Imbued with a Love of Science: “Summer in a Bog” by Katharine Dooris Sharp, 1913

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Aug 012020
 

…women may be imbued with a love of science for its own sake, and pursue it in spite of obstacles….

But while the road to scientific attainment is for the man broad and well-paved through centuries of use, there is generally for woman, when she dares to walk therein, a look askance and a cold reception. But she will not mind that greatly — the woman who truly loves nature….

Disappointments, discouragements, adversities constitute food for hardy natures, and no other need attempt the road of science.

TRUE TO THE BOOK’S TITLE, “SUMMER IN A BOG” OPENS AT A BOG AT THE EDGE OF A CORNFIELD SOMEWHERE IN MADISON COUNTY, OHIO. The husband of the protagonist/author, identified as the Doctor (of Medicine), is in the process of driving past a flourishing cornfield that is interrupted by “a strip [that] seemed given over to weeds and black morass, wild grasses and moss:

“If I owned that cornfield, I’d drain it better,” said the Doctor, critically….

“It’s just like a strip of lovely flowered ribbon,” said I. “Here, stop and let me off, I’ve been intending to visit that bog for more than a year, and I’ll do it now….”

At any other time the Doctor would have found a dozen reasons why I should sit still and continue my ride, but my resolution came on so suddenly that he had not time to formulate an objection. So I was down on the road in a jiffy, trowel and portfolio in hand.

“Ribbon!” he muttered, half aloud, as he drove away….

“Crawling through a wide space in the barred fence, I found myself in a wilderness of weeds almost as high as myself. Beating these to right and left, an open spot was soon attained where the decorations of the “ribbon” came into view.

A PICTURE QUICKLY EMERGES OF A HIGHLY ENTHUSIASTIC AND EQUALLY DETERMINED WOMAN BOTANIST. PURSUING HER BLISS IN AN AGE WHEN WOMEN WERE STILL LARGELY CONFINED TO HOME LIFE. She never gives up, despite the challenges and dangers. At one point, she tells of her frightful encounter with two different tramps lying in fields; she escaped both of them without their waking up, and later found out that they were simply local workers out in the field tending to the cattle. At another point, just after the opening quote in this post and in what is perhaps the most hilarious part of the book, Sharp explains the subterfuge necessary to secure her botanical specimens:

When taking her rides abroad with unsympathetic companions, collecting, what had at first been conceded to her as a hobby of possibly brief duration, like any other fad, by reason of prolonged and persistent continuance, became burdensome; and finally, objection was not infrequently made to stopping for botanical acquisition. In this emergency, and after being summarily whisked by coveted treasures, a new expedient suggested itself.

Gloves and hand-bags had mysterious ways of falling over the wheel into the road in near proximity to new and attractive weeds: in getting out to recover the one, she audaciously insisted on securing the other. Her soul is still harrowed by recollection of a much-desired specimen, dimly identified at a moment when nothing was at hand to drop — her hat being the only article possible to so use, and it tightly, alas! pinned to her hair. What a pity that heads could not be conveniently tipped off on such interesting occasions! And that specimen has never been seen since, and is still absent from her collection.

In this passage, Sharp celebrates the delight that she finds studying collecting and identifying plants for her herbarium:

An enviable task is that of the naturalist. What pleasure nature spreads in the path of her devotee; the expectancy of the search, the unmixed joy of the discovery! There are no labors so purely delightful as those which we assume with nature.

Society, meanwhile, throws many impediments in a woman’s path to taking on that role:

What is it for a woman to be a botanist? With maternal, domestic, or social duties, to say nothing of literary, if she incline that way, and each an occupation in itself, how shall she find opportunity to cultivate acquaintance with Nature and reduce her observations to a science?

She will do it because she was born to do it; because within her is the heaven-imparted kinship with Nature which is the open sesame to that kingdom of delight. But she will do it under difficulties.

ALAS, SHARP’S BOOK IS A MISCELLANY, A COMPENDIUM OF FORMERLY PUBLISHED NEWSPAPER COLUMNS, NOT ALL OF WHICH SPEAK TO THE READER OF TODAY. Much of the opening essay, Summer in a Bog, is about the unusual human characters she encounters in the midst of her fieldwork. A later essay discusses the poisonous character of tobacco, while another essay names the women botanists in Ohio she knew or read about. The closing essay is an A to Z list, with brief biographies, of famous botanists (or persons associated with botany) around the world, from antiquity to her present day. The reader, if one pardons the inevitable pun, gets bogged down from time to time. My eyes did perk up, though, for one essay toward the end of the book: Passing of the Wildwood. First published in the periodical Plant World in May, 1900, the brief piece is a call for setting aside bits of wild nature in all communities across the country:

A glimpse of nature, an object lesson for the denizens of the city, surrounded from day to day, as they are, by the works of man; why can not such spots be spared, here and there, from the general destruction of nature’s original beauty, which takes place wherever a city is planted?

Alas, for some parts of the country in 1900, it seemed already too late:

But civilization daily encroaches upon these remnants of pristine formations, and in many localities nothing remains of nature’s original construction.

IN THE FORWARD TO HER BOOK, SHARP WONDERS TO HERSELF WHETHER IT IS REALLY WORTHWHILE TO REPUBLISH HER VARIOUS WRITINGS FROM THE COLUMNS OF PAST PERIODICALS. In order to answer that, she shares the following thoughts with her readers:

There is no ennui, no heavy time to kill, when all around us secrets of Nature invite to revealment. Then, secrets no longer, let us while away a little time in recording them.

So, if anything is learned from these pages, if any impulse in the right direction proceeds from them, or if they furnish only the entertainment of an idle hour, they are worth while.”

THANK YOU, KATHERINE DOORIS SHARP, FOR A WORTHWHILE READ.

FINALLY, A WORD ABOUT MY COPY OF THIS BOOK. Yet again, a first edition was well outside my price range, and I suspect there was no second edition printed. Fortunately, thanks to Forgotten Books, a publisher that re-prints scanned copies of books no longer under copyright, I was able to secure a like-new paperback copy for a pittance. I miss the sense of history, though I still prefer it to the Kindle alternative (even though it is a far better choice from an environmental viewpoint).

Infinite Mental Detail: “The Friendship of Nature” by Mabel Osgood Wright, 1894

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Jul 292020
 

Day is relentless, boundless, pushing in its thoughts and suggestions; one road opens upon another and every path has its branches. Walk in the fields; at each step you meet a new circumstance and a different idea is forced upon you. In the woods you are led by a strange leaf, a new flower, a mossed stone, — in themselves, trifles, — into infinite mental detail. The flight of a bird opens vista upon vista, until you cease to follow, cease even to absorb, but are both possessed and absorbed by the power of Nature. Beauty becomes almost an oppression, and the sun-fed colour blinding, the sense of personal littleness humbling. How can we realize it all, how can we arrange ourselves in relation to it and interpret it rightly? There is so much to see, so much to learn, and so little time between the first consciousness of the eye and its closing.

THIS QUOTE FROM MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT’S “THE FRIENDSHIP OF NATURE” BRILLIANTLY CAPTURES THE EXPERIENCE I HAD READING THIS BOOK. For most of its scant hundred pages, I felt utterly barraged by a never-ending procession of birds and flowers. In a single sentence, I might encounter a towee (who “hops among the bushes”), a redstart (“with breeze-ruffled feathers”), and a bluebird (whose “plaintive note drops liquidly”). Consider, for instance, this encounter with roadside weeds on a summer’s day walk:

The seeds and flowers are mingled together along the roadside, and the loiterer treasures many things that the farmer casts out of his fields. The yellow-starred St. Johnswort traces the path, and the grimy burdock, meshed with dusk-hung cobwebs, crowds the moth-mullein, and wild carrots spread their filmy umbles beside brown stalks of last year’s dock. Creeping, with clean, green leaves, the yellow hop-clover spreads and mats with the sweet white clover escaped from the files. The yellow toad-flax, or butter and eggs, a cousin of the garden snapdragon, with its densely packed racemes, steps in and out, climbing on stone heaps, tangled thick with trailing blackberry vines, underneath whose leaves lies the ripe, sweet, astringent fruit. Tasting it, we suck the purple drops of summer wine, and drinking, grow in tune with Nature’s melodies.

Reading this passage again, I am in awe of how brilliantly Wright has composed her scene, moving beyond a litany of names to ascribe unique features to each flowering plant, something to set it apart in the crowd of weeds along the road’s edge. The result is almost overpoweringly rich in visual detail. Indeed, her writing at times evokes a photograph album (Wright herself was an early nature photographer of considerable merit, and included several of her photographs in this book). Consider, for example, this wintery scene, incorporating seven different kinds of plants and animals:

In winter, when the frost-crust had the ground and the caked ice banked the stiffened creek, the reeds and sedges, long since gone to seed, rustled and cracked in the wind, etching clear shadows in the snow. The stripped bushes, with every twig articulated by crystal points, were perches for the owls, and on the wooded knoll, by the creek’s mouth, the eagle watched high in a tattered oak. The starving crows winged past like silhouettes, and the gulls, with hollow laugh, swept morsels from the sea, and at sunset all the scene was suffused with a cold purple glow.

