Brook Magic: “Wild Pastures” by Winthrop Packard (1909)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Jun 232022
 

Was it an accident, or intention, that caused Winthrop Packard to title this volume using his own initials for inspiration (just as he had with Woodland Paths the year before)? How much is Packard playing with the reader in these essays? Does he seek to evoke a magical element in nature as a rhetorical device pointing to the wonders of the everyday? Or does he genuinely believe in it? Is his “science skepticism” real, or merely feigned? Who is laughing at whom? I honestly don’t know for sure. All I can do is present what I have read and let readers decide for themselves.

Horace Lunt opened his Short Cuts and By-Paths by noting that “not much of scientific value has been demonstrated in these pages” — then went on to describe with scientific exactitude the nature of lichens, mosses, and invertebrates of the seashore. If his work is “not much of scientific value”, I am not sure what to make of Packard’s prose. His descriptions are pleasant (he has a keen eye for colors) and he has quite a bit of botanical knowledge. He demonstrates basic awareness of common butterflies and their behaviors. And when writing about Ponkapoag Pond in Blue Hills State Reservation south of Boston, he describes the process by which a pond becomes a bog and then a marsh and eventually a field. Yet when he shares the ways of the witch hazel shrub in his chapter “Brook Magic”, he veers away from science into folklore, where he seems more comfortable:

Pluck one of the [witch-hazel] nuts of a midsummer evening and look it in the face. Note the little shrewd pig eyes of the witch ingrown in it, the funny shrewish tip-tilted nose, the puffy cheeks and eyelids. See that slender horn in the forehead, the sure mark of the witch. No wonder that it has the name witch-hazel with such ways and such faces growing all over it at a time when most other trees and shrubs have but finished blossoming. But if you want further proof that the shrub harbors witches than you need but to examine its oval, wavy-toothed leaves just at this time of the year and see the little conical red witch-caps hung on them. There need be but little doubt that, sitting under it at midnight of a full moon, you may see the witch faces detach themselves from the limbs, put on these red caps and sail off across the great yellow disk. That such things are not seen oftener is that people are dull and go to bed instead of sitting out under the witch-hazel at midnight of a full moon.

To be sure there are scientific men, grey-bearded entomologists, who will tell us that these little red caps are galls, the rearing-place of plant aphids, caused by the laying of the mother insect’s egg within the tissue of the leaf, but one might as well believe that the witches hang their hats on the witch-hazel over night as to believe that the laying of a minute egg in the tissue of a leaf could cause the plant to grow a witch hat.

No doubt these same wise men would explain to you that it is not possible to become invisible by sprinkling fern seed on your head during the dark of the moon and saying the right words, but did one of them ever try it?

It is appropriate that the witch-hazel should shade the portals through which the brook enters the glen at the foot of the pasture, for the path here enters you into a world of witchery where the glamour of the place will hold you long of a summer afternoon.

Winthrop Packard, what are you saying here? My first thought was that he was alluding to the seemingly magical facets of scientific explanations, but I wonder at that. There is another possibility, namely, that he longs to inhabit a world where magic still exists — evoking Donovan more than half a century later, “Still I hear facts, figures, and logic; fain would I hear lore, legend, and magic.” Is the scientist in Packard’s mind a wise interpreter of nature, or a bogeyman dispelling enchanting fancies in the light of empirical knowledge?

Packard is not quite done arguing with science, however serious or whimsical his remarks might be. In a later essay on “Some Butterfly Friends,” he speaks more directly about scientific knowledge. In the passage below, he engages in a flight of fancy before coming back to earth with a more viable explanation of pollination:

I do not know what the clethra which gleams in white in the dusk should need anything more than its own white beautfy to call the moth to its wooing. Perhaps it does not need more. Perhaps all this fine fragrance isbut the overflow of its soul’s delight at being young and chastely beautiful, and trembling in the ultra violet darkness on that delicious verge of life that waits the wooer. I half fancy that it is true of all perfume of flowers, that it is less a call to butterfly or bee to come to their winning than it is a radiation of delight from their own pure hearts at the dawning of the full joy of living. I am not always willing to take the word of the scientific investigator on these points as final. The scientists of the not very remote past have known so much that is not so!

It is possible that, just as a hunting dog picks up a scent that is strong in his nostrils and has no power in ours, so the flowers that we call scentless send out an odor too faintly fine for our senses, yet one that the antennae of moth or bee may entangle as it passes and hold for a certain clue. Perhaps the scents that are only faint to us carry far for the butterfly, but if so, and if flower perfumes are made only for the calling of insects, why need they be made so intoxicating to the human senses?

And there is a third possibility — that it is all just a game, these evocations of magic in pastures and streams, this poking at scientists. Just like the naming of his books — Wild Pastures, Woodland Paths. Still, at least his words, images, and imaginings make for fairly pleasant if somewhat insipid reading — an acceptable diversion for a long sultry summer afternoon. Oh — and the book cover is pretty, too.

Winthrop Packard is decidedly obscure, having thus far avoided an entry in Wikipedia. He lived from 1862 until 1943, and he wrote quite a few books in the “nature” genre. One source notes that he was also a lyricist and composer. Thanks to a newspaper obituary, I also know that Packard was secretary-treasurer of the Massachusetts Audobon Society and that he established and financed the Society’s first bird sanctuary (Moose Hill) in Sharon, Massachusetts in 1916. He graduated from MIT in 1885 and worked as a chemist in Boston. He somehow ended up in the newspaper business, becoming editor of the Canton Journal in 1894 and then switching to National Magazine, Youth’s Companion, and finally the Transcript. He was a member of an expedition to Alaska and Siberia in 1900. He married Alice Petrie and had four sons.

My copy of Wild Pastures is in superb shape; the cover looks practically new. It was signed by a previous owner, Ethel R. Ulrick (Ulrich?) on October 25th, 1911; she appears to have accomplished an even greater level of Internet obscurity than Packard.

The Attentive, Discriminating Rambler: “Short Cuts and By-Paths” by Horace Lunt (1891)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Education, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Jun 222022
 

In 1891, Horace Lunt published what would be the last in a trio of nature books. The first, Across Lots (1888), was previously reviewed in this blog. The middle volume, As the Wild Bee Hums, appears to be available only through online archives. I return to an original volume of his work. In addition to obtaining a glimpse of his nature studies three years later, this process also resulted in online research that turned up a few more fragments of information about his life. More about that anon.

The publisher used the same decorative cover for this volume as is found on Across Lots. One suggestion that Lunt has “come up in the world” a bit as a writer since 1888 is that this volume has several black and white illustrations, most notably the pair of chickadees above. Another difference is that, while much of the book is filled with Lunt’s trademark nature rambles in New England over different seasons of the year, there are also several essays suggesting that Lunt has broadened his connections to other scientists, while also gaining scientific knowledge himself. In various parts of the book, Lunt writes about invertebrate life in ocean tidepools, diverse species of flies, lichens (considered plants at the time), and mosses. In each case, he makes certain to use the appropriate scientific terms; for lichens, those include apothecia, gonidia, thallus, and podetia. Unfortunately, the book’s illustrations are strictly decorative, and for the lichen novice, trying to grasp the nature of lichens without visuals strikes me as well nigh impossible. The same problem, unfortunately, is true of Lunt’s flies, tidepool life, and mosses. Lunt’s self-professed enthusiasm for nature is evident throughout; however, even robust (at times, bordering on eloquent) descriptive text is insufficient to convey many of those natural wonders to his readers.

Lunt’s circle of correspondents and/or writers he has read appears to have expanded considerably over three years. Not surprisingly, he mentions Torrey, Burroughs, Darwin, and Thoreau. But he also mentions a “Mr. Minot” — Henry Davis Minot (1859-1890), a railway magnate and ornithologist with whom we will become better acquainted in a future post. He also mentions George B. Emerson (1797-1881), educator and President of the Boston Society of Natural History as well as the cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His work, A Report on the Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of Massachusetts (1846), has been identified by some scholars as marking the beginning of the American Conservation Movement due to its advocacy of wiser forest management practices. Lunt names a female correspondent, Corinne Hoyt Coleman, living in New Hampshire. Finally, Lunt also refers to a “Robinson”, but his steadfast refusal to offer a first name or other details ensures that person’s enduring anonymity.

