Nature-Study Sisters: “Among Green Trees” (1902) by Julia Ellen Rogers, and “The Brook Book” (1901) by Mary Rogers Miller

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place, Spirituality  No Responses »
Feb 032024
 

SISTER ELLEN had never seen the trailing arbutus in its native woods. The rills and brooks near the city had been so greatly “improved” by their contact with civilization that scarcely a leaf remained to suggest the sweetness of the Mayflower. It had retreated before the ever-advancing army of flower pickers with baskets and grasping hands. With it had gone the pinxter- flower, and even the more rugged columbine had been driven to establish itself on the steep sides of the gorges, where no human foot had ever trod...

…one azalea remained in our near-by woods and a chosen few knew its station. It served us for a calendar. When its buds were pink at the points we knew that the north slope of Tower Hill would be covered with arbutus and the south side with pink azaleas. With baskets and small black pail we started, Sister Ellen, the Doctor and I.

We followed the course of the stream, making our own path as we went. Ellen pounced upon the first promising bit of green which showed under the carpet of dead leaves. It proved to be a small plant of arbutus too young to have a blossom. “Wait till we get farther down,” I advised knowingly.

We were coming to the arbutus country, by the signs which we who had been there aforetime recognized. Soon now the patient scrapings of Sister Ellen would be rewarded. We must keep near her and catch the glow of her first “fine frenzy.” For the twentieth time she dropped to her knees among the dead _ leaves. This time was her reward. There lay the most exquisite clusters, like pink ivory, delicately wrought. The faint elusive perfume enslaved us all. Down on your knees and offer homage to this woodland princess!

The turn of the century (from the 19th into the 20th) marked the apex of the Nature-Study Movement. Its purpose and principles are worthy of many blog posts if not a book or two. Inspired in part by Liberty Hyde Bailey, professor of horticulture at Cornell University, Nature-study was an approach to teaching children about the natural world through direct observation and guided inquiry. Led by an inquisitive teacher (who was likely far from being a nature expert herself), children would ramble out-of-doors, find a particular thing of interest (insect, plant, stream, etc.), and study it closely. They might be asked to sketch the object, and/or come up with different questions to ask about it. The intention was far less to teach natural history content than it was to guide children into a greater appreciation and wonder about the everyday natural landscape all around them (whether in rural places or cities). Other figures in the New York State branch of Nature-study education (there was another that emerged in Chicago) included author/educator Anna Botsford Comstock (who wrote The Handbook of Nature Study, still in print) and her husband, the entomologist and author John Henry Comstock, to whom The Brook Book was dedicated. (Comstock is “the Doctor” in the passage above.) Mentored by Bailey and the Comstocks, sisters Mary Rogers Miller (1868-1971) and Julia Ellen Rogers (1866-1958) pursued careers in Nature-study, first in Ithaca, New York, and later in Long Beach and Los Angeles, California, respectively. Early in their careers, while still in Upstate New York, they both authored nature books of their own. Encouraged by Liberty Hyde Bailey, Julia Ellen wrote a general book on trees, covering their structure, propagation, and care, along with a guide to the most common trees of the Northeast. Mary, inspired by John Comstock, wrote a book on streams with an emphasis on aquatic life, especially insects. Julia Ellen does not mention her sister, but Mary refers to “Sister Ellen” in several places, including the text above, which tells the story of Julia Ellen’s first encounter with blooming arbutus.

At first, I found The Brook Book a puzzling read. It consists of a series of vignettes chronicling nature expeditions, arranged seasonally to begin with spring and end with wintertime. But while her sister devoted several pages to explaining the design and rationale behind Among Green Trees, Mary explained the purpose behind her own book in much simpler terms: “Throughout a year a brook is captivating. It is as companionable as a child, and as changeful. It hints at mysteries. But does it tell secrets other than its own? Does it tell where the wild things come down to drink? Does it tell where the birds take their baths, or where the choice wild flowers lurk? I fain would know the story of its playfellows and dependents.” Between the lines of this playful, teasing account is some hint, perhaps, of her audience might be — the child within all of us, old and young alike.

That said, the first several dozen pages favored the young. I enjoyed the writing, but learned nothing new and encountered little of note. Then I came upon a chapter about how spiders spin their webs. Mary quoted briefly from a nature guidebook that explained how orb weavers begin constructing their webs by spinning a series of guy lines, using dry and rigid thread so that they can support the entire structure while being easy for the spider to traverse readily. Only then does the spider spin its web of sticky and elastic threads — not in concentric circles, but instead a continuous spiral. She then set out to find an orb web herself and see how it was built. Indeed, her own observations matched what she head read. But reading it alone was not enough. For my own part, reading her book almost 125 years after it was written, I confess that I had never stopped to think about how spiders build their webs. Somewhere along the line, I just assumed the webs consisted of a series of concentric circles, not single spirals. There was how it was done — hiding all this time in plain sight, in a web on the railing of a bridge over a brook. “After seeing all these things happen,” Mary observed, “we know the philosophy of the two kinds of threads, but the wonder of it is still with us.” And that wonder is the the ultimate prize of the Nature-study enthusiast. The book contains other intriguing discoveries, including a hypothesized “cow shed”, a “curious, muddy-looking” object on the stem of a shrub that John Comstock claims was built by ants to house a herd of aphids. (The aphidse secret a sugary substance that the ants feed on, receiving in exchange protection from would-be insect predators.) I admit to being skeptical regarding that one.

One of my favorite passages in the book, though, is a stern critique of a neighbor’s utilitarian outlook on the value of nature — an anthropromorphic one that, I fear, matches that of many Americans today:

…we are told that both the back-swimmer and the waterboatman grow, as do other insects of their order, by successive molts or changes of skin. They reach maturity, if they escape their enemies, and spend the winter at the bottom, as did their parents.

After enthusiastically describing these business-like little creatures to a neighbor one day, even persuading her to go with me and watch them in Meadow Brook, I was chilled and fairly disgusted at her question: “What are they good for?”