CLICK. The vivid scene is etched into the reader’s memory, like the shadows of sedges in the snow. And all of it is beautiful, all of it is to be savored. Beauty calls to us everywhere:

Precious is the solitude and the song of the water thrush, for they soothe the spirit; precious are the orchards, the sunlight, and the home-going cattle, for they warm the heart. The red thrush perching high pours out his voluble song, while the lilacs sway over the wall. Still querying in an elm swings the oriole; is he bird, or flower, or cloud, or the transmigration of all?

BUT THERE ARE SERPENTS IN THIS WRIGHT’S GARDEN OF EDEN, ALSO. I intend that in the most literal sense — snakes. “Whether they are hurtful or not,” Wright declares to her readers, “snakes always seem a token of evil, a sign of some sinister power, and doubly so when we come upon them amid birds and flowers.” Care and appreciation for nature, then, may include removing (i.e., killing) certain animals so that others can prosper. For instance, during the first three years in which Wright managed a bird sanctuary near her home, cats, rats, snakes, and several unwanted bird species (such as European starlings) were all killed. Indeed, there is a reason that Wright’s book is subtitled “A New England Chronicle of Birds and Flowers”; those are the elements of Nature that she finds most entrancing. She may mention a squirrel in a sentence or two, but by the following paragraph, she has returned to her beloved birds and flowers once again.

WHERE DO HUMAN BEINGS FIT INTO IT ALL? In the final pages of her book, she speaks briefly of the inevitability of some environmental harm, so that human beings can live and progress. The damage cannot be ignored, but also cannot be prevented:

To the eastward stand tall chimneys that breathe flame and cinders, a factory city, whose thin, piercing spires are partly hidden by smoke.

Look at those chimneys also, though they break the harmonious circle, we must wear clothes and we must eat, for we may not all find sweetness in white oak acorns, like Thoreau. In winter, which lays bare the earth, man’s needs appear, and intensify his personal limitations. Mutual dependence, and not isolation, was the plan of creation.

IN RECOGNIZING OUR DEPENDENCE UPON NATURE, SHE WAS PERHAPS AHEAD OF HER TIME. In her claim that Nature somehow depends upon us, she was very much a product of her time. “The earth,” she asserted, “needs man’s stamp of progression.” It would be many decades — well beyond the scope of this present study — before humans would come to realize that, in fact, Nature would quite likely thrive without us.

ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MY BOOK. This time I had to settle for a recent paperback, as an original first edition is outside my price range. (But it is not as costly as one might imagine: a first edition is available right now at ABEBooks for under $100. It should be further noted that the initial run of this book was a mere 250 copies.) My modern edition from Johns Hopkins University Press includes a lengthy, highly informative introduction by Daniel Philippon, providing an account of Mabel Osgood Wright’s life and work. My particular paperback was published in 1999, and includes an inscription on the flyleaf: “To Mom with thoughts of our VT walks. [heart] Katy. 11/06.”

Drawn to the Heart of Nature: “Among the Isles of Shoals” by Celia Thaxter, 1873

 Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Jul 272020
 

We waited for the spring with an eager longing; the advent of the growing grass, the birds and flowers and insect life, the soft skies and softer winds, the everlasting beauty of the thousand tender tints that brought us unspeakable bliss. To the heart of Nature one must needs be drawn in such a life….

AFTER READING A NUMBER OF AUTHORS WHO SCRUTINIZED NATURE THROUGH A SCIENTIFIC LENS, CELIA THAXTER’S MEMORIES OF LIFE ON THE ISLES OF SHOALS WAS A REFRESHING SEA CHANGE. “Among the Isles of Shoals” is not, strictly speaking, a work of natural history; rather, nature imbues its pages because it is impossible to avoid elemental forces from atop small bits of rock with veneers of soil, perched on the edge of a vast ocean, nine miles’ journey from the New Hampshire mainland. Encountering nature is an inevitable part of living there. Thaxter’s writing rambles, like a tourist to Appledore Island might do. There are no chapters; the reader is pulled into the author’s island world and swept along from one topic to the next, running the gamut of past settlers, folkways, weather patterns, past storms, shipwrecks, the seasons, the sky, the birds…. I like to think that the blending of topics in this manner is somewhat intentional, an organic form emerging out of the experience of inhabiting a small island:

The eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception; sharp outlines become blurred and softened like a sketch in charcoal; nothing appeals to the mind with the same distinctness as on the mainland, among the rush and stir of people and things, and the excitements of social life.

It is a landscape where nature predominates; remnants of the human past become worn down and lichen encrusted, and eventually lost.

When man has vanished, Nature strives to restore her original order of things, and she smooths away gradually all traces of his work with the broad hands of her changing seasons.

THE MOST DELIGHTFUL PAGES IN THIS BOOK SPEAK OF THAXTER’S EARLY CHILDHOOD, SPENT AT THE LIGHTHOUSE ON WHITE ISLAND. She was “scarcely five years old” when her father became lighthouse keeper there. Celia and her two brothers grew up among the rocks, waves, birds, and flowers of a tiny, treeless island. Bereft of a social world beyond her own family, Nature instead provided her with everything she needed — companionship, play, and wonder. Over a span of about twenty pages, Thaxter magically evokes those experiences for the reader. Consider this extended passage, in which she speaks of the childhood mysteries and delights of White Island’s flowers:

I remember in the spring kneeling on the ground to seek the first blades of grass that pricked through the soil, and bringing them into the house to study and wonder over. Better than a shop full of toys they were to me! Whence came their color? How did they draw their sweet, refreshing tint from the brown earth, or the limpid air, or the white light? Chemistry was not on hand to answer me, and all her wisdom would not have dispelled the wonder. Later the little scarlet pimpernel charmed me. It seemed more than a flower; it was like a human thing. I knew it by its homely name of poor-man’s weatherglass. It was so much wiser than I, for, when the sky was yet without a cloud, softly it clasped its small red petals together, folding its golden heart in safety from the shower that was sure to come! How could it know so much? Here is a question science cannot answer. The pimpernel grows everywhere about the islands, in every cleft and cranny where a suspicion of sustenance for its slender root can lodge; and it is one of the most exquisite of flowers, so rich in color, so quaint and dainty in its method of growth. I never knew its silent warning fail. I wondered much how every flower knew what to do and to be; why the morning glory didn’t forget sometimes, and bear a cluster of elder-bloom, or the elder hang out pennons of gold and purple like the iris, or the golden-rod suddenly blaze out a scarlet plume, the color of the pimpernel, was a mystery to my childish thought. And why did the sweet wild primrose wait till after sunset to unclose its pale yellow buds; why did it unlock its treasure of rich perfume to the night alone? Few flowers bloomed for me upon the lonesome rock; but I made the most of all I had, and neither knew of nor desired more. Ah, how beautiful they were!

FOR THAXTER, LIFE ON THE ISLES OF SHOALS WAS A STREAM OF ENCOUNTERS WITH EVER-CHANGING ELEMENTAL PRESENCES. Everywhere she looked, she found entrancing forms and colors, shapes and scents, waves and winds. I will close the post with this enchanting collage of island experiences:

Nothing is too slight to be precious: the flashing of an oar-blade in the morning light; the twinkling of a gull’s wings afar off, like a star in the yellow sunshine of the drowsy summer afternoon; water-spout waltzing away before the wild wind that cleaves the sea from the advancing thunder-cloud; the distant showers that march about the horizon, trailing their dusky fringes of falling rain over sea and land; every phase of the great thunder-storms that make glorious the weeks of July and August, from the first floating film of cloud that rises in the sky till the scattered fragments of the storm stream eastward to form a background for the rainbow, — all these things are of the utmost importance to dwellers at the Isles of Shoals.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY COPY OF THIS BOOK. It is a paperback, from 1994, belonging to my wife; the book is a reproduction of the original 1873 edition. My wife studied marine biology on the Appledore Island in the Isles of Shoals, and likely purchased this book a few years later. It includes a few photos of the island from the time, including one of some buildings on Smuttynose Island, among which is the “Honvet House…where famous murders were committed in March 1873.” For those keen on learning more about 19th century New England axe murders, here is an article on what happened there. If you choose to check it out, remember, you axed for it.

The Glory of the Commonplace: “My Studio Neighbors” by W. Hamilton Gibson, 1897

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Jul 252020
 

I permitted my eyes to scan the tiny patch of bare ground at my feet, and what I observed during a very few moments suggested the present article as a good piece of missionary work in the cause of nature, and a suggestive tribute to the glory of the commonplace.

IN MY OPINION, W. HAMILTON GIBSON WAS THE MOST INSPIRING OF THE FORGOTTEN NATURALISTS FROM THE GENERATION AFTER THOREAU. Nowadays, he claims a Wiki page and little else, though scanned copies of his books are easily obtained from online archives, along with his biography (even more forgotten) from 1901. Gibson was an amazingly talented artist and natural scientist, who harnessed those two interests to craft highly engaging vignettes revealing mysteries of the everyday world around his summer art studio in Washington, Connecticut. Even the most dull bit of bare earth held its share of secrets to him, and he worked wonders with flowers, teasing out the complex interplay of flower structure and pollinator species. “Pluck the first flower that you meet in your stroll to-morrow,” he wrote, “and it will tell you a new story.”