Before I close my review of this book, I will share a couple of Lunt’s most noteworthy descriptive passages. This first is from a visit to the seaside in his essay, “By the Sea” (complete with an obligatory military simile):

To Norwood’s bluffs, or the long stretch of sandy beach, I go to study the wonders of the shore in detail, and to obtain a nearer view of the ocean’s wrinkled face. It has character — its face is sterner and more imposing and expressive than the face of an inland sea. It’s voice is “The eternal bass in nature’s anthem,” and its breath has a healthful savoriness, a briny flavor, as refreshing to the scent as the perfume of flowers is to the homeward-bound sea voyager.

The winds play with it till it becomes impatient and beats itself against the rocks. Its plastic lips are wrought into a thousand gnarls and convolutions, as they curl through the fissures and caverns, while its foamy tongues, licking the stony bluffs as they recede, leave behind them many pretty cascades that flow gently down the slopes, till the waters mingle again with the incoming waves.

As there are lulls in the wind on a breezy day, so at intervals, as if exhausted with its fury, the sea by the shore becomes suddenly almost calm. Only gurgling, purling sounds are heard for a minute or two, as the wavelets lap the edges of the rocks. But it is gathering strength for another onslaught. Far out, the seas are running high again. A long procession of them swell up from the waters and roll toward the shore at the rate of four hundred feet in thirty seconds. I watch the leader rising higher and concaving as it comes rapidly on. Its crest undulates and throws up streamers of spray, like the flying hairs on the mane of a galloping horse. Now the climax is reached. The sharp edge bends in graceful curves, tumbles over and breaks with dull, heavy roar, into a long line of foam, that shoots swiftly up the steep, shingly beach; then, as it retreats, rolls back a thousand stones, which, as they strike against each other, make a crackling, rattling sound, like the snapping of musket caps by a regiment of soldiers.

Finally, here are a couple of excerpts from Lunt’s encounter with the moss world in his “Winter Sketches”:

So these modest, unpretentious mosses are humbling fulfilling their mission on the earth. They are continually making new leaves, while the old leaves are converted into rich mld, from which in time will spring up an army of higher plants, with their flourish of trumpets and their flying colors. Here at the foot of a tree is a large clump of moss with finer leaves and the thickly matted stems more delicately spun. If a yard or two of yellowish green plush with long hirsute pile had been carelessly spread out and conformed to the general unevenness of the ground, it could hardly have been distinguished, at a distance, from this beautiful piece of Nature’s weaving. The numerous awl-shaped, strongly curved leaves are arranged only on one side of the stem, as if the heavy winds blowing constantly on them from one direction had bent them, like grass-blades in the meadows. From out this soft, mossy bed has grown a mimic forest of brownish-yellow stems or pedicels on which are attached tiny fruit-cups — cornucopiae, arched or bent over like bows. A month or two ago each one of these fruit-cases was completely sealed by a ring of cells growing between the rim of the orofice and cover, that the vessels might be impervious to the weather during the growth of the spores. As the cases ripened, the cells were ruptured and the covers thus dropped off, and the spores or moss seeds were poured out and sown by the Winter’s wind…

If the attentive, descriminating rambler accepts the invitation which these humble but cheerful plants offer, he will be surprised to know how many species will salute him, and impart to him the various entertaining lessons in moss lore during an ordinary woodland walk. Each kind takes him by the button, as it were, and talks to him privately of its special characters and peculiarities.

I am struggling here with the image of a carefree talking moss plant. I think I may prefer Lunt in his more martial moments.

Since my last blog on Horace Lunt, I learned a bit more about him. He was born in York, Maine, and became an orphan at age five. He and his brother Samuel were raised by their aunt and uncle in Kittery, Maine. Another new tidbit about his life was that he may have had a leg amputated following the Civil War. His interest in nature evidently predated the war. In addition to writing, Lunt also gave public speeches. He was found dead in Essex County, Massachusetts, in May 1911 at the age of 74.

My volume of Short Cuts and By-Paths is neither signed nor stamped.

For the Birds: “Little Brothers of the Air” by Olive Thorne Miller (1892)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Jun 202022
 

The book that started me on this peculiar quest to resurrect long-dead obscure nature writers was In American Fields and Forests, published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1909. It was an anthology of six American nature writers. Two have retained their renown to this day — Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. One was quite famous at the time and, though largely forgotten today, still has several works in print — John Burroughs. (He will soon become a regular in this blog — more on that anon.) The remaining three are lost to the history of nature writing, though I hope to change that in some small way. They were Bradford Torrey, Dallas Lore Sharp, and Olive Thorne Miller. I have already read several books by Torrey and Sharp (with others waiting on my shelf). But I have been putting off Olive Thorne Miller, until now.

Harriet Mann Miller (1831-1918) published several books on birds under the pen name of Olive Thorne Miller. She had a fairly uneventful childhood (apart from moving every few years), then married Watts Todd Miller, bore and raised four children, and wrote several children’s books. She was introduced to ornithology by Sara Hubbard (director of the Illinois Audobon Society) in 1880 and quickly became an avid bird watcher. She wrote eleven bird books between 1885 and 1904. I have obtained four but have been putting them off for one simple reason: I hereby confess that I am not a birder. I appreciate birds — their colorful forms, fascinating behaviors, lovely songs (and raucous cries). I am particularly fond of American cranes, sandhill and whooping. Hawks and eagles are stunning, and the intelligence of crows gives me pause. But I cannot identify birds by call, and I have a minimal capacity for spotting birds calling in dense foliage. I know a dozen bird species — and a dozen more that are found along the Maine Coast, courtesy of a summer narrating puffin tours for Project Puffin many years back. But I am quite frankly intimidated by birders — their expensive cameras with telephoto lenses that look like they might have cost more than my house, their fascination with life lists, and their stunning capacities for identifying birds from faint calls or a momentary flash of color in a tree. OK, I admit it: they intimidate me. I will stick to insects and plants. I have yet to meet a botanist with special camera equipment to capture chestnut trees or May apples, bearing a life-list of plant species they have encountered or able to identify any plant from the merest fragment of a leaf.

So I have been putting off reading Miller’s work, even while I managed to accrue four of her titles, including her first and last bird books (Little Brothers of the Air was her second one.) I am doing my best to track down early women natural history writers, of which there were quite a few. So I didn’t want to ignore her completely. And Torrey was mostly an ornithologist, so I have already read books laden with passing bird descriptions. In an age before photography was readily available and easy to use in the field, ornithological writers provided rich text descriptions of the birds they saw — all of which fled my mind the moment I read them. Torrey’s books don’t have illustrations, and neither does this volume by Miller. So text is practically all there is to paint the scene and the feathered beings inhabiting it.

I am proud to say that I survived Little Brothers of the Air, though I am in no hurry to read the remaining three books of hers in my collection. She was a fine writer and notable for her independence and spirit of scientific inquiry. While some of her field outings were accompanied by a companion or two (usually female), many of her nature outings were solitary affairs. She was highly dedicated to closely observing birds, which might mean watching a nest through an opera-glass for one or two weeks at a time (or even, in one case, two months!). (“One must be an enthusiast to spy out the secrets of a bird’s life,” she remarks at one point.) Here she describes the privations she underwent in her nature studies:

Didst ever, dear reader, sit in one position on a camp-stool without a back, with head thrown back, and eyes fixed upon one small bird thirty feet from the ground, afraid to move or turn your eyes, lest you miss what you are waiting for, while the sun moves steadily on till his hottest rays pour through some opening directly upon you; while mosquitoes sing about your ears (would that they sang only!), and flies buzz noisily before your face; while birds flit past, and strange notes sound from behind; while rustling in the dead leaves at your feet suggests snakes, and a crawling on your neck proclaims spiders? If you have not, you can never appreciate the enthusiasms of a bird student, nor realize what neck-breaks and other discomforts one will cheerily endure to witness the first flight of a nestling.

The volume is a collection of vignettes of bird behavior, particularly nesting. Some chapters chronicle her observations of a particular nest, from construction through the fledging of the young — or not. She reported that, over a season, about half the nests she watched failed to produce young, often due to the depredations of chipmunks, other birds, or a couple of neighbor boys who stole eggs from nests. Other chapters are based on her travels in New England. She would stay in a friend’s cabin and set out every day to make her acquaintance with all the bird species in the area. Along the way, she might also describe the landscape and vegetation features, offering a delightful reprieve from all the feathers flying.