How could I answer her? Of the added joy of existence which they had given to me, I hadn’t the heart to speak. Her question told me that no such “foolishness” would appeal to her. Neither could I make her understand that, so far as I was concerned, no utility need be assigned to any creature as an excuse for its presence among us. As well ask: “What use, to them, are we?” But I saw she expected me to speak up in defense of these denizens of Meadow Brook, and so I said: “Oh, food for fish!”—a lame response and totally unfounded on personal observation. A conciliatory “Umph!” assured me that my reply was entirely satisfactory, as there could be no question in any one’s mind as to the use of fish.

…that intelligent grown people should demand a reason for the existence of every other creature is nearly unforgivable. May the time soon come when the silly superstitions about animals and plants will cease to be visited upon the third and fourth generation, and supplanted by personal knowledge of nature. Man will become more tolerant of other creatures and less sure, perhaps, of his own exalted position in the universe. Let us hope that he will then see himself as others see him and begin to learn to love his neighbor as himself.

A hearty “Amen” to that, Mary! I also found myself nodding in agreement at the high value she placed on ferns — much in keeping with the Victorian fascination for them: “Who ever had enough of ferns? They are always the right thing in the right place.” I will close my account of The Brook Book with this charming passage extolling the joys of a winter nature walk:

I shall never again allow myself to be mewed up between walls of brick and mortar for any length of time. The arching tree-tops are temples which call to worship. Their voices and the murmur of the ice-rimmed stream mingle like soft music from a far-off organ. I will go often, and be lifted out of the humdrum of every-day existence. The outdoor world is full of life in winter. To know this life one needs only to be open-eyed and open-hearted; the spirit of winter is ever ready to guide, to cheer and to bless.

Among Green Trees offered quite a contrast. Julia explained that she had crafted an “all-around tree book” offering no less than four different points of view: the Nature-study side; the physiological side; the practical side; and the systematic side”. Ellen herself clearly favored the nature-study side, and I would have to concur. The portions of the book covering the wonders of buds, branches, and bark were by far the most fascinating. Indeed, once the book transitioned into chapters on planting and caring for trees (including when and how to spray them with various toxic chemicals) I lost interest. I considered reading the detailed accounts of different trees (systematic side), but opted to be satisfied with having read on the the first half of the book (though, given the oversized pages and modest font, that was still considerable text).

Although Julia comes across as a bit more sophisticated and professional in tone, she comes alive when speaking about her true passion, Nature-study. “Nature-study,” she announces, “is a keen, appreciative study of the common things around us. It means accurate seeing and clear thinking. Nature-study is the most vital idea today in education. It is studying things instead of studying about things. Under it, the commonplace becomes transfigured.” It is intriguing to note that her choice of “transfigured” echoes the religious tone of her sister’s description of tree-tops as “temples which call to worship.” There is a spiritual, transformational facet to Nature-study, one that is largely neglected (or outright avoided) in environmental education programs nowadays.

Lest we get too serious, Julie also reminds her readers of the joy that can be found learning from nature. In a chapter on how leaves are arranged on branches, she observes that “Leaf-arrangement is intensely interesting, when we come to study it. The botanists try to scare the common folks away by calling it Phyllobotany. But they can’t keep the fun all to themselves. Let us get into their pleasant game.“

IJulia clearly loved trees, and went out of her way to describe them as akin to human beings. Indeed, the subtitle of her book is “A Guide to Pleasant and Profitable Acquaintance with Familar Trees“. Early on in the work, she observes that “Trees speak a language, if only we have the patience to learn it. It’s a sign language, and through it they tell us all manner of interesting things about how they make their living — about their hopes and their disappointments.” A bit later in the book, in a chapter called The Sleep of Trees, she declares that “Trees are, after all, very much like folks! …In winter, trees put on their warmest coats — a fashion set by the woodchuck and the bear — and just sleep and wait for spring! In warm weather a tree goes to sleep at sundown, and wakes up in the morning. If the sky is overcast, the tree is drowsy; if rain sets in, it goes right off to sleep.” One reviewer felt compelled to remark on the “many unscientific and misleading statements” in the book, particularly her lines about trees sleeping: “We suppose that this is a reference to the photosynthetic process, but to the uninitiated this would convey the idea that the tree is actually drowsy in the same sense that animals are.” Ironically, recent research on plants has revealed that they “behave” in particular ways and even have an innate, though highly distributed, “intelligence”.

Reading books that are 100 years old or more, I sometimes find myself a bit jarred by having passed into a long-gone world. In the case of Among Green Trees, this experience took the form of images and passages concerning elm trees. Thanks to the ravages of Dutch elm disease, it has been more than 50 years now since any elms could be found in backyards and along city streets. Julia opens her book with a lengthy quote from an 1841 article by Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (her abolitionist grandfather), part of which celebrates the elm:

And the elm — the patriarch of the family of shade, the majestic, the umbrageous, the antlered elm! We remember one at this moment — in sight from our own home on the banks of the Pemigewassett. It stood just across that cold stream, by the roadside, on the margin of the wide intervale. It stood upon the ground as lightly as though “it rose in dance,” its full top bending over toward the ground on every side with the dignity of the forest tree, and all the grace of the weeping willow. You could gaze upon it for hours. It was the beautify handy-work and architecture of God, on which the eye of man never tires, but always looks with refreshing and delight.

Julia herself extolled the glories of a New England village lined with elms:

Especially impressive to me was the little village whose main street forms the frontispiece of this volume. It is hardly what you would eall a populous village. There is just this one long avenue, with a few little feints at cross streets; no railroad, no factory, no noise, no bustle—just the quiet industries of a village whose commerce is with the thrifty farmer folk round about. It is not a village you could duplicate in the west, for the houses are century old, solidly built, and mostly innocent of paint. There are lilacs, purple and white, leaning up against the houses, and quaint, old-fashioned gardens shut in behind low picket fences.