GIBSON LIVED A TRAGICALLY BRIEF LIFE, DYING OF A STROKE BROUGHT ON BY OVERWORK AT THE AGE OF 46. “My Studio Neighbors” was published posthumously. As such, it does not have the coherence of his more polished works (which I will read and report upon at a later date). Instead, it is composed of several essays about insects and their fascinating (and somewhat macabre) stories well-crafted to engage the general reader, and several botanical essays on flowers and their pollinators that seem pitched to a more scientific crowd. I suspect he may have had a book in mind, or possibly even two. I learned quite a bit from his botanical pieces about pollination; for instance, I did not know that all orchids are characterized by having both anther and stigma (male and female reproductive parts) on the same stalk, known as a column. I also found fascinating how he went about figuring out what pollinated each flower, sometimes by observation, sometimes by deduction, and sometimes by forcing an insect such as a bumblebee to enter a flower to pollinate it. He accompanies his explanations by drawings that indicate stages if a process. In the drawings below, a bumblebee is making her way out of a Cyprepedium orchid (left), a process that requires getting doused with pollen (center) before being able to force her way out through the top (right).

MY FAVORITE ESSAYS FROM THIS BOOK, THOUGH, EXPLORED BACKYARD NATURE MYSTERIES. Gibson was an engaging storyteller: he we describe the what he saw, then explain carefully to the reader how he went about solving the puzzle as to what was actually going on. His stories focus on everyday things, and in doing so, they have the effect of inspiring the reader to find similar wonders close to home. He opens his essay Doorstep Neighbors with this exhortation:

How little do we appreciate our opportunities for natural observation! Even under the most discouraging and commonplace environment, what a neglected harvest! A backyard city grass-plot, forsooth, what an invitation!

After these enthusiastic words, Gibson gets to work setting the stage for his tale:

The arena of the events which I am about to describe and picture comprised a spot of almost bare earth less than one yard square, which lay at the base of the stone step to my studio door in the country.

Against this humble backdrop, Gibson proceeds to share about the many holes he finds there, and the wandering insects that suddenly disappear into them. Clearly, there is a whole lot going on. Not content merely to watch, Gibson consigns a couple of victims to their fate:

A poor unfortunate green caterpillar, which, with a very little forcible persuasion in the interest of science, was induced to take a short-cut across this nice clean space of earth to the clover beyond, was the next martyr to my passion for original observation. He might have pursued his even course across the area unharmed, but he…persisted in trespassing, and suddenly was seen to transform from a slow creeping laggard into the liveliest acrobat, as he stood on his head and apparently dived precipitately into the hole which suddenly appeared beneath him.

Gibson continues his bemused explorations, trying to cover up the holes and the watching them cleared of debris as if by magic. Finally, using a long blade of Timothy grass as a fishing pole equivalent, Gibson inserted it into one of holes. A beetle grub lurking at the bottom (10 inches down) snapped at the grass and was brought to the surface for inspection. But this did not solve all of the mysteries, because meanwhile other holes were being excavated by various wasps, who would fly away only to reappear dragging the body of a spider or a caterpillar. This, too, let to some fascinating research using everyday materials:

Constructing a tiny pair of balances with a dead grass stalk, thread, and two disks of paper, I weighed the wasp, using small square pieces of paper of equal size as my weights. I found that the wasp exactly balanced four of the pieces. Removing the wasp and substituting the caterpillar, I proceeded to add piece after piece of the paper squares until I had reached a total of twenty-eight, or seven times the number required by the wasp, before the scales balanced. Similar experiments with the tiny black wasp and its spider victim showed precisely the same proportion….

IF I WERE GOING TO USE ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE GIBSON’S WORK, I THINK ‘CHARMING’ WOULD DO THE JOB WELL. Gibson would have been a delightful person to meet and talk with at length — though in my case, I fear we would soon get stuck on the topic of how overwhelmed we our by our respective work obligations. He never quite took himself too seriously, avoiding the pontificating that Blatchley sometimes fell prey to. He was both a highly talented artist and a keen naturalist, and I will undoubtedly write more of him and his other books in the future.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE COPY I READ. My copy is likely a second edition, published in 1898. A bit stained and weatherbeaten, it is still in fine fettle, with the binding in excellent condition. The outstanding feature of the book (apart, of course, from Gibson’s drawings and writings) is the spectacular cover. A ring of butterflies encircles the book title, against a background of olive green cloth. As for its history, all I have in this regard is a tiny stamp glued to the upper left corner of the inside of the front cover, with the name Amelia Stevenson printed on it.

Each Pebble Has a Past: “Boulder Reveries” by W. S. Blatchley, 1906

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Jul 232020
 
W. S. Blatchley, 1859-1940
Unknown author / Public domain

Each pebble has a past; each tiny grain of clay and soil a future. The boulder on the hillside, how came it there and when? ‘Tis but an atom as compared with the bulk of the great round earth beneath, yet ’tis as worthy as a theme of thought.

THE TRANSITION FROM SIMPSON TO BLETCHLEY WAS JARRING. After the simple, straightforward sentences and comical scenes of Simpson’s Florida, Bletchley’s pontifications from north-central Indiana were tough going, like climbing the face of a sand dune in steel-toed hiking boots. Blatchley’s book is far more introspective and sullen. Written almost entirely as diary entries composed in fountain pen ink while the author was resting on a boulder in a wooded pasture, the book is an admixture of observations of the close-at-hand (mostly insects and flowers), ponderings on time’s passage (deep time and human transience), and occasional brow-beatings of his own supposed inability to make better use of his hours. (Given that he published a couple of dozen scientific monographs and books over his lifetime, I find that line unconvincing.) The language is frequently affected, and sometimes he gushes forth in lines that feel like fortune cookie clichés, even now, over 100 years later:

Possess thyself in patience, O my soul! Let seconds be as days unto thy reckoning. Do well the little things which come thy way. Think well the thoughts thou wouldst impress upon the table of eternity.

At one point, Blatchley describes the debris in a rural brook after a flood in these words:

Often-times in the bends of the stream are bunches of drift composed of logs, chips, pieces of bark, limbs, rails, boards, dead weeds and leaves, flotsam and jetsam of the freshet days, all heterogeneously mingled….

What an apt description of this book! There are images and ideas to be mined here, but there is also much to be, well, waded through. Part of it falls on the author’s book design — snippets of reflections from a boulder and along a nearby stream, mostly in the summer months, spanning several years. What could have been a fascinating study of place in nature over the course of a year (one that would have fit in well with many another nature book of the time) is lost due to the many missing months. Blatchley says little about himself (and his Wikipedia bio is fairly minimal), but I get the sense that he is writing from a summer retreat in the country (he mentions a city home at one point). By framing the book as reveries, he opened the door to saying pretty much whatever he felt like saying. It isn’t quite a nature book, or a book of philosophy, or of poetry. Unfortunately, for all that there are some intriguing passages, I cannot even find it possible to point to a page and say, “If only the rest of the book were like this.” Still, there are gems here, and let us explore them.

MY FAVORITE ASPECTS OF BLATCHLEY’S BOOK ARE HIS CONTEMPLATIONS OF ELEMENTAL FORCES AND DEEP TIME. He writes, for instance, about how matter and energy are united in living beings. He speaks of the forces of nature, and how glaciers have shaped the Indiana countryside. And always there is the presence of time — both human time (the time between entries, the span of person’s life) and deep time (the time it took for rocks to form and land be shaped). Consider this passage, in which Blatchley finds a bit of quartz and visualizes its story:

Stooping I pick up a piece of semi-transparent quartz; pure white, vitreous, and in outline roughly angular; yet worn by abrasion until its sharp edges and corners are rounded. How came it here? Go back through the centuries to the ice sheet, four hundred feet and more in thickness, which once covered this spot. Follow that sheet northward to some deep ravine whose edges are clothed with fir and pine, and there, in the dense Canadian wilderness, will you find the mother ledge of quartz, gleaming pure and white, from which this piece was broken. Cold, hard, and durable enough to withstand all elements of the present, it harks back to that age when ice was its master, bearing it onward in vise-like grip to be dropped on or near its present resting place. One fragment of matter, without life, thought or motion, has, after a lapse of thousands of centuries, met another endowed with these, and has been connected, at least in thought, with the ledge of which it was once a part.

OCCASIONALLY, TOO, BLATCHLEY WROTE ABOUT FLOWS IN NATURE, IN A MANNER THAT HINTED, AT LEAST, AT ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS THINKING. Here is one of his finest (in my opinion) forays into the topic — in this case, the flow from plant sap to aphid honey to ant nourishment:

…I noted by the pathway a clump of curled dock on the stems of which were hundreds of dark, leaden-gray plant-lice, or aphids, their bodies swelling with the juices that they had imbibed or rather sucked, from the soft succulent stems. Over the dock there crawled rapidly numerous large, black ants which, as they moved, were waving their antennae swiftly to and fro as if in search of something lost. As I looked, an ant approached closely one of the thicker-bodied of the lice, when the latter turned its abdomen upward and exuded therefrom a drop of liquid, clear as crystal . With a single lap the ant swallowed the morsel of “honey-dew.” Thus is the juice of the dock transmitted through the body of the aphis into the stomach of the ant, undergoing, doubtless, on the way a chemical change which renders it sweet and to the especial liking of that insect. Wonderful is the relationship thus existing between the organic matter in the soil, the plant and the two insects. Interesting the process by which that inorganic matter is fitted for the food of the higher form, the ant. Varied the changes which matter must undergo as a part of the earth and the dwellers thereon during its unceasing round of existence.