Occasionally, too, she would complain about something; I enjoyed this feisty side to her nature. She complained about farmers logging their wood lots, though she admitted that the lumber provided a valuable income from their point of view. She complained about farmers replacing old zig-zag stone walls with barbed wire fences: “Nature doesn’t take kindly to barbed wire.” She complained vigorously about the lack of nature knowledge among country folk: “A chapter might be written on the ignorance of country people of their own birds and plants. A chapter, did I say? A book, a dozen books, the country is full of material.” Finally, she also complained about how naturalists like to name everything (a bit ironic, given her own tendency to do so):

Why have we such a rage for labeling and cataloguing the beautiful things of Nature? Why can I not delight in a bird or flower, knowing it by what it is to me, without longing to know what it has been to some other person? What pleasure can it afford to one not making a scientific study of birds to see such names as “the blue and yellow-throated warbler,” “the chestnut-headed golden warbler,” “the yellow-bellied, red-poll warbler,” attached to the smallest and daintiest beauties of the woods?

Before I close the covers of this unassuming green cloth volume with gilt letters on the cover, I ought to say a few words about Miller’s descriptive style. Her careful observation of birds is evident on every page. However, she also frequently goes beyond mere action to interpretation — investing particular behaviors with motivations. Frequently, those motivations mirror human ones. Sometimes, the result is a bit disconcerting to the modern reader, used to reading about birds as non-human beings rather than as quasi-human persons. For example, she describes a male kingbird as singing to his mate while she is brooding her eggs to encourage her in the task. Elsewhere, she describes a young bluebird who “talked with himself for company, a very charming monologue in the inimitable bluebird tone. with modifications suggesting that a new and wonderful song was possible to him. He was evidently too full of joy to keep still.” On rare occasions, she endeavors to offer justification for her accounts. For example, in one of the last essays in the volume, she describes the behaviors of a pair of goldfinches. The female sat on the eggs, and the male would show up whenever she called to him. He would fly above her, trying to locate other birds that might be annoying her.

Sometimes that conduct did not reassure the uneasy bird, and she called again. Then he brought some tidbit in his beak, went to the edge of the nest, and fed her. Then she was pacified; but do not mistake her, it was not hunger that prompted her actions; when she was hungry, she openly left her nest and went for food. It was, as I am convinced. the longing desire to know that he was near her, that he was still anxious t serve her, that he had not forgotten her in her long absence from his side. This may sound a litle fanciful to one who has not studied birds closely, but she was so “human” in all her actions that I feel justified in judging of her motives exactly as I should judge had she measured five feet instead of five inches, and wore silk instead of feathers.”

Miller’s confidence in drawing such brazen parallels between bird behavior and human behavior does strike me as somewhat far-fetched at times. Of course, one could argue that this kind of personification of animals was common back then and would only become more pronounced by the time of the “nature faker” controversy a decade later. Furthermore, whatever the actual motives behind them, the birds’ actions themselves were painstakingly observed and (generally speaking) accurately described. I am confident, too, that her books encouraged many a reader to take up a notebook and opera-glass, and venture into the local woods and fields.

My copy of Little Brothers of the Air is in great condition for its age. The blank page after the flyleaf bears the signature of Lydia Bell Moscrif, June, ’97.

Nature Never Really Rests: “The Procession of the Flowers and Kindred Papers” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1897)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Education, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Jun 192022
 

There is virtually no structure to this volume by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, unless you consider the frontispiece. That image depicts a moonglade, the path made by moonlight on the water. The term was first used by James Russell Lowell in the mid-1800s and commandeered by Higginson for an essay of the same name some years later. The Prefatory Note to this work teasingly remarks, “It may interest some readers to know that the designer of the frontispiece to this volume is identical with the child described in its closing pages.” (It also notes that the view in the frontispiece is in Newport, Rhode Island.) And thus, this image and its accompanying essay bookend the text. But who is the mysterious artist? Higginson only identifies her as “this little maiden who sits beside me in the shadow.” Fortunately, she placed her initials on the work; unfortunately, “MBM” has proven elusive. There was a writer of children’s fiction, Mary Bertha Toland, née MacKenzie (1825?-1875), but she would have been too close in age to Higginson to have been a child at the time he originally wrote the essay.

“Moonglade” is evocative of the esthetics of Ruskin mingled with a touch of Transcendentalism; as such, it makes as good a place as any for approaching this slender volume. Higginson opens the essay by remarking that “There is no Americanism more graceful than the word ‘moonglade.’ Later, he observes,

So calm are sometimes the summer evenings by this bay that all motion sees at an end, and the weary play of events to have stopped forever. But Nature never really rests, and the moon, which seems only an ornament for this quiet water, is in reality leading it along with restless progress, bidding it roll lazily over reefs, surge into sea caves, and sweep away with it any boat that is not moored.

This notion of nature as constant flux is a fine candidate for a theme of many of these essays, beginning with “The Procession of the Flowers.” As advertised, that essay considers the progression of blooms from spring until autumn in New England (more precisely, Worcester, Massachusetts, where Higginson served as minister of the Worcester Free Church). In a later essay on“April Days“, Higginson writes about how many flowering plants native to the Boston region have been displaced by human development. The result is an abundance of naturalized plants, including dandelion, buttercup, chickweed, celandine, mullein, burdock, and yarrow, among others. “Bigelow’s delightful book Florula Bostoniensis,” he keenly observes, “is becoming a series of epitaphs.” The result is two contrasting forms of change: Nature’s change across the seasons (always happening, but consistent year to year), and the landscape changes of Massachusetts (urbanization and suburbanization) with their radical impact on the local flora — and “the special insects who haunt them.” Do I detect a hint of woe in Higginson’s observation (quoting a letter from Dr. Thaddeus William Harris) that so many native plants have “disappeared from their former haunts, driven away, or exterminated perhaps, by the changes effected therein”? I cannot help but read Higginson in the light of the ongoing modern-day global climate disruption, where even the reliable progression of the flowers is being considerably impacted. “Fair is foul, foul is fair,” three witches once remarked.

Another theme in several pieces in this volume is the human need for Nature. Here, Higginson seems to presage recent research into the role of nature experiences in child development (including the intellect):

No man can measure what a single hour with Nature may have contributed to the moulding of his mind. The influence is self-renewing, and if for a long time it baffles expression by reason of its fineness, so much the better in the end.

The soul is like a musical instrument; it is not enough that it be framed for the most delicate vibration, but it must vibrate long and often before the fibres grow mellow to the finest waves of sympathy. I perceive that in the veery’s carolling, the clover’s scent, the glistening of the water, the waving wings of butterflies, the sunset tints, the floating clouds, there are attainable infinitely more subtile modulations of thought than I can yet reach the sensibility to discriminate, much less describe.

Cue applause from Ralph Waldo Emerson in the shadows.

Spending time in nature, Higginson argues, ought to be a vital part of healthy education for children. “The little I have gained from colleges and libraries,” he declares, “has certainly not worn as well as the little I learned in childhood of the habits of plant, bird, and insect.” Alas, schools at the time (and now) generally did not (do not) offer those opportunities to young people. “Under the present educational system we need grammars and languages far less than a more thorough out-door experience.”

By way of a miscellany (which reflects this book well), another thing I particularly noticed while reading it was the natural philosophy and science community in which HIgginson lived and wrote. At various points in the book, he quotes Humboldt; he refers to “so good an observer as Wilson Flagg”; he quotes Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, American entymologist; and he mentions Ralph Waldo Emerson. His greatest praise is reserved for Thoreau: “Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond, and show us that absolutely nothing in nature has every yet been described, — not a bird nor a berry of the woods, not a drop of water, nor a spicula of ice, nor summer, nor winter, nor sun, nor star.” Later, he refers to a conversation with Thoreau about local bird distributions in December, 1861, just five months before he died: “…he mentioned most remarkable facts in that department, which had fallen under his unerring eyes.”