The glory of the old place is its double row of superb American elms, which arch above the long street, intermingling their tops, and making of it a shadowy aisle with vaulted arches, like some vast cathedral. Long ago the villagers dug little trees im the neighboring woods and lined the road on both sides with them. Then they let them alone! Violets and ferns came with them from the woods, and spread undisturbed in their new environment. To-day they may still be seen among the gnarled roots of the patriarchal trees, springing out here and there as they have been doing for a hundred years.

Alas, the elms are long gone now, relics of another age.

I Do Not Desire to Grow Old Too Soon: “A Nature Wooing at Ormond by the Sea” by W. S. Blatchley (1902), part one

 Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Dec 252023
 

“For fifteen years I have been a naturalist. They have been years full of work, of hopes, of ambitions. Happiest those days when I have been alone in woods and fields, when I was learning for the first time lessons from nature — lessons purer, nobler and better than I ever expect to learn from the books of man — lessons showing me the close relationship existing among all animate and inanimate things, teaching me that this world, this universe of ours, is not made up of single, isolated objects and forces, but that each object, each force is but a necessary part of one grand and perfect whole. At the end of fifteen years I am still a tyro — still learning daily new facts from the book of nature, still, and ever expect to be, a tramp naturalist. I still delight to chase the winged butterfly o’er field and pasture; draw the seine through ripple and shallow for silvery minnow and rainbow darter — climb hill and wade pond for partridge berry or water lily, or wander all day through thicket and forest in search of hermit thrush and hooded warbler.

I am not a specialist in any branch of natural history, nor do I ever expect to be one. I do not desire to spend my life in pondering over the synonymy, and studying the minute structure of the organs of some particular group of animal or plant life. The world at large will never know me as an eminent ichthyologist or botanist, ornithologist or entomologist, geologist or conchologist, but I wish to know myself as being, in a small way, an ichtho-bota-ornigeo-concho-entom-etc.-gist, and so be able to see more and more clearly as time goes on the mutual relations and interdependence of the various classes of nature’s objects. Such a course will never bring me the renown that I might have achieved had I become a specialist; but what is renown as compared with present happiness and pleasure? And then, as Emerson, in his Essay on Nature, says: “In the woods a man caste off his years as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth.” I do not desire to grow old too soon, and so will seek in the way that I have chosen that fountain of youth which Ponce de Leon sought for in vain on the coast where I am now sitting.”

On March 17, 1899, Willis Blatchley penned these words from the coast of north Florida, in between excavating part of the Ormond Mound (a shell midden) the day before, and encountering a red-headed lizard later the same day. The book in which he shares these reflections, A Nature Wooing at Ormond by the Sea, is ostensibly an account of a naturalist’s exploits on vacation in Florida. But there is another story here, as well, one that I find intriguing and a bit mysterious as well. The book, I highly suspect, also chronicles Blatchley’s struggles with what nowadays would be termed a midlife crisis. And here, in this passage, he confronts the possibility that he will achieve no lasting fame, but has traded that for present happiness. His comments (and Emersonian quote) on growing old speak to someone midway on their life journey, confronting the reality of diminishing days. Even more telling is the reason Blatchley went to Florida in the first place: on the advice of his doctor, following “a severe attack of nervous prostration.” What precipitated the crisis is a mystery at the moment (though one I am keen to research further if I can). It could have resulted from stress, overwork, depression, or some combination of these. Born in October of 1859, Blatchley would have been 39 1/2 when he visited Florida. Given that life expectancy in America in 1900 was only 47, Blatchley was already facing the possibility of being in his last decade (fortunately, he lived until 1940, passing away at the age of 80). Is a mid-life crisis an underlying diagnosis here?

A week later, Blatchley returns to his theme of the interconnectedness of all things, in an enraptured moment of Emersonian pantheism:

“I would not give much for a man who can look upon the first wild flowers of spring and not feel a love, a boundless love, of Nature in his soul. For to know God, the true God, the one universal and all, one must know Nature in the true sense. But few, if any, men have ever known her thus, for to do so is to know the relation existing between matter and force, between atom and molecule, between element and compound, between cell and tissue, between organ and system, between plant and animal, between each one of nature’s objects and all the rest. It is to grasp, as it were, the universe in one grand comprehension— to stand on an eminence a thousand times higher than any on earth and see all objects in one grand vista before you; and at the same time feel and understand the workings of the great natural forces about you. Then, and then only, can one see and know his relation to all — feel that he is a part of the universal whole — a parcel of the universe — bound to it and kin to all which it comprises. For the Universe is God, and God is the Universe.”

Where does that leave human beings, then? What is the human condition, but to return — both body and consciousness — to the universe upon death? Two days later, Blatchley grapples with the prospect of ceasing to exist in a “revery on death” (as he labels the page). It closes with the inevitable realization that all we have is the moment in which we live, and happy is the one that can find joy in it.

“I note the body of a butterfly lying beside me and its presence begets a revery on death — that death which cometh to one and all in some form — which is as inevitable as the rising of tomorrow’s sun. Whether it comes to the mansion of the rich, where every desire of the invalid is granted, or to the hovel of the hermit, where solitude is its only companion ; whether it comes in the cool shade on the mountain’s side, or in the burning glare of the noonday sun on a desert waste, it matters little; it can come but once. Peace and forgetfulness are its accompaniments. All hopes, all fears, all hatreds, all loves, all desires, all passions, become forever things of the past. The step is taken into the great unknown. Millions, aye, hundreds of billions of human forms, of plant and animal forms, have gone — not one has e’er returned to tell us of the way. All concerning it is guess work. The wisdom of years’ experience stored in the gray matter of cerebral cells availeth nothing. The clay — the matter — is left behind. The living part — the energy — passeth beyond. Like that heat which, transmitted into electric power, propels a car, and then, by friction, passes into space, so the energy of all living forms joins that sum total of all energies, which pervadeth the universe. The thoughts which man has inscribed, the good which he has done to his fellowman; the ambitions, the loves, the hopes which he has inspired, are left and become a part of the world’s wealth, for the future use of mankind.