AS AN ENTOMOLOGIST, BLATCHLEY APPRECIATED, AND CELEBRATED, THE SMALL AND OVERLOOKED, AND HOW THOSE THINGS INTO A LARGER STORY. That could be a piece of quartz, or an aphid on a dock plant. Everything in nature belonged, and existed in some sort of relationship with other objects and beings. But I will stop here, lest I begin to put words and ideas into Blatchley’s book that he never quite managed to express. I will close with this thought about observing natural relationships:

To a true naturalist nothing in nature is lowly, nothing is isolated. An inter-relationship, and inter-dependence, is everywhere visible. However small, however stunted and ill shaped, nothing natural seems out of place.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE COPY OF THIS BOOK I READ. One thing I have noticed about all of W. S. Blatchley’s books is that they were published by the Nature Publishing Company and used a similar front cover design with title in gold at a jaunty angle. I strongly suspect that the Nature Publishing Company label was Blatchley’s own. According to a further note on the copyright page, it was printed by Wm. B. Burford of Indianapolis. It includes several black and white photographs of passable artistry, scattered throughout the pages. There is no writing on my copy, and therefore I can say nothing further of its history.

Nature At a Snail’s Pace: “In Lower Florida Wilds” by Charles Torrey Sampson, 1920

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History, Night, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 212020
 

[The Seminoles’] words are composed of a great number of syllables. Willoughby has given a vocabulary of them in his book Across the Everglades and in this only two words have a single syllable while many run up into eight or more. For instance heron is “wak-ko-lat-koo-hi-lot-tee”; instep is “e-lit-ta-pix-tee-e-fa-cho-to-kee-not-ee,” and wrist “in-tee-ti-pix-tee-e-toke-kee-kee-tay-gaw.” I should think it would take a half hour for a Seminole to ask the time of day, but fortunately he has plenty of time.

There is something very distressing in the gradual passing of the wilds, the destruction of the forests, the draining of the swamps and lowlands, the transforming of the prairies with their wonderful wealth of bloom and beauty, and in its place the coming of civilized man with all his unsightly constructions — his struggles for power, his vulgarity and pretensions. Soon this vast, lonely, beautiful waste will be reclaimed and tamed; soon it will be furrowed by canals and highways and spanned by steel rails. A busy, toiling people will occupy the place that sheltered a wealth of wild life. Gaily dressed picnicers or church-goers will replace the flaming and scarlet ibis, the ethereal egret and the white flowers of the crinums and arrowheads, the rainbow bedecked garments of the Seminoles. In place of the cries of wild birds there will be heard the whistle of the locomotive and the honk of the automobile.

We constantly boast of our marvelous national growth. We shall proudly point some day to the Everglade country and say: “Only a few years ago this was a worthless swamp; to-day it is an empire.” But I sometimes wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled the land with countless human beings. Is the percentage of happiness greater in a state of five million inhabitants than in one of half a million, or in a huge city with all its slums and poverty than in a village? In short I question the success of our civilization from the point of view of general happiness gained for all or for the real joy of life for any.

IN THIS TIME WHEN HAPPINESS IS RARE INDEED TO FIND, SIMPSON’S WORDS SPEAK DIRECTLY TO MY HEART. Opening the first pages of “In Lower Florida Wilds”, I developed an immediate affinity for the author. Though I know relatively little about him yet (his published biography is on its way to me now), through the pages of this book I have found him to be sincere, affable, thoughtful, perceptive, caring, and a bit self-deprecating to boot. His deep love for nature flows through these pages — along with his keen scientific mind and eye. Over the course of nearly 400 pages and over 60 black and white photographs (not to mention a color frontispiece of Simpson’s beloved tree snails), the reader travels through the geologic story of South Florida and then the myriad terrestrial and marine ecosystems found in the region. Through it all, Simpson mourns again and again the tragic demise of Florida’s wild animals, plants, and places. He seems largely resigned to their passing, though he does offer a ray of hope that conservation might yet be possible:

This locality [along the south shore of mainland Florida] is one of the last resorts of some of our most beautiful and interesting wading birds. Here in days gone by resorted vast numbers of gorgeous flamingos, scarlet ibises, roseate spoonbills, and roseate terns. This was one of the chief breeding places of the ethereally beautiful egret…and the even more perfect snowy heron…. Owing to woman’s vanity and man’s greed they are now well-nigh exterminated….

The entire region (which is of little value for anything else) should be set apart by the federal government, as a great bird reservation, but even then it would be difficult enough to protect the birds within it, for the same men who killed Bradley [a murdered bird warden whose tale is told here] would not hesitate to do the same by any other warden.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE, SIMPSON IS ALSO A MARVELOUS TELLER OF TALES OF HIS EXPERIENCE IN THE SOUTH FLORIDA WILDS. One of my favorite stories, though, happens to him in Key West, where he finds himself collecting lovely shells — of still-living snails — with quite comicl consequences:

I once made a cruise in the schooner Asa Eldridge from Bradentown, Florida to Honduras and on a Sunday morning while lying at Key West I strolled over to the north side of the island. As I approached I saw from a short distance that it was everywhere a mass of glowing violet color and then I found it to be covered from below tide to well out on the land with fresh Hanthinas. All the depressions and pot holes in the rocky shore were filled — in places several feet deep. A vast community or gathering of them probably extending for miles had stranded the night before on the beach. It was the most astounding sight in the way of molluscan life I had ever seen and when I recovered from my surprise I proceeded to collect specimens. Lacking any receptacle in which to put them I used my handkerchief, then my new straw hat, then one pocket after another of my fresh white linen suit, and when fully loaded I started for the schooner.

The day was hot, and soon the snails seemed to be melting. To my horror violet blotches appeared on my coat and trousers, spreading rapidly until the purple juice from the animals actually ran down and filled my shoes! I reached the city as the church bells were ringing and I tried to evade people by taking alleys and back streets but everywhere I met groups of churchgoers who stared at me in astonishment. They no doubt took me for an escaped lunatic. It seemed to me that Key West had a population of a hundred thousand and all churchgoers. Having run that gauntlet and reached the vessel our crew greeted me with shouts and laughter. My smart suit was ruined, nor could I even wear it around the vessel without being derided — but I had the satisfaction of cleaning up over two thousand fine Janthina shells.

Janthina janthina sea snail with its bubble raft, washed up on the east shore of Maui, Hawaii. (Wikimedia Commons)

THOUGH I DO NOT PICTURE SIMPSON AS A CHURCHGOER HIMSELF, HE WROTE OFTEN OF THE INSPIRATION AND WONDER HE FOUND IN NATURE. For instance, in this passage, he wrote admiringly (and well ahead of his time) of an intelligence operative throughout the natural world — not the intelligence of a supernatural designer, but of the plants and animals themselves:

It seems to me that there is a soul throughout nature, that the animals, and I like to believe, the plants, to a certain extent, think, something in the same manner that human beings do. Howe invents the sewing machine, Bell the telephone, McCormick the reaper — all devices to perform some service to the benefit of man. A palm sends its growing stem deep into the earth and buries its vitals to protect them from fire; the mangrove raises itself high on stilted roots in order than it may live above the water and breathe; an orchid perfects a complicated device to compel honey-loving insects to cross-fertilize its pollen. Animals resort to all manner of tricks to conceal themselves from their enemies. All these work not merely for themselves but for the benefit of the race to which they belong. If the work of man is the result of thought that of animals and plants must be also in some lesser degree. If man developed from a lower animal, the superior from the inferior, where may we draw the line between reason and instinct?

Consider, too, the paragraph below, in which Simpson (an “old man” at 73, though he lived another 13 years after this) celebrates the deep joys that come from going on wilderness adventures under primitive conditions in the swamps of south Florida:

Why should an old man, past the age when most persons seek adventure, leave a comfortable home and plunge into the wilderness to endure such hardships? What rewards can he receive for it? I never return utterly warn out from such a trip but that I vow it is the last. But in time the hardships are forgotten and recollections of the pleasant features only remain and I am ready to start again. There is in all this a sort of fascination not easy to explain — the relief that comes from being away from all the restraints and artificialities of communal life — and then, the “call of the wild.” There is a wonderful inspiration in the great out of doors. Every feels it — some more, some less. Personally I cannot resist the call and must respond when I hear it and understand its meaning.

Here is a lovely passage in which Simpson expresses a childlike wonder at the experience of being outdoors at night:

I love the night with its silence, its strange sounds, its beauty and mystery. It has an infinite attraction for the devotee of nature: al that he sees, hears, and feels are so different from the experiences of the daytime; he seems to be in another world…. Much of the wonder and beauty of the night consists in what is only half seen, in what is partly suggested, leaving the imagination to do the rest.

Itis then largely because of the stimulation of the imagination that the night is so wonderful. Under its spell we create a world of our own and revel in the make-believe — like the children of a larger growth that we all are.