Following my encounters with the Collector in Wild Honey by Samuel Scoville, Jr., I was refreshed to discover in Higginson a strong resistance to violence against birds. I think it is in keeping with his radical abolitionist spirit (he was one of Secret Six that backed John Brown’s Raid) and strong moral principles regarding freedom and basic rights for all that he extends similar care to the birds:

The small number of birds yet present in early April gives a better opportunity for careful study, — more especially if one goes armed with the best of fowling-pieces, a small spy-glass; the best, — since how valuable for purposes of observation is the bleeding, gasping, dying body, compared with the fresh and living creature, as it tilts, trembles, and warbles on the branch before you!

Before I close my book and place it next to all the others collecting in my bookshelf of completed texts, I offer up this lovely descriptive passage as evidence of the soaring, elegant prose Higginson sometimes achieved:

As I sat in my boat, one sunny afternoon of last September, beneath the shady western shore of our quiet lake, with the low sunset striking almost level across the wooded banks, it seemed as if the last hoarded drops of summer’s sweetness were being poured over all the world. The air was full of quiet sounds. Turtles rustled beside the brink and slithered into the water, — cows plashed in the shallows, — fishes leaped from the placid depths, — a squirrel sobbed and fretted on a neighboring stump, — a katydid across the lake maintained its hard, dry croak, — the crickets chirped pertinaciously, but with little, fatigued pauses, as if glad that their work was almost done, — the grasshoppers kept up their continual chant, which seemed thoroughly melted and amalgamated into the summer, as if it would go on indefinitely, though the body of the little creature were dried into dust. All this time the birds were silent and invisible, as if they would take no more part in the symphony of the year. Then, seemingly by preconcerted signal, they joined in: Crows cawed anxiously afar; Jays screamed in the woods; a Partridge clucked to its brood, like the gurgle of water from a bottle; a Kingfisher wound his rattle, more briefly than in spring, as if we now knew all about it and the merest hint ought to suffice; a Fish-Hawk flapped into the water, with a great, rude splash, and then flew heavily away; a flock of Wild Ducks went southward overhead, and a smaller party returned beneath them, flying low and anxiously, as if to pick up some lost baggage; and, at last, a Loon laughted loud from behind a distant island, and it was pleasant to people these woods and waters with that wild shouting, linking them with Katahdin Lake and Amperzand.

Next, a few words about Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) and my copy of his book. According to Wikipedia, Higginson was a Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, and soldier. During the Civil War, he served as Colonel of the first federally recognized black regiment. He was a correspondent and mentor to Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). His own books covered a range of topics, from his Civil War experiences to the rights of women. HIs few nature essays originally appeared in Outdoor Papers, published in 1889. In 1897, he extracted most of the nature essays, combining them with “Moonglade” to produce the present volume.

According to a signature inside the book, my copy was previously owned by Isabella L. Houghton of North Adams, Massachusetts; she obtained the book on March 17, 1900. The only thing I was able to learn about her online is that she also signed her name in a copy of Women and the Alphabet: A Series of Essays, also by Higginson, published in 1900. I assume that she passed the newspaper clipping with a poem by S.R. Smith of Kingston in the front. For the curious, S.R. Smith happens to be the name of the world’s leading manufacturer of pool deck equipment. Enough said. The back page of the book contains a passage from Paolo and Francesca that appears to have been copied in Isabella’s hand. The work was a tragedy in four acts (first performed in 1902) by the English poet and dramatist Steven Phillips (1864-1915). The particular copied bit was spoken by Franc (frankly?); the copyist took a bit of liberty with the first line. Here is the original:

And yet, Nita, and yet — can any tell

How sorrow forth doth come? Is there a step,

A light step, or a dreamy drip of oars?

Is there a stirring of leaves, or ruffle of wings?

For it seems to me that softly, without hand,

She touches me.

Weeds and Winters: “The Lay of the Land” by Dallas Lore Sharp (1908)

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Insects, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Jun 142022
 

Having revisited Bradford Torrey, it seemed only proper (and fair) that I do the same for Dallas Lore Sharp, another fairly renowned (relatively speaking) of the nature essayists of natural history’s golden age. Sharp is probably most known (again, in a relative sense) for his essay, “Turtle Eggs for Agassiz” (in another volume of his, still waiting on the shelf), in which he collects turtle eggs to send to the renowned biologist, Louis Agassiz. While Torrey (and so many others) were actively writing in the 1880s and 1890s, Sharp (1870-1929) was a “late bloomer” who published his first nature book in 1901. As such, he was positioned at the height of the Nature-Study Movement and was able to survey its origins, expression, and impacts on American culture. Indeed, some of his finest essays in The Lay of the Land explore this theme. (Most of the rest of the essays offer themes relating to the various seasons of the year, from “Christmas in the Woods” to “High Noon” (late summer). Although I naturally associate Sharp with Torrey, they are dramatically different as authors. Torrey rambles through the woods and fields, making discoveries along the way; the reader often joins him on his adventures without knowing where he might end up. Sharp has a central theme about which the essay is tightly constructed; though many animals and plants may appear along the way, the central image or idea is never far from view. The prose is composed of refreshingly simple sentences, the kind that would have been to Hemmingway’s liking. There are no thickets of convoluted text here. Each essay has a refreshing clarity that goes down like a dipperful of cool water from a mountain stream. Here, for instance, is Sharp’s closing paragraph from his opening essay, “The Muskrats Are Building”:

The muskrats are building; the last of the migrating geese have gone over; the wild mice have harvested their acorns; the bees have clustered; the woodchucks are asleep; and the sap in the big hickory by the side of the house has crept down out of reach of the fingers of the frost. I will put on the storm-doors and the double windows. Even now the logs are blazing cheerily on the wide, warm hearth.

There is no affectation here, no mystery as to the intended meaning. But there is still plenty of room left for wonder, joy, and poetry. “As I watch the changing seasons…across the changeless years,” Sharp observes in that same essay, “I seem to find a scheme, a plan, a purpose, and there are weeds and winters in it, and it seems divine.” Through observing and celebrating everyday events and phenomena, Sharp finds “something close akin to religion,” that

…is a inspiration, the kind of experience one has in living with the out-of-doors. It doen’t come from books, from laboratories, not even from an occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship with nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any one, nor only to poets who write. I have had such experiences, such moments of quiet insight and uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of the woods.

As may already be evident to the reader, Sharp’s vision of nature study combines two elements: biological knowledge (science) and inspiration for the spirit (poetry). Both are essential to engaging meaningfully with the natural world. ” A botanist who is never a poet misses as much in the out-of-doors as a poet who is never botanist.” Elsewhere, Sharp declares that “Nature study is the out-of-door side of natural history, the unmeasured, unprinted side of poetry. It is joy in breathing the air of the fields; joy in seeing, hearing, living the life of the fields; joy in knowing and loving all that lives with you in your out-of-doors. The best nature-study books, therefore, “appeal to sentiment as well as to sense” and are “very unlike the earlier desiccated, unimaginative treatises.”

How does one become a student of nature? The pathway into nature study begins with close observation over time in a particular place. “Let us learn to see and name first. The inexperienced, the unknowing, the unthinking cannot love. One must live until tired, think until baffled, before he can know his need of Nature.”

The first necessity for interesting nature study is an intimate acquaintance with some locality. It does not matter how small, how commonplace, how near the city, — the nearer the better, provided there are trees, water, fences, and some seclusion. If your own roof-tree stands in the midst of it, then that is ideal.

The true nature student is literally at home in nature, cognizant of its many moods and aware of the comings and goings of all the creatures — neighbors — who share that space with him. He observes the daily development of seedlings and flower buds, watches birds building their nests, and notices the muskrats constructing their winter lodges. With close inspection of and engagement with nature over the long years, a beautiful pattern emerges, “and there are weeds and winters in it, and it seems divine.”

My copy of The Lay of the Land is nearly pristine; there are no marks of past ownership. There is a small bookseller stamp on the flyleaf’s lower left. This book was originally sold in Boston, by a company owned and operated by Charles Emelius Lauriat (1842-1920). HIs son (Charles Emelius Lauriat, Jr. — 1874-1937) was among the survivors of the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, seven years after this book was published.