He who can get his pleasures during life from simple, common things, is the happiest, the richest. If the song of bird, the habits of insects, the colors of flowers and the graceful forms of leaves afford me material for thought and reason, and lead to my contentment, I am most fortunate. Then, O Nature, let me be a devotee to thee while life remains!”

Granted this conviction, Blatchley is able, by the end of his stay, to arrive at newfound hope (or, short of that, appears to talk himself into finding it), as he reports under the heading of April 10th:

“This morn a new life begins to stir within me. I know not how long it will last. I feel that new ambitions should be cherished in my soul, that the old should be forsaken; that new hopes should reign in my heart, that the old should be forgotten; that a new love of nature should be forever with me, that the old should belong to the eternity of the past.”

To this reader, at least, it seems that Blatchley’s time in nature along the Florida coast granted him the healing he yearned for. He returned to Indiana in mid-April and lived another 40 years — time spent pursuing his myriad passions in natural history, traveling to Alaska, South America, and yes, back to Florida as well.

Having considered the book as a work of mental, emotional, and spiritual transformation, there remains the question of how the book fares as a work of nature literature. That will be the topic of my next post — along with a bit more biographical matter on this fascinating naturalist.

The Little Things that Sing Around Us: “The Dune Country” by Earl H. Reed (1916)

 Birds, Sense of Place, Spirituality  No Responses »
Dec 232023
 

“One may stand upon a mountain-top and behold the splendors of awful immensities, but the imagination is soon lost in infinity, and only the atom on the rock remains. The music of the swaying rushes, the whispers among rippling waters and softly moving leaves, and the voices of the Little Things that sing around us, all come within the compass of our spiritual realm. It is with them that we must abide if we would find contentment of heart and soul.”

Earl Howell Reed (1863-1931) was, first and foremost, a self-taught artist. After working for 20 years as a grain broker for the Chicago Stock Exchange, he gave it up to pursue a dream of becoming an artist and author. He found inspiration among the Indiana Dunes, returning many times and publishing three books of his etchings of the dune landscape and people; seventy-seven of his original works are now in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, while five others (particularly stunning) are held at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, though none is currently on display. Ironically, though, for all the lovely black and white images that fill The Dune Country, the book is as much a celebration of sound as of vision. For all its “appealing picturesqueness,” the Dune Country is most marked by the richness of its wild music. The Dune Country was Reed’s second book; his first, primarily artwork with brief text accompaniment, was titled, The Voices of the Dunes. In a chapter on gulls and terns, Reed explains that

“The voices of the dunes are in many keys. The cries of the gulls and crows — the melodies of the songsters — the wind tones among the trees — the roar of the surf on the shore — the soft rustling of the loose sands, eddying among the beach grasses – — the whirr of startled wings in the ravines — the piping of the frogs and little toads in the marshy spots — the chorus of the katydids and locusts — the prolonged notes of the owls at night-— and many other sounds, all blend into the greater song of the hills, and become a part of the appeal to our higher emotions, in this land of enchantment and mystery.”

And the voices, for the most part, come from the Little Things. I find it fascinating how Reed chooses to take a label for smaller living creatures and capitalize it, so that collectively, those Little Things are, in fact, beings of much power and beauty. Reed explains, a page before the quote above, why he is inspired by them:

“The love of the Little Things which are concealed from the ordinary eye comes only to one who has sought out their hiding-places, and learned their ways by tender and long association. Their world and ours is fundamentally the same, and to know them is to know ourselves.

We sometimes cannot tell whether the clear, flutelike note from the depths of the ravine comes from the thrush or the oriole, but we know that the little song has carried us just a little nearer to nature’s heart than we were before.”

For all the beauty Reed finds among the dunes, there is wildness here, too — a fierce wildness that cannot be escaped.

“The herons stand solemnly, like sentinels, among the thick grasses, and out in the open places, watching for unwary frogs, minnows, and other small life with which nature has bountifully peopled the sloughs. The crows and hawks drop quickly behind clumps of weeds on deadly errands in the day time, and at night the owls, foxes, and minks haunt the margins of the wet places. The enemies of the Little Things are legion. Violent death is their destiny. With the exception of the turtles, they are all eaten by something larger and more powerful than themselves.”

Tragically, the love and care Reed expresses for the wild landscape of the dunes is not shared by everyone. Early on in the book, Reed complains about how

“Man has changed or destroyed natural scenery wherever he has come into practical contact with it. The fact that these wonderful hills are left to us is simply because he has not yet been able to carry away and use the sand of which they are composed. He has dragged the pines from their storm-scarred tops, and is utilizing their sands for the elevation of city railway tracks. Shrieking, rasping wheels now pass over them, instead of the crow’s shadow, the cry of the tern, or the echo of waves from glistening and untrampled shores.”

Much later in the book, Reed encounters a farm family living a hardscrabble existence in the backcountry behind the dunes. The family kept a raccoon they had saved as a baby after the rest of its family had been killed by dogs in a coon hunting outing. They kept the raccoon chained beside a wooden box in their front yard. The sight of it prompted Reed to declare, “It is mankind that does these things — not the brutes — and yet we cry out in denunciation when humanity is thus outraged. We chain and cage the wild things, and shriek for freedom of thought and action. Verily this is a strange world!”

For all his fascination with wild beauty in sound and scene, Reed spends much of his book sharing about the unusual human characters he encounters living in various isolated shacks throughout the dune country. He sketches their facial profiles at every opportunity, and in his visits with them documents their stories (believable or otherwise). Overwhelmingly old men, these dune residents are “old derelicts,” human flotsam cast ashore among the dunes, living on the edge of civilization, usually by choice:

“While we may be interested and amused with the petty gossip, the rude philosophy, the quaint humor, the little antagonisms, and the child-like foibles of these lonely dwellers in the dune country, the pathos that overshadows them must touch our hearts.

