The Effect of Nature As a Whole: “Where Town and Country Meet” by James Buckham (1903)

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Jul 282023
 

If we are seeking God in nature, we shall not find him so readily by analysis as by synthesis; not by minute study of individuals and par ticulars, but by free, joyous acceptance of the effect of nature as a whole. So, I think, we shall be justified in leaving our note books at home in September, and just abandoning ourselves to the influence of nature upon the spirit. Something better may come out of that than the discovery of a new plant or the identification of a long-sought bird.

There is nothing spectacular about the works of James Buckham, or his life, for that matter. As far as I have been able to find out online, there is precious little biographical information about him (no Wikipedia entry!) and no photograph or other image of him. The closest I could find was a picture of his gravestone. He was born on November 25th, 1858 in Burlington, Vermont, and died only 49 years later, on January 8th, 1908, in Melrose, Massachusetts. In-between the two, he was well educated, obtaining a BA and MA. Evidently he planned a future in the theological seminary, but voice-related problems sent him into journalism instead. In 1895, he married Mary Bingham of Hyde Park, Vermont. After 18 years of journalism, he left the field to become an essayist, poet, fiction writer, and nature writer. As far as I have been able to tell, he published only two works about nature in his lifetime: “Where Town and Country Meet” and “Afield with the Seasons” (review coming soon). His cause of death is unknown.

Buckham’s book “Where Town and Country Meet” is a pleasant volume but nondescript compared to many of its time. The cover features only the title at the top and the author name at the bottom, gold-embossed on gray-green cloth. There are no illustrations of any kind, unless one counts the decorative insignia on the title page above. And there is little that is striking about the volume. It is a pleasant read, certainly. Like many other nature writers of his time (and not surprisingly, considering his theological bent), Buckham views nature experiences as opportunities for appreciating the wonders of God’s creation. This outlook leads him to extol “the impressions of nature as a whole”, in the passage above and in this one, from a page earlier:

One is not much disposed to observe minutely, I think, on a September tramp. The last of the birds and the last of the flowers may challenge a somewhat languid interest, but for my own part I like to take things in the mass, in the aggregate, when nature’s long season of emphasized indivi ualism is on the wane. For months we nature-lovers have been burdening our brains and note-books with observations of concrete life in a thousand different forms. Innumerable birds, flowers, insects, trees, plants, and four-footed creatures have confronted us at every step and stimulated curiosity and study. Now the birds have mostly departed, the flowers are a few and sedate company, the insects are frost-killed or driven into retirement, and I for one am tired of particularizing, and am glad to go back for a time to those free, buoyant, youthful impressions of nature as a whole. Instead of pulling to pieces single flowers I want to let my eye range over a whole living field of them, assembled in a carpet of purple and gold. I do not care to ask their names. I simply want them to make an impression of beauty and harmony and joy upon my spirit.

To speak of this as any sort of proto-ecological thinking would clearly be excessive. Yet, given the many writers of his time (Bradford Torrey being a fine example), nature experiences mostly involved identifying and watching birds, flowers, or the two in alternation. To pause and appreciate nature taken altogether I found refreshing.

That said, Buckham could also appreciate the particulars of an Eastern woodland. Here is his joyous tale of wandering the land in early springtime:

I had scarcely entered the woods when in the crumbling, disintegrating snow I found the wiry, nervous, wandering tracks of a ruffed grouse, which had evidently been abroad that very morning, far earlier than I, to seek a breakfast of leaves and berries on the knolls uncovered by the heat of the sun. I followed the winding trail for some distance, but finally it so turned, and doubled, and intertwined with itself, that I lost my clue and had to give it up.

Everywhere, from the trustworthy record of the snow, it appeared that the squirrels had been on the move likewise, passing from tree to tree with long, joyous leaps, the vigor of spring already in their veins. Many rabbit tracks through the thickets showed where the cottontails also had chased each other, like those black lovers in midair. All this awakening and new activity seemed a part of the glad expectation of spring.

The skunk-cabbage was thrusting its spearpoint up through the black loam along the brook earliest of all the wild sod breakers. I found the alder-buds swelling beneath their scales, and the catkins of both alders and willows already visible. There was bright green cress in the bed of the brook, and a few spears of green grass lifted themselves out of the loam in a shel tered, sunny corner of the swamp. Chickadees were lisping their faint dee-dee-dee in the hemlocks; jays were screaming lustily among the dwarf oaks ; and a yellow-hammer sent forth his clarion challenge from the hillside. Everywhere the decomposing snow was black with myriads of tiny, sput tering snow-lice, that darted hither and thither like sparks out of a fire. Surely, spring was in the air and underfoot! It was good to be abroad at the first whisper of her coming.