Arriving at No Particular Place: “Across Lots” by Horace Lunt (1888)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Reptiles  No Responses »
Jun 082022
 

According to Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge), Horace Lunt was a linguist in Slavic Studies who lived from 1918 until 2010. Unfortunately, that does not explain how he managed to publish a book of New Hampshire nature essays in 1888. Hence the problem. While trying to gain information about this author, every site I visited invariably led to the wrong Horace Lunt. Finally, I stumbled upon a scan of a book on the Lunt family of New England, which included a paragraph about the right Horace. What I learned only made him more mysterious to me. Horace was born on March 17, 1838. He worked as a house servant before joining a local militia company in 1861 and then a Maine infantry regiment a year and a half later. His regiment fought in many battles during the Civil War, including Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and Appomattox. He was one of the few members of his regiment to survive the war, although one of his legs was severely impaired due to the long marches and other hardships. After the war, he became a nature writer, publishing three books; Across Lots was the first. He died in 1911. I could not find an image of his grave, let alone of him.

So I fill in the blanks as best I can. What happened to him between 1865 and the publication of his first book? Did he try his hand at other careers along the way? Did he have the 19th Century equivalent of PTSD? (How could he have possibly endured so many horrific battles psychologically unscathed?) Did he perhaps seek solace in nature, a calming presence to soothe his troubled memories? I don’t know. I did notice the presence of his past, in terms of how frequently he would use military images to describe natural scenes in his essays. Here is how the first essay, “A March Ramble,” opens:

March, in New England, is the disputable month between the seasons spring and winter; the space, as it were, between the picket lines of both armies, where many battles are fought for the mastery and power of governing the land. Winter commands Boreas to station his wind batteries on the bleak northern hills to belch forth a storm of snow and hail, and a general frigid icicle charge is ordered along the whole line until not a vestige of spring is seen. Then the frost army, wearied with its fierce onslaught, sleeps, and the vernal force, driven far southward, turns again its face toward the foe, insidiously creeps along the flank, and takes the gray old general in his fancied stronghold by surprise… Winter wakes again and marshals his strength, but his front is not so vigorous. He sullenly retires before the genial commander of the other side, that moves slowly and steadily forward to the vernal equinox.

Equinox? Appomatox? They practically rhyme. Only, in this version of the story, the South ultimately wins (for the spring, at least).

I truly wanted to enjoy Lunt’s work. His essays are vivid, and his emulation of Thoreau is uncanny. He captures a couple of Thoreau’s mannerisms from his journals, including a tendency to interrupt description to declare something fervently and his frequent addition of questions without answers. However, he lavishes the most praise on John Burroughs, “whose writings have the true sylvan ring — to read them is next to walking in the woods.” And that, I suppose, is what Lunt is chiefly after in his book — using text to evoke a virtual reality through which the reader can travel, as if out of doors. Lunt keeps his own musings to a minimum and eschews references to literature and history. Reading his descriptive passages, I feel like I am there with him — roaming the woods, gazing down into a pond, following a half-tumbled-down wall. Consider this delightful passage on autumnal plants and how they disperse their seeds:

As I walk across-lots, I am struck with the varied and ingenious methods the different plants have used to scatter their seeds. Here is an army of goldenrods and asters, milk-weeds and epilobiums, holding aloft on their wand-like stems millions of seeds, to which are attached balloons, parachutes and wings, that the wind at the proper time may carry them miles away. I wave one of these wands when, as if by magic, hundreds of the winged grains go sailing through the air like the flight of insects. Here, too, are hooks, barbs, and prickles that cling to the dress of passers-by or to the hairs of cattle, and thus are carried away to be rubbed off and deposited in some other locality. Other seeds artfully hide themselves in lucious, brilliant wrappings that the birds may be attracted to them. Strawberries, raspberries, and the early drupes have scattered their seeds by this process; but the various cornels, honeysuckles, greenberries, rose and spice bushes, the bright red fruit clusters of the winter-berry, the purple panicles of the prim, that feast the eyes of the autumn rambler, are still waiting patiently for the snows to put an embargo on other supplies near the ground.

Here I chose a botanical passage. But Lunt’s observational skills were far-ranging. He emphasized birds the most (meticulously describing their color patterns, as if the poor reader could ever remember them in a book devoid of illustrations). But he also wrote about snakes, turtles, small mammals, insects, and even microscopic pond life. While his command of animal behavior was perhaps average for nature writers of the time, his skills in identifying and describing organisms were prodigious. And yet I struggled with feeling that the book was missing something vital — without which it simply could not stand alongside Thoreau. After reading one of the last passages from the final essay, “Cross-cut Views of Winter,” I finally figured it out.

I note the tracks of various prowlers in the woods. A rabbit has lately passed along, making indentations in the snow at regular intervals, as if he had been surveying or pacing off a certain portion of the lot for himself. Further on the lines appear more numerous; cross and re-cross each other, and are tangled in such a knot that it would be a hopeless task to find the creatures’ homes. They seem to have gone everywhere, and arrived at no particular place.

Thank you, Horace! That is precisely what I mean. Your book goes everywhere (within your New Hampshire woodland domain) and arrives at no particular place. There is no point to your essays — or rather, the point of your essays is the ramble itself. Unless I include your understandable fascination with war imagery, there are no connection to anything larger than the moment and the walk and the things you discover along the way. There is no destination. A reader could pick up the book and begin anywhere — could probably even read the paragraphs in backward order, and it wouldn’t matter. Across Lots is intended as a vehicle for virtual experience at a time long before the coffee-table photography book, video, and virtual reality headsets. And as such, it can end equally at any point, such as here.

A Peek at Effie Bignell’s “Woodland Intimates” (1903)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, Books, Natural History  No Responses »
Jun 062022
 
My Woodland Intimates (1903)

Effie Molt Bignell is one of those most unusual personages, an author who does not even have a Wikipedia page to her name. I was able to glean from a few bits and pieces online that she was born in 1855 in Burlington, Vermont. A member of the American Ornithological Union, she authored several books, including two with a nature focus: Mr. Chupes and Miss Jenny (about two robins) and this one. She married William J. Bignell. That is all that I know about her. I cannot even locate her picture. I might add that my information search was impeded a bit by the title of this book, which tended to yield Google results such as this one:

NOT My Woodland Intimates

No, this is not THAT kind of book! In fact, it is a flowing, charming romp through a wooded grove and adjacent gardens belonging to an obviously wealthy woman with abundant time on her hands. As she describes in the book, her home is quite large, with a carriage drive in the front, and employing at least one maid and gardener. Her aristocratic bearing is telegraphed to readers through her occasional cultured French phrases (untranslated, of course) such as feu-de-joie, haute société, and table d’hôte. With the exception of the last chapter (a trip to a rural community near the St. Lawrence River in Quebec), the book entirely takes place, over the course of a year, on Effie Bignell’s estate somewhere in eastern New Jersey. There, she entertains the reader as an honored guest, telling stories about the birds and squirrels of her domain, and pointing ut the various seasonal sights of her woods. I admit that I found her companionship in text quite affable, her descriptions vivid and poetic. There is no particular storyline or grand adventure. There is, though, a bit of escape into an affluent suburban yard of more than 100 years ago. Her hope, in writing this work, was that “to someone in sick room or city pent, these pages might carry restful little messages from “God’s out-of-doors,” or pleasing suggestions of woodland friends.” At the close of the volume, I confess that I was sorry to part company with the author, as she remarked on the journeys we had taken together:

Do you realize that nearly a twelvemonth had elapsed since you and I took our first stroll through the grove together? How rapidly the “mounds of years” heap themselves up! How quickly the cycles pass! Oh, for unlimited leisure, for unbounded opportunities for investigation, and the vision that penetrates to the heart of the mysteries by which we are surrounded.

In-between preface and closing line, seasons change, but otherwise precious little happens. There are no grand ecological discoveries, spectacular events, profound statements, or even “walks afield” (at least, until the final chapter). There is the house and the yard and the trees. Yet her flowing imagery carries the reader along, and her childlike delight in nature is quite enticing. Consider this lovely, languid description of a summer afternoon:

The noonday lull has already set in. No sound now save the bees’ drowsy droning and the rustling of wind-swayed leaves. In the wild garden daisies and buttercups are nodding to each other, and soft waves and ripples are playing over the tops of the tall grasses. How caressing, how soothing the fragrance-laden breeze as it fans one’s brow and lightly touches one’s hair, whispering all the time of beautiful, mystical things to which the heart responds though it but dimly understands.

