, a tapestry of words that weaves the reader into the landscape, through encounters with its storms, topography, geology, cultures, and wildlife. Consider this rich evocation of the way to the home of the Shoshone Indians:
To reach that country…, one goes south and south, within hearing of the lip-lapping of the great tideless lake, and south by east over a high rolling distinct, miles and miles of sage and nothing else. So one comes to the country of the painted hills, — old red cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral earths, hot, acrid springs, and steam jets issuing from a leprous soil. After the hills the black rock, after the craters the spewed lava, ash strewn, of incredible thickness, and full of sharp, winding rifts. There are picture writings carved deep in the face of the cliffs to mark the way for those who do not know it. On the very edge of the black rock the earth falls away in a wide sweeping hollow, which is Shoshone land.
South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly wooded with the ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the border of the Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very var by broken ranges, narrow valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted to the sky-line, east and east, and no man knows the end of it.
It is a land that was, in Austin’s day, still partly unknown, despite the (scanty) human presence upon it. Consider, for instance, Austin’s account of the tulares, vast expanses of marsh covered almost entirely by tule, a species of sedge. Avoided by people, the landscape is a haven for birds:
The tulares are full of mystery and malaria. That is why we have meant to explore them and have never done so. It must be a happy mystery. So you must think, to hear the redwinged blackbirds proclaim it clear March mornings. Flocks of them, and every flock a myriad, shelter in the dry, whispering stems. They make little arched runways deep into the heart of the tule beds. Miles across the valley, one hears the clamor of their high, keen flutings in the mating weather.
Wild fowl, quacking hordes of them, nest in the tulares. Any day’s venture will raise from open shallows the great blue heron on his hollow wings. Chill evenings the mallard drakes cry continually from the glassy pools, the bittern’s hollow boom rolls along the water paths. Strange and farflown fowl drop down against the saffron, autumn sky. All day wings beat above it, hazy with speed; long flights of cranes glimmer in the twilight. By night one wakes to hear the clanging geese go over. One wishes for, but gets no nearer speech from those the reedy fens have swallowed up. What they do there, how fare, what find, is the secret of the tulares.
Finally, to close, here is perhaps my favorite passage from the book — a potent evocation of the western landscape, told almost entirely through its scents. (Dare I call it scentsational?)
Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills, there is more sky than any place in the world. It does not sit flatly on the rim of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space in which the earth is poised, hollows more, and is full of clean winey winds. There are some odors, too, that get into the blood. There is the spring smell of sage that is the warning that sap is beginning to work in a soil that looks to have none of the juices of life in it; it is the sort of smell that sets one thinking what a long furrow the plough would turn up here, the sort of smell that is the beginning of new leafage, is best at the plant’s best, and leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop. There is the smell of sage at sundown, burning sage from [Paiute Indian villages] and sheep camps, that travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke; the kind of smell that gets into the hair and garments, is not much liked except upon long acquaintance, and every Paiute and shepherd smells of it indubitably. There is the palpable smell of the bitter dust that comes up from the alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons, and the smell of rain from the wide-mouthed cañons. And last the smell of the salt grass country, which is the beginning of other things that are the end of the mesa trail.
AS A POSTSCRIPT, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. Alas, I cannot afford a first edition of Austin’s work, priced in the hundreds of dollars. I settled instead for a 1961 paperback a Doubleday Anchor Book from the Natural History Library. Though well worn and weatherbeaten, the book was otherwise free of writing or other evidence of its history. The list of other titles in the series in back was particularly helpful; it enabled me to find two more writers from the first 42 years of the 20th century.
The elemental forces — water, air, earth, light — were from the beginning. Man is merely a later happening, dependent upon the elements for existence, and in the scheme of creation little more than a looker-on. Only in recent years has he begun to study his environment and to notice the myriad combinations and manifestations of the elements which he calls Nature. It is still a bewildering panorama to him. He sees and admires the striking high-lights, the bright colors, the huge forms, but he overlooks the half-tones, the broken tints, the lesser forms that make up the great body and background of the picture. These minor keys seem to him ordinary or commonplace. But there are no such words in Nature’s vocabulary. Everything is shaped to an end, in a mould and pattern of its own, and for a specific purpose. The fault is in man’s lack of vision and want of comprehension. He sees and understands only in part. If he saw and understood all he would admire all.
“THE MEADOWS” WAS WRITTEN LATE IN VAN DYKE’S LIFE, AFTER HE HAD ALREADY PUBLISHED CLOSE TO 20 BOOKS, MOSTLY ON ART HISTORY BUT ALSO SEVERAL EXPLORING THE DRAMATIC LANDSCAPES OF THE AMERICAN WEST. Dyke’s best-known work, by far, “The Desert”, had been published nearly a quarter-century before, back when Van Dyke was a spry 42. After traveling afar (and in his imagination — most of what Van Dyke reports seeing and doing in “The Desert” was, it turns out, manufactured from his brother’s experiences and books he read), Van Dyke set his eyes on the humble Raritan Valley of his native New Brunswick, New Jersey, and crafted this book. Like myself setting out on a year-long pilgrimage down Piney Woods Church Road in search of the wonders of the everyday, Van Dyke looked to the woods and meadows for rich colors and forms and intriguing patterns changing across the seasons. As an artist first and naturalist second, Dyke celebrates the colors and textures of the feathers of common birds; he touches upon their behavior also, but there he seems to draw mostly on personal experience and less on scientific knowledge at the time. The book as a whole is flowing panorama of changing colors and forms, and array of exclamations of wonder and delight.
WHAT STANDS OUT MOST FOR ME ABOUT THE BOOK IS NOT THAT IT IS A WORK CELEBRATING LOCAL NATURAL HISTORY, BUT RATHER IT IS A BOOK WRITTEN BY A NEARLY 70-YEAR-OLD ART CRITIC CONFRONTING MORTALITY AND LOSS. There is beauty and delight here, but even that somehow always feels bittersweet. Speaking of the field mice, for example, Van Dyke turns an appreciation of their simple lives into a critique of civilization shortly after the end of the First World War:
Apparently the field mice lead a tranquil existence, raise large families, and feed fat without a varied diet. They are not worried about their hours of labor or their social status, nor are they obsessed by their possessions. They have no large ambitions to gratify, no desire to “get on” or be “progressive” or “up to date.” Their forefathers before them lived in the meadow grass and the orn shock, and probably they long ago concluded that their living conditions could not be improved by fighting the mice in a neighboring corn shock or agitating for socialism or communism in their tribal relations. They accepted the mouse tradition, and carried on with it because they realized that they could not, by taking thought or changing habit, become anything different, try as much as they could or would.
Set against the magnificence of Nature, the human contribution seems so empty, perhaps even irrelevant. Nature is, well, natural, while human art is awkward and forced:
I am continually bringing home from the meadows bare sprays of wild rose, raspberry, bittersweet; dead stalks of thistle, wild rice, wild oats, purple aster; pods of the milkweed, cones of the pine and hemlock, clustered berries of the black haw, bunched seeds of the scarlet sumac. Placed in jars or arranged against the wall, and studied leisurely, they become more marvellous even than in their meadow habitat. One never gets to the end, never gets to the point where all is told, as so often happens with human inventions. Always there is something new, something beyond, something never known before. Nature seems limitless in design, fathomless in meaning.
How these dead stems and branches cheapen the art of man! A spray of bronze-green cedar makes my apple-green tea-jar of the best Chinese kiln look like a common crockery door-knob, and the pod of the milkweed or the cone of the hemlock puts a Renaissance bronze into a gas-fixture category. I account for this with an odd notion that the chemical elements that go to make up the cedar, the cone, or the pod are in perfect accord, agree in every particular, and come together by natural affinity. This coming together under peculiar conditions of soil, light, heat, moisture is perhaps fortuitous — something that may happen in a certain year or century or millenium, and then never again in the world’s history. On the contrary, the vase and the bronze are things arbitrarily put together by man without regard to chemical affinity or time or any other natural combination or circumstance. The result with them is a feeling of things being pushed into false relation, a lack of harmony in color, a lack of unity in design, a lack of quality in texture. We feel instinctively that nature never did, never could, bring forth such a distortion.
ULTIMATELY, VAN DYKE SAVES HIS GREATEST CONDEMNATION OF HUMANITY FOR HIS OBSERVATIONS ABOUT HUMAN DESTRUCTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT. Song and garden birds were disappearing, for instance:
That year by year the lawn and garden birds grow less is perhaps due to the lawn and garden producing less. Coal dust, city smoke, carbonic acid gas in the air and in the rainfall over cities, are not good for the growth of either insects or fruit.
Meanwhile, sprawl had overtaken the landscape — something I am sure he had witnessed first hand in his many decades living in northern New Jersey:
Nature and her progeny change little and have no wish to change at all. Indeed, it is nature’s plan to maintain the status quo, the existing order of things, for a time at least; but man is ever driving her to a wall, sapping her resources, distorting her purposes, establishing artificial conditions. Year by year the border-line is being pushed further back. Civilization and the suburbs are being carried into the fields and forests, and the birds and animals are shrinking away into the inaccessible portions of the earth. Nature did not reckon wisely in bringing forth her last creation — man. She perhaps had no thought that he would prove to be the great destroyer. Least of all did she reckon with his arrogant assumption that the world was given him to destroy.
Consider, too, his bitter, almost nihilistic lines about the polluted Raritan River and its disappearing fish:
Even some of the fishes once native to the stream, such as the sunfish, the perch, the small-mouthed black bass, have disappeared. Chemical factories that spit fumes into the air and refuse, acids, and oils into the streams will destroy almost anything that lives….
No one sighs or protests much about the river pollution and the passing of the fish. A river in these days is usually thought merely as an open sewer for cities. If necessity demands use of the water for drinking purposes, a filtering plant gives it a clean look and chlorine kills the typhoid germs. The conception of a river as something worth while, aside from water supply or drainage, passed out some time ago. Consuming, not conserving, the earth is the present bent. It is sometimes called “development”, which is too often only another name for flaying the face of things for present profit.
BUT WE CANNOT END THERE. It is too dark. There is still joy in this book, even if it is found mostly in the backward glance. While the future of nature and man may be grim, the past is a refuge, freely accessed through memory:
Children gathering flowers! Was that not the earliest recollection, the first introduction to nature, for most of us? That long-ago, far-away day when we first were taken to the meadows! How dreamily we can still remember the scent and hum and warm wind blowing, with white clouds above and a great blue beyond! And out of the vagueness we can still see that picture of waving fields of grass, with daisies and buttercups caught and rolled in the green wave — daisies spattered thicker than the stars in the Milky Way. And later, the trip along the brook where the small fish darted at our approach and the crows were cawing about their nests in the locusts — the trip that led through the woods with all the wonder of its humming life in the month of June! Was not that our first expansion to the glory of the world, even as the growths themselves had expanded to the sunlight and the air!
How those first experiences remain with us and refuse to be ousted by the sordid rush of later life! Down in the street, worrying with the world of business, or hemmed in a factory with the whirr of machinery, or tethered by the leg to some desk in a breathless office, how often a glance at the sky or the distant hills brings back the memories of those childhood days! No wonder there is a sigh over lost youth and a vision of a return to the countryside — to the farmhouse, the orchard, the fields of timothy and clover, the slow-winding brook and the great oak in the meadow, with its branches spread across the pool. We know now, if not then, that one impulse from a vernal wood may last us through a lifetime and be a consecration and a poet’s dream to us forever.It is not necessary that it should be a romantic, a classic, or a haunted wood. Even the commonplace woods of New Jersey may prove sufficiently compelling.
Of course, Van Dyke could not stop there. He closed out the passage with one final dig at modern society, a critique that sounds all the more true today, nearly one hundred years later:
But all that belongs to a bygone age. The humble things to-day fail to make lasting impressions. The rushing world craves the novel and exotic, and in seeking to avoid the obvious it only too often falls into admiration of the merely bizarre.
AS A POSTSCRIPT, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY COPY OF THIS BOOK. While many of Van Dyke’s titles have been reprinted in paperback, that is not true for “The Meadows”. As far as I can tell, his 1926 edition was never reissued. My copy is a navy blue hardback with gilt letters and a front cover design with a stream flowing through a meadow. The cover photograph of a meadow is the only one in the book. After reading Van Dyke’s insightful remarks about environmental destruction, I regret that this book is so obscure. Any arguments that Americans in the early 1900s didn’t recognize the extent of the damage civilization was causing to the natural world are quickly put to rest by a few excerpts from this volume.
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.
Chin deep in [the] middle [of Walden Pond], you begin to feel that you know the pond. In a sense you are its eye and look upon the world as it does. Day breaks for the swimmer as it does for Walden, and the flash of the sun above the wood to eastward warms you both with the same sudden sweep of its August fire. In the same sense you are pond’s ear and hear as it does. The morning rustle of the trees, shaking the dark from their boughs, comes to you as a clear ecstasy, and you think you can hear the wan tinkling of the invisible feet of fairy mists as they leap sunward from the surface and vanish in the day. Over the wood comes the intermittent pulse of Concord waking, and by fainter reverberations the pond knows that Lincoln and more distant villages are astir. Then the first train of the day crashes by the southern margin and stuns the tympanum with a vast avalanche of uproar.
THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST EVOCATIVE AND MYSTICAL PASSAGES IN PACKARD’S BOOK. If we can overlook the allusion to fairies, it is really quite beautiful; a lone swimmer at Walden’s center, who becomes the pond’s own ear and eye. I have read many accounts of visiting Walden (and have ventured there a few times myself, including one fairly magical early morning when the pond was wreathed in fog). Yet Packard manages to see the place from a different vantage point than anyone else, and to considerable effect. Other sections of “Literary Pilgrimages of a Naturalist,” while failing to reach the heights of that one, still do a noteworthy job of capturing the rich flora of an hillside pasture near the birthplace of John Greenleaf Whittier:
Kenoza Lake opens two wide blue eyes at your feet, and all along beneath you roll bare, round-topped hills sloping down to dark woods and scattered fields, as unspoiled by man as in Whittier’s days. The making of farms does not spoil the beauty of a county; it adds to it. It is the making of cities that spells havoc and desolation. Through the pasture, up the steep slopes to the summit of Job’s Hill, that seems so bare at first glimpse, climb all the lovely pasture things to revel in the free winds. Foremost of these is the steeplebush, prim Puritan of the open wold, erect, trying to be just drab and green and precise, but blushing to the top of his steeple because the pink wild roses have insisted on dancing with him up the hill, their cheeks rosy with the wind, their arms twined round one another at first, then around him as well.
I THINK WE HAD BEST STOP THERE. I have read writers that anthropomorphize wildlife — deer, foxes, perhaps even an insect or two. But until I encountered Packard, I never would have guessed it possible to imbue wildflowers with decidedly human behaviors and feelings. Packard describes birds and butterflies at times, too, but his specialty is flowers. And what strange descriptions they are. Consider Bouncing Bet, a.k.a. soapweed, Saponaria officinalis. I’ll bet the reader has never encountered it described as a wanton amidst New England Puritans before:
Here, too, rioting through the old time flower gardens and out of them, dancing and gossiping by the roadside and in the field, sending rich perfume across lots as a dare to us all, is Bouncing-Bet. I cannot think of this amorous, buxom beauty as having been allowed to come with a shipload of serious, praying Pilgrims or any later expedition of stern-visaged Puritans. I believe she was a stow-away and when she did reach New England danced blithely across the gang plank and took up her abode wherever she saw fit. Thus she does today. All over the Cape she strays, a common roadside weed and a beauty of the gardens at once.
And then there is his odd account of the seaside goldenrod with its “bare toes”:
Of these wild flowers the seaside goldenrod is most profuse. Pasture-born like the cedars, it too loves the sea and crowds to its very edge like the people at Revere and Nantasket, so close indeed that at high tides the smelt and young herring, swimming in silver shoals, nibble at the bare toes the plants dabble in the water. You may know this even if you do not see the nibblers, for the plants quiver and shake with suppressed laughter at being thus tickled.
TIME TO ADD “FLOWER TICKLING” TO MY LIST OF ODD NATURAL HISTORY ACTIVITIES I HAVEN’T YET ATTEMPTED. But if we can overlook Packard’s strange botanical fancies (and fantasies), we are left with a robust, serviceable (if not always inspiring) volume of the author’s rambles in the landscapes of writers of yore. In addition to Thoreau and Whittier, these include Frank Bolles and Celia Thaxter. I will close with a lovely text description of the interior reaches of Thaxter’s Appledore Island, followed by a 1911 photograph of Boles’ beloved Lake Chocorua, with the mountain beyond.
Often in the tiny valleys in the heart of [Appledore] Island, surrounded by its dense shrubbery, you lose sight of the sea, but you cannot forget it. However still the day, you can still hear the deep breathing of the tides, sighing as they sleep, and a mystical murmur running through the swish of the breakers, that is the song of the deep sea waves, riding steadily in shore, ruffled but in no wise impeded by the west winds that vainly press them in the contrary direction. However rich the perfume of the clematis the wind brings with it the cool, soothing odor that is born of wild gardens deep in the brine and loosed with nascent oxygen as the curling wave crushes to a smother of white foam. It may be that the breathing of this nascent oxygen and the unknown life-giving principles in this deep sea odor gives the plants of Appledore their vigor and luxuriance of growth. Certainly it would not seem to be the soil that does it. Down on the westward shore of the island, in an angle of the white granite, where there was but a thin crevice for its roots and no sign of humus, I found a single yarrow growing. Its leaves were so luxuriant, so fern-like and beautiful, such feathery fronds of soft, rich green as to make one, though knowing it but yarrow, yet half believe it a tropic fern by some strange chance transported to the rugged ledges of the lonely island. With something in the air, and perhaps in the granite, that makes this common roadside plant develop such luxuriance. it is no wonder that the other common pasture folk, goldenrod and aster, morning glory and wild parsnip, and a dozen others, growing in abundant soil in the tiny levels and hollows, are taller and fuller of leaf and petal than elsewhere. In the richness and beauty of the yarrow leaves growing in the very hollow of the granite’s hand, as in the height and splendor of the Shirley poppies in the little garden, one seems to find a parallel to Celia Thaxter, whose own character, nurtured on the same sea air, sheltered in the hollow hand of the same granite, grew equally rich and beautiful.
Lake Chocorua, 1911
FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK ITSELF. This time, I read a first edition hardcover (was there ever another edition published?), fairly worn with library use. It spent many of its past days as 917.4 / P12 on a shelf at the library of the State Normal School in Valley City , North Dakota, about a third of the way from Fargo to Bismarck. I am a bit jealous of my book in that regard: North Dakota is one of only two states (along with Alaska) that I haven’t visited yet. According to the Date Due page (still present), the book was last checked out in November and December of 1967, and sometime after that was withdrawn from Allen Memorial Library of Valley City University (which, I suspect, is what the State Normal School later became). The volume’s most notable feature is its gilt cover, gold on a red cloth background:
We waited for the spring with an eager longing; the advent of the growing grass, the birds and flowers and insect life, the soft skies and softer winds, the everlasting beauty of the thousand tender tints that brought us unspeakable bliss. To the heart of Nature one must needs be drawn in such a life….
AFTER READING A NUMBER OF AUTHORS WHO SCRUTINIZED NATURE THROUGH A SCIENTIFIC LENS, CELIA THAXTER’S MEMORIES OF LIFE ON THE ISLES OF SHOALS WAS A REFRESHING SEA CHANGE. “Among the Isles of Shoals” is not, strictly speaking, a work of natural history; rather, nature imbues its pages because it is impossible to avoid elemental forces from atop small bits of rock with veneers of soil, perched on the edge of a vast ocean, nine miles’ journey from the New Hampshire mainland. Encountering nature is an inevitable part of living there. Thaxter’s writing rambles, like a tourist to Appledore Island might do. There are no chapters; the reader is pulled into the author’s island world and swept along from one topic to the next, running the gamut of past settlers, folkways, weather patterns, past storms, shipwrecks, the seasons, the sky, the birds…. I like to think that the blending of topics in this manner is somewhat intentional, an organic form emerging out of the experience of inhabiting a small island:
The eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception; sharp outlines become blurred and softened like a sketch in charcoal; nothing appeals to the mind with the same distinctness as on the mainland, among the rush and stir of people and things, and the excitements of social life.
It is a landscape where nature predominates; remnants of the human past become worn down and lichen encrusted, and eventually lost.
When man has vanished, Nature strives to restore her original order of things, and she smooths away gradually all traces of his work with the broad hands of her changing seasons.
THE MOST DELIGHTFUL PAGES IN THIS BOOK SPEAK OF THAXTER’S EARLY CHILDHOOD, SPENT AT THE LIGHTHOUSE ON WHITE ISLAND.She was “scarcely five years old” when her father became lighthouse keeper there. Celia and her two brothers grew up among the rocks, waves, birds, and flowers of a tiny, treeless island. Bereft of a social world beyond her own family, Nature instead provided her with everything she needed — companionship, play, and wonder. Over a span of about twenty pages, Thaxter magically evokes those experiences for the reader. Consider this extended passage, in which she speaks of the childhood mysteries and delights of White Island’s flowers:
I remember in the spring kneeling on the ground to seek the first blades of grass that pricked through the soil, and bringing them into the house to study and wonder over. Better than a shop full of toys they were to me! Whence came their color? How did they draw their sweet, refreshing tint from the brown earth, or the limpid air, or the white light? Chemistry was not on hand to answer me, and all her wisdom would not have dispelled the wonder. Later the little scarlet pimpernel charmed me. It seemed more than a flower; it was like a human thing. I knew it by its homely name of poor-man’s weatherglass. It was so much wiser than I, for, when the sky was yet without a cloud, softly it clasped its small red petals together, folding its golden heart in safety from the shower that was sure to come! How could it know so much? Here is a question science cannot answer. The pimpernel grows everywhere about the islands, in every cleft and cranny where a suspicion of sustenance for its slender root can lodge; and it is one of the most exquisite of flowers, so rich in color, so quaint and dainty in its method of growth. I never knew its silent warning fail. I wondered much how every flower knew what to do and to be; why the morning glory didn’t forget sometimes, and bear a cluster of elder-bloom, or the elder hang out pennons of gold and purple like the iris, or the golden-rod suddenly blaze out a scarlet plume, the color of the pimpernel, was a mystery to my childish thought. And why did the sweet wild primrose wait till after sunset to unclose its pale yellow buds; why did it unlock its treasure of rich perfume to the night alone? Few flowers bloomed for me upon the lonesome rock; but I made the most of all I had, and neither knew of nor desired more. Ah, how beautiful they were!
FOR THAXTER, LIFE ON THE ISLES OF SHOALS WAS A STREAM OF ENCOUNTERS WITH EVER-CHANGING ELEMENTAL PRESENCES. Everywhere she looked, she found entrancing forms and colors, shapes and scents, waves and winds. I will close the post with this enchanting collage of island experiences:
Nothing is too slight to be precious: the flashing of an oar-blade in the morning light; the twinkling of a gull’s wings afar off, like a star in the yellow sunshine of the drowsy summer afternoon; water-spout waltzing away before the wild wind that cleaves the sea from the advancing thunder-cloud; the distant showers that march about the horizon, trailing their dusky fringes of falling rain over sea and land; every phase of the great thunder-storms that make glorious the weeks of July and August, from the first floating film of cloud that rises in the sky till the scattered fragments of the storm stream eastward to form a background for the rainbow, — all these things are of the utmost importance to dwellers at the Isles of Shoals.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY COPY OF THIS BOOK. It is a paperback, from 1994, belonging to my wife; the book is a reproduction of the original 1873 edition. My wife studied marine biology on the Appledore Island in the Isles of Shoals, and likely purchased this book a few years later. It includes a few photos of the island from the time, including one of some buildings on Smuttynose Island, among which is the “Honvet House…where famous murders were committed in March 1873.” For those keen on learning more about 19th century New England axe murders, here is an article on what happened there. If you choose to check it out, remember, you axed for it.
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.