Buckham’s joy here is palapable and contagious. Reading his gleeful observations, I am sorely tempted to put down the book and step outside — into the steamy heat occf a climate-collapse summer heatwave in Georgia. The more I read these works from a hundred years ago or more, the greater my sorrow that the relative constancy of weather — and the relative abundance of many animal species — are both rapidly becoming things of the past.

Although the book focuses primarily on nature’s beauty as an experience of God, I do not want to leave readers thinking that he entirely lacked a scientific perspective or grounding in natural history. Inspired by Thoreau, he dined on thawed, wild apples, pronouncing them delicious indeed:

Beyond the golf links, on a hillside where scattered birches and scrub pines were growing, I came upon a stunted wild apple tree, the ground under which was thickly strewn with frozen and thawed apples. Immediately there occurred to me Thoreau’s enthusiastic praise of the spicy cider of thawed wild apples. Gathering my hands full of the russet fruit, I sat down upon a rock to taste this primitive nectar (as Thoreau recommends) “in the wind.” It was indeed delicious–not so tart and bitter as the juice of the wild apple in its sound state, but distinctly sweetened and ameliorated by the frost; a kind of spicy wild wine, innocent as water, refreshing to the palate, and wholesome and medicinal to the entire body. I gathered more and more of the wild apples, and sucked their cool nectar until my thirst was slaked. It was a real discovery, this new winter drink, and I would heartily pass on Thoreau’s recommendation of it to other ramblers.

In other passages, Buckham remarks on evolution by natural selection as a guiding biological principle. And most intriguingly, he writes about the urban heat island effect — I had never guessed this phenomenon was already recognized back in 1903! He notes how cities in summer reflect “abnormal conditions through which man artificially intensifies a phenomenon of nature. A hot wave raises the temperature of New York City from five to ten degrees above that of the surrounding country; but it is an adventitious supremacy, due to intercepted air, heated bricks, and blistering pavement.” (I have to admit that Buckham lost me there on the “adventitious” part.)

Still, these passages are exceptions to the general rule. This is a book whose audience was clearly those of a somewhat religious bent, laboring in urban workspaces (mostly executive offices, I would guess) but craving a taste of nature just beyond the city limits. Buckham does well at evoking such experiences in text. The result is a truly pleasant read, if a bit bland at times. Still, it is good to celebrate the poetic in nature, and that is how I will close out this post:

I am thoroughly in sympathy with those who think that too much exact knowledge takes something of the romance and poetry out of our acquaintance with nature. There must be a certain indefiniteness, a certain hazy quality, in our knowledge of the outer world we must not, in a word, know nature too well or we shall miss that elusive charm which pervades the poetry of Wordsworth, for instance. I am not sure but that we should be more appreciative nature lovers if we did not feel obliged to identify and mentally catalogue every creature and plant we see and every song or cry we hear.

Fellow Members of a Great Universe: “The Human Side of Plants” by Royal Dixon (1914)

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Jul 252023
 

It is amazing—the average child reaches manhood or womanhood with a surprising lack of knowledge concerning the simplest natural objects about it. Educated in the great colleges of the country, having laboured through “courses” in botany, the student too often comes forth with a vague impression that “chlorophyll is green stuff,” “plants are fertilised by bees,” and with decided likes and dislikes for plants in the edible form of table vegetables. The fact that in studying plants he has been studying living organisms, beings which think and feel, which have souls and worship, fellow members of a great universe, has never entered his thought. The appalling thing in this regarding of plants as mere things is not the apparent slight to the plant, but the real loss to the student in his lack of appreciation of the wonder and beauty around him.

Royal Dixon (1885-1962 was, quite simply, one of the most intriguing nature writers from the era between Thoreau and World War II that I have yet encountered. He approached nature from a Christian religious perspective, like many 19th century natural history authors, particularly in England. Yet from that base emerged an enduring conviction that all living beings — plants (including trees), birds, water animals, insects, and all other animals — have a mind and a soul of their own, just like human beings. The implications of that are as profound now as they were over a hundred years ago — that all life is to be respected, and that all living beings are fellow-voyagers through the cosmos. Dixon’s life trajectory is one that a would-be biographer might only dream about. Born in Huntsville, Texas, he was a child actor and dancer. Following his schooling, he worked for five years as a curator of plant collections at the Field Museum of Chicago. He went on from there to become a staff writer for the Houston Chronicle and found a school for creative writing. Meanwhile, he co-founded the First Church of Animal Rights in Manhattan in 1921, with 300 congregants. For decades, he lived openly in Houston with his partner, Chester Snowdon, an artist who illustrated several of Dixon’s works. A prolific author, Dixon wrote (and co-wrote) quite a few books about how plants and animals are like human beings, beginning with The Human Side of Plants in 1914. He also wrote a book advocating for the “Americanization” of immigrants. And did I mention several works of fiction, including books of animal stories for children, an early science fiction/fantasy novel, and a novel in black dialect set in the South? To answer the inevitable question, yes, I am seriously considering undertaking his biography, a feat that has not yet been accomplished.