The reader is overcome with this desire to pull up a lounge chair and take it all in. Heck, in her world, even decaying leaves are worthy of appreciation, as she relates below in her chapter Good-by to Summer:

Several bird families have already left us, and others are on the eve of departure. In this beautiful secluded corner a pair of wood-thrushes have held a perpetual At Home from early in the season. It is just the wild, unmolested spot to take the fancy of those ardent wood-lovers. Broken boughs have piled themselves up undisturbed under the interlocking branches from which they fell, and moist, rich leaf-mold, boasting of layers and layers, generaions and generations of decay, mats itself around the deeply shaded tree-bases. Think of the lucious larder this represents!

Along the way, Bignell gently nudges readers toward taking action on behalf of songbirds. She shares tips for feeding birds in the winter and reminds readers about how much plant and tree destruction by insects is prevented by the work of birds. Like many writers of the time, she is clearly quite taken with her avian visitors. At one point, she fervently declares,

What wonderful beings birds are! Earth, tree-tops, and sky are at their service, and, for some of their number, even surging waves make a safe resting-place and deep snows a warm covering. How pitiful and small and labored do even the swiftest and most extensive of our voyages seem in comparison with the free, untrammelled journeyings of these “brothers of the air”.

Apart from all the birds (lots and lots of them, calling from practically every page) and a few squirrels (named, of course), the only other character in Bignell’s book is her dog, “a vigilant little Chihuahuan” also known as “The Mexican”. A feisty protector of birds, she patrols the area where Bignell puts out seeds, nuts, and breadcrumbs for the birds, making sure that the birds can dine without putting their lives at risk. “Such is the power of valor,” Bignell declares, “that all the cats of the neighborhood flee in terror before the redoubtable little creature; three pounds and a half of dog!”

Reluctantly, I close the book. Another half-dozen titles arrived today, continuing to build my library of obscure American nature authors from 100 years ago or more. Other volumes and authors are jostling me for attention. Yet I hold this book — completely free of marks from past owners — in my hands for a moment longer. It feels light, smooth, and comfortable. Maybe I’ll visit again someday…

A Work of Dredgery: “Up and Down the Brooks” with Mary Bamford (1889)

 Backyard Nature, Books, Insects, Natural History, Snails  No Responses »
Jun 052022
 

For my latest book, I have chosen Volume 4 from The Riverside Library for Young People, Up and Down Brooks by Mary E. Bamford. At a bit smaller than five by seven inches, this little tome invites smaller hands or perhaps the pocket of a knapsack. The book itself is a carefree romp with a quirky, playful, scholarly “self-named “bug-hunter” as she makes her way up and down brooks, armed with a cloth dredger and a bucket, collecting water beetles and anything else she can find in the streams of Alameda County, California. Along the way, at an (and every) opportunity, she makes some sort of connection to classical or medieval history, culture, and literature. The result is, well, exhausting. Perhaps her literary allusions were common to readers at the time (maybe even younger ones), but most of them were entirely lost on me. As a guidebook for how to study streams, the book also fails. The reader is halfway through the text (of over 200 pages) before mention is made of how to make a dredger of one’s own. And there are few common names for insects; instead, Bamford resolutely names them by genera. Thus, a hellgrammite becomes “larva of horned Corydalus,” and the adult dobson-fly is simply “Horned Corydalus.” Who are her readers, then? How many children would have a clue what her various insect names signify? At the same time, some of her playful passages definitely seem best suited to a child (or childlike adult). Consider her experiences with a captive predacious water stick-insect, Ranatra (again, the genus name):

I think Ranatra had no music in his soul, and he probably never missed the bird-twitterings of his native brook. As a personal favor and a reminder of the days when he lived in the creek, I sometimes took a flute and played “Way down upon the Swanee River” close to his jar. But the calmness with which he received the serenade was only equal to that with which he usually surveyed the world when no music was going on. Neither the “growly” nor the “squeeky” parts of the piano affected his nerves, even when his bottle was placed touching the instrument next the keys.

A page later, Bamford reports on Ranatra’s unexpected death:

Peace to his ashes. I never did know how I loved him until he died. Never did I part from a bug with such regret… The jar looked lonely without him, he had lived in it so long, and I felt half inclined to that, in spite of his having dwelt with them so securely for so long a time, he had at last fallen a victim to those cowardly cousins of his, the scorpion-bugs. They rushed about as usual, evidently caring nothing for the death of the bug that was worth twenty of them.

As the reader can plainly observe, Bamford does not hold back on her feelings about the various organisms she encounters. There is a whimsy to her descriptions and even sometimes abject silliness. Her many failed attempts to raise a tiger beetle larva to adulthood in captivity included the following individuals (forever immortalized in her prose): Conqueror of Coffee-Pot-Lid Lake; Conqueror II; The Hesitator; Larva of Yeast-Powder-Lid Lake; Scarer of Soapdish-Lid-Lake; Triumpher of Tin-Pan Lake; Monarch of Mortar Lake; “The Last”; Oliver; Frightener of Flower-Pot Lake; and “The Last-But-One.” Yet beneath all the craziness and the random references to obscure etymologies and myths, there is also an observant and patient scientist noting the minutiae of lives mostly overlooked at the time. Consider her assessment of a snail’s lot:

Yet the fact of the matter is that there is not much character to a pond-snail. To slip out of a mass of jelly with one’s house on one’s back, to float on the surface of the pond, to dine on leaves or confervae, to rest when weary and to journey when so disposed, to retreat into one’s house when in danger, to pass along through life in a somewhat humdrum fashion with small spirit or vim in one, to cleanse the pool what little one may, and finally to drop down through the water and whiten with one’s lifeless shell the scum of the pond, to have that slime close at last over one’s shell and leave one buried in oblivion while all the pond-life goes on above one still, — this is the snail’s life. Devoid of fighting instincts, not gifted with ambition to soar like the beetles, or to be ever in sight like the skaters, treating all the pond-neighbors with quiet reserve, going one’s own way and doing much good in the world, such is the pond-snail. If he is not brilliant, he is good, and what more could be asked of him?

The respect Bamford grants many f the insects she encounters is not always expressed toward the many local residents, particularly children, who see her with dredger in hand and assume she is trying to catch fish. All too few of them, she complains more than once, have any interest in insects — like this teen who disrupts her work:

“What are you catching? Fish?” demands a voice, and I look up to see the yellow head of an inquisitive foureen-year-old youth peering over the bank.

“Water-beetles,” and I hold up my pail to show the contents.

“What are they good for?” proceeds the utilitarian.

I hesitate a moment. Shall I tell him of the decaying leaves that these numerous Hydrophilidae devour, assisted by these pond-snails; of the yearly plague of frogs from which we are delivered by the disappearance of the juices of the polliwogs through the proboscides of these water-boatmen; of the multitudes of mosquitoes who never have a chance to bite us, because as wigglers they have met their fates under the masks of these dragon-fly larvae? I excuse myself from this lesson on zoology, and make answer, “I take them home and keep them, and study their habits.”

What motivates Bamford to make such a study of stream life, especially insects? At one point in her ramblings, she shares this early memory with her readers, offering a window into her motivations:

I remember the day when the idea first entered my brain that other creatures than human have interesting lives. I must have been about eight or nine years old. I had been taking a walk in a little mining town among the Sierra Nevada foothills. A minister was with me, and he had a hand-microscope or glass in his pocket.

We sat down under the trees on a hill somewhere back of a church, and he showed me through the glass a multitude of little creatures living in the heart of a yellow flower… I remember that as a very wonderful day, one on which I did not see half enough through that glass to suit me, but still one on which I obtained a glimpse of a world very different from that in which I usually lived.

Indeed, it is a world with very different rules. Toward the book’s close, Bamford remarks on “how hard-hearted the insects are toward one another! In all the time I have watched them, I do not recollect ever having seen an act of compassion performed by any kind of insect for another.” She then proceeds to describe her experiences waiting for a caterpillar to pupate, only for many parasitic flies to emerge instead, having fed upon the caterpillar’s body. Yet through this all, she ultimately conveys a sense of wonder and delight in this foreign world beneath the water’s surface.