Finally, I will close with this marvelous passage in which Simpson speaks of his reverence and devotion toward nature, something he fears that too many specialist scientists have lost:

It was in the wilds that Humboldt, Darwin, Wallace, Bates, Spruce, and the splendid company of the earlier and greater naturalists studied and worshipped Nature. They were interested in every phase and detail of it; their contact with it made them broad and big and able to see the great truths. There are many specialists who study intensively some small group of animals or plants until they know more about it than anyone else, but they have too little general scientific knowledge, and they care too little for the great scheme of nature. In fact they are too little. They may slave on the anatomy or heredity of a few things but they neglect the larger questions of environment and distribution. They are closet students — scientists, not naturalists; their whole occupation is business; they find neither beauty nor charm in it. They dig in a tunnel and see nature through a pinhole….

I do not want to investigate nature as though I were solving a problem in mathematics. I want none of the element of business to enter into any of my relations with it. I am not and cannot be a scientific attorney. In my attempts to unravel its mysteries I have a sense of reverence and devotion, I feel as though I were on enchanted ground. And whenever any of its mysteries are revealed to me I have a feeling of elation — I was about to say exaltation, just as though the birds or the trees had told me their secrets and I had understood their language — and Nature herself had made me a confidant.

Close-up of page edges of “In Lower Florida Wilds” showing water-damage(left);
birthday note to unknown recipient from Elsa, 1932, on flyleaf of book (right)

REGARDING MY COPY OF THIS BOOK, IT HAS HAD A ROUGH LIFE, THAT’S FOR SURE. The covers bow out a bit, and the pages have recovered from a good soaking. Reading it, I do not get that pleasurable sensation of being able to bend back the top corner of the page and advance quickly through the text; pages turn only singly. Though there is no salt brine, and my wife assures me the damage is not great enough to reflect a complete immersion, I cannot shake the image of this book having been used as a life preserver, cast overboard to a drowning would-be swimmer somewhere off the Florida Keys. I suspect the truth is as prosaic as an unexpected afternoon rainshower falling on a book left on a table on the back patio.

In terms of its history, the only event in its existence of which I can speak (besides its publication in 1920) happened on an unknown recipient’s birthday, March 4th, 1932, when Elsa gave someone this book on her (or his) 40th birthday, in Miami, Florida.

As another note from one who has taken a fancy to Charles Torrey Simpson — the friendship can be a costly one. This book was not terribly costly — about $40. However, his other two books, published in 1923 and 1932, are another matter. I have learned that any book published after 1922 is not available as a free scan online, nor are facsimile copies sold on Amazon or elsewhere. The book is truly out of print. For those craving more of this author, the choices are hunting university libraries for copies, or buying copies. I opted for the latter. I snatched a copy of his 1932 book for only $40, but his 1923 book was a “steal” in a signed copy in good shape for “only” $135. I think in the future I need to stick to less desirable authors — the disreputable riffraff of the literary naturalist community, if there is such a thing.

Look to the Horizon: “Land of the Lingering Snow” by Frank Bolles, 1891

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Geometry and Nature, Native Plants, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 042020
 

The summit [of Mt. Wachusett] consists of a few acres, destitute of trees, covered with bare rocks, interspersed with blueberry bushes, raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, moss, and a fine wiry grass. The common yellow lily, and dwarf cornel, grow abundantly in the crevices of the rocks. This clear space, which is gently rounded, is bounded a few feet lower by a thick shrubbery of oaks, with maples, aspens, beeches, cherries, and occasionally a mountain ash intermingled, among which we found the bright blueberries of the Solomon’s Seal, and the fruit of the pyrola. From the foundation of a wooden observatory, which was formerly erected on the highest point, forming a rude hollow structure of stone, a dozen feet in diameter, and five or six in height, we could dimly see Monadnock, rising in simple grandeur…..

from “A Walk to Wachusett” by H. D. Thoreau, 1842

The summit, reached just at noon, proved anything but attractive. Stripped of trees and bushes, it has been afflicted by a large and commonplace hotel, several barns and ugly sheds, and a bowling alley, billiard room, and tintype gallery. The north wind was polluted by the escaping odors of a cask of gasoline, and when we sought the groves below the crest, we encountered tin cans, broken bottles and other remains of previous seasons. When one seeks gasoline, electric bells, and a tintype gallery he has a right to feel pleased on finding them, but when I seek Nature on a mountain top and find her fettered by civilization, I have a right to feel aggrieved…. What first struck us was the number of fires which were contributing columns of blue smoke to [the] atmosphere…. Northward of the Berkshires the sky line was ragged with hills and distant mountains in Vermont and New Hampshire, even to the point where, rising serenely from its granite bed, Monadnock reared its noble head toward the heavens. It alone in all that smoky landscape was majestic.

from “Wachusett” by Frank Bolles, 1891

IT IS DIFFICULT TO READ FRANK BOWLES’ WORK WITHOUT THINKING OF THOREAU. While Bolles only mentions the sage of Concord a couple of times in his book, “Land of the Lingering Snow”, the spirit of Thoreau pervades it. A chronicle of Bolles’ outdoor nature encounters over the first half of a year, the book includes accounts of a trip to Cape Cod (visited several times by Thoreau) and a walk up Mt. Wachusett (also chronicled by Thoreau). Yet this connection only highlights the key difference between the experiences of the two authors; Thoreau inhabited the rural landscape of Concord in the mid-19th-century, while Bolles lived in the gritty industrialized landscape of Cambridge on the brink of the 20th century. Thoreau set out on a country walk to Wachusett, remarking on the bucolic scenery of the hop fields. Bolles set out by horse and carryall, remarking on the journey that

For the first four miles, the road was far from agreeable. We encountered rough pavements or dust, the obtrusive features of a young and by no means beautiful city, hillsides denuded of trees, and in many cases turned into quarries, the Nashua River defiled by mill-waste and stained by chemicals, railroad embankments coated with ashes and bare of verdure, and brick mill buildings, grim, noisy, and forbidding. The road gradually ascended, and at length crossed the river, passed under the railway and sought the woods. A parting glance down stream showed a mass of steeples, chimneys, brick walls, quarry derricks, freight cars, and dirty mill ponds flanked by wasted hillsides and overhung by a cloud of smoke. Between the smoke and the hurly-burly of the town a distant line of hills show out on the horizon. It was the promise of something purer above.

ALAS, BOLLES’ HOPE OF WACHUSETT AS EDEN WAS QUICKLY DASHED. Yet again, he looked to the horizon, and saw Monadnock in its grandeur. At least Monadnock yet remained, a symbol of that pure wild nature he craved.

IT IS DIFFICULT NOT TO THINK OF FRANK BOWLES AS A SOMEWHAT TRAGIC FIGURE. Like Thoreau, he was drawn to nature (particularly birds which, I suspect, he was better able to identify by plumage and song than Thoreau himself). He had a gift for reading stories in the snow or sand tracks of mammals and birds. But while I think of Thoreau as dying too young at the age of 47, Bolles died even younger, at the age of 38, of pneumonia. And many of the rural haunts of Thoreau were gone by Bolles’ day, transformed by industrial “progress” into mills and stone quarries. And while Thoreau is perhaps the most celebrated American environmental writer of all time, Frank Bolles has not even merited a Wikipedia entry yet. Partly I think this is due to the paucity of his work — two collections of nature essays: “Land of the Lingering Snow” (his outings in New England between January and June of a year) and “At the North of Bearcamp Water” (his wanderings between July and December), plus two posthumous volumes, one of poetry and the other of unpublished writings. All of his work is out of print now, unless you take into consideration the print-on-demand option and scanned copies available for free online.

AT THE SAME TIME, FRANK BOLLES STRIKES ME AS A NATURAL HISTORY WRITER I WOULD DEARLY LOVE TO HAVE MET. His youth, enthusiasm, and even humor (see his quote about the gasoline and electric bells on Wachusett, above) are quite winning. He is knowledgeable without being pretentious, keenly perceptive without being pedantic. He is humble and thoughtful. I admit that I do not care for his propensity for capturing baby owls from the wild and rearing them as pets. On the other hand, nowhere in the book does he mention hunting, though he catches quite a few trout for dinner one day. And like Robertson, Bolles is able to admire a snake and let it go: “Being given his freedom unhurt he rewarded us by some brilliant tree climbing, during which he glided up a trunk, in and out among branches, and along limbs from tree to tree. I hope he will do no harm during the new term of life which we gave him.”

PERHAPS BOLLES LACKED SOME OF THE LITERARY COMPLEXITY OF THOREAU. Yet in his simpler prose, there is much to wonder at and appreciate. Consider, for instance, his description of the effects of a rainstorm on the dune grasses:

As the wind blew the sand grass, its long blades whirled around, cutting circles in the sand with their tough tips and edges. These circles could be seen from a long distance, so deeply and clearly were they cut. Sometimes a long blade and a short one whirled on the same root and made concentric circles. The geometrical correctness of these figures made them striking elements in a landscape so chaotic as the dunes in the Equinoctial.

Then there is this peculiar bit of imaginative prose (a flight of fancy, one might call it) in which bluebirds generate goldfinches. The passage had been marked in pencil in my copy of the book, and further indicated by a torn piece of paper with the page number on it slipped into the book, so I feel compelled to share the passage here:

Over the brook stood an oak; in the oak sat a bluebird; from the bluebird’s inmost soul poured the sweetest of bird music, and, wonderful to relate, the music as it fell upon the air turned into goldfinches which undulated over the pasture, finally rested upon the oak and added their songs to the general join of the occasion. It may be said by harsh commentators that goldfinches never could have been made out of bluebirds’ music. Then the burden is on them to prove where the goldfinches come from, for to our eyes they came from the air, which had nothing in it except the song of the bluebird.