The Human Side of Plants was his first book. It is an elegant volume, with a lovely cover illustration of pitcher plants and several gorgeous color reproductions of artwork showing other plants, such as wisteria, in full bloom. The illustrations are tipped in. Then there are dozens of full-page black and white photographs, also. From his text (and the ownership history of another book in the series — stay tuned), I am confident that he intended readers to be both adults and older children (perhaps tweens and above). Reading it, I was reminded a bit of Ripley’s Believe It or Not as it shared accounts of all sorts of plants doing peculiar (and humanlike) things. (Ripley’s first Believe It or Not cartoon came out four years later.) I found myself reading with my smartphone beside me, periodically challenging some of the more outrageous claims Dixon made. The results were surprising. Most of what Dixon reported has turned out to be accurate. (I will share some of those instances below.) Maybe 10% or 15% of the stories were hoaxes. At the time, though, with the information resources available to him, I can understand why Dixon might have believed (or wanted to believe, at least) that some of them were true.

As I noted earlier, Dixon distingished trees from other plants, devoting a later book just to trees. As a result, herbaceous plants get top billing, along with woody vines and occasional shrubs. In order to make his case that plants are like us, his book enumerates different categories of similarity, some of which strike me as less than flattering to plants and humans alike or simply don’t sound all that human at all. Based upon Dixon’s chapter titles, plants walk, fish, see, entertain, and sleep. Plants also (like some humans) plunder and murder, kidnap, and keep a standing army. Yet other chapters tell of plants that eat insects, build islands, and hide their blossoms and fruit. I have yet to meet a person who does any of these things. Looking at Dixon’s entire list of common characteristics, there are quite a few that are particularly human, like telling stories, caring for others, and solving complex problems that are (understandably) absent from the list. The ultimate impact of the book (following both my reading of the words and some selective Internet truthing) was mostly a sense that plants are more fascinating than I had thought before, and that the book was in some ways ahead of its time. I don’t think I am quite ready yet to classify plants as “human”.

The very fact that I learned about some plant oddities that were entirely new to me is truly astounding for a book on plants over 100 years old. For the sake of full disclosure, though, I will begin with some completely absurd cases from the volume. First, accounts of a man-eating Vampire Vine growing on the shores of Lake Nicaragua are greatly exaggerated. Next, the rattlesnake iris may produce a dried seed pod that sounds a bit like a snake’s rattle when shaken by the wind, but that definitely did not evolve as a defense mechanism for the plant (most of which has died back by the time the seed pod dries out). Mistletoe, parasitic to many trees, does not share its nutrients with those trees during the wintertime. The leaves of rosary pea (Abrus precatorius) do not predict meteorological phenomena. Finally, plants do not emit light.

However, there were some real surprises here. I did already know about an acacia in South America with hollow thorns used by ants who feed on nectar from the plant, and in exchage for food and lodging, protect it from insect pests. But I did not realize this was known so long ago. Dixon also reported on a fern, Polypodium nectariferum (now Aglaomorpha nectarifera), that produces nectar which also attracts ants that protect it. In the past couple of decades, scientists have finally established that the fern species producing nectar (there are several) experience decreased herbivory relative to ferns that do not. Score one for Dixon. Then there is the telegraph plant of India, whose leaves move sponaneously above a certain temperature. This one has to be seen to be believed. Why had I never heard of this plant before? Finally, consider Dixon’s suggestion that plants have rudimentary eyes. I include an extended passage, which captures Dixon’s enthusiasm and optimism well, if not quite accurately capturing the state of knowledge at the time:

When the Creator made light, that was not enough; there must be eyes to appreciate this light; so He created animals with eyes, and human beings with eyes, and lastly, although the average person knows it not, plants with eyes, that they too might worship this great work of their Maker.

The number of plant eyes is legion. They are usually tiny cells located in the epidermis of the leaves, and occasionally on the leaf-stalk. Numerous experiments have been made by Dr. Haberlandt which prove conclusively that the eyes of many species of plants are capable of detecting as slight shades of variation in light as are those of man. This is amply proved by the fact that certain plants, like the vetch, pea, or lentil, may be so influenced in their earliest stages of growth that they deliberately turn toward lights.

The scientific world now thoroughly recognises that plants have eyes, and actually see! Not only do they respond to light, but they give every other evidence of the use of their eyes in their work. The eyes of plants are of two distinct kinds; one kind, the less complex, are made by smooth epidermis, and the cells have a plain outer covering. These are very similar to a glass window which allows the sun’s rays to pass through, and fall on the objects within a room, but in no way aids in concentrating the rays of light in definite places. The other kind of eyes are formed of papillose epidermis, whose outer and inner surfaces are so made as to produce plano-convex lenses. These readily concentrate the rays of light over a definite area, and in this respect are very similar to human eyes. In the study of light-producing plant types, as in the understanding of all types and classes of plants, the average botanist has but knocked at the outer door; while before him is a labyrinth of many doors and many barriers. Apparently the secret passage to the centre of this maze, to the heart of the flowers, lies in the attuning of the human nature to the nature of the plants. Science tells us much, but without an absolute communion, a thorough accord and responsive affinity between human soul and plant soul there never can be a thorough understanding of the nature of the plants.

A few things strike me in this passage. First, Dixon demonstrates a fairly keen technical grasp of research in the area of plant light detection. Second, he appears convinced that all scientists are in accord about plants having eyes. Finally, he argues that to really understand plants, scientists need to seek a sort of mystical union with them. Here, scientists would likely be in accord that this is preposterous. There are, however, recently published books well outside the scientific literature by people who claim they have communicated with plants telepathically. Now, in terms of plant eyes, I do think Dixon was a bit premature. However, a 2022 article from New Scientist reports on a controversial study that argues that plants can, in fact, see. So the claim, if not well substantiated, at least still remains in play 107 years later.

A few words about my lovely copy of this book. On the inside of the front covered is scrawled, in at least two different hands with three different writing instruments, three of the book’s previous owners — all of whom cared for it very well indeed.

Unfortunately, tracking down owners online by initials only is very difficult, particularly in the absence of other information, such as a particular city or town. A relatively common last name like Hansen doesn’t help. Still, I am thankful to these three unknowns that the volume I read was practically as elegant as when it was originally printed, apart from the inevitable tanning of age.

In the Blackness of a Blue Midnight: “Half Mile Down” by William Beebe (1934)

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Jul 222023
 

When, at any time in our earthly life, we come to a moment or place of tremendous interest it often happens that we realize the full significance only after it is all over. In the present instance the opposite was true and this very fact makes any vivid record of feelings and emotions a very difficult thing. At the very deepest point we reached I deliberately took stock of the interior of the bathysphere; I was curled up in a ball on the cold, damp steel, Barton’s voice relayed my observations and assurances of our safety, a fan swished back and forth through the air and the ticking of my wrist-watch came as a strange sound of another world.

Soon after this there came a moment which stands out clearly, unpunctuated by any word of ours, with no fish or other creature visible outside. I sat crouched with mouth and nose wrapped in a handkerchief, and my forehead pressed close to the cold glass—that transparent bit of old earth which so sturdily held back nine tons of water from my face. There came to me at that instant a tremendous wave of emotion, a real appreciation of what was momentarily almost superhuman, cosmic, of the whole situation; our barge slowly rolling high overhead in the blazing sunlight, like the merest chip in the midst of ocean, the long cobweb of cable leading down through the spectrum to our lonely sphere, where, sealed tight, two conscious human beings sat and peered into the abyssal darkness as we dangled in mid-water, isolated as a lost planet in outermost space. Here, under a pressure which, if loosened, in a fraction of a second would make amorphous tissue of our bodies, breathing our own homemade atmosphere, sending a few comforting words chasing up and down a string of hose—here I was privileged to peer out and actually see the creatures which had evolved in the blackness of a blue midnight which, since the ocean was born, had known no following day; here I was privileged to sit and try to crystallize what I observed through inadequate eyes and interpret with a mind wholly unequal to the task. To the ever-recurring question, “How did it feel?”’, etc., I can only quote the words of Herbert Spencer, I felt like “an infinitesimal atom floating in illimitable space.” No wonder my sole written contribution to science and literature at the time was “Am writing at a depth of a quarter of a mile. A luminous fish is outside the window.”

The C. William Beebe who traveled to Mexico in 1904 was definitely not the same Beebe who recorded the bathysphere’s deep ocean expeditions off the coast of Bermuda three decades later. The prose is far less rambling, and the book’s structure almost too consciously engineered: opposite the table of contents is an outline of the divisions of the book: Emotional (Chapter 1); Historical (Chapters 2-3), Pragmatic (Chapters 4-9), and Technical (Appendices). After an opening I would classify more as philosophical than emotional, the book devotes four chapters to the history of deep ocean exploration, culminating with Otis Barton’s design of the bathysphere. In a volume of only 225 pages (excluding the appendices), the first underwater visit to “Davy Jones’s Locker” doesn’t get underway until a hundred pages in. When it does, the more wooden prose of Beebe’s historical narrative gives way to passages expressing the childlike wonder he found in encountering new worlds. Until Beebe’s journeys, no one had ventured a quarter mile beneath the sea, let alone half a mile. The water pressures at such depths would kill a diver instantly. And deepwater trawls yielded only bits of dead fish; their bodies, so well adapted to the insane pressure of the deep ocean, could not endure when brought up to the surface. As the bathysphere passed below the range of light penetration, it very much entered an entirely new world.

On all but one of the dives — Beebe allowed two assistants to go down a short distance below the waves in celebration of a birthday) — the bathysphere was manned by William Beebe and Otis Barton. Barton, as the designer of the bathysphere and the chief funder of the expedition, allowed its use provided he accompanied Beebe on the dives. History has not been kind to Barton; in The Bathysphere Book, Brad Fox depicts him as entirely ineffectual at taking underwater photographs (though he kept on trying), less than useful at observing and describing marine life, and prone to bouts of nausea while sealed inside a tiny metal ball with Beebe. In the absence of photographs, the most stunning expedition discoveries were instead immortalized in paintings by Else Bostelmann. Like a forensic artist creating a composite image of a suspect from witness accounts, Else worked closely with Beebe to translate his word descriptions into stunning visual images. Tragically, an online scan of the book at Archive.org is missing the color paintings; they may not have been included in all editions of the book.

Today, of course, the modern reader with an interest in the deep ocean will have seen abundant photos and videos of many of the fishes Beebe saw, along with even stranger ones as much as seven miles down (plus, in a quite unsettling discovery, a plastic bag). In our day of access to visuals of all types (real and AI-generated) on the Internet, along with quite a few years of VR technology, it is difficult to imagine the degree of wonder Beebe experienced half a mile below the sea surface, suspended in a tiny metal ball, gazing out into an inky blackness occasionally aluminated by a light he turned off and on at intervals. Indeed, the finest moments in the text, in my opinion, are Beebe’s thoughts about the nature of the experience — his amazement and awe at the oceans’ vastness in space and time.

While still near the lowest limit of our dive the thought flashed across my mind of the reality of the old idea of elements—fire, water, earth, and air. They persist as a mental concept, no matter how our physicists and chemists continue to discover new elements, to dismember atoms, and to recognize such invisible phenomena as neutrons. I have seen and felt the heat of molten, blazing stone gushing out of the heart of our Earth; I have climbed three and a half miles up the Himalayas and floated in a plane still higher in the air, but nowhere have I felt so completely isolated as in this bathysphere, in the blackness of ocean’s depths. I realized the unchanging age of my surroundings; we seemed like unborn embryos with unnumbered geological epochs to come before we should emerge to play our little parts in the unimportant shifts and changes of a few moments in human history. Man’s recent period of strutting upon the surface of the earth would have to be multiplied half a million times to equal the duration of existence of this old ocean.

This is not to rule out, of course, the scientific discoveries Beebe made, including the identification of several new fish species. In this passage, he shares a literal flash of inspiration that resolves a long-standing puzzle from earlier dives of sudden flashes of light he would notice through the bathysphere’s window in the blackness of the deep sea’s “perpetual night”:

I have spoken of the three outstanding moments in the mind of a bathysphere diver, the first flash of animal light, the level of eternal darkness, and the discovery and description of a new species of fish. There is a fourth, lacking definite level or anticipation, a roving moment which might very possibly occur near the surface or at the greatest depth, or even as one lies awake, days after the dive, thinking over and reliving it. It is, to my mind, the most important of all, far more so than the discovery of new species. It is the explanation of some mysterious occurrence, of the display of some inexplicable habit which has taken place before our eyes, but which, like a sublimated trick of some master fakir, evades understanding.

This came to me on this last deep dive at 1680 feet, and it explained much that had been a complete puzzle. I saw some creature, several inches long, dart toward the window, turn sideways and—explode. This time my eyes were focused and my mind ready, and at the flash, which was so strong that it illumined my face and the inner sill of the window, I saw the great red shrimp and the outpouring fluid of flame. This was a real Fourth Moment, for many “dim gray fish” as I had reported them, now resolved into distant clouds of light, and all the previous “explosions” against the glass became intelligible. At the next occurrence the shrimp showed plainly before and during the phenomenon, illustrating the value in observation of knowing what to look for. The fact that a number of the deep-sea shrimps had this power of defense is well known, and I have had an aquarium aglow with the emanation. It is the abyssal complement of the sepia smoke screen of a squid at the surface.

Here, a bit abruptly perhaps, my blog post ends. For Beebe, too, when the expedition concluded, so did his days of deep underwater study. Ultimately, he would return to land, particularly the tropical jungles that he loved. The year Half Mile Down was published, Otis Barton would Otis Barton set a new human diving record, reaching 1,370 meters down (0.85 miles) in the bathysphere. And then, in 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh would descend to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (10,740 meters or 6.67 miles down). Seventeen years later, the bizarre chemosynthesis-based ecosystem of the hydrothermal vents would be encountered for the first time.

The Complicated Dependence of All the Life about Us: “Two Bird-Lovers in Mexico” by C. William Beebe (1905)

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Jul 212023
 

Every walk about our camp revealed new flowers or seed pods of beautiful colours and strange shapes. We longed for the key to the interrelations of plants and insects, for hints concerning the complicated dependence of all the life about us, — bird on insect, insect on plant, plant on both, which ever links even the extremes of nature.

When William Beebe published Two Bird-Lovers in Mexico in 1905, he was 28 years old and nly three-years married to someone as fascinated by nature as he was., Mary Blair Rice. Though they had honeymooned in Nova Scotia after the wedding, their trip to Mexico together from December, 1903 until April of 1904 was a second honeymoon for the two. The stated purpose of the expedition was to study and collect birds for the New York Zoological Park, where Beebe had recently become Curator of Ornithology. Much of Mexico was still wilderness at the time, and the two traveled mostly by horseback through a variety of tropical ecosystems, from desert scrub to lush rainforest, staying in tents at base camps for weeks at a time. Everywhere he went, Beebe was impressed by the rich bird life and the vast number of birds he encountered. For example, on a visit to the marshes surrounding Lake Chapala, he gushed that

…the feelings we experienced cannot be put into words; such one feels at a fist glance through a great telescope, or perhaps when one gazes in wonder upon the distant earth from a balloon. At these tims, one is for an instant outside of his petty personality and a part of, a realizer of, the cosmos. Here on these marshes and waters we saw, not individuals or flocks, but a world of birds! Never before had a realization of the untold solid bulk in numbers of the birds of our continent been impressed so vividly upon us.

There is a youthful vigor to this book. While Beebe would later be famous for his vast number of global expeditions, particularly to the topics, at the time of his trip to Mexico he had never been so far from his home in New York City. He brought with him a zest for seeing wildlife, though his desire to learn all the ways of the local wildlife did not extend to the human cultures of the region, as this whimsical tale of his daily encounters with a local villager makes plain:

Every day about noon, an old, old man drove several forlorn cows down the trail and up past our camp, for a drink and an hour’s feed of fresh green grass. A ragged shirt, a breech-clout, and a pair of dilapidated sandals formed the whole of his outfit. He knew not a word of Spanish, but jabbered cheerfully away to us in some strange Indian tongue, — Aztec, we pleased ourselves by calling it, — as if we understood every word. When he learned that we were afraid to have his half-wild cattle roaming at will about our provision tent, he took great pains, by means of liandfuls of gravel and a torrent of “Aztec” expletives, to banish them to the opposite side of the stream. His greeting was always ”Ping-pong racket!” This may seem absurdly trivial and irrelevant, yet these syllables exactly represent his utterance. “Ping-pong racket!” I shouted to liim as he appeared with his wild charges. “Ping-pong racket!” he answered joyfully, and patted me on the back with an outburst of incoherent gutturals, doubtless expressing his pleasure at my ready grasp of his mother tongue!

He showed us where the purest and coldest spring was to be found, for which we were extremelv grateful. A bowl of frijoles drew expressions of extravagant delight from him. But he seemed most pleased if only we would talk to him, although the words could convey not a particle of meaning. I would converse for a while in my choicest German, then harangue him with all the Latin I could recall and perhaps end witli an AEsop’s Fable, or part of tlie multiplication table. Whether I gravely informed him that Artemia salina could be converted into Artemia muhlenhausii by adding fresh water and stirring, or whether I chanted the troubles of AEneas, the venerable “Aztec” courteously listened with the greatest interest!

His final greeting was tremulous and sincere, and, as we repeated the phrase which sounded so ridiculous to our ears, we felt a strong pity for this poor ignorant man, whose speech was that of long-gone centuries. And yet he had no need of our sympathy. Day after day for years (so we gathered from his sign language) he had driven his cattle back and forth from some tiny village miles away. He was faithful in this and his happiness was full. It was overflowing when, at parting, we gave him some little trinkets and our spare change.

I found this charming and whimsical tale (albeit a bit disdainful on the part of a white American scientist) to be a highlight of the book. Beyond it, the prose was pleasant enough, though lackluster. Beebe was still developing as a writer, and the fact that the book reflected a first journey into uncharted territory meant that he came way from the trip with far more questions than answers. Still, while so much of the narrative was consumed with descriptions of the birds he saw, Beebe also offered glimpses of a more inclusive vision of nature, one that would emerge into the mainstream as the discipline of ecology over the coming decades. While 19th Century writers like Badford Torrey would go for woodland rambls seeking to identify and observe birds and plants just like Beebe in Mexico, Beebe was consumed by the questions of how they related to each other, and how they fit together into a larger whole — a “complicated dependence of all the life”.

To Arouse True Appreciation of Nature: “Nature Trails” by Dietrich Lange (1927)

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Jul 082023
 

Nothing in nature is isolated. Everything is somehow connected with everything else. There is interaction everywhere between climate and plant life, between plants and insects, between insects and higher animals, and in that way the chain of life runs on and on. The organic is linked to the inorganic; the whole universe is one.

This passage opens a brief essay on the distribution of trees in North America in Lange’s work. It captures that nascent ecological vision that quite a few early 20th-century naturalists observed and pondered. It also stands out in a work that, while well-crafted, is directed toward an audience of older children, to encourage them to get outdoors and appreciate its wonders. Indeed, Lange served at various times in his life as a supervisor and a director of nature study programming in Minnesota. At the time his book was published, he was serving as principal of the Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul.

I was excited to discover this title a few months ago, because for the considerable sweep of time this blog covers (almost 100 years, from 1850 to WW2), so many parts of the country remain unrepresented by nature writers. I have found dozens in Massachusetts, for example, but very few in Connecticut. Up until this book, I had not found any from the Upper Midwest. Lange, himself, was not a native. He was born in Bonstorf, Germany on June 2nd, 1863, traveling with his family to Minnesota at age 18. He held various teaching and principal positions in and around St. Paul throughout his adult years. He wrote at least fifteen works of both fiction (often featuring boy scouts) and non-fiction (nature-themed, particularly birds). He also published a handbook of nature study for teachers and pupils in the elementary grades. He died in St. Paul in 1940 of unknown causes.

As a nature writer, Longe was eager to encourage young people to “observe, investigate, and enjoy” nature. He listed among his own inspirations the works of Thoreau, Burroughs, Muir, Dallas Lore Sharp, and Gilbert White. Elsewhere, he quoted Bradford Torrey, mentioned C.C. Abbott, and recommended Ernest Ingersoll’s book, “Nature’s Calendar” (blog review coming soon). On the whole, he spoke up for environmental conservation at a time when relatively few animals (apart from birds) were given any protection. He called for game laws to protect bears, for instance, and also protections for orchids (which were being driven extinct by enthusiastic collectors and bouquet gatherers). “It was, perhaps, natural that in the pioneer stage of our country everybody should have been allowed to cut, pick, and burn; to kill, trap, and catch as he pleased,” Lange wrote. “We have now conquered the continent, and the days of the pioneer are gone, but we are still altogether too much a nation of destroyers and exploiters of all that is useful and beautiful in our land.” But lest we exalt Lange too highly, this nature writer who found a place in his heart (and in natural ecosystems) for giant ragweed also argued that the extinction of venomous snakes was “desirable”.

In keeping with Lange’s calling as a nature study teacher, the book includes an appendix on outdoor nature study, with questions to encourage students to engage with the natural world around them.

My copy of this book has considerable text on the flyleaf. As well as I can discern the writing, it reads “Merry Christmas to my friend Henry Horowitz. D. Lange. 1936. Ryan Hotel, December 23, 1936.” I pursued this puzzle a bit further, locating a circa 1900 postcard of the opulent Ryan Hotel in St. Paul, which stood downtown from 1885 until it was demolished in 1962 (see below). I even found a potential recipient of the dedication. Henry Alchanon Horowitz (1906-1990) was living at the time in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. It could be him, though I would have felt more confident to have located someone living in Minnesota at the time.

His Lot Is Cast in Poetic Places: “In Beaver World” with Enos Mills (1913)

 book review, Books, Landscape History, Natural History, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 082023
 

Beaver works are of economical and educational value besides adding a charm to the wilds. The beaver is a persistent practicer of conservation and should not perish from the hills and mountains of this land. Altogether the beaver has so many interesting ways, is so useful, skilled, practical, and picturesque that his life and his deeds deserve a larger place in literature and in our hearts.

This was not my first visit with Enos Mills. The self-styled “John Muir of the Rockies”, Mills lived for many years in a cabin in Estes Park, and was a staunch advocate for the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park. Over several decades, he rambled through the mountains, often serving as a guide for tourists to the region. I have read a couple of his books already, with considerable relish. A consummate storyteller, Mills had a tendency to end up in backcountry predicaments (such as getting caught in a blizzard or falling down a slope) and then managing to emerge hale and hearty as ever. I have several more of his books that will appear in this blog in the future, including a book on geology — a topic near and dear to my heart

But given the relatively recent (past year) arrival of a family of beavers to a local park near my home, I decided to embark on a reading campaign to get to know them better. I am slowly working my way through Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why they Matter, by Roy Goldfarb (2018). I purchased it on Kindle, unfortuately, and I rarely am willing to view yet anther screen for my reading, so it is still half unfinished. About the same time, I pulled Mills’ volume off my shelf for a more historical take on the charming mammals.

Mills is nearly forgotten today, beyond his local hero status as father of Rocky Mountain National Park (established in 1915). A wannabe Muir, his writing (delightful though it is) never reached the mystical raptures of his hero of the Sierras. Still, I cannot help but feel amazement at his level of committment to observing beavers in the wild: by 1913, he had spent 27 years noticing them (which, admittedly, takes him back to the humble age of six) in every state of the US (at the time) and also Alaska, Mexico, and Canada. He had observed active beaver colonies in every season, and often for one or more weeks at a time.

The book is full of his accounts of what he saw — the extents of dams (the longest measuring 2140 feet, on the Jefferson River, near Three Forks, Montana), the number of active beavers in one place (over a dozen) and counts (quite precise) of how many aspen trees were taken down by a group of beavers in a certain amount of time. Again and again, he tells of his patient witnessing of beaver construction projects (dams and lodges) brought to an end by local trappers after their pelts. At the time, there was no protection whatsoever for beavers, who were largely viewed with a mix of amusement, disdain, and avarice (for their pelts) by most Americans encountering them.

The book is a bit of a trudge to get through — the observations vastly outnumber his stories present in many of his other essays. But what emerges is a portrait of a beaver as actively shaping the ecosystem it inhabits — a holistic picture constructed decades before ecology hit the mainstream. He also celebrated the beaver in passages that occasionally touched the poetic, such as this one:

As animal life goes, that of the beaver stands among the best. His life is full of industry and is rich in repose. He is home-loving and avoids fighting. His lot is cast in poetic places.

The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primeval place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle. Around are the ever-changing and never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. Beaver grow up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the brilliant flowers and great boulders, in the piles of driftwood and among the fallen logs on the forest’s mysterious edge. They learn to swim and slide, to dive quickly and deeply from sight, to sleep, and to rest moveless in the sunshine; ever listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water, living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond; beginning serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich autumn’s hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear the robes of gold, while the birds go by for the southland in the reflective autumn days.

In another delightful passage, Mills chronicles the many ways in which beavers’ supreme architectural achievements, their dams, influence the surrounding landscape and its myriad other inhabitants. It is quite an impressive list indeed!

The dam is the largest and in many respects the most influential beaver work. Across a stream it is an inviting thoroughfare for the folk of the wild. As soon as a dam is completed, it becomes a wilderness highway. It is used day and night. Across it go bears and lions, rabbits and wolves, mice and porcupines; chipmunks use it for a bridge, birds alight upon it, trout attempt to leap it, and in the evening the graceful deer cast their reflections with the willows in its quiet pond. Across it dash pursuer and pursued. Upon it take place battles and courtships. Often it is torn by hoof and claw. Death struggles stain it with blood. Many a drama, romantic and picturesque, fierce and wild, is staged upon the beaver dam.

The beaver dam gives new character to the landscape. It frequently alters the course of a stream and changes the topography. It introduces water into the scene. It nourishes new plant-life. It brings new birds. It provides a harbor and a home for fish throughout the changing seasons. It seizes sediment and soil from the rushing waters, and it sends water through subterranean ways to form and feed springs which give bloom to terraces below. It is a distributor of the waters; and on days when dark clouds are shaken with heavy thunder, the beaver dam silently breasts, breaks, and delays the down-rushing flood waters, saves and stores them; then, through all the rainless days that follow, it slowly releases them.

My copy of this book was never signed, so I can say little about its history. There is a small bookseller’s stamp affixed to the inside back cover: G. F. Warfield & Co. / Booksellers & Stationers / Hartford, Conn. After changing hands (and names) many times, Huntington’s Bookstore closed in 1993 after being in continuous operation for 158 years.