And so the traveler beside this brook and over these hills may learn, if he looks, that man is not the only creature who builds houses and is disappointed about living in them. There is material here for a fine sermon after all, take the brook through and through. Here are fightings and murders and thefts and trickeries, the semblance of death, the awakening from slumber, the rising to new life, the change from the grovelling on the earth to the soaring of wings in the sunshine.

And the ultimate point of the sermon? Here, Banford slips back into a comfortable corner within Nineteenth-Century American Christianity, declaring fervently that “The majority of people scarcely pause to realize that the different kinds of creatures represent so many of God’s different thoughts and that it might possibly be worth while to glance at the things that He has deigned to place on earth.”

Mary Bamford’s grave, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland

And what of Mary Ellen Bamford? She was born to a pioneer settler couple in Healdsburg, California, in 1857. After attending public school in Oakland, she worked for four years as an assistant in the Oakland Free Public Library. After that, she became a full-time writer, producing over a dozen books, including several titles for the American Baptist Publishing Society. She was a prohibitionist and advocate for Asian immigration into the US. She died in 1946 at the age of 88.

My first (only) edition of this book was previously in the collections of the Reed Free Library in Surrey, New Hampshire.

The Great Plan of Economy: “The Life of North American Insects” by B. Jaeger (1859)

 Backyard Nature, Books, Insects, Natural History  3 Responses »
Jun 032022
 

The book is quite literally falling apart. The pages are browned and foxed, the cover fabric (sporting a gilt impression of a moth) is pulling loose from the spine, the binding disintegrating. It feels like an old book. And it is. B. (Benedict) Jaeger’s volume on North American Insects predates the Civil War. It is the oldest book I have read for this blog so far, taking us back toward the beginnings of the late 19th Century’s fascination with nature. My volume is copyright 1859, though the book was published five years earlier, in a more limited edition that included five color plates (and costs considerably more today than this one). And 1859 was — as diehard natural historians likely know — the year that Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species”. Jaeger’s writing offers a window into the foreign and intriguing world of natural history before evolution revolutionized it. Terms and concepts that evoke a kind of proto-ecology jostle on the page with paeans to God’s handiwork, in a book that at times is as much a religious text as a biological one. And through it all, the rambling voice of Benedict Jaeger, world traveler, natural philosopher, and bane of editors.

Who was Jaeger? The title page of the book notes that he was a “late Professor of Zoology and Botany for the College of New Jersey.” According to Bugguide.net, a catalog of his papers at Princeton University notes that he was a professor of natural history and modern languages at Princeton from 1832 until 1843. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1789, and died in Brooklyn, New York in 1869. He supposedly wrote many books on insects. And that is all I was able to find out about him, besides what might be gleaned from his travel stories scattered throughout this book.

Given the year the book was published, and the fact that Henry David Thoreau lived until 1861, could he have read this book, or at least glanced at it? For all that it is unknown today, Jaeger’s rather slender tome was the first general book on North American insects ever published. Though far from a field guide as we know it today (relatively few insects are covered at the species level, and amounts of information on different types of insects vary widely), the book was still a landmark in American entomology. So I like to imagine Thoreau thumbing through it (and possibly frowning at some of its more extreme anthropocentric declarations). And, in fact, he probably did. The Concord Library website includes a listing of books from the library of Edwin Way Teale (scholar of Thoreau and a nature writer to boot). The list includes the following item:

Jaeger, Benedict. The Life of North American Insects. By B. Jaeger … Assisted by H.C. Preston, M.D. With Numerous Illustrations from Specimens in the Cabinet of the Author. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859.

319 pages. Illustrated. 19.5 cm.

Inscription in ink on front free endpaper: A duplicate of one / of the insect books / that Thoreau used. / For the Teales from / the Walter Hardings. / Hampton, Conn., August / 20th, 1963.

A few marginal markings in pencil.

How exciting! That said, I am quite confident that Jaeger’s outlook on nature was not one that Thoreau shared. And as a tool for insect identification, it was definitely wanting.

“Philosophy,” Jaeger declares in his opening line, “has invested even the commonest objects of Nature with charms unknown to the uneducated.” But why study insects, in particular? Ultimately, because insects are useful:

It is time that our people in general, and particularly our youth, should be made acquainted with a class of animals which everywhere surround us, day and night, and which furnish us amusements, food, coloring substances, and medicines, in order that they may be able to distinguish the useful from the injurous ones, the harmless from the noxious, and to discover those which may furnish new articles for manufacture, commerce, and domestic industry.

There is a deeper reason, though (cue choir of heavenly angels). Learning about insects opens the door to “…a more general knowledge of Natural History, and a deeper admiration of the ten thousand sublime and beautiful creatures that, in one common song of praise, pour out their gratitude and proclaim their dependence upon one common Father.” In this image, Jaeger evokes spiritual unity — there is a whole to nature because nature is holy. And that implies that the individual constituents of the natural world (living and nonliving) must interact and function as one great system. Here, he was inspired in part by Alexander Humboldt, whose first volume of Cosmos was published in 1845:

…we find all these different varieties of the three natural kingdoms [plant, animal, mineral] united under one general law; all dependent upon one another, as component parts of one great universal whole, aand we are forced, with he great philosopher Humboldt, to exclaim, “Nature is the unity in variety.”

Intriguingly, going down this path leads Jaeger to affirm principles that would years later be echoed in rudimentary ecology. Since nature is a system created by God, there cannot be any part that is irrelevant or without purpose: “…none of the works of nature are so insignificant as to be wholly without use in the great plan of economy.” How does that plan work? Consider the caterpillars, Jaeger suggests, who feed on plants and therefore pose a threat to agriculture. The obvious choice would be to kill them all, to safeguard our crops and flowers. But that would be unwise, Jaeger cautions:

…were we to annihilate caterpillars, our gardens, wods, and fields would be abandoned by the whole feathered tribe who feed on them, and melancholy sadness shroud the abodes of man. Ardently, then, would bwe long for the return of the oxious Caterpillars, and with them the joyous songsters of the forest. …so beautifully is the doctrine of compensation illustrated throughout the Animal Kingdom, as well as in all the objects of Nature.

Elsewhere, Jaeger refers to this same principle as the law of antagonization instead:

[Insects] afford a constant evidence of the working of Nature’s great law of antagonization — the one undoing wha the other does; the injuries which one species would infliec upon man are checked by other species, which prevent their superabundance and keep an even balance in the scale of being.

Carrying capacity, anyone? Ironically, this law does not prevent Jaeger from declaring firmly a few pages later that herbivorous beetles “are noxious and should be destroyed wherever encountered.” There appears to be a disconnect between Jaeger’s pre-ecological mindset and practical reality.

Lest we extoll this pre-Darwinian model of the Cosmos as brilliant and ahead of its time, while Nature may be a system created by God, it is still a hierarchical one. And guess who is at the top?

It is more than wonderful, it is sublime, to view atom after atom of the whole creation unceasingly changing place, that man, the lord of creation, may be abundantly supplied with all his comforts and his luxuries.; to see the lilies of the field, and the insects of the earth and air, living and dying for man, yielding up their lives for man’s sustenance and adornment.

To rework a line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All living things are significant, but some are more significant than others.” “The great plan of economy,” is clearly under man’s rule. At least one can find a bit of solace, though, in the fact that women are not entirely forgotten: “I write also for the young ladies,” Jaeger announces midway through his book.

My copy is definitely in “fair” shape. For its considerable age, all I can say about the book’s past is that it was once owned by William Mansell (thank you, Kent, for your correction on my reading of this signature), who dated it August 18?9. (My guess is that the mysterious digit is a 5, as it could not be a 2. Given that the book was published in 1859, it is most likely that Maxwell obtained it then.) Efforts to find information about William Mansell online were unsuccessful. There are plenty of somewhat famous persons with this name, but none of them quite fit this time period.