They have brought their life scars into the desolate sands, where the twilight has come upon them. The roar of a mighty world goes on beyond them. Unable to navigate the great currents of life, they have drifted into stagnant waters.”

The accounts of these eccentric souls are well worth reading. I could even imagine constructing a one-act play around them and their stories.

I greatly enjoyed The Dune Country for its haunting prose and fascinating depictions of the people who lived there, as well as its fine etchings. Reed was an artist and observer, not a naturalist, of course. His bird classification extends no further than “gulls”, “terns”, and “crows”. He does remark, a bit wistfully, on how being able to identify songbirds might enrich our appreciation of them: “If we could see the singer and learn his name, his silvery tones would be still more pure and sweet when he comes again.” But he is far more fascinated by the music and poetry of Indiana Dunes than the ecological relationships he encounters there. Yet his descriptions are evocative, and effectively transport the reader (or me, at least) into the world of the dunes. For instance, he writes about how “Swamps of tamarack, which are impenetrable, contribute their masses of deep green to the charm of the landscape. The ravagers of the wet places hide in them, and the timid, hunted wild life finds refuge in their still labyrinths. In the winter countless tracks and trails on the snow lead into them and are lost.” Reed’s gift was not lost among contemporary readers, however forgotten his works are today. As Annex Galleries claims, “Reed brought so much attention to the Dunes and the need to conserve the natural habitat that the Indiana State Legislature established the Indiana Dunes State Park in 1923.”

Finally, a few words about the provenance of my edition of this book. It is a first edition, but was also the only edition ever published. It appears to have been owned by two people in the past 110 years. One signed his (her?) name in the upper right-hand corner of the flyleaf. The second stamped his name on the lower left-hand corner of the front end sheet. I am guessing, from the style of the signature, that it belongs to the first owner. I honestly cannot read the name with any confidence. If anyone reading this blog can offer a translation of the script, please leave a comment here, as I would very much like to know who they were.

The second name, Harold Phelps Stokes, actually belongs to someone of some renown. He served on the Editorial Board of the New York Times between 1928 and 1937. He also traveled to Alaska on Warren G. Harding’s ill-fated journey (Harding died in California on the way home.) and was a friend of Herbert Hoover. Stokes wrote editorials regarding state and city affairs in New York, along with problems relating to transit and traffic. In vain I sought some connection between his life and travels and Indiana Dunes, but that connection, if there ever was one, appears to belong to Elemental Mystery (to use another term of Reed’s).

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

 Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
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)

 book review, Books, Native Plants, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
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.

A Perpetual Letter from God: “Star Papers: Experiences of Art and Nature” by Henry Ward Beecher (1855)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Aug 282022
 
Nature becomes to the soul a perpetual letter from God,
freshly written every day and each hour.

I am not quite certain what to make of this book or its author, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887). A contemporary of Thoreau, the two may have met but were certainly not close acquaintances. Thoreau does report in his journal about attending church in New York City to see him preach. It is not known whether Beecher, a Unitarian clergyman, ever read Emerson or Thoreau. Beecher wrote one novel — Norwood — entirely unknown today, though his sister’s novel remains famous for helping start the Civil War (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Beecher published only this one collection of writings that included nature essays (among other topics in the volume). Yet he is not an obvious progenitor of any later nature authors, although he did develop a close friendship with William Hamilton Gibson late in his life (this friendship included marrying Gibson and Emma Ludlow Blanchard in 1878). The book title is one of its most mysterious features, though there is no cosmic significance intended. It turns out that Beecher had written a number of columns for the New York Independent Newspaper, with the ones authored by him denoted with a star. Inevitably, then, this book is a compilation of those starred papers.

Opening the book with care — it is one of the oldest titles in my collection — I steeled myself for flowery, overwrought prose and a lot of reflections of a religious bent (as the title of this blog post suggests). And while these characteristics are present, so, too, is a passion for nature and a delightfully whimsical and occasionally even self-deprecating sense of humor. His essay on books and bookshops (see my previous post) rings amazingly true for me today. And while he was certainly no scientist, he did have a keen command of plant identification and basic botanical nomenclature (both wildflowers and trees) and a working knowledge of common names of birds. Here are two passages on flowering weeds from “A Discourse on Flowers” that opens the Nature section of his book. First, dog fennel, a tall and odoriferous weed I contend with each year on my property in Georgia:

What shall we say of mayweed, irreverently called dog-fennel by some? Its acrid juice, its heavy pungent odor, make it disagreeable; and being disagreeable, its enormous Malthusian propensities to increase render it hateful to damsels of white stockings, compelled to walk through it on dewy mornings. Arise, O scythe, and devour it!

And second, the lowly dandelion that covers my yard with its festive yellow blooms:

You can not forget, if you would, those golden kisses all over the cheeks of the meadow, queerly called dandelions. There are many greenhouse blossoms less pleasing to us than these. And we have reached through many a fence, since we were incarcerated, like them, in a city, to pluck one of these yellow flower drops. Their passing away is more spiritual than their bloom. Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than the transparent seed-globe — a fairy dome of splendid architecture.

His greatest rapture, though, he reserves for the stately Connecticut elms. This extended passage evokes what America has lost, and how different the small town landscape must have been 150 years ago when elms were commonplace:

A village shaded by thoroughly grown elms can not but be handsome. Its houses may be huts; its streets may be ribbed with rocks, or channeled with ruts; it may be as dirty as New York, and as frigid as Philadelphia; and yet these vast, majestic tabernacles of the air would redeem it to beauty. These are temples indeed, living temples, neither waxing old nor shattered by Time, that cracks and shatters stone, but rooting wider with every generation and casting a vaster round of grateful shadow with every summer. We had rather walk beneath an avenue of elms than inspect the noblest cathedral that art ever accomplished. What is it that brings one into such immediate personal and exhilarating sympathy with venerable trees! One instinctively uncovers as he comes beneath them; he looks up with proud veneration into the receding and twilight recesses; he breathes a thanksgiving to God every time his cool foot falls along their shadows. They waken the imagination and mingle the olden time with the present. Did any man of contemplative mood ever stand under an old oak or elm, without thinking of other days, — imagining the scenes that had transpired in their presence? These leaf-mountains seem to connect the past and the present to us as mountain ridges attract clouds from both sides of themselves…

No other tree is at all comparable to the elm. The ash is, when well grown, a fine tree, but clumpy; the maple has the same character. The horse-chestnut, the linden, the mulberry, and poplars, (save that tree-spire, the Lombardy poplar,) are all of them plump, round, fat trees, not to be despised, surely, but representing single dendrological ideas. The oak is venerable by association, and occasionally a specimen is found possessing a kind of grim and ragged glory. But the elm, alone monarch of trees, combines in itself the elements of variety, size, strength, and grace, such as no other tree known to us can at all approach or remotely rival. It is the ideal of trees; the true Absolute Tree! Its main trunk shoots up, not round and smooth, like an over-fatted, lymphatic tree, but channeled and corrugated, as if its athletic muscles showed their proportions through the bark, like Hercules’ limbs through his tunic. Then suddenly the whole idea of growth is changed, and multitudes of long, lithe branches radiate from the crotch of the tree, having the effect of straightness and strength, yet really diverging and curving, until the outermost portions droop over and give to the whole top the most faultless grace. If one should at first say that the elm suggested ideas of strength and uprightness, on looking again he would correct himself, and say that it was majestic, uplifting beauty that it chiefly represented. But if he first had said that it was graceful and magnificent beauty, on a second look he would correct himself, and say that it was vast and rugged strength that it set forth. But at length he would say neither; he would say both; he would say that it expressed a beauty of majestic strength, and a grandeur of graceful beauty.

Such domestic forest treasures are a legacy which but few places can boast. Wealth can build houses, and smooth the soil; it can fill up marshes, and create lakes or artificial rivers; it can gather statues and paintings; but no wealth can buy or build elm trees — the floral glory of New England. Time is the only architect of such structures; and blessed are they for whom Time was pleased to fore-think! No care or expense should be counted too much to maintain the venerable elms of New England in all their regal glory!

Elm trees are not the only living beings lost or diminished since Beecher’s days. Similarly, we are rapidly losing the diversity and number of insects that were once present in the American landscape. Consider this account of a trouting excursion gone awry. Can you imagine encountering this many (and this great a diversity of) grasshoppers on a rural New England fishing trip today?

Still further north is another stream, something larger, and much better or worse according to your luck. It is easy of access, and quite unpretending. There is a bit of a pond, some twenty feet in diameter, from which it flows; and in that there are five or six half-pound trout who seem to have retired from active life and given themselves to meditation in this liquid convent. They were very tempting, but quite untemptable. Standing afar off, we selected an irresistible fly, and with long line we sent it pat into the very place. It fell like a snow-flake. No trout should have hesitated a moment. The morsel was delicious. The nimblest of them should have flashed through the water, broke the surface, and with a graceful but decisive curve plunged downward, carrying the insect with him. Then we should, in our turn, very cheerfully, lend him a hand, relieve him of his prey, and, admiring his beauty, but pitying his untimely fate, bury him in the basket. But he wished no translation. We cast our fly again and again; we drew it hither and thither; we made it skip and wriggle; we let it fall plash like a blundering bug or fluttering moth; and our placid spectators calmly beheld our feats, as if all this skill was a mere exercise for their amusement, and their whole duty consisted in looking on and preserving order.

Next, we tried ground-bait, and sent our vermicular hook down to their very sides. With judicious gravity they parted, and slowly sailed toward the root of an old tree on the side of the pool. Again, changing place, we will make an ambassador of a grasshopper. Laying down our rod, we prepare to catch the grasshopper. That is in itself no slight feat. At the first step you take, at least forty bolt out and tumble headlong into the grass; some cling to the stems, some are creeping under the leaves, and not one seems to be within reach. You step again; another flight takes place, and you eye them with fierce penetration, as if thereby you could catch some one of them with your eye. You can not, though. You brush the grass with your foot again. Another hundred snap out, and tumble about in every direction. There are large ones and small ones, and middling-sized ones; there are gray and hard old fellows; yellow and red ones; green and striped ones. At length it is wonderful to see how populous the grass is. If you did not want them, they would jump into your very hand. But they know by your looks that you are out a-fishing. You see a very nice young fellow climbing up a steeple stem, to get a good look-out and see where you are. You take good aim and grab at him. The stem you catch, but he has jumped a safe rod. Yonder is another creeping among some delicate ferns. With broad palm you clutch him and all the neighboring herbage too. Stealthily opening your little finger, you see his leg; the next finger reveals more of him; and opening the next you are just beginning to take him out with the other hand, when, out he bounds and leaves you to renew your entomological pursuits! Twice you snatch handfuls of grass and cautiously open your palm to find that you have only grass. It is quite vexatious. There are thousands of them here and there, climbing and wriggling on that blade, leaping off from that stalk, twisting and kicking on that vertical spider’s web, jumping and bouncing about under your very nose, hitting you in your face, creeping on your shoes, or turning summersets and tracing every figure of parabola or ellipse in the air, and yet not one do you get. And there is such, a heartiness and merriment in their sallies! They are pert and gay, and do not take your intrusion in the least dudgeon. If any tender-hearted person ever wondered how a humane man could bring himself to such a cruelty as the impaling of an insect, let him hunt for a grasshopper in a hot day among tall grass; and when at length he secures one, the affixing him upon the hook will be done without a single scruple, with judicial solemnity, and as a mere matter of penal justice.