ULTIMATELY, BOLLES FOUND IN NATURE MUCH JOY AND PEACE, QUALITIES THE HUMAN WORLD DID NOT ALWAYS OFFER. After one walk through the woods and fields of eastern Massachusetts, Bolles remarked that “In all that day’s wandering I saw no sign of terror in any living thing that was not caused by man. Nature by herself is not all peace, by any means, but she is nearer to it than when man is present.” And ultimately, in the passage of the seasons Bolles chronicled in his two books, he even found meaning in mortality — meaning that I would like to think offered him solace during his final moments, dying of pneumonia in 1894:

As I look at this grass and the flowers which shine in its midst, at the myriad leaves upon the trees, at the butterflies, caterpillars, locusts, ants, and bees, and at the birds, solicitous for their eggs or young, should I be sorrowful because in a few days the annual tide of life will turn and the grass begin to ripen, the flowers to fade, the butterflies to die, and the birds to take note of the sky and begin their journey southward? No. The rhythm of the universe demands just this coming and going, rising and falling, expanding and contracting, living and dying. Without reaction there could be no action. Without death we should not know what life meant; without what we call sorrow there could be no joy.”

THOUGH FRANK BOLLES IS NEARLY FORGOTTEN TODAY, THERE REMAINS ONE MONUMENT TO HIM, OF WHICH HE WOULD BE QUITE PROUD. Frank Bolles had purchased land with an old farmhouse at the foot of Mt. Chocorua in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and took his family there as often as he could. The region features in several of Bolles’ nature essays. In 1969, Bolles’ daughter, Evelyn Bolles Phenix, donated 247 acres to the Nature Conservancy; Frank Bolles Preserve is now open to all those seeking peace and solace in nature.

The Nature Conservancy, https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places-we-protect/frank-bolles-preserve/

BY WAY OF CLOSING, A FEW REMARKS ON MY BOOK. My copy is a “first edition” from 1891; I did find record on the website of ABE Books of a 4th edition that came out in 1895. The book is still together though the binding it showing signs of coming apart. There were no names or other words written anywhere in the book, though a couple of passages were marked with pencil. In addition to “Page 105” written on a torn piece of paper and slipped into the book, the volume also included an old newspaper clipping (possibly from the period of the book) with a poem by Bolles, The Whip-Por-Will. It was later published on page 61 of a posthumous volume of his poetry entitled “Chocorua’s Tenants”. The book has been scanned and may be viewed online here.

Full Assurance of Spring: “In New England Woods and Fields” by Rowland E. Robinson, 1896

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Reptiles, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 022020
 

The lifeless dun of the close-cropped southward slopes and the tawny tangles of the swales are kindling to living green with the blaze of the sun and the moist tinder of the brook’s overflow.

ROWLAND ROBINSON IS NOT AN EASY AUTHOR TO READ. His sentences sometimes run for a dozen lines on the page, nearly every one a dense thicket of adjectives and nouns with scarcely an adverb in sight. He was taken to reflecting, and rhapsodizing, on the campfire; half a dozen of his essays focus on them. (He is quite taken with fire in general, as the quote above demonstrates.) The volume I read is a collection of short essays, written for the magazine Forest and Stream, an early conservation magazine that merged with Field and Stream in 1930. As such, the works are organized, to a rough approximation, across the seasons of the year. But otherwise, the book has no structure or theme beyond encountering nature in the woods and fields of Vermont. And while his text includes a number of passages in his essays on various animals that could be interpreted as the work of an early conservationist, he falls short of advocating for greater regulations on sport hunting. (In Robinson’s defense, George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt are even more famous conservationists who bagged far more game than he did.)

AND YET HIS WRITING SOMETIMES EVOKES SEASONAL MOMENTS OF NATURE IN A VIVID AND BEAUTIFUL WAY. Consider, for instance, that same quote with which I began this essay. Or here is another one, from earlier in the season. Reading it slowly, I am transported there, to see and feel his world of the northern Vermont forest, still gripped by winter but with intimations of springtime, tree trunks decorated by shifting patterns of light and shadow:

The coarse-grained snow is strewn thickly with shards of bark that the trees have sloughed in their long hibernation, with shreds and tatters of their tempest-torn branches. But all this litter does not offend the eye nor look out of place, like that which is scattered in fields and about homesteads. When this three months’ downfall of fragments sinks to the carpet of flattened leaves, it will be at one with it, an inwoven pattern, as comely as the shifting mesh of browner shadows that trunks and branches weave between the splashes of sunshine. Among these is a garnishment of green moss patches and fronds of perennial ferns which tell of life that the stress of winter could not overcome. One may discover, amid the purple lobes of the squirrelcup leaves, downy buds that promise blossoms, and others, callower, but of like promise, under the dusty links of the arbutus chain.

IT IS EASY TO CLASSIFY HIS WRITING AS “FLOWERY” AND DISMISS IT ALTOGETHER. Nowadays, nature writing is not tasked with painting pictures, but instead can accompany them. Robinson was first an artist, and only later in life a writer; surprisingly, this book of nature essays is entirely unillustrated apart from its cover art. Instead, his essays are filled with still-lifes, vivid sentences depicting the landscape and its inhabitants (primarily birds, frogs, and mammals, with a brief nod to a few different plants (like squirrelcup, a.k.a. hepatica, which has cameos in several of the essays). They challenge the frenetic reader of today to slow down and let the words sink in and allow his landscape to appear in the imagination:

At last there is full and complete assurance of spring, in spite of the baldness of the woods, the barrenness of the fields, bleak with sodden furroughs of last year’s ploughing, or pallidly tawny with bleached grass, and untidy with the jetsam of winter storms and the wide strewn litter of farms in months of foddering and wood-hauling.

There is full assurance of spring in such incongruities as a phoebe a-perch on a brown mullein stalk in the midst of grimy snow banks, and therefrom swooping in airy loops of flight upon the flies that buzz across this begrimed remnant of winter’s ermine, and of squirrelcups flaunting bloom and fragrance in the face of an ice cascade, which, with all its glitter gone, hangs in dull whiteness down the ledges, greening the moss with the moisture of its wasting sheet of pearl.

At its best, the result of Robinson’s wordsmithery is a prose poem to the season, fraught with images akin to William Carlos Williams’ poem, Red Wheelbarrow, but far less spartan — more like a scene filled choc-a-bloc with various wheelbarrows, all clamoring for attention at once:

Summer is past its height. The songless bobolink has forsaken the shorn meadow. Grain fields, save the battalioned maize, have fallen from gracefulness and beauty of bending heads and ripple of mimic waves to bristling acres of stubble. From the thriftless borders of ripening weeds, busy flocks of yellowbirds in faded plumage scatter in sudden flight at one’s approach like upblown flurries of dun leaves. Goldenrod gilds the fence corners, asters shine in the dewy borders of the woods, sole survivors of the floral world save the persistent bloom of the wild carrot and succory — flourishing as if there had never been mower or reaper — and the white blossoms of the buckwheat crowning the filling kernels. The fervid days have grown perceptibly shorter, the lengthening nights have a chilly autumnal flavor, and in the cool dusk the katydids call and answer one to another out of their leafy tents, and the delicate green crickets the Yankee folks call August pipers play their monotonous tunes.

VIVID, OR OVERWROUGHT? Rowland walks that line through much of his prose, and my reaction to it depends upon my willingness to absorb his words and enter his world. Either way, though, I can still appreciate him, too, for some of his environmental sentiments. For instance, here he speaks out about the wanton killing of garter snakes, at a time when the killing of animals of any and all kinds was commonplace and often done with little thought of the consequences:

…a moving curved and recurved gleam of gold on black and a flickering flash of red catch your eye and startle you with an involuntary revulsion. With charmed eyes held by this new object, you grope blindly for a stick or stone. But, if you find either, forbear to strike. Do not blot out one token of spring’s awakening nor destroy one life that rejoices in it, even though it be so humble a life as that of a poor garter snake. He is so harmless to man that, were it not for the old, unreasoning antipathy, our hands would not be raised against him; and, if he were not a snake, we should call him beautiful in his stripes of black and gold, and in graceful motion — a motion that charms us in their undulation of waves, in their flickering reflections of sunlight on rushy margins and wooded shores, in the winding of a brook through a meadow, in the flutter of a pennant and the flaunting of a banner, the ripple of wind-swept meadow and grain field, and the sway of leafy boughs.

Robinson continues the scene by imagining that the viewer witnesses the garter snake, newly out of hibernation, catch and swallow a frog. He then suggests that the snake will, in fact, catch and eat many “noxious insect[s] and mice over the course of the year, and thus be of considerable benefit to the farmer. Robinson acknowledges that a garter snake might also feed on some eggs and young of ground-nesting birds, supposedly providing justification for killing the snake. In fact, though, Robinson argues, that is a hypocritical act, because the same person killing the snake probably shoots numerous woodcock and grouse for sport. Robinson closes the scene with these strong and prescient words about the human relationship to nature:

Of all living things, only man disturbs the nicely adjusted balance of nature. The more civilized he becomes, the more mischievous he is. The better he calls himself, the worse he is. For uncounted centuries the bison and the Indian shared a continent, but in two hundred years or so the white man has destroyed the one and spoiled the other.

AT THE SAME TIME, THERE ARE MOMENTS IN HIS WRITING WHEN HE SEEMS WILLING TO EXCUSE SOME OF THE DAMAGE, OR AT LEAST EXPRESSES RESIGNATION TO THE FACT THAT IT IS LIKELY TO CONTINUE. For instance, it is still okay in his book to kill potentially harmful animals, or animals that provide some value to humans. Robinson’s is still an anthropocentric viewpoint, much aligned with the end of the 19th century in America. His essay, A Century of Extermination, bemoans the fate of so many dwindling creatures — bison, passenger pigeons, heath hens. The last two were still living in 1896, though rapidly headed toward extinction. Yet Robinson offers little hope for change, closing the essay with an image of an old man grateful he will not live to see the destruction, and sad when pondering “the poor inheritance of his children.”

By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11310696

AS A POSTSCRIPT, I OFFER THESE REFLECTIONS ON WHAT PHYSICALLY REMAINS OF ROWLAND ROBINSON’S LIFE AND WORK. I will begin with a photograph of Rokeby in Ferrisburg, Vermont, the home for 200 years of the Robinson family, including Rowland Robinson’s father (a radical abolitionist who used his home as a stop on the Underground Railroad) and Rowland himself. Apart from Gene Stratton-Porter (two of whose homes are preserved and open to the public in Indiana) and John Burroughs (whose cabin and final home are both available for viewing New York), Robinson is only the third of the eight authors with at least one home preserved for posterity. (I might add that efforts are also underway to save Chimney Farm, Henry Beston’s home in Maine after leaving the Outermost House.) Sadly, I have yet to visit any of these places; perhaps I will plan a tour once travel becomes both possible and safe again.

MEANWHILE, I HAVE A FIRST EDITION (ONLY EDITION) OF ROBINSON’S BOOK. My copy is in excellent condition, which, on the flip side, means that there is little I can share of its history. Only one page, the opening of his Golden-Winged Woodpecker essay, contains pencil writing. On the margin, almost a poem, are the words, “Flicker / white rump / wings show / yellow in / flight.” It is comforting to know that at least one reader of this book was not content to encounter nature by armchair, but also sought to encounter its wild inhabitants out-of-doors. Dare I call it a flicker of hope?

Travelling Through an Extensive Morass: “A Year Among the Trees” by Wilson Flagg, 1881

 Backyard Nature, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jun 252020
 

WHEN THOMAS WILSON FLAGG DROPPED HIS FIRST NAME EARLY IN HIS WRITING CAREER, IT WAS HIS FIRST AND LAST ACT AS EDITOR. What would follow, over the course of a lengthy and prolific writing career, would be dozens and dozens of highly detailed accounts of nature — birds, trees, the functions of a forest. What they nearly all share is a writing style that one admiring reader called “whimsical” but I would classify instead as soporific. I will allow the modern-day reader to judge from this supposedly “whimsical” passage:

Evening calls [the botanist] out from his retreat, to pursue another varied journey among the fairy realms of vegetation, and ere she parts with him curtains the heavens with splendor and prompts her choir of sylvan warblers to salute him with their vespers.

Another example, the inspiration for the title of this post:

The White Cedar constitutes with the southern cypress the principal timber of the Great Dismal Swamp, and is the last tree, except the red maple, which is discovered when travelling through an extensive morass.

FLAGG IS NOTABLE TODAY CHIEFLY FOR BEING A CONTEMPORARY OF HENRY THOREAU, RECOGNIZING THOREAU, GEORGE PERKINS MARSH, AND JOHN BURROUGHS AS SOURCES OF INSPIRATION. Alas, he and Thoreau never met (nor did he meet the the other two, from what I have found). However, in an 1857 letter to Daniel Rickerson, Thoreau voiced his opinion of Flagg’s work in no uncertain terms; after reading 300 pages of Flagg’s writing, I honestly confess that I agree with Thoreau on this one:

Your Wilson Flagg seems a serious person, and it is encouraging to recognize a contemporary who recognizes nature so squarely…. But he is not alert enough. He wants stirring up with a pole…. His style, as I remember, is singularly vague (I refer to the book) and before I got to the end of the sentences I was off the track.

TO BE FAIR TO FLAGG, THE BOOK I READ PUTS HIM AT A CONSIDERABLE DISADVANTAGE FOR WINNING OVER THE READER. During his lifetime, he produced dozens of essays, and all of his books are essay compilations. One of them followed the year round, making use of an organizational structure that was commonly employed from the 1840s through the 1940s, and is still encountered in some modern-day nature writing. The one I read — the only volume I could afford, I might add, due (I expect) to the relative scarcity of the other tiles — was “A Year Among the Trees”. It consists of a subset of essays, taken from a larger work, “The Woods and Byways of New England”. The common theme in this work is trees and shrubs. Unfortunately, most of the essays highlight particular tree and shrub species, giving them a rather field-guidish treatment but often without illustrations and without scientific names in the text (though they are included in the table of contents). Flag tends to focus his account on aesthetic considerations, highlighting the degree to which a tree form is picturesque or not, and the extent to which the tree is more or less attractive than its English counterpart (when there is one). Combine that with wandering sentences generally long on Latinate words, and the result is a sort of mind-numbing tedium, a morass of tree limbs, leaf forms, and flowery words.

THERE IS ANOTHER KIND OF ESSAY IN THIS BOOK, TOO; IT INCLUDES SOME OF HIS FINEST WORK AND ALSO SOME OF HIS MOST PECULIAR IDEAS. In a series of essays scattered throughout the book (with no clear order to them), Flagg explores the nature and functions of forests. The volume opens with an essay on The Primitive Forest in which Flagg proposes that, prior to European settlement, most of North America east of “The Great American Desert” (as the Great Plains was called at the time) was densely covered with forest. Subsequent clearing of the trees has led to regional warming, for reasons explained here:

The American climate is now in that transitional state which has been caused by opening the space to the winds from all quarters by operations which have not yet been carried to their extreme limit. These changes of the surface have probably increased the mean annual temperature of the whole country by permitting the direct rays of the sun to act upon a wider area….

WHILE HIS CLIMATOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS FELL WIDE OF THE MARK, HIS CONCERNS ABOUT THE LOGGING OF STEEP SLOPES REMAIN SCIENTIFICALLY VALID. As in his thoughts about the influence of forest cover on climate, it is not clear the extent to which Flagg’s ideas are original; in this case, for instance, he may owe a debt to George Perkins Marsh (who he mentions in another essay in the book). In his essay Relations of Trees to Water, Flagg explains,

If each owner of land would keep all his hills and declivities, and all slopes that contain only a thin deposit of soil or a quarry, covered with forest, he would lessen his local inundations from vernal thaws and summer rains. Such a covering of wood tends to equalize the moisture that is distributed over the land, causing it, when showered upon the hills, to be retained by the mechanical action of the trees and their undergrowth of shrubs and herbaceous plants, and by the spongy surface of the soil underneath them, made porous by mosses, decayed leaves, and other debris, so that the plains and valleys have a moderate oozing supply of moisture for a long time after every shower. Without this covering, the water when precipitated upon the slopes, would immediately rush down over an unprotected surface in torrents upon the space below.

AS AN AMATEUR GEOMORPHOLOGIST, FLAGG IS QUITE NOTEWORTHY. Indeed, his musings remind me of some of Thoreau’s own unpublished research and observations on the effects of dams on stream flow. Like Thoreau, Flagg looked closely and thought deeply about natural processes in his native Massachusetts. Also like Thoreau, he calls for the establishment of parks to protect the remaining New England forests. First, here is Thoreau, from the last pages of his manuscript “Wild Fruits” as edited by Bradley Dean:

I think that each town should have a park, or rather primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres…where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses — a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.

And here is Wilson Flagg’s proposal, from his essay The Dark Plains; though not quite as plainly spoken, he echoes Thoreau’s general sentiment well:

Some spacious wood ought to remain, in every region, in which the wild animals would be protected, and we might view the grounds as they appeared when the wild Indian was lord of this continent.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK ITSELF. This time, the closest I could come to an original volume by the author was an edition of Flagg from 1889, eight years after the original edition, and five years after Flagg’s death. Apart from the gilt cover with pine branch and cones, the book is fairly nondescript. The work includes three photo illustrations, including the roadside elm above. It also includes a number of line drawings of the parts of various trees and shrubs. Affixed to the inside of the front cover is a book label, indicating this book was once part of the Private Library of Walter S. Athearn. Here my tale potentially gets more interesting. Out of curiosity, I did a Google search of the name, and this biography turned up. Dr. Walter Scott Athearn lived from 1872 until 1934, and was a pioneering religious educator. While much of his life was spent in Iowa, he did move east in 1916 to serve for 13 years as a Graduate School Dean at Boston University. Could he have purchased the title in some used bookshop upon his arrival, perhaps with an eye toward learning more about the trees and forests of his new home state? Or could the person who owned my book just happened to have had the same name? I could not locate any obituaries online for a different Walter S. Athearn, but I doubt I will ever know for certain. Meanwhile, his photo brings a fitting closure to this post.

Keeping a Sharp Lookout: “A Year in the Fields” by John Burroughs, 1901

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jun 192020
 

…the student and lover of nature has this advantage over people who gad up and down the world, seeking some novelty and excitement; he has only to stay at home and see the procession pass. The great globe swings round to him like a revolving showcase; the change of seasons is like the passage of strange and new countries; the zones of the earth, with all their beauties and marvels, pass one’s door and linger long in the passing…. I sit here among the junipers of the Hudson, with purpose every year to go to Florida, or to the West Indies, or to the Pacific coast, yet the seasons pass and I am still loitering, with a half-defined suspicion, perhaps, that, if I remain quiet and keep a sharp lookout, these countries will come to me.

AFTER THREE QUITE OBSCURE NATURE WRITERS, I THOUGHT IT WAS TIME TO VISIT FAMILIAR GROUND, SO I PULLED MY VOLUME OF BURROUGHS DOWN FROM THE SHELF. Granted, many casual natural history readers forget “the other John”, recalling from this time period only John Muir (who, like Burroughs, sported a white beard and spoke exultantly of nature’s marvels). The two, though, are remarkably different. John Muir was a mountain prophet, speaking in tones of religious rapture about his beloved Sierra Nevada fastnesses. John Burroughs, on the other hand, grew up and lived out his days in the Catskills of New York State, keeping close to the Hudson River. Muir walked long distances alone in the mountains and climbed a redwood in a thunderstorm just to feel it rocking in the wind; Burroughs, meanwhile, remarked self-deprecatingly about his own efforts to venture into the wilds. After a particularly difficult short camping trip with a few companions, he observed that “On this excursion…I was taught how poor an Indian I should make, and what a ridiculous figure a party of men may cut in the woods when the way is uncertain and the mountains high.” It must be added that the highest point in the Catskill “Mountains” is Slide Mountain, at 4189 feet; the highest point in the Sierras, Mount Whitney, is 14,505 feet.

JOHN BURROUGHS’ PROSE WANDERS COMFORTABLY THROUGH THAT LIMINAL RURAL SPACE BETWEEN CIVILIZATION AND THE WILD. I would classify him as a ruderal writer, using a term most commonly applied to plants that are the first to colonize ground disturbed by human action, such as an abandoned field. Cattle roam across many a page, and he frequently writes of fields and weeds. My particular copy of this book, the second edition from 1901, features about 50 photographs (all black and white, of course) of John Burroughs in the landscape and at home. Most of his out-of-door images show predominantly open farmland dotted with occasional trees. In these familiar haunts, Burroughs encountered, and wrote about, numerous birds, trees, and forbs (flowering ground plants), occasionally drifting into comments about his other “neighbors”, from bumblebees to black bears. In all of his walks, his enduring goal, I think, was to realize himself as more deeply a part of his home landscape, and to more fully understand not only nature, but himself as part of it:

One’s on landscape comes in time to be be a sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mor those hills, and he suffers…. Man can have but one interest in nature, namely, to see himself reflected or interpreted there; and we quickly neglect both poet and philosopher who fail to satisfy, in some measure, this feeling.

FOR BURROUGHS, KEEPING A SHARP LOOKOUT INVOLVED ALL THE SENSES, NOT JUST THE KEEN EYE. In his essays in this volume (collected from his previous works), Burroughs wrote with equal enthusiasm about the scents and sounds of the fields and woodlands near his home. For instance, writing about early April, he enthusiastically remarked:

Then its odors! I am thrilled by its fresh and indescribable odors — the perfume of the bursting sod, of the quickened roots and rootlets, of the mould under the leaves, of the fresh furrows. No other month has odors like it. The west wind the other day came fraught with a perfume that was to the sense of smell what a wild and delicate strain of music is to the ear. It was almost transcendental.

Speaking of “music to the ear”, here Burroughs describes the sounds of tiny frogs (species not identified) “piping in the marshes” in late April:

…toward the last of the month, there is a shrill musical uproar, as the sun is setting, in every marsh and bog in the land. It is a plaintive sound, and I have heard people from the city speak of it as lonesome and depressing, but to the lover of the country it is a pure spring melody.

BURROUGHS ALSO CELEBRATES SEASONAL CHANGE, AND HOW IT REFLECTED THE NATURE’S INNATE VITALITY. “Does not the human frame yield to and sympathize with the seasons?” he asked the reader, in his essay “Autumn Tides”. Underlying it all, no matter how much insight science can offer us, is an abiding mystery: “The only thing inexplicable is the inherent impulse to experiment, the original push, the principle of Life.”

BURROUGHS IS AT HIS MOST PROFOUND, I FEEL, IN HIS MUSINGS ABOUT SCIENCE AND POETRY. In his written work, he moves comfortably between the two worlds, appreciating their kindred natures. As he explains toward the close of his essay, “A Sharp Lookout”,

You may go to the fields and the woods, and gather fruit that is ripe for the palate without any aid of yours, but you cannot do this in science and in art. Here truth must be disentangled and interpreted — must be made in the image of man. Hence all good observation is more or less a refining and transmuting process, and the secret is to know the crude material when you see it…. Before a fact can become poetry, it must pass through the heart or the imagination of the poet; before it can become science, it must pass through the understanding of the scientist.

THE PACE OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE DURING HIS LIFETIME WAS QUITE DRAMATIC. He was already in his late 20s when the Civil War broke out, but by the last decade of his life he gleefully roamed the countryside in a Model T automobile given to him by Henry Ford. His long life (he died just short of his 84th birthday) spanned America’s transition from a largely agrarian society to a rapidly industrializing one. Yet he maintained a confidence in what science and technology have to offer. I wonder if he would still maintain this outlook if he were alive today?

Science does not mar nature. The railroad, Thoreau found, after all, to be about the wildest road he knew of, and the telegraph wires the best aeolian harp out of doors. Study of nature deepens the mystery and charm because it removes the horizon farther off. We cease to fear, perhaps, but how can one cease to marvel and to love?

BEFORE CLOSING THIS ESSAY, I CANNOT RESIST COMPARING HIS WRITING STYLE WITH THAT OF HIS CONTEMPORARY, EDITH THOMAS. Both of them, it turns out, wrote about gossamer — the slender threads of spider silk festooning the landscape in the autumntime. Thomas actually devoted an entire essay to it, and provides a more detailed picture of the phenomenon than Burroughs does. Here is an excerpt:

During this season [of gossamer summer], …miles and miles of hazy filament (if it could be measured linearly) are floating about in the soft, indolent air. Especially, late in the afternoon, with a level and glowing sun, do these mysterious threads flash out along the ground, horizontally between shrubs, slantwise from grass to tree, or else cut adrift, and sailing as the wind wills…. It takes nothing from the poetry that lies in the weft of the gossamer when it is known to be the work of an unconsidered spider…. By some, it is claimed that this floating web is not spread with predaceous intent, but rather as a means of aerial navigation; indeed, these vague and indeterminate threads would hardly disturb a gnats’ cotillion, if blown in their path. Hitherto, we have regarded the spider as an humble, plodding creature of the earth, an unaspiring, stay-at-home citizen, but this new aeronautic hypothesis hints that the poor insect is a very transcendentalist, an ideal voyager…. Some naturalists assert that the gossamer spider instinctively takes advantage of the levity of the atmosphere, thrusting out its threads until they reach a current of warmer and rarer air, which draws them upward, the spider going along with the uncompleted web. Whether it is capable of cutting short its journey and casting anchor at pleasure is indeed questionable.

And here is gossamer again, this time described by Burroughs:

A peculiar feature of our fall may sometimes be seen of a clear afternoon late in the season. Looking athwart the fields under the sinking sun, the ground appears covered with a shining veil of gossamer. A fairy net, invisible at midday and which the position of the sun now reveals, rests upon the stubble and the spears of grass covering acres in extent — the work of innumerable little spiders. The cattle walk through it, but do not seem to break it. Perhaps a fly would make his mark upon it. At the same time, stretching from the tops of the trees, or from the top of a stake in the fence, and leading off toward the sky, may be seen the cables of the flying spider, — a fairy bridge from the visible to the invisible. Occasionally seen against a deep mass of shadow, and perhaps enlarged by clinging particles of dust, they show quite plainly and sag down like a stretched rope, or sway and undulate like a hawser in the tide.

(A hawser is a thick rope for mooring or towing a ship.)

AS A POSTSCRIPT, I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WHAT I CAN ABOUT MY PARTICULAR VOLUME OF BURROUGHS. I was able to obtain an original second edition from 1901 (augmented by a biographical sketch of Burroughs and the some further photos by Clifton Johnson). It has a lovely gold gilt cover, and includes dozens of photographs of Burroughs, posing on rocks, standing in the doorway of his study, pointing out tracks in the snow with his walking stick, etc. My copy bears almost no marks of its 119-year journey to me, with the notable exception of a normally blank back page filled with text in ink. It is a poem (not inspiring particularly, but a step up from Bradford Torrey’s), entitled “The Lure o’ the Woodland”, attributed to Thomas S. Jones, Jr. Thanks to the marvel of the Internet, I was able to discover that the work originally appeared in Ainslee’s magazine in November, 1907. Unfortunately, every year of the magazine is available online except for 1907. So this transcription of the poem, semi-legible though it is, may be the only copy left in existence. Of the copy-writer, all I know is that his or her initials were JWD, and that he or she was in Jacksonville, Florida on March 19, 1911.

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