I Seek the Companionship of “Friends Worth Knowing” with Ernest Ingersoll (1880)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Snails  3 Responses »
May 302022
 
Cover of First (Only?) Edition, Harper & Brothers, 1880

At last, after a year-and-a-half away, I return to my quest — an exploration of the fascinating lost world of the golden age of American nature writing. Beginning with Thoreau’s passing in 1861 and extending until WWI, this time period is historically interpreted as being a wasteland of nature writing. There was John Muir, of course. And for the more intense environmental writing aficionados, there was the other John, John Burroughs. But otherwise, there are no authors typically identified as writing in the genre until Aldo Leopold’s groundbreaking “Sand County Almanac” was published in 1949. True, there aren’t as many naturalist essayists between the two world wars (I have found a few, and will visit them from time to time). But it turns out that the first few decades of this time period were fecund with nature essays — a rich array of magazine articles, and a plethora of delightfully obscure authors, many of whom corresponded with and visited each other. What is even more gratifying is that the writers’ very obscurity makes this adventure possible. I am striving to read original copies — first editions if I can, period texts if not — of as many of the books as I can afford. During my absence, I have discovered hitherto unknown troves of book titles, including a collection from the Library of Congress holdings. I am so excited to return to this bygone era. The books are stacked on my desk and crowded into my bookcase. Let’s get underway!

Ernest Ingersoll, 1906 or before

My first selection is one of several works by Ernest Ingersoll that I now own. According to the font of all knowledge (a.k.a., Wikipedia), Ingersol was an American naturalist, writer, and explorer who lived from 1852 until 1946. He published nearly two dozen books, mostly in the nature essay vein. He began his career in academia, under the tutelage of Louis Aggasiz at Harvard University. He served as Zoologist on the Hayden Geological Expedition to Yellowstone in 1874. Returning East, he wrote up his discoveries from the trip, mostly mollusks. He also became a staff reporter for the New York Tribune and contributed articles to a periodical that was the antecedent to Field and Stream. He traveled west again in 1877 and 1879, reporting on his experiences. He also embarked on a project reporting on US shellfisheries for the US Fish Commission and US Census Bureau. He subsequently became a popular nature essayist and lecturer. Friends Worth Knowing was his very first foray into the genre.

The book is quite an eclectic affair. There is no clear structure to the essay collection — it appears to be a compilation of previously published articles, sufficient to justify a book title. Given the author’s molluscan predilections, it is not surprising that the first chapter, In a Snailery, is a visit with gastropods. A later essay explores the lives and habits of wild mice species. There is also an essay on bison and their fate. One less-memorable essay reports on various accounts of domesticated animals finding their way back home over long distances. Another essay, toward the end of the book, considers the “civilizing influences” of western culture at the time (more about that ahead). The rest of the book’s offerings are largely ornithological in scope.

I have to say that In a Snailery sets a fairly high standard for the volume. The engravings are my favorites in the book. Indeed, many other chapters had few engravings at all, and the artwork isn’t of the same quality of detail. Some of the snail engravings are visually packed (such as the tropical snails below), but my favorite is probably an edible snail making its way across the middle of a page, sans slime trail.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Edible-Snail-1024x671.jpg

I quite enjoyed Ingersoll’s pronouncements about the merits of snails, too. He observed on the first page that “Snails are of a vast multitude and variety, ancient race, graceful form, dignified manners, industrious habits, and gustatory excellence…” I appreciated how Ingersoll enthusiastically set out to counter what was likely a general disgust or disinterest with snails, apart from their culinary potential. His prose is thoughtful and observant as he details the life cycle of the snail and then considers its long evolutionary heritage, going back to an origin “when dark forests of ferns waved their heavy fronds over the inky Paleozoic bogs. Distance disappears in the presence of such prodigious time.” Along the way, his essay points out where the reader might find snails in the wild. This is not the last time in the book that Ingersoll encourages readers to venture out into nature on their own. While the essays share Ingersoll’s own observations, his intent is, at least in part, to offer a gentle nudge to his readers.

His second essay, First Comers, is about the first birds of spring that he encounters in his New England home. “To the lovers of long rambles in the woods and meadows,” he announces, “…every indication of approaching spring is eagerly scanned, and is hailed with delight.” HIs enthusiasm and sense of familiarity with the birds he writes about are evident in descriptions like this one, of a house wren: “…this little bobbing bunch of brown excitement is the very spirit of impudence.” After introducing a number of bird species, he turns to the chipping sparrow. Here, he remarks that “The chippy is so easily watched that I do not propose to tell all I have learned about it, and thus rob a reader of the pleasure of learning its beautiful ways for himself.” I appreciate, again, how Ingersoll seeks to guide his readers, but ultimately toward making their own discoveries.

Throughout the book, Ingersoll gestures toward many contemporaries and near-contemporaries in the natural history field. At various points, he mentions H.D. Thoreau, John Burroughs (quoting a letter Ingersoll received from him), Alfred Russel Wallace, and Dr. C.C. Abbott (whom I have visited before in this blog, and will return to frequently in upcoming posts). He mentions many other people, too, who appear to have shared anecdotal information about nature with him. I continue to appreciate how there was a vibrant nature study community present in the US during this time period.

Jumping over some ornithological writings (there will be plenty of those in the blog posts ahead), we come to The Buffalo and His Fate. The essay purports to be a review of another scientist’s report on the status of the bison, but it is difficult to determine what Ingersoll is offering second-hand and what is based upon his considerable time in the West. He opens the essay with a grim prognosis: “Its history has been a tale of its extermination, and a very short time will be likely to see the last of these noble beasts roaming over the plains.” Then, at the close of the essay, he notes that the remaining bison are now in two main herds– northern and southern. Considering the southern herd in Texas (which, at the time, was occupied by understandably hostile Indians), Ingersoll coldly noted that “…unless legal interference be quickly made and strict regulations enforced, the fate of the buffalo south of the Platte will be a repetition of its history east of the Mississippi — speedy extermination.” And here is where I realized the extent to which Ingersoll’s era is quite foreign to my own. Nowadays, such an announcement would be followed by exhortations to take action. Surely, Ingersoll’s readers might send letters to their Congressmen urging such safeguards for the remaining bison? Yet instead, Ingersoll resolutely accepts their inevitable demise. This was not an age for environmental activism. The certain march of Western progress was not to be questioned. Along the way, there might be casualties, but they were unavoidable.

This outlook is even more blaring in Civilizing Influences, where Ingersoll seeks to convince his readers (and maybe himself, too) that Western progress is not all bad. Sure, most wild quadrupeds were being wiped out (other than the mice) and hawks, owls, and snakes were routinely killed by farmers, but the songbirds “seem…to recognize the presence of man’s civilization as a blessing.” In a mix of accurate science, anecdotal observations, and dubious theorizing, Ingersoll presents the premises of his argument. Less forest means a less rigorous climate (huh?) and more sunny spots where birds prefer to place their nests (really?). Plowing exposes more insects for birds to eat, while orchards likewise encourage insects to thrive. Horses, cattle, and sheep droppings provide food and homes for beetles that many birds feed upon. Fewer avian and reptilian predators make it easier for the birds to survive. In fact, not only are songbirds thriving, Ingersoll asserts, but they are singing more, too. We are civilizing them! “By making their lives less laborious, apprehensive, and solitary, man has left the birds time and opportunity for far more singing than their hard-worked, scantily-fed, and timorous ancestors ever enjoyed….”

I will not leave Ingersoll there, in the baffling heart of his own longing to exempt Western civilization from all the accusations of environmental damage that might be levied against it. After all, here he was merely echoing ideas that were all too popular at the time. I will offer up, instead, this charming portrait of the musical enchantment available to the rambler out-of-doors on a New England April day: “[The song sparrow’s] clear tenor, the gurgling, bubbling alto of the blackbirds, the slender purity of the bluebird’s soprano, and the solid basso profundo of the frogs, with the accompaniment of the April wind piping on the bare reeds of winter, or the drumming of raindrops, form the naturalist’s spring quartette — as pleasing, if not as grand, as the full chorus of early June.”

I will close with a paragraph about my particular copy of this book, which has a bit of history of its own. The bookplate is that of Jonathan Dwight, Jr. (actually Jonathan Dwight V), 1858-1926, founding member of the American Ornithologist’s Union and ultimately its president. His ornithological collections were housed in the American Museum of Natural History. After his death, his extensive ornithological library found its way to the Smithsonian in 1970. I am assuming this particular volume didn’t make the cut, and instead remained in private hands.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries