Nothing in nature is isolated. Everything is somehow connected with everything else. There is interaction everywhere between climate and plant life, between plants and insects, between insects and higher animals, and in that way the chain of life runs on and on. The organic is linked to the inorganic; the whole universe is one.
This passage opens a brief essay on the distribution of trees in North America in Lange’s work. It captures that nascent ecological vision that quite a few early 20th-century naturalists observed and pondered. It also stands out in a work that, while well-crafted, is directed toward an audience of older children, to encourage them to get outdoors and appreciate its wonders. Indeed, Lange served at various times in his life as a supervisor and a director of nature study programming in Minnesota. At the time his book was published, he was serving as principal of the Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul.
I was excited to discover this title a few months ago, because for the considerable sweep of time this blog covers (almost 100 years, from 1850 to WW2), so many parts of the country remain unrepresented by nature writers. I have found dozens in Massachusetts, for example, but very few in Connecticut. Up until this book, I had not found any from the Upper Midwest. Lange, himself, was not a native. He was born in Bonstorf, Germany on June 2nd, 1863, traveling with his family to Minnesota at age 18. He held various teaching and principal positions in and around St. Paul throughout his adult years. He wrote at least fifteen works of both fiction (often featuring boy scouts) and non-fiction (nature-themed, particularly birds). He also published a handbook of nature study for teachers and pupils in the elementary grades. He died in St. Paul in 1940 of unknown causes.
As a nature writer, Longe was eager to encourage young people to “observe, investigate, and enjoy” nature. He listed among his own inspirations the works of Thoreau, Burroughs, Muir, Dallas Lore Sharp, and Gilbert White. Elsewhere, he quoted Bradford Torrey, mentioned C.C. Abbott, and recommended Ernest Ingersoll’s book, “Nature’s Calendar” (blog review coming soon). On the whole, he spoke up for environmental conservation at a time when relatively few animals (apart from birds) were given any protection. He called for game laws to protect bears, for instance, and also protections for orchids (which were being driven extinct by enthusiastic collectors and bouquet gatherers). “It was, perhaps, natural that in the pioneer stage of our country everybody should have been allowed to cut, pick, and burn; to kill, trap, and catch as he pleased,” Lange wrote. “We have now conquered the continent, and the days of the pioneer are gone, but we are still altogether too much a nation of destroyers and exploiters of all that is useful and beautiful in our land.” But lest we exalt Lange too highly, this nature writer who found a place in his heart (and in natural ecosystems) for giant ragweed also argued that the extinction of venomous snakes was “desirable”.
In keeping with Lange’s calling as a nature study teacher, the book includes an appendix on outdoor nature study, with questions to encourage students to engage with the natural world around them.
My copy of this book has considerable text on the flyleaf. As well as I can discern the writing, it reads “Merry Christmas to my friend Henry Horowitz. D. Lange. 1936. Ryan Hotel, December 23, 1936.” I pursued this puzzle a bit further, locating a circa 1900 postcard of the opulent Ryan Hotel in St. Paul, which stood downtown from 1885 until it was demolished in 1962 (see below). I even found a potential recipient of the dedication. Henry Alchanon Horowitz (1906-1990) was living at the time in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. It could be him, though I would have felt more confident to have located someone living in Minnesota at the time.
Beaver works are of economical and educational value besides adding a charm to the wilds. The beaver is a persistent practicer of conservation and should not perish from the hills and mountains of this land. Altogether the beaver has so many interesting ways, is so useful, skilled, practical, and picturesque that his life and his deeds deserve a larger place in literature and in our hearts.
This was not my first visit with Enos Mills. The self-styled “John Muir of the Rockies”, Mills lived for many years in a cabin in Estes Park, and was a staunch advocate for the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park. Over several decades, he rambled through the mountains, often serving as a guide for tourists to the region. I have read a couple of his books already, with considerable relish. A consummate storyteller, Mills had a tendency to end up in backcountry predicaments (such as getting caught in a blizzard or falling down a slope) and then managing to emerge hale and hearty as ever. I have several more of his books that will appear in this blog in the future, including a book on geology — a topic near and dear to my heart
But given the relatively recent (past year) arrival of a family of beavers to a local park near my home, I decided to embark on a reading campaign to get to know them better. I am slowly working my way through Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why they Matter, by Roy Goldfarb (2018). I purchased it on Kindle, unfortuately, and I rarely am willing to view yet anther screen for my reading, so it is still half unfinished. About the same time, I pulled Mills’ volume off my shelf for a more historical take on the charming mammals.
Mills is nearly forgotten today, beyond his local hero status as father of Rocky Mountain National Park (established in 1915). A wannabe Muir, his writing (delightful though it is) never reached the mystical raptures of his hero of the Sierras. Still, I cannot help but feel amazement at his level of committment to observing beavers in the wild: by 1913, he had spent 27 years noticing them (which, admittedly, takes him back to the humble age of six) in every state of the US (at the time) and also Alaska, Mexico, and Canada. He had observed active beaver colonies in every season, and often for one or more weeks at a time.
The book is full of his accounts of what he saw — the extents of dams (the longest measuring 2140 feet, on the Jefferson River, near Three Forks, Montana), the number of active beavers in one place (over a dozen) and counts (quite precise) of how many aspen trees were taken down by a group of beavers in a certain amount of time. Again and again, he tells of his patient witnessing of beaver construction projects (dams and lodges) brought to an end by local trappers after their pelts. At the time, there was no protection whatsoever for beavers, who were largely viewed with a mix of amusement, disdain, and avarice (for their pelts) by most Americans encountering them.
The book is a bit of a trudge to get through — the observations vastly outnumber his stories present in many of his other essays. But what emerges is a portrait of a beaver as actively shaping the ecosystem it inhabits — a holistic picture constructed decades before ecology hit the mainstream. He also celebrated the beaver in passages that occasionally touched the poetic, such as this one:
As animal life goes, that of the beaver stands among the best. His life is full of industry and is rich in repose. He is home-loving and avoids fighting. His lot is cast in poetic places.
The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primeval place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle. Around are the ever-changing and never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. Beaver grow up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the brilliant flowers and great boulders, in the piles of driftwood and among the fallen logs on the forest’s mysterious edge. They learn to swim and slide, to dive quickly and deeply from sight, to sleep, and to rest moveless in the sunshine; ever listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water, living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond; beginning serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich autumn’s hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear the robes of gold, while the birds go by for the southland in the reflective autumn days.
In another delightful passage, Mills chronicles the many ways in which beavers’ supreme architectural achievements, their dams, influence the surrounding landscape and its myriad other inhabitants. It is quite an impressive list indeed!
The dam is the largest and in many respects the most influential beaver work. Across a stream it is an inviting thoroughfare for the folk of the wild. As soon as a dam is completed, it becomes a wilderness highway. It is used day and night. Across it go bears and lions, rabbits and wolves, mice and porcupines; chipmunks use it for a bridge, birds alight upon it, trout attempt to leap it, and in the evening the graceful deer cast their reflections with the willows in its quiet pond. Across it dash pursuer and pursued. Upon it take place battles and courtships. Often it is torn by hoof and claw. Death struggles stain it with blood. Many a drama, romantic and picturesque, fierce and wild, is staged upon the beaver dam.
The beaver dam gives new character to the landscape. It frequently alters the course of a stream and changes the topography. It introduces water into the scene. It nourishes new plant-life. It brings new birds. It provides a harbor and a home for fish throughout the changing seasons. It seizes sediment and soil from the rushing waters, and it sends water through subterranean ways to form and feed springs which give bloom to terraces below. It is a distributor of the waters; and on days when dark clouds are shaken with heavy thunder, the beaver dam silently breasts, breaks, and delays the down-rushing flood waters, saves and stores them; then, through all the rainless days that follow, it slowly releases them.
My copy of this book was never signed, so I can say little about its history. There is a small bookseller’s stamp affixed to the inside back cover: G. F. Warfield & Co. / Booksellers & Stationers / Hartford, Conn. After changing hands (and names) many times, Huntington’s Bookstore closed in 1993 after being in continuous operation for 158 years.
These Spring days, when we hear the bluebirds carol, and mark the revivifying influence of the season, we are sure to be affected thereby, and my companion smiles to see me dance beneath the pine tree. ” You seem happy,” he says, and yet I notice the light kindle in his own eyes, for the sunshine, the bluebirds and the robins have not come in vain to him.
What a blessing are the balmy hours of Spring! The warm sun distills a fragrance from the earth, and in the waste pastures, where there is a thick mat of vegetation, this odor is particularly strong. Nature is stirring straw- berries and crickets into life. The air is full of little flies, beetles run along the roadway, dogs lie asleep on the grass and the yellow flicker sounds his rattle in the trees. Then does the light within burn brightest, and our hearts seem to beat more joyously than they have all Winter long, and we are happy and at least transiently well under the sun. Old Sol smiles at our ways; we are flies on the sunny side of a pumpkin to him, and to ourselves we know not what we are.
It is a blessing to retain the simple delights of childhood, to be easily pleased, and it is well to be affected by the greening of the earth, even though we cannot exactly mention the charm or tell why we should be glad. It is no wonder that there have been May-poles, no wonder that the shepherds of old danced about the straws in the field at the feasts of Pales, and no wonder again that my companion and I become joyous in the hopeful days of Spring.
A child-like wonder infuses William T. Davis’ work, Days Afield on Staten Island (1892). With curiosity, wonder, and delight he explores the scruffy landscapes of a long-inhabited place, from its vacant lots and old orchards to its tidal marshes and its tumbledown farmhouses. He ventures afield through the seasons, describing both the remains of past inhabitation and the plants and animals that have taken over now that the human occupants are gone. In a time when much of Staten Island was still somewhat rural, he provided a series of charming vignettes of places that are now largely (though not completely) gone. I suspect he saw what was coming, though. In his second essay, “South Beach”, he observed that “not only do the land animals fall year by year before advancing civilization, but the life that ocean would seem to hold so securely, is also being gradually stolen away.”
Throughout his book, there is a haunting presence of the past. At one point, he explores an abandoned farmhouse, finding old ledgers and other artifacts strewn about the home. The dead are never far away; they linger at the edges of our sight. In the passage below, the Revolutionary War is remembered in the landscape.
In April the blood-root blossoms, and its single leat often closely clasps the flower stem, forming a sort of green collar. It is a dainty flower but none too choice to deck the steep hill sides of the crooked and shaded ravine where it grows in greatest profusion. This is Blood-root Valley and Blood-root Valley Brook, along the course of which, it is said, a British messenger, in Revolutionary days, travelled on his way from camp to camp. This stream, which is often dry in summer, also rises near the highest point, and goes to form the Richmond brook. The drainage of the district was formerly collected in a pond, used by a saw-mill, of which there is now only a few beams left, and the dam is broken. About 1870, the boys bathed in this pond, and a little lame boy with crutches and a board for support, used to enjoy himself as much as his companions.
A number of skirmishes occurred along Richmond or Stony brook, in the years of the Revolution, particularly on the day of the fight at St. Andrew’s Church. But it is more pleasing to think of it in the times of peace, to see the water snakes glide in so smoothly, the turtles scuttle with much haste and the wayward frogs jump recklessly off the bank frightening the black-nosed dace below. When these little fish are disturbed, they will scatter in all directions, coming together shortly, if they imagine the danger is past. At other times they will sink to the deepest places in the stream, and remain on the sand or pebbles, not moving a fin, and as their backs are sand colored, they are not easily seen from above. Occasionally when there is nothing to fear, one will be seen lying motionless for a long time between two pebbles, and thus can they rest and sleep when they desire.
And here, in this passage, the Indian presence is evoked by scattered potsherds:
To the east of the Bohman mansion, near Bohman’s Point, there is a little brook, that flows through a sandy semi pasture and woodland region. It is bordered in part by willows and old orchard trees, and the land has that unmistakable air of an ancient farming spot. On the high sand dune, nearby, about which this brook bends in bow fashion, the Indians lived in old time, and their implements and little heaps of flint chips, where the arrows were made, may still be discovered. The spring, where they got water, is on the hill-side, though now filled up with sand and grass grown, but the stones that formed its sides mark the site, and a tiny rill issues from among them in very wet weather.
They had an eye for beauty, as evinced by the patterns on the broken pieces of pottery lying about, and no doubt they thought the warblers very gay, that congregate in spring-time about a moist place near the brook. The warblers come every year, just the same, but the Indians are gone, and probably in the large factory across the Kill with its thousands of employes, only one or two would recognize their implements scattered among the other stones on the sand.
Finally, here is one last passage from the book, a charming vignette from the autumn time:
It is good to ramble in the autumn fields, in one of the barren sandy nooks where the sweet-fern grows, and where a sad pleasant flavored joy, seems to pervade all about you. With dextrous throws you bring down the apples, and though they may be gnarled and puny, you eat them with a relish, for they seem such free gifts from nature. They come without the asking or the toil, like the persimmons, or the strawberries in the field.
Autumn colors the barren ground vegetation very early with the deepest dye, and as we are taller than most of the plants that grow on the sand, we may look over them, and thus get a wide and varied view. The Virginia creeper runs flaming red along the ground, and the sumachs, the cat-briers and the poison ivy vines, are most vividly colored.
Perhaps the most curious tint of all the autumnal show is the greenish-white leaves of the bittersweet vine, that are speckled with yellow. They have an odd appearance, for all about them the leaves have turned to most vivid colors, while they alone have assumed so white and ghostly a shade. In the chestnuts and some of the oaks, the green color remains longest near the mid-rib, and in the oaks it is often a deep olive shade, and greatly adds to the beauty of the turning leaf. The wild cherry trees color an orange red, and the seedling cultivated cherries are flushed with red and look to be in a fever. The chestnut-oaks turn a light yellow, as do the chestnut trees and the hickories.
There is a vividness of color in many of the leaves that seems almost supernatural, and it is plain that we, who live and grow old on the Earth, can never cease to wonder at the yearly display. ” Look,” says the little boy, “at that Virginia creeper,” and in manhood he points again in wonderment at the flaming red vine in the cedar tree.
A few words about this book and its author are in order. I confess that I broke down and purchased a modern-day paperback copy; the originals are far outside f my price range, even though the book contains no illustrations whatsoever. At the time, I had assumed the author is unknown. In fact, William Thompson Davis (1862-1945) has a National Wildlife Refuge on Staten Island named after him. The property is now only 30 acres smaller than Central Park. Working with the Audobon Society, Davis helped secure the original 52-acre parcel back in 1928. Davis himself was a naturalist, entomologist, and historian. This was his only nature volume for a general audience, although he also published some scientific work on cicadas (ironically, cicadas are not mentioned in this book). Much later in his life, in 1930, he co-authored a five-volume history of Staten Island.
Stewart’s Pond, on the Hamburg road a mile or so from the village of Highlands, served me, a visiting bird-gazer, more than one good turn: selfishly considered, it was something to he thankful for; but I never passed it, for all that, without feeling that it was a defacement of the landscape. The Cullasajah River is here only four or five miles from its source, near the summit of Whiteside Mountain; and already a land- owner, taking advantage of a level space and what passes among men as a legal title, has dammed it (the reader may spell the word as he chooses — “ dammed ” or “ damned,” it is all one to a mountain stream) for uses of his own. The water backs up between a wooded hill on one side and a rounded grassy knoll on the other, narrows where the road crosses it by a rude bridge, and immediately broadens again, as best it can, against the base of a steeper, forest-covered hill just beyond. The shapelessness of the pond and its romantic surroundings will in the course of years give it beauty, but for the present everything is unpleasantly new. The tall old trees and the ancient rhododendron bushes, which have been drowned by the brook they meant only to drink from, are too recently dead. Nature must have time to trim the ragged edges of man’s work and fit it into her own plan. And she will do it, though it may take her longer than to absorb the man himself.
When I came in sight of the pond for the first time, in the midst of my second day’s explorations, my first thought, it must be confessed, was not of its beauty or want of beauty, but of sandpipers, and in a minute more I was leaning over the fence to sweep the water-line with my opera-glass. Yes, there they were, five or six in number, one here, another there; solitary sandpipers, so called with only a moderate degree of appropriateness, breaking their long northward journey beside this mountain lake, which might have been made for their express convenience. I was glad to see them.
Bradford Torrey was a master at the “ramble”, a genre of nature essay that, as the name suggests, rambled about. It had no particular objective beyond relating what Torrey saw and experienced on his outings into the natural world. Torrey’s world was dominated by what passed for a birding life-list in his day — he was constantly seeking out new species. He rarely observed them closely — identification was his primary goal. When birds were scarce, he noticed plants, particularly flowering ones. Very occasionally he mentioned some other other animal — for instance, a box turtle:
On Buck Hill, in the comparative absence of birds, I amused myself with a “dry land tarrapin,” as my West Virginia acquaintance had called it (otherwise known as a box turtle), a creature which I had seen several times in my wanderings, and had asked him about; a new species to me, of a peculiarly humpbacked appearance, and curious for its habit of shutting itself up in its case when disturbed, the anterior third of the lower shell being jointed for that purpose. A phlegmatic customer, it seemed to be; looking at me with dull, unspeculative eyes, and sometimes responding to a pretty violent nudge with only a partial closing of its lid. It is very fond of may apples (mandrake), I was told, and is really one of the “features” of the dry hill woods. I ran upon it continually.
While Torrey’s earliest essays explored familar haunts in Massachusetts (Torrey lived in Weymouth for most of his life), many of his later books feature his travels (by train, stagecoach, and foot) through various parts of the country that were beginning to find renown as touristed areas. Indeed, his accounts of his visits likely encouraged others to follow suit and take to the open road. A World of Green Hills was one of these accounts, based upon trips to the mountains of North Carolina and to Virginia (southwestern and the Natural Bridge area). In these later works, Torrey infused his nature observations with some of his notes on and conversations with the rural folk he chanced to meet along the way. They add a note of entertainment to what is otherwise a rather dry text — despite the “exotic” (for him) locales.
I have come to the conclusion that the ramble was very much a genre for its day, and its day has long passed. When Torrey published his book in 1898, reading was still one of the chief forms of entertainment for the urban and suburban middle and upper classes. In a time before radio and television, I can imagine a family gathering around a fireplace in the evening to listen to Torrey’s writings. They flow well and do not overly challenge the intellect. For all that I suspect he saw of changes in the land, Torrey rarely rebelled against the status quo. The opening passage of this blog post is a rare exception indeed. At another spot in this book, Torrey does observe how bird species appear to be changing in response to the clearing of forests, but here he offers no critique (if anything, I suspect that he welcomed what he perceived as an increase in avian biodiversity). Specifically, in comparing birds observed in North Carolina by William Brewster (a renowned ornithologist) many years previous, Torrey noted that
A few birds, too familiar to have attracted any particular notice on their own account, became interesting because of the fact that they were not included among those found here by Mr. Brewster. One of these was the Maryland yellow-throat, of which Mr. Brewster saw no signs above a level of 2100 feet… Probably the species had come in since Mr. Brewster’s day (eleven years before), with some change of local conditions, — the cutting down of a piece of forest, perhaps, and the formation of a bushy swamp in its place. A villager closely observant of such things, and well acquainted with the bird, assured me from his own recollection of the matter (and he remembered Mr. Brewster’s visit well) that such was pretty certainly the case.
Otherwise, I confess that I found little to share in this book. The ramble simply does not allow for in-depth explorations of ideas, issues, or even animal behaviors. Everything is cursory, in passing. The result may be ideal for a winter evening off-grid, but does not leave the reader much enriched in new insights. Still, may more Torrey volumes still await reading, and I will continue to seek out the few moments (like his dammed and damned passage above) where his observations and reflections shine.
We entered the tiny road (for in this kind of hunting a mouse is as good as a mink), and found ourselves descending the woods toward the garden-patch below. Halfway down we came to a great red oak, into a hole at the base of which, as into the portal of some mighty castle, ran the road of the mice. That was the end of it. There was not a single straying footprint beyond the tree.
I reached in as far as my arm would go, and drew out a fistful of pop-corn cobs. So here was part of my scanty crop ! I pushed in again, and gathered up a bunch of chestnut shells, hickory-nuts, and several neatly rifled hazelnuts. This was story enough. There was a nest, or family, of mice living under the slashing pile, who for some good reason kept their stores here in the recesses of this ancient red oak. Or was this some squirrel’s barn being pilfered by the mice, as my barn is the year round ? It was not all plain. But this question, this constant riddle of the woods, small, indeed, in the case of the mouse, and involving no great fate in its solution, is part of our constant joy in the woods. Life is always new, always strange, always fascinating.
It has all been studied and classified according to species. Any one knowing the woods at all would know that these were mice-tracks, the tracks of the white-footed mouse, even, and not the tracks of the jumping mouse, the house mouse, or the meadow mouse. But what is the whole small story of these prints ? What purpose, intention, feeling do they spell? What and why? a hundred times!
But the scientific books are dumb. Indeed, they do not consider such questions worth answering, just as under the species Mus they make no record of the fact that
The present only toucheth thee.
But that is a poem. Burns discovered that Burns, the farmer! The woods and fields are poem-full, and it is largely because we do not know, and never can know, just all that the tiny snow-prints of a wood-mouse may mean, nor understand just what
root and all, and all in all, / the humblest flower is.
The pop-corn cobs, however, were a known quantity, a tangible fact, and falling in with a gray squirrel’s track not far from the red oak, we went on, our game-bag heavier, our hearts lighter at the thought that we, by the sweat of our brow, had contributed a few ears of corn to the comfort of this snowy winter world.
The more I read the works of Dallas Lore Sharp, the more I appreciate his flair for seeing both the scientific and the poetic elements in nature. The marriage of the two, as I have observed in many past blogs, was a common theme in American nature writing of this period. Sometimes the combinations were forced, like an arranged marriage between polar opposites, enforced by an author who is either a poet or a scientist, but rarely both at once. And sometimes a lovely description is marred by bad poetry, or a poetic account is marred by poor science. But in Sharp’s finest work, the two seem supremely natural when joined together. Neither alone can capture the complexity, majesty, wonder, and magic of nature, either in our own backyard or in the remote wilds. (In Sharp’s case, mostly rural nature, close at hand.)
This volume of Sharp’s essays is a trove of delightful writing. If I had to single out a few for praise, I would certainly highlight “Turtle Eggs for Aggasiz”, a somewhat humorous second-hand account of a naturalist’s frantic effort to secure turtle eggs for the renowned scientist Louis Agassiz, under the stipulation that the eggs had to have been laid no more than four hours previously. This essay, which is about as close to a page-turner as nature writers from this era ever achieve, is frequently anthologized. (Frequently, that is, relative to practically anything else I have read for the blog thus far.) Another essay celebrates John Burroughs; however, he borrowed heavily from it for his eulogy to Burroughs, The Seer of Slabsides, after the author’s death. The title essay, “The Face of the Fields”, celebrates the childlike quality of nature, in contrast to adults’ feelings of fear and dread we feel as we confront death in its many guises:
We cannot go far into the fields without sight-ing the hawk and the snake, the very shapes of Death. The dread Thing, in one form or another, moves everywhere, down every wood-path and pasture-lane, through the black close waters of the mill-pond, out under the open of the winter sky, night and day, and every day, the four seasons through. I have seen the still surface of a pond break suddenly with a swirl, and flash a hundred flecks of silver into the light, as the minnows leap from the jaws of the pike. Then a loud rattle, a streak of blue, a splash at the centre of the swirl, and I see the pike, twisting and bending in the beak of the kingfisher. The killer is killed; but at the mouth of the nest-hole in the steep sandbank, swaying from a root in the edge of the turf above, hangs the black snake, the third killer, and the belted kingfisher, dropping the pike, darts off with a cry. I have been afield at times when one tragedy has followed another in such rapid and continuous succession as to put a whole shining, singing, blossoming world under a pall. Everything has seemed to cower, skulk, and hide, to run as if pursued. There was no peace, no stirring of small life, not even in the quiet of the deep pines; for here a hawk would be nesting, or a snake would be sleeping, or I would hear the passing of a fox, see perhaps his keen hungry face an instant as he halted, winding me.
Fox and snake and hawk are real, but not the absence of peace and joy except within my own breast. There is struggle and pain and death in the woods, and there is fear also, but the fear does not last long; it does not haunt and follow and terrify; it has no being, no substance, no continu- ance. The shadow of the swiftest scudding cloud is not so fleeting as this shadow in the woods, this Fear. The lowest of the animals seem capable of feeling it; yet the very highest of them seem incapable of dreading it; for them Fear is not of the imagination, but of the sight, and of the passing moment.
The present only toucheth thee!
It does more, it throngs him our fellow mortal of the stubble field, the cliff, and the green sea. Into the present is lived the whole of his life — none of it is left to a storied past, none sold to a mortgaged future. And the whole of this life is action; and the whole of this action is joy. The moments of fear in an animal’s life are moments of reaction, negative, vanishing. Action and joy are constant, the joint laws of all animal life, of all nature, from the shining stars that sing together, to the roar of a bitter northeast storm across these wintry fields.
We shall get little rest and healing out of nature until we have chased this phantom Fear into the dark of the moon. It is a most difficult drive. The pursued too often turns pursuer, and chases us back into our burrows, where there is nothing but the dark to make us afraid. If every time a bird cries in alarm, a mouse squeaks with pain, or a rabbit leaps in fear from beneath our feet, we, too, leap and run, dodging the shadow as if it were at our own heels, then we shall never get farther toward the open fields than Chuchundra, the muskrat, gets toward the middle of the bun- galow floor. We shall always creep around by the wall, whimpering.
But there is no such thing as fear out of doors. There was, there will be; you may see it for an instant on your walk to-day, or think you see it; but there are the birds singing as before, and as before the red squirrel, under cover of large words, is prying into your purposes. The universal chorus of nature is never stilled. This part, or that, may cease for a moment, for a season it may be, only to let some other part take up the strain; as the winter’s deep bass voices take it from the soft lips of the summer, and roll it into thunder, until the naked hills seem to rock to the measures of the song.
As nature lives only in the moment, fear and dread are largely absent. The predator strikes and kills, then death departs again — its presence a fleeting shadow, quickly forgotten again. At the close of the essay, Sharp reprises this theme in a haunting, poetic passage that explains the meaning of the essay title:
Life, like Law and Matter, is all of one piece. The horse in my stable, the robin, the toad, the beetle, the vine in my garden, the garden itself, and I together with them all, come out of the same divine dust ; we all breathe the same divine breath; we have our beings under the same divine law; only they do not know that the law, the breath, and the dust are divine. If I do know, and yet can so readily forget such knowledge, can so hardly cease from being, can so eternally find the purpose, the hope, the joy of life within me, how soon for them, my lowly fellow mortals, must vanish all sight of fear, all memory of pain! And how abiding with them, how compelling, the necessity to live! And in their unquestioning obedience what joy!
The face of the fields is as changeful as the face of a child. Every passing wind, every shifting cloud, every calling bird, every baying hound, every shape, shadow, fragrance, sound, and tremor, are so many emotions reflected there. But if time and experience and pain come, they pass utterly away; for the face of the fields does not grow old or wise or seamed with pain. It is always the face of a child, asleep in winter, awake in summer, a face of life and health always, if we will but see what pushes the falling leaves off, what lies in slumber under the covers of the snow; if we will but feel the strength of the north wind, and the wild fierce joy of the fox and hound as they course the turning, tangling paths of the woodlands in their race with one another against the record set by Life.
One other particularly noteworthy essay in this volume is “The Nature-Writer”, which sheds light upon the character of the Nature Writing Movement of the time. Early in the essay, Sharp observes that “the nature-writer has now evolved into a distinct, although undescribed, literary species.” Sharp goes on to attempt to elucidate what characterizes him (or her, though usually him):
…the nature-writer, while he may be more or less of a scientist, is never mere scientist — zoologist or botanist. Animals are not his theme; flowers are not his theme. Nothing less than the universe is his theme, as it pivots on him, around the distant boundaries of his immediate neighborhood.
His is an emotional, not an intellectual, point of view; a literary, not a scientific, approach; which means that he is the axis of his world, its great circumference, rather than any fact any flower, or star, or tortoise. Now to the scientist the tortoise is the thing: the particular species Tbalassochelys kempi; of the family Testudinidse; of the order Chelonia; of the class Reptilia; of the branch Vertebrata. But the nature-writer never pauses over this matter to capitalize it. His tortoise may or may not come tagged with this string of distinguishing titles. A tortoise is a tortoise for a’ that, particularly if it should happen to be an old Sussex tortoise which has been kept for thirty years in a yard by the nature-writer’s friend, and which [quoting Gibert White] “On the 1st November began to dig the ground in order to the forming of its hybernaculum, which it had fixed on just beside a great tuft of hepaticas.”
The nature-writer also becomes deeply familiar with a particular spot of Earth, inhabiting it deeply and sharing its lessons with readers.
It is characteristic of the nature-writer… to bring home his outdoors, to domesticate his nature, to relate it all to himself. His is a dooryard universe, his earth a flat little planet turning about a hop-pole in his garden — a planet mapped by fields, ponds, and cow-paths, and set in a circumfluent sea of neighbor townships, beyond whose shores he neither goes to church, nor works out his taxes on the road, nor votes appropriations for the schools.
He is limited to his parish because he writes about only so much of the world as he lives in, as touches him, as makes for him his home…
It is a large love for the earth as a dwelling-place, a large faith in the entire reasonableness of its economy, a large joy in all its manifold life, that moves the nature-writer. He finds the earth most marvelously good to live in — himself its very dust; a place beautiful beyond his imagination, and interesting past his power to realize — a mystery every way he turns. He comes into it as a settler into a new land, to clear up so much of the wilderness as he shall need for a home.
Alas, Sharp’s examples of nature writers are mostly the familars — Gilbert White, Henry David Thoreau, and John Burroughs. (“In none of our nature-writers… is this love for the earth more manifest than in John Burroughs. It is constant and dominant in him, an expression of his religion.”) Later in the essay, Sharp does make brief reference to Dr. C. C. Abbott and Maruice Maeterlinck (Belgian playwright and author of The Life of the Bee). But no others make the cut — not even Bradford Torrey. Alas, “the sad case with much nature-writing… is that it not only fails to answer to genuine observation, but it also fails to answer to genuine emotion. Often as we detect the unsound natural history, we much oftener are aware of the unsound, the insincere, art of the author.” Here, it would have been most helpful for Sharp to identify a few particular authors and their works, as a caution to the reader. Which of the many nature authors I have read, I wonder, would Sharp have placed in this category?
Sharp closes his essay with this poetic passage about good nature writing. Essentially, good nature writing is true to life, expressing an abiding love of the natural world.
Good nature-literature, like all good literature, is more lived than written. Its immortal part hath elsewhere than the ink-pot its beginning. The soul that rises with it, its life’s star, first went down behind a horizon of real experience, then rose from a human heart, the source of all true feeling, of all sincere form. Good nature-writing particularly must have a pre-literary existence as lived reality; its writing must be only the necessary accident of its being lived again in thought. It will be something very human, very natural, warm, quick, irregular, imperfect, with the imperfections and irregularities of life. And the nature-writer will be very human, too, and so very faulty; but he will have no lack of love for nature, and no lack of love for the truth. Whatever else he does, he will never touch the flat, disquieting note of make-believe. He will never invent, never pretend, never pose, never shy. He will be honest which is nothing unusual for birds and rocks and stars ; but for human beings, and for nature-writers very particularly, it is a state less common, perhaps, than it ought to be.
…the real fascination of hunting is not in the killing but in seeing the creature at home amid his glorious surroundings, and feeling the freely rushing blood, the health-giving air, the gleeful sense of joy and life in nature, both within and without.
Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson (a872-1959)was a turn-of-the-century adventurer and world traveler. After publishing this, her first book, she went on to produce nine more, chronicling her journeys to China, India, Southeast Asia, and South America. She was also the wife of the highly prolific author of wild animal accounts for young people, Ernest Thompson Seaton, whom she refers to as Nimrod in this volume. The appellation is ironic since the Biblical name has come to mean both a hunter and an idiot. I trust she had the former in mind in this case.
As a work of nature writing, this book probably isn’t, unless by association. While Ernest Seton Thompson (whose writings we will visit in future blog posts) wrote stories about the life experiences of North American wildlife (which eventually got him embroiled in the Nature Faker Controversy initiated by John Burroughs, also to be covered at a later date), his wife wrote mostly about the experience of being a woman roaming the wild West when the West was truly quite wild. The book is filled with advice to other tenderfoot wives, sometimes serious, other times more tongue-in-cheek. An entire early chapter is devoted to the best wardrobe choices for heading into the mountains on horseback. Her account leaves the reader thinking that the expedition she undertook with her husband was largely about hunting; however, there is a passage in which she reports on trapping a woodchuck which leads me to think it was mostly intended as a research opportunity.
Nimrod wanted some photographs of animals from life, and the energy which we put forth to obtain these was a constant surprise and disturbance to Uncle John and his co-loafers. They could understand why one might trap an animal, but to let it go again unhurt, after spending hours over it with a camera, was a problem that required many drinks and much quiet cogitation in the shade of the office.
For days we tried to get a woodchuck. At last we succeeded, and I find this note written in my journal for that date: “Oct. 15th: Nimrod caught a woodchuck to-day, a baby one, and we called him Johnny. Johnny stayed with us all day in his cage, while Nimrod made a sketch of him and I took his picture. Then, in the late afternoon, we took him back to his home in the stone-clad hill, and put him among his brothers and sisters, who peeped cautiously at us from various rocky niches, higher up the hill.
Little Johnny must have had a great deal to say of the strange ways and food of the big white animal. It must have been hard, too, for him to have found suitable woodchuck language to express his sensations when he was carried, oh! such a long way, in a big sack that grew on the side of his captor; and of the taste of peppermint candy, which he ate in his prettiest style, sitting on his haunches and clutching the morsel in both forepaws like any well-bred baby woodchuck. And then those delicious sugar cookies that Mrs. Spiker had just baked ! How could he make his ignorant brother chuckies appreciate those cookies ! Poor little Johnny is a marked woodchuck. He has seen the world.”
Apparently, neither she nor her husband was an expert in woodchuck nutrition.
In her charming, whimsical way, Grace then proceeds to share about her husband’s efforts to trap a skunk for photographs:
When Nimrod went hunting skunks, the group at the office gave us up. ” Locoed, plumb locoed,” was the verdict.
Have you ever been on a skunk hunt? But perhaps you have no prejudices. I had. My code of action for a skunk was, if you see a black and white animal, don’t stop to admire its beautiful bushy tail, but give a good imitation of a young woman running for her life.
This did not suit Nimrod. He assured me that there was no danger if we treated his skunkship respectfully, and, as I was the photographer, I put on my old clothes and meekly fell in line. Nimrod set several box traps in places where skunks had been. These traps were merely soap boxes raised at one end by a figure four arrangement of sticks, so that when the animal goes inside and touches the bait the sticks fall apart, down comes the box, and the animal is caged unhurt. The next morning we went the rounds. The first trap was unsprung. The second one was down. Of course we could not see inside. Was it empty? Was the occupant a rat or a skunk, and if so, what was he going to do?
Nimrod approached the trap. Just then a big tree chanced to get between me and it. I stopped, thinking that as good a place as any to await developments.
” It’s a skunk all right,” Nimrod announced gleefully.
The box was rather heavy, so Nimrod went to Yeddar’s, which was not far away, to see if he could get one of the loungers to help carry the captive to a large wire cage that we had rigged up near our shack.
There were six men near the office, bronzed mountaineers, men of guns and grit, men who had spent their lives facing danger; but, when it came to facing a skunk, each looked at Nimrod as one would at a crazy man and had important business elsewhere. For once I thoroughly appreciated their point of view, but as there was no one else I took one end of the box, and we started.
It was a precarious pilgrimage, but we moved gently and managed not to outrage the little animal’s feelings.
When the men saw us coming across the creek, with one accord they all went in and took a drink.
We gingerly urged Mr. Skunk into the big cage, and with the greatest caution, never making a sudden move, I took his picture. All was as merry as a marriage bell, and might have continued so but for that puppy Sim. That is the trouble with skunks; they will lose their manners if startled, and dogs startle skunks.
Of course the puppy barked; of course the skunk did not like it. He ruffled up his cold black nose, and elevated his bushy tail his beautiful, plumy tail. I opened the door of his cage and, snatching the puppy, fled.
The skunk was a wise and good animal, really a gentleman, if treated politely. He appreciated my efforts on his behalf. He forbearingly lowered his tail, composed his fur, and walked out of the cage and into the near-by woods as tamely as a house tabby out for a stroll.
Grace’s work opens with the observation that “This book is a tribute to the West”. Ultimately, as a semi-comedic Western adventure, it is a charming read. She does in fact go hunting with her husband, killing first an elk and then an antelope. She reminds readers, however, that having bagged these two, she hunted from that point on only with a camera.
Elsewhere in the book, she shares a delightful story about getting lost with her husband. She also describes scenes of ducks swimming, does prancing, coyotes calling, and pikas gathering hay in the high Rockies. Throughout the book, the author conveys a fortitude that contradicts her fairly frequent self-deprecating remarks. As she notes by the end of the book, her adventures turned her into a seasoned traveler, and she was no longer able to claim the title of Woman Tenderfoot.
The next fortnight was not productive of many adventures or noteworthy incidents, though it contained plenty of hard work. Our track led across into the head of the San Luis Park, and so on down to Saguache — a Mexican town near the Rio Grande. There was a pleasant bit of natural history picked up along here, though.
The plover of these interior valleys does not seem to care for marshes, like the most of his race, but haunts the dry uplands. It is closely related to the golden plover, and is named in books Aegialitis montanus. A flock of these plovers dropped down on the plain one day, and I determined to get them for dinner, if possible. Jumping off my horse — who would stand stock-still wherever I left him— I approached to where they had dropped, and finally caught sight of one by distinguishing the dark dot of its eye against the light-tinted surface of the ground. Even then I really could not follow with my eye the outline of the bird’s body, so closely did the colors of the plumage agree with the white sand and dry grass. I shot it ; then found another, shot that; and so on until all were killed, none of them flying away, because their ” instinct,” or habit of thought, had taught them that when danger threatened they must invariably keep quiet ; movement would be exposure, and exposure would be fatal. I and my gun formed a danger they had had no experience of, and here their inherited “instinct” was at fault. When I had shot them I was unable, with he most careful searching, to find all the dead birds.
Ernest Ingersol’s early book, Knocking About the Rockies, chronicles two trips he took into the Rockies (1874 and 1877), accompanying scientific and surveying expeditions. His flair for natural history (he would go on to write a dozen works in the “nature” realm, one previously covered in this blog, with several more awaiting reading) led me to this book and his subsequent one about travels by train through the Rockies (The Crest of the Continent, 1885). I eagerly anticipated observations and reflections on the wildlife of the region. And he delivered well, including several allusions to Thoreau. What I had not reckoned on was that many of them would take a culinary turn. Here, “a pleasant bit of natural history” includes identifying a new bird species and then shooting it for dinner. Or not even dinner. Maybe just as a specimen to observe more closely, or possibly just because his gun is handy?
Climbing a high point back of our tents, which were in the midst of a sage-brush flat, close to the river, I had a queer little bit of good luck one evening. It was just at nightfall, and as I reached the top a large owl came swooping down and perched on a crag some distance off. Drawing my revolver, I held it up and walked slowly nearer, expecting neither to get within range nor hit the bird if I fired; but he let me get so near that at last, about thirty yards off, I blazed away, and down came the owl. Rushing up, I could see him lying in the brush a little way below; but it was some time before I got courage enough to reach down and take hold of him, for a bite or talon-grasp from a wounded owl is no joke. He proved to be stone-dead, and it was a long time before I found out the bloodless wound, the bullet having gone in at the base of the skull and out of the open mouth, without tearing any of the feathers. He was a fine barred or “cat” owl, about two feet long.
I am sure the owl did not appreciate this “queer little bit of good luck”.
It is easy, in hindsight, to condemn this behavior in a would-be naturalist. Of course, the great bird illustrator John James Audubon shot all his bird specimens, too, attaching their lifeless bodies to branches in order to draw them. While one or more cameras accompanied these expeditions — several of the illustrations in the book are engravings from photographs — photography had not advanced enough yet to make close-up images of wildlife possible. The understood technique for close study of animals was to shoot them first. This was slowly changing, as birders began carrying opera glasses into the field instead. And Ingersoll, himself, would rein in his hunting proclivities in his later volumes. Finally, it is to be noted that, in order to travel light and save money, the expeditions carried little food, intending that protein needs be satisfied with hunting and trapping.
Now that we have gotten that aspect of this book out of the way, we can sit back and enjoy some lovely late 19th Century prose about the wilds of the Colorado Rockies (including some delightful geological terms). Here is Grand Lake as seen (more like imagined, actually) from a mountaintop, sounding truly grand indeed:
From this pinnacle, in daylight, there is visible a picture of blue mountains whose sharp, serrated outline indicates a portion of the main range in front of Long’s Peak. Among those immutable yet ever-changing bulwarks lies a lake in a circle of guardian peaks whose heads tower thousands of feet above it, and whose bases meet no one knows how far below the surface of its dark waters. It is Grand Lake, a spot taboo among Indians and mysterious to white men. The scenery is primeval and wild beyond description: Roundtop is one mountain at least that has suffered no desecration since the ice ploughed its furrowed sides. The lake itself lies in the trough of a glacier basin, and its western barrier is an old terminal moraine, striking evidences of glacial action occurring on all sides in the scored cliffs and lateral moraines that hem it in. Its extent is about two miles by three, and its greatest depth unfathomable with a line six hundred feet in length. The water is cold, and clear near the shore, but of inky blackness in the middle. In the reflection usually pictured upon its calm bosom all the cloud-crowned heads about it meet in solemn conclave; but not seldom, and with little warning, furious winds sweep down and lash its lazy waters till the waves vie with each other in terrible energy.
Ingersoll clearly had a passion for climbing peaks and gazing out upon the landscape from their heights. Here, he waxes religious in extolling the glories of just such an experience:
However interesting it might prove, time forbids even to suggest all that meets the eye and is implanted in the memory while one is sitting for two or three hours on a peak of the Rocky Mountains — the surprising clearness of the air, so that your vision penetrates a hundred and fifty miles; the steady gale of wind sucked up from the heated valleys ; the frost and lightning shattered fragments of rock incrusted with lichens, orange and green and drab and white; the miniature mountains and scheme of drainage spread before you; the bright blue and yellow mats of moss-blossoms ; the herds of big-horned sheep, unconscious of your watching; the hawks leisurely sailing their vast aerial circles level with your eye ; the shadows of the clouds chasing each other across the landscape; the clouds and the azure dome itself; the purple, snow-embroidered horizon of mountains, “upholding heaven, holding down earth.” I can no more express with leaden types the ineffable, intangible ghost and grace of such an experience than I can weigh out to you the ozone that empurples the dust raised by the play of the antelopes in yonder amethyst valley. Moses need have chosen no particular mountain whereon to receive his inspiration. The divine Heaven approaches very near all these peaks.
Not that Ingersoll found every experience on his travels filled him with awe and wonder. Here, he expresses quite different sentiments in a dark spruce forest in the mountains:
What a sombre world that of the pine-woods is! None of the cheerfulness of the ash and maple groves — the alternation of sunlight and changing shadow, rustling leaves and fragrant shrubbery underneath, variety of foliage and bark on which to rest the jaded eye, exciting curiosity and delight: only the straight, upright trunks; the colorless, dusty ground; the dense masses of dead green, each mass a repetition of another; the scraggy skeletons of dead trees, all their bare limbs drooping in lamentation. The sound of the wind in the pines is equally grewsome. If the breeze be light, you hear a low, melancholy monody; if stronger, a hushed kind of sighing; when the hurricane lays his hand upon them the groaning trees wail out in awful agony, and, racked beyond endurance, cast themselves headlong to the stony ground. At such times each particular fibre of the pine’s body seems resonant with pain, and the straining branches literally shriek. This is not mere fancy, but something quite different from anything to be observed in hardwood forests. There the tempest roars; here it howls. I do not think the idea of the Banshee spirits could have arisen elsewhere than among the pines ; nor that any mythology growing up among people inhabiting these forests could have omitted such supernatural beings from its theogony.
But do not conclude that the gloom of the pine-woods clouded our spirits. So many trees had fallen where our tents were pitched that the sunshine peered down there, and at night the moon looked in upon us, rising weirdly over a vista of dead and lonely tree-tops. Then, too, the brook was always singing in our ears — absolutely singing! The sound of the incessant tumble of the water and boiling of the eddies made a heavy undertone, like the surf of the sea; but the breaking of the current over the higher rocks and the leaping of the foam down the cataracts produced a distinctly musical sound — a mystical ringing of sweet-toned bells. There is no mistaking this metallic melody, this clashing of tiny cymbals, and it must be this miniature blithe harmony that fine ears have heard on the beach in summer where the surf breaks gently.
While Ingersoll viewed these mountains, forests, and grasslands with rapture, he also saw what would soon be. Observing extensive grasslands at the feet of the mountain peaks, Ingersoll remarked that “Here are the future pastures for millions of cattle, and they are sure to be occupied.” I find it strange that for all the natural beauty he witnessed, he seemed resigned to (or even somewhat enthusiastic about) a future in which the Rockies would be dramatically modified — and the bison would nearly go extinct.
Clearly, the lynx in the drawing above is looking surprised, perhaps even shocked. Maybe this is because it was drawn in such an odd way — it almost looks like it belongs on ancient Chinese porcelain instead of a page of a nature book from a hundred years ago. Or maybe it is because it has just read the most proposterous attempt at the application of Darwinian evolutionary theory (mixed with Lamarck) imaginable. But I won’t tell you myself — I’ll let William Everett Cram share his rather deranged hypothesis, and you can make of it what you will:
Are hares and rabbits rodents or are they merely a degenerate branch of the carnivora forced by circumstances during some long forgotten period of hardship and poor hunting to adapt themselves to a vegetable diet? I have studied the question from one point of view and another until fully convinced that this is the true solution of many a vexed point concerning them. On more than one occasion I had been asked by people of more than common intelligence if I believed it possible for cats and rabbits to interbreed. My questioner in each instance felt perfectly certain that cases under observation bore sufficient proof to settle the matter beyond all ordinary doubt. Now while classed among the rodents, hares and rabbits have always been in a group by themselves. All other rodents are characterized by their incisors; two pairs of strong, chisel-like teeth for gnawing. In the hares and rabbits the under jaw is furnished in this manner, but in the upper jaw these are replaced by four small and comparatively weak teeth that resemble the front teeth of a flesh eater quite as much as they do the typical incisors of a rodent. In very young specimens there is yet another pair of even smaller teeth both in the upper and lower jaw beside the permanent ones, and it is a fact worth noting that in kittens and very young rabbits the dentition is more nearly alike than in adults. Now in pointing out the most insurmountable barrier to any possible relationship between cats and rabbits one would naturally indicate the distinguishing character of their teeth; yet while classifying animals by dentition we must not lose sight of the fact that the variation of the teeth was undoubtedly caused by the use and disuse of different teeth incident to the nature of the food the animal lived upon, and that we have no way of knowing just how long a period is required to bring about this modification. That the rodents became separated very far back in the history of animal life is a self-evident fact well borne out by sufficient testimony of fossil remains of the different ages, but let us suppose that the ancestors of our hares and rabbits were not included among the earlier rodents. Consider the possibility that at some much later period when the cat family had attained to something like its present stage of development, an island cut off from the mainland, should in the absence of native carnivora become overrun with mice, lemmings, and other small and defenceless animals; then that during a period of excessively cold winters a number of the smaller varieties of wildcats or lynxes driven southward by the cold or scarcity of food should find a way across the ice to this island, where, finding the hunting so good, they would remain until cut off from the mainland by the melting of the ice. Here they would breed and multiply until their numbers were increased to such an extent that at last the small animals that they had been living upon would be completely exterminated. Now in cases of this kind there are two courses which animals may follow according to the laws of Nature, for when the supply of food is cut off no animal will give up its hold on life without a tremendous struggle. The larger and stronger of these cats would begin to prey upon the smaller and weaker ones, while these in their turn would be under the necessity of feeding upon whatever they could get, and long before the last of the mice and insects had vanished would be tasting and nibbling at grass and berries and mushrooms, as cats, weasels and foxes will ever do in times of famine. Now the law of the survival of the fittest works unceasingly and is ever ready at just such an opening to step in and work surprising changes; use and disuse are its most potent factors; only a very small proportion of the cats on the island could possibly survive through many seasons of such privations, and these few would be the ones best able to adapt themselves to the changed conditions, viz. certain of the larger ones that proved strong and active enough to succeed in killing a sufficient number of their weaker brethren, and those among the smaller ones that managed to survive on a vegetable diet and at the same time maintain that swiftness and agility which formerly had enabled them to catch more than their share of the rapidly diminishing supply of mice and insects and “other small deer,” and must now insure their safety from being caught and eaten in their turn. The kittens of these few survivors would unquestionably have a somewhat better chance than their parents, one of Nature’s foremost laws being that the coming generation must be cherished, even at the expense of the one that went before; nourished for a time on milk (though the supply must necessarily be considerably shortened on account of the meager diet of their mothers), they would at a very early age learn to follow the example of the older ones and take to nibbling at such plants as had proved to be most nourishing to their race, in most cases quickly adapting themselves to a wholly vegetable diet. Then the law of use and disuse would step in. As generation succeeded generation of these small, grass-eating cats, the sharp two-edged canine teeth of their race (always inconspicuous in kittens) would grad- ually cease to be developed, while the incisors, which in a full-grown cat you may see as six small teeth set in a row between the projecting canines, would prove the more useful and in time would become the principal cutting or gnawing teeth, following the same law of development through need which ages before, we may suppose, built up the characteristic gnawing teeth of the true rodents. Other changes would of course be going on all the time. From constantly pushing through between the stems of bushes and thick grass (among which they would naturally find their safest hiding places) the round flat head of the cat tribe would give place to a narrow shape, which would have the added advantage of placing the eyes where they could see above and behind and on all sides at any time to forestall the possible approach of an enemy, whereas the eyes of a cat are set to focus directly in front in order better to see the quarry ahead, like those of a bird of prey. Following out along the same line we can see how the ears would grow longer to catch every faintest sound that might come down the wind, the hind legs longer for speed in running away, while the claws would lose their sharp tearing hooks through disuse; for the economy of Nature is such that only those essentials constantly in use may be long retained in perfection. Thus at the end of a few hundred thousand years (more or less) the inhabitants of our island would have evolved two separate types. Darwin says, ” Whatever the cause may be of each slight difference in the offspring from their parents (and a cause for each must exist), it is the steady accumulation, through natural selection, of such differences, when beneficial to the individual, that gives rise to all the more important modifications of structure, by which the innumerable beings on the face of the earth are enabled to struggle with each other, and the best adapted to survive.”
Alas, poor Darwin — I fear you have been most tragically and wrongfully used. But Cram doesn’t even stop there. He continues with a meticulous comparison of bone structures, offered up as evidence of his bizarre claim. Of course, Lamarck’s peculiar notion of acquired characteristics doesn’t help the situation. Finally, he offers this final tidbit, to sway any remaining disbelievers (though he does at least acknowledge its dubious scientific value):
In this connection it is to be remarked as certainly a little singular (though hardly to be accepted as scientific evidence) that the flesh of cats and rabbits is said to be so very similar in quality, that innkeepers in Europe are not infrequently convicted of substituting the one for the other without any imposition being suspected by their guests.
Tastes like chicken, perhaps? Maybe there is another evolutionary connection there that he missed!
At this point, I feel compelled to recognize my own efforts to maintain a respectful tone and genuine tolerance for scientific speculation in the nature books that I have been reading, given that most of them were written 100 years ago or more. Certainly, our understanding of prehistory has considerably advanced since 1912. However, I cannot escape the fact that this idea is completely nuts.
I find it rather amusing, in light of Cram’s own odd thinking, that he is quite willing to point out the particular failings of other mammals — remarking, for example, on “the well-known stupidity of the individual opossum”. Meanwhile, the porcupine “exhibits both in physique and character the degenerating effects of too easy living.” Cram is particularly aghast at the porcupine’s housekeeping behaviors: “For a home, the porcupine takes possession of any chance cavern among the ledges or some prostrate hollow log, apparently never making the slightest effort towards improving the condition of things as he finds them.”
For all this, late in the book, Cram weighs in on the question of whether animals act entirely out of instinct, or whether they possess intelligence sufficient to act out of reason. Ultimately, he favors reason, offering this haunting image of connecting for a moment with a member of the more-than-human world (as David Abram puts it):
There are times…when to see the thing in the doing has a convincing power greater, to the observer at least, than any conclusion arrived at by the logical balancing of evidence against evidence; when the turn of a neck, the gleam of a woodland eye looking for an instant’s glance straight into your own, leaves you with a sense of “knowing without knowing how you know” that behind the glance that met yours was a thought, and that your image reflected in the eye of the wild thing that looked at you would remain as a memory to be puzzled over.
I will leave Cram here, in this thoughtful moment of poetic reverie, lest I give in to temptations to disparage him further. Suffice it to say that sometimes publishing a sequel to a book can be a grave mistake.
We open another eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of things–whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision.
Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes were added.
Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees. The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or the writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key.
Here, in what is undoubtedly the finest essay in this volume (“Sharp Eyes”), Burroughs hints at possessing an ecological vision, half a century before the term “ecosystem” was coined in 1935. (Although Ernest Haeckel came up with “ecology” in 1866, that concept, too, awaited the 20th century to develop much further.) Yet here, in this passage, lies the beginnings of a transition from merely identifyingliving things (birds, plants, etc.) to seeingliving things in relationship to each other and the landscape. The more naturalists enhance their base of knowledge, the more “words” they can glimpse, and the better authors they can become, assembling the words into meaningful sentences that can tell wonderful tales: “Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes, are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them.” Wonder emerges when we look beyond the name of the bird, to begin exploring its behaviors at a particular moment.
Later in the same essay, Burroughs offers further guidance on seeing the natural world deeply:
…the habit of observation is the habit of clear and decisive gazing. Not by a first casual glance, but by a steady deliberate aim of the eye are the rare and characteristic things discovered. You must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind. The sharp-shooter picks out his man and knows him with fatal certainty from a stump, or a rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to locate, not only form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye, but also a faculty which they call individuality–that which separates, discriminates, and sees in every object its essential character. This is just as necessary to the naturalist as to the artist or the poet. The sharp eye notes specific points and differences,–it seizes upon and preserves the individuality of the thing.
These insights (in a literal and figurative sense) comprise the highlight of this volume. I think of this work as one of transition; he moved to a farm in the Hudson Valley in 1873, so these essays mark his first encounters with a landscape he would grow to know even more deeply over the next 48 years. Many of his delightful works deeply rooted in the Hudson landscape and adjacent regions of New York State (such as the Catskills) were yet to be penned in 1879. I found these writings pleasant enough, I suppose, and certainly diverse; they covered beekeeping, trout fishing, weather prognostication, wild strawberries, traveling, an expedition to Canada, and, of course, birds of all kinds. (One essay, comparing British birds to American ones, is even entitled, “Birds and Birds”. Cue Monty Python’s infamous “Spam Song”.)
A couple more passages will suffice, I think, to offer a satisfactory sampling of Locusts and Wild Honey. In his “Birds and Birds” essay, Burroughs reminds us of how long ago the book was written. In 1879, passenger pigeons were still fairly abundant. This led Burroughs to wonder, “The pigeon lays but two eggs, and is preyed upon by both man and beast, millions of them meeting a murderous death every year; yet always some part of the country is swarming with untold numbers of them.” A tragic footnote, dated 1895, adds that “This is no longer the case. The passenger pigeon now seems on the verge of extinction.” Even Burroughs didn’t see that coming.
Next, a lovely, rich description of Rondout Brook in the Catskills, complete with some 19th century geological terms:
If there ever was a stream cradled in the rocks, detained lovingly by them, held and fondled in a rocky lap or tossed in rocky arms, that.stream is the Rondout. Its course for several miles from its head is over the stratified rock, and into this it has worn a channel that presents most striking and peculiar features. Now it comes silently along on the top of the rock, spread out and flowing over that thick, dark green moss that is found only in the coldest streams; then drawn into a narrow canal only four or five feet wide, through which it shoots, black and rigid, to be presently caught in a deep basin with shelving, overhanging rocks, beneath which the pheebe-bird builds in security, and upon which the fisherman stands and casts his twenty or thirty feet of line without fear of being thwarted by the brush ; then into a black, well-like pool, ten or fifteen feet deep, with a smooth, circular wall of rock on one side worn by the water through long ages; or else into a deep, oblong pocket, into which and out of which the water glides without a ripple.
The surface rock is a coarse sandstone superincumbent upon a lighter-colored conglomerate that looked like Shawangunk grits, and when this latter is reached by the water it seems to be rapidly disintegrated by it, thus forming the deep excavations alluded to.
My eyes had never before beheld such beauty in a mountain stream. The water was almost as trans- parent as the air, — was, indeed, like liquid air; and as it lay in these wells and pits enveloped in shadow, or lit up by a chance ray of the vertical sun, it was a perpetual feast to the eye, —so cool, so deep, so pure; every reach and pool like a vast spring. You lay down and drank or dipped the water up in your cup, and found it just the right degree of refreshing coldness. One is never prepared for the clearness of the water in these streams. It is always a surprise… Absolutely without stain or hint of impurity, it seems to magnify like a lens, so that the bed of the stream and the fish in it appear deceptively near. It is rare to find even a trout stream that is not a little “off color,” as they say of diamonds, but the waters in the section of which I am writing have the genuine ray; it is the undimmed and untarnished diamond.
If I were a trout, I should ascend every stream till I found the Rondout. It is the ideal brook. What homes these fish have, what retreats under the rocks, what paved or flagged courts and areas, what crystal depths where no net or snare can reach them!—no mud, no sediment, but here and there in the clefts and seams of the rock patches of white gravel, — spawning beds ready-made.
The finishing touch is given by the moss with which the rock is everywhere carpeted. Even in the narrow grooves or channels where the water runs the swiftest, the green lining is unbroken. It sweeps down under the stream and up again on the other side, like some firmly-woven texture. It softens every outline and cushions every stone.
Oh, for the days when naturalists out in the wilds would drink the waters of mountain streams with delight (and impunity)!
I close with this marvelous quote, from the same essay as above (“A Bed of Boughs”), on the virtues of immersing oneself in wild nature: “It is our partial isolation from Nature that is dangerous; throw yourself unreservedly upon her and she rarely betrays you.”
Three volumes of my 23-volume Burroughs collection down, and 20 more to go. Stay tuned…
Nature becomes to the soul a perpetual letter from God,freshly written every day and each hour.
I am not quite certain what to make of this book or its author, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887). A contemporary of Thoreau, the two may have met but were certainly not close acquaintances. Thoreau does report in his journal about attending church in New York City to see him preach. It is not known whether Beecher, a Unitarian clergyman, ever read Emerson or Thoreau. Beecher wrote one novel — Norwood — entirely unknown today, though his sister’s novel remains famous for helping start the Civil War (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Beecher published only this one collection of writings that included nature essays (among other topics in the volume). Yet he is not an obvious progenitor of any later nature authors, although he did develop a close friendship with William Hamilton Gibson late in his life (this friendship included marrying Gibson and Emma Ludlow Blanchard in 1878). The book title is one of its most mysterious features, though there is no cosmic significance intended. It turns out that Beecher had written a number of columns for the New York Independent Newspaper, with the ones authored by him denoted with a star. Inevitably, then, this book is a compilation of those starred papers.
Opening the book with care — it is one of the oldest titles in my collection — I steeled myself for flowery, overwrought prose and a lot of reflections of a religious bent (as the title of this blog post suggests). And while these characteristics are present, so, too, is a passion for nature and a delightfully whimsical and occasionally even self-deprecating sense of humor. His essay on books and bookshops (see my previous post) rings amazingly true for me today. And while he was certainly no scientist, he did have a keen command of plant identification and basic botanical nomenclature (both wildflowers and trees) and a working knowledge of common names of birds. Here are two passages on flowering weeds from “A Discourse on Flowers” that opens the Nature section of his book. First, dog fennel, a tall and odoriferous weed I contend with each year on my property in Georgia:
What shall we say of mayweed, irreverently called dog-fennel by some? Its acrid juice, its heavy pungent odor, make it disagreeable; and being disagreeable, its enormous Malthusian propensities to increase render it hateful to damsels of white stockings, compelled to walk through it on dewy mornings. Arise, O scythe, and devour it!
And second, the lowly dandelion that covers my yard with its festive yellow blooms:
You can not forget, if you would, those golden kisses all over the cheeks of the meadow, queerly called dandelions. There are many greenhouse blossoms less pleasing to us than these. And we have reached through many a fence, since we were incarcerated, like them, in a city, to pluck one of these yellow flower drops. Their passing away is more spiritual than their bloom. Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than the transparent seed-globe — a fairy dome of splendid architecture.
His greatest rapture, though, he reserves for the stately Connecticut elms. This extended passage evokes what America has lost, and how different the small town landscape must have been 150 years ago when elms were commonplace:
A village shaded by thoroughly grown elms can not but be handsome. Its houses may be huts; its streets may be ribbed with rocks, or channeled with ruts; it may be as dirty as New York, and as frigid as Philadelphia; and yet these vast, majestic tabernacles of the air would redeem it to beauty. These are temples indeed, living temples, neither waxing old nor shattered by Time, that cracks and shatters stone, but rooting wider with every generation and casting a vaster round of grateful shadow with every summer. We had rather walk beneath an avenue of elms than inspect the noblest cathedral that art ever accomplished. What is it that brings one into such immediate personal and exhilarating sympathy with venerable trees! One instinctively uncovers as he comes beneath them; he looks up with proud veneration into the receding and twilight recesses; he breathes a thanksgiving to God every time his cool foot falls along their shadows. They waken the imagination and mingle the olden time with the present. Did any man of contemplative mood ever stand under an old oak or elm, without thinking of other days, — imagining the scenes that had transpired in their presence? These leaf-mountains seem to connect the past and the present to us as mountain ridges attract clouds from both sides of themselves…
No other tree is at all comparable to the elm. The ash is, when well grown, a fine tree, but clumpy; the maple has the same character. The horse-chestnut, the linden, the mulberry, and poplars, (save that tree-spire, the Lombardy poplar,) are all of them plump, round, fat trees, not to be despised, surely, but representing single dendrological ideas. The oak is venerable by association, and occasionally a specimen is found possessing a kind of grim and ragged glory. But the elm, alone monarch of trees, combines in itself the elements of variety, size, strength, and grace, such as no other tree known to us can at all approach or remotely rival. It is the ideal of trees; the true Absolute Tree! Its main trunk shoots up, not round and smooth, like an over-fatted, lymphatic tree, but channeled and corrugated, as if its athletic muscles showed their proportions through the bark, like Hercules’ limbs through his tunic. Then suddenly the whole idea of growth is changed, and multitudes of long, lithe branches radiate from the crotch of the tree, having the effect of straightness and strength, yet really diverging and curving, until the outermost portions droop over and give to the whole top the most faultless grace. If one should at first say that the elm suggested ideas of strength and uprightness, on looking again he would correct himself, and say that it was majestic, uplifting beauty that it chiefly represented. But if he first had said that it was graceful and magnificent beauty, on a second look he would correct himself, and say that it was vast and rugged strength that it set forth. But at length he would say neither; he would say both; he would say that it expressed a beauty of majestic strength, and a grandeur of graceful beauty.
Such domestic forest treasures are a legacy which but few places can boast. Wealth can build houses, and smooth the soil; it can fill up marshes, and create lakes or artificial rivers; it can gather statues and paintings; but no wealth can buy or build elm trees — the floral glory of New England. Time is the only architect of such structures; and blessed are they for whom Time was pleased to fore-think! No care or expense should be counted too much to maintain the venerable elms of New England in all their regal glory!
Elm trees are not the only living beings lost or diminished since Beecher’s days. Similarly, we are rapidly losing the diversity and number of insects that were once present in the American landscape. Consider this account of a trouting excursion gone awry. Can you imagine encountering this many (and this great a diversity of) grasshoppers on a rural New England fishing trip today?
Still further north is another stream, something larger, and much better or worse according to your luck. It is easy of access, and quite unpretending. There is a bit of a pond, some twenty feet in diameter, from which it flows; and in that there are five or six half-pound trout who seem to have retired from active life and given themselves to meditation in this liquid convent. They were very tempting, but quite untemptable. Standing afar off, we selected an irresistible fly, and with long line we sent it pat into the very place. It fell like a snow-flake. No trout should have hesitated a moment. The morsel was delicious. The nimblest of them should have flashed through the water, broke the surface, and with a graceful but decisive curve plunged downward, carrying the insect with him. Then we should, in our turn, very cheerfully, lend him a hand, relieve him of his prey, and, admiring his beauty, but pitying his untimely fate, bury him in the basket. But he wished no translation. We cast our fly again and again; we drew it hither and thither; we made it skip and wriggle; we let it fall plash like a blundering bug or fluttering moth; and our placid spectators calmly beheld our feats, as if all this skill was a mere exercise for their amusement, and their whole duty consisted in looking on and preserving order.
Next, we tried ground-bait, and sent our vermicular hook down to their very sides. With judicious gravity they parted, and slowly sailed toward the root of an old tree on the side of the pool. Again, changing place, we will make an ambassador of a grasshopper. Laying down our rod, we prepare to catch the grasshopper. That is in itself no slight feat. At the first step you take, at least forty bolt out and tumble headlong into the grass; some cling to the stems, some are creeping under the leaves, and not one seems to be within reach. You step again; another flight takes place, and you eye them with fierce penetration, as if thereby you could catch some one of them with your eye. You can not, though. You brush the grass with your foot again. Another hundred snap out, and tumble about in every direction. There are large ones and small ones, and middling-sized ones; there are gray and hard old fellows; yellow and red ones; green and striped ones. At length it is wonderful to see how populous the grass is. If you did not want them, they would jump into your very hand. But they know by your looks that you are out a-fishing. You see a very nice young fellow climbing up a steeple stem, to get a good look-out and see where you are. You take good aim and grab at him. The stem you catch, but he has jumped a safe rod. Yonder is another creeping among some delicate ferns. With broad palm you clutch him and all the neighboring herbage too. Stealthily opening your little finger, you see his leg; the next finger reveals more of him; and opening the next you are just beginning to take him out with the other hand, when, out he bounds and leaves you to renew your entomological pursuits! Twice you snatch handfuls of grass and cautiously open your palm to find that you have only grass. It is quite vexatious. There are thousands of them here and there, climbing and wriggling on that blade, leaping off from that stalk, twisting and kicking on that vertical spider’s web, jumping and bouncing about under your very nose, hitting you in your face, creeping on your shoes, or turning summersets and tracing every figure of parabola or ellipse in the air, and yet not one do you get. And there is such, a heartiness and merriment in their sallies! They are pert and gay, and do not take your intrusion in the least dudgeon. If any tender-hearted person ever wondered how a humane man could bring himself to such a cruelty as the impaling of an insect, let him hunt for a grasshopper in a hot day among tall grass; and when at length he secures one, the affixing him upon the hook will be done without a single scruple, with judicial solemnity, and as a mere matter of penal justice.
Now then the trout are yonder. We swing our line to the air, and give it a gentle cast toward the desired spot, and a puff of south wind dexterously lodges it in the branch of the tree. You plainly see it strike, and whirl over and over, so that no gentle pull will loosen it. You draw it north and south, east and west; you give it a jerk up and a pull down; you try a series of nimble twitches; in vain you coax it in this way and solicit it in that. Then you stop and look a moment, first at the trout and then at your line. Was there ever anything so vexatious? Would it be wrong to get angry? In fact you feel very much like it. The very things you wanted to catch, the grasshopper and the trout, you could not; but a tree, that you did not in the least want, you have caught fast at the first throw. You fear that the trout will be scared. You cautiously draw nigh and peep down. Yes, there they are, looking at you and laughing as sure as ever trout laughed! They understand the whole thing. With a very decisive jerk you snap your line, regain the remnant of it, and sit down to repair it, to put on another hook, you rise up to catch another grasshopper, and move on down the stream to catch a trout!
In this brief passage, also on the theme of fishing, Beecher gazes longingly at a brook plunging down the mountainside. He urges readers to leave some wild places unfished (untouched). Or then again…
…we are on the upper brink of another series of long down-plunges, each one of which would be enough for a day’s study. Below these are cascades and pools in which the water whirls friskily around like a kitten running earnestly after its tail. But we will go no further down. These are the moun- tain jewels ; the necklaces which it loves to hang down from its hoary head upon its rugged bosom.
Shall we take out our tackle? That must be a glorious pool yonder for trout ! No, my friend, do not desecrate such a scene by throwing a line into it with piscatory intent. Leave some places in nature to their beauty, unharassed, for the mere sake of their beauty. Nothing could tempt us to spend an hour here in fishing; — all the more because there is not a single trout in the whole brook.
To declare Beecher an early conservationist akin to Thoreau would be a stretch, I think. But he does make a strident call for respecting old trees instead of cutting them down. Ultimately, his motivation is less for the sake of the tree itself, however, than for its spiritual significance as a creation of God.
Thus do you stand, noble elms! Lifted up so high are your topmost boughs, that no indolent birds care to seek you; and only those of nimble wings, and they with unwonted beat, that love exertion, and aspire to sing where none sing higher. — Aspiration! so Heaven gives it pure as flames to the noble bosom. But debased with passion and selfishness it comes to bo only Ambition!
It was in the presence of this pasture-elm, which we name the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow that we had indeed become owners of the soil ! It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face, and when I whispered to myself, This is mine, there was a shrinking as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory, at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said, “I may not call thee property, and that property mine! Thou belongest to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty temple where birds praise God. Thou belongest to no man’s hand, but to all men’s eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God ! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots, and the ax from thy trunk.”
For, remorseless men there are crawling yet upon the face of the earth, smitten blind and inwardly dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages is, that it is food for the ax and the saw ! These are the wretches of whom the Scripture speaks: “A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees.“
Thus famous, or rather infamous, was the last owner but one, before me, of this farm. Upon the crown of the hill, just where an artist would have planted them, had he wished to have them exactly in the right place, grew some two hundred stalworth and ancient maples, beeches, ashes, and oaks, a narrow belt-like forest, forming a screen from the northern and western winds in winter, and a harp of endless music for the summer. The wretched owner of this farm, tempted of the Devil, cut down the whole blessed band and brotherhood of trees, that he might fill his pocket with two pitiful dollars a cord for the wood! Well, his pocket was the best part of him. The iron furnaces have devoured my grove, and their huge stumps, that stood like gravestones, have been cleared away, that a grove may be planted in the same spot, for the next hundred years to nourish into the stature and glory of that which is gone.
In other places, I find the memorials of many noble trees slain; here, a hemlock that carried up its eternal green a hundred feet into the winter air; there, a huge double-trunked chestnut, dear old grandfather of hundreds of children that have for generations clubbed its boughs, or shook its nut-laden top, and laughed and shouted as bushels of chestnuts rattled down. Now, the tree exists only in the form of loop-holed posts and weather-browned rails. I do hope the fellow got a sliver in his finger every time he touched the hemlock plank, or let down the bars made of those chestnut rails !
What then, it will be said, must no one touch a tree? must there be no fuel, no timber? Go to the forest for both. There are no individual trees there, only a forest. One trunk here, and one there, leaves the forest just as perfect as before, and gives room for young aspiring trees to come up in the world. But for a man to cut down a large, well-formed, healthy tree from the roadside, or from pastures or fields, is a piece of unpardonable Vandalism. It is worse than Puritan hammers upon painted windows and idolatrous statues. Money can buy houses, build walls, dig and drain the soil, cover the hills with grass, and the grass with herds and flocks. But no money can buy the growth of trees. They are born of Time. Years are the only coin in which they can be paid for. Beside, so noble a thing is a well-grown tree, that it is a treasure to the community, just as is a work of art. If a monarch were to blot out Euben’s Descent from the Cross, or Angelo’s Last Judgment, or batter to pieces the marbles of Greece, the whole world would curse him, and for ever. Trees are the only art-treasures which belong to our villages. They should be precious as gold.
But let not the glory and grace of single trees lead us to neglect the peculiar excellences of the forest. We go from one to the other, needing both ; as in music we wander from melody to harmony, and from many-voiced and intertwined harmonies back to simple melody again.
To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two groves are alike. There is as marked a difference between different forests as between different communities. A grove of pines without underbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resinous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple woods, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light and shade, or the sound of its leaves.
Do I detect, at the close of this passage, incipient thoughts about the diversity of forest ecosystems? Alas, it is a thought he carries no further, beyond remarking on his favorite blending of forest trees.
Ultimately, his thoughts of nature are bounded by his ultimate aim, appreciating God in all his glory. Here, toward the end of the book, Beecher considers the various uses of nature. While he does not identify fully with the utilitarian perspective, he does not reject it, either. Ultimately, he advocates nature appreciation as a form of religious devotion. We will leave him there, pondering the ineffable as the sun sinks low in the sky over New England.
As things go in our utilitarian age, men look upon the natural world in one of three ways: the first, as a foundation for industry, and all objects are regarded in their relations to industry. Grass is for hay, flowers are for medicine, springs are for dairies, rocks are for quarries, trees are for timber, streams are for navigation or for milling, clouds are for rain, and rain is for harvests. The relation of an object to some commercial or domestic economy, is the end of observation. Beyond that there is no interest to it.
The second aspect in which men behold nature, is the purely scientific. We admire a man of science who is so all-sided that he can play with fancy or literality, with exactitudes or associations, just as he will. But a mere man of accuracy, one of those conscientious-eyed men, that will never see any thing but just what is there, and who insist upon bringing every thing to terms; who are for ever dissecting nature, and coming to the physical truths in their most literal forms, these men are our horror. We should as soon take an analytic chemist to dine with us, that he might explain the constituent elements of every morsel that Eve ate; or an anatomist into a social company, to describe the bones, and muscles, and nerves that were in full play in the forms of dear friends. Such men think that nature is perfectly understood when her mechanism is known; when her gross and physical facts are registered, and when all her details are catalogued and described. These are nature’s dictionary-makers. These are the men who think that the highest enjoyment of a dinner would be to be present in the kitchen and that they might see how the food is compounded and cooked.
A third use of nature is that which poets and artists make, who look only for beauty.
All of these are partialists. They all misinterpret, because they all proceed as if nature were constructed upon so meager a schedule as that which they peruse; as if it were a mere matter of science, or of commercial use, or of beauty; whereas these are but single developments among hundreds.
The earth has its physical structure and machinery, well worth laborious study; it has its relations to man’s bodily wants, from which spring the vast activities of industrial life; it has its relations to the social faculties, and the finer sense of the beautiful in the soul; but far above all these are its declared uses, as an interpreter of God, a symbol of invisible spiritual truths, the ritual of a higher life, the highway upon which our thoughts are to travel toward immortality, and toward the realm of just men made perfect that do inherit it.
For its vast age, my copy of this book offers few clues as to its history. There is a bookseller stamp for J.T. Heald, Bookseller and Binder, 127 Market Street, Wilmington, Delaware. There is also a signature without a date or other identifying information. The name appears to be Hannah B. Michner. I was unable to locate the name online when searched with Delaware, Pennsylvania,
Wilmington, or Philadelphia. I am not clear if the last name is a maiden name or a name received upon marriage. Nor do I have any hint regarding whether the owner purchased the book new, in Delaware, or used, somewhere else.