Now then the trout are yonder. We swing our line to the air, and give it a gentle cast toward the desired spot, and a puff of south wind dexterously lodges it in the branch of the tree. You plainly see it strike, and whirl over and over, so that no gentle pull will loosen it. You draw it north and south, east and west; you give it a jerk up and a pull down; you try a series of nimble twitches; in vain you coax it in this way and solicit it in that. Then you stop and look a moment, first at the trout and then at your line. Was there ever anything so vexatious? Would it be wrong to get angry? In fact you feel very much like it. The very things you wanted to catch, the grasshopper and the trout, you could not; but a tree, that you did not in the least want, you have caught fast at the first throw. You fear that the trout will be scared. You cautiously draw nigh and peep down. Yes, there they are, looking at you and laughing as sure as ever trout laughed! They understand the whole thing. With a very decisive jerk you snap your line, regain the remnant of it, and sit down to repair it, to put on another hook, you rise up to catch another grasshopper, and move on down the stream to catch a trout!

In this brief passage, also on the theme of fishing, Beecher gazes longingly at a brook plunging down the mountainside. He urges readers to leave some wild places unfished (untouched). Or then again…

…we are on the upper brink of another series of long down-plunges, each one of which would be enough for a day’s study. Below these are cascades and pools in which the water whirls friskily around like a kitten running earnestly after its tail. But we will go no further down. These are the moun- tain jewels ; the necklaces which it loves to hang down from its hoary head upon its rugged bosom.

Shall we take out our tackle? That must be a glorious pool yonder for trout ! No, my friend, do not desecrate such a scene by throwing a line into it with piscatory intent. Leave some places in nature to their beauty, unharassed, for the mere sake of their beauty. Nothing could tempt us to spend an hour here in fishing; — all the more because there is not a single trout in the whole brook.

To declare Beecher an early conservationist akin to Thoreau would be a stretch, I think. But he does make a strident call for respecting old trees instead of cutting them down. Ultimately, his motivation is less for the sake of the tree itself, however, than for its spiritual significance as a creation of God.

Thus do you stand, noble elms! Lifted up so high are your topmost boughs, that no indolent birds care to seek you; and only those of nimble wings, and they with unwonted beat, that love exertion, and aspire to sing where none sing higher. — Aspiration! so Heaven gives it pure as flames to the noble bosom. But debased with passion and selfishness it comes to bo only Ambition!

It was in the presence of this pasture-elm, which we name the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow that we had indeed become owners of the soil ! It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face, and when I whispered to myself, This is mine, there was a shrinking as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory, at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said, “I may not call thee property, and that property mine! Thou belongest to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty temple where birds praise God. Thou belongest to no man’s hand, but to all men’s eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God ! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots, and the ax from thy trunk.”

For, remorseless men there are crawling yet upon the face of the earth, smitten blind and inwardly dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages is, that it is food for the ax and the saw ! These are the wretches of whom the Scripture speaks: “A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees.“

Thus famous, or rather infamous, was the last owner but one, before me, of this farm. Upon the crown of the hill, just where an artist would have planted them, had he wished to have them exactly in the right place, grew some two hundred stalworth and ancient maples, beeches, ashes, and oaks, a narrow belt-like forest, forming a screen from the northern and western winds in winter, and a harp of endless music for the summer. The wretched owner of this farm, tempted of the Devil, cut down the whole blessed band and brotherhood of trees, that he might fill his pocket with two pitiful dollars a cord for the wood! Well, his pocket was the best part of him. The iron furnaces have devoured my grove, and their huge stumps, that stood like gravestones, have been cleared away, that a grove may be planted in the same spot, for the next hundred years to nourish into the stature and glory of that which is gone.

In other places, I find the memorials of many noble trees slain; here, a hemlock that carried up its eternal green a hundred feet into the winter air; there, a huge double-trunked chestnut, dear old grandfather of hundreds of children that have for generations clubbed its boughs, or shook its nut-laden top, and laughed and shouted as bushels of chestnuts rattled down. Now, the tree exists only in the form of loop-holed posts and weather-browned rails. I do hope the fellow got a sliver in his finger every time he touched the hemlock plank, or let down the bars made of those chestnut rails !

What then, it will be said, must no one touch a tree? must there be no fuel, no timber? Go to the forest for both. There are no individual trees there, only a forest. One trunk here, and one there, leaves the forest just as perfect as before, and gives room for young aspiring trees to come up in the world. But for a man to cut down a large, well-formed, healthy tree from the roadside, or from pastures or fields, is a piece of unpardonable Vandalism. It is worse than Puritan hammers upon painted windows and idolatrous statues. Money can buy houses, build walls, dig and drain the soil, cover the hills with grass, and the grass with herds and flocks. But no money can buy the growth of trees. They are born of Time. Years are the only coin in which they can be paid for. Beside, so noble a thing is a well-grown tree, that it is a treasure to the community, just as is a work of art. If a monarch were to blot out Euben’s Descent from the Cross, or Angelo’s Last Judgment, or batter to pieces the marbles of Greece, the whole world would curse him, and for ever. Trees are the only art-treasures which belong to our villages. They should be precious as gold.

But let not the glory and grace of single trees lead us to neglect the peculiar excellences of the forest. We go from one to the other, needing both ; as in music we wander from melody to harmony, and from many-voiced and intertwined harmonies back to simple melody again.

To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two groves are alike. There is as marked a difference between different forests as between different communities. A grove of pines without underbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resinous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple woods, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light and shade, or the sound of its leaves.

Do I detect, at the close of this passage, incipient thoughts about the diversity of forest ecosystems? Alas, it is a thought he carries no further, beyond remarking on his favorite blending of forest trees.

Ultimately, his thoughts of nature are bounded by his ultimate aim, appreciating God in all his glory. Here, toward the end of the book, Beecher considers the various uses of nature. While he does not identify fully with the utilitarian perspective, he does not reject it, either. Ultimately, he advocates nature appreciation as a form of religious devotion. We will leave him there, pondering the ineffable as the sun sinks low in the sky over New England.

As things go in our utilitarian age, men look upon the natural world in one of three ways: the first, as a foundation for industry, and all objects are regarded in their relations to industry. Grass is for hay, flowers are for medicine, springs are for dairies, rocks are for quarries, trees are for timber, streams are for navigation or for milling, clouds are for rain, and rain is for harvests. The relation of an object to some commercial or domestic economy, is the end of observation. Beyond that there is no interest to it.

The second aspect in which men behold nature, is the purely scientific. We admire a man of science who is so all-sided that he can play with fancy or literality, with exactitudes or associations, just as he will. But a mere man of accuracy, one of those conscientious-eyed men, that will never see any thing but just what is there, and who insist upon bringing every thing to terms; who are for ever dissecting nature, and coming to the physical truths in their most literal forms, these men are our horror. We should as soon take an analytic chemist to dine with us, that he might explain the constituent elements of every morsel that Eve ate; or an anatomist into a social company, to describe the bones, and muscles, and nerves that were in full play in the forms of dear friends. Such men think that nature is perfectly understood when her mechanism is known; when her gross and physical facts are registered, and when all her details are catalogued and described. These are nature’s dictionary-makers. These are the men who think that the highest enjoyment of a dinner would be to be present in the kitchen and that they might see how the food is compounded and cooked.

A third use of nature is that which poets and artists make, who look only for beauty.

All of these are partialists. They all misinterpret, because they all proceed as if nature were constructed upon so meager a schedule as that which they peruse; as if it were a mere matter of science, or of commercial use, or of beauty; whereas these are but single developments among hundreds.

The earth has its physical structure and machinery, well worth laborious study; it has its relations to man’s bodily wants, from which spring the vast activities of industrial life; it has its relations to the social faculties, and the finer sense of the beautiful in the soul; but far above all these are its declared uses, as an interpreter of God, a symbol of invisible spiritual truths, the ritual of a higher life, the highway upon which our thoughts are to travel toward immortality, and toward the realm of just men made perfect that do inherit it.

For its vast age, my copy of this book offers few clues as to its history. There is a bookseller stamp for J.T. Heald, Bookseller and Binder, 127 Market Street, Wilmington, Delaware. There is also a signature without a date or other identifying information. The name appears to be Hannah B. Michner. I was unable to locate the name online when searched with Delaware, Pennsylvania,

Wilmington, or Philadelphia. I am not clear if the last name is a maiden name or a name received upon marriage. Nor do I have any hint regarding whether the owner purchased the book new, in Delaware, or used, somewhere else.

Beautiful Mysteries: “Eye Spy: Afield With Nature Among Flowers and Animate Things” by William Hamilton Gibson (1897)

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Aug 272022
 

…A few more similar expositions of the beautiful mysteries of the common flowers which we meet every day in our walks, and which we claim to “know” so well, may serve to add something to the interest of our strolls afield. It is scarcely fair to assert that familiarity can breed contempt in our relations to so lovely an object as a flower, but certain it is that this everyday contact or association, especially with the wild things of the wood, meadow, and wayside, is conducive to an apathy which dulls our sense to their actual attributes of beauty. Many of these commonplace familiars of the copse and thicket and field are indeed like voices in the wilderness to most of us. We forget that the “weed” of one country often becomes a horticultural prize in another, even as the mullein, for which it is hard for the average American to get up any enthusiasm, and which is tolerated with us only in a worthless sheep pasture, flourishes in distinction in many an English or Continental garden as the “American velvet plant.”

James A. Garfield

Try as I may, I cannot shake the parallels from my mind. Every time I bring William Hamilton Gibson (1850-1896) into my thoughts, inevitably I also think of James Abram Garfield (1831-1881), 20th President of the United States. Both have three names (though Garfield’s middle name is usually abbreviated to A.); both have last names of two syllables, beginning with G; both were of roughly the same era; both were quite gifted — Garfield in politics, Gibson in art and writing; both sported similar beards; and both died tragically at a young age (well, younger than I am, a least). James A. Garfield fell to an assassin’s bullet just a few months into his Presidency; William H. Gibson died of a stroke from overwork just a few months before Eye Spy was published. Of the two, I think Gibson was likely the more light-hearted and playful; Garfield looks fairly serious in this photo. I greatly admire Garfield, but since this is a nature blog (and since Candace Millard already crafted a fabulous biography of him), I will focus solely on Gibson in this post, despite my innate need to associate them somehow.

Gibson was a gifted artist who closely observed the world around him — particularly what lay at his feet, in the form of both flowers and the insects associated with them. Employing the two skills in tandem, Gibson reveals in Eye Spy many mysteries pertaining to everyday nature in rural New England, where his studio was situated. “The beauty of the commonplace often requires the aid of the artist as its interpreter,” he remarks in an early essay in this volume. He then proceeds to share with readers, using careful drawings, how the lowly figwort (“a tall, spindling weed”) orchestrates visits by the tiny wasp that pollinates it. He reveals how “these queer little homely flowers” function as “mere devices — first, to insure the visit of an insect, and second, to make that insect the bearer of the pollen from one blossom to the stigma of another.”

I will not bother with the complexities of the process here, but you can read all about this sequence of images in Gibson’s essay, “A Homely Weed”.

One particularly noteworthy feature of this book is that, in keeping with Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Gibson examines flowers and insects together, in light of the “‘new botany’, which recognizes the insect as an important affinity of the flower–the key to its various puzzling features of color, form, and fragrance…” Gibson, though, goes beyond Darwin to imbue these relationships with spiritual significance, reflecting “the conscious intention of the flower as an embodiment of a divine companion to an insect.” Remarking on how botany has been transformed by Darwin’s work, Gibson exclaims in “Riddles in Flowers”: “What puzzles to the mere botanist! for it is because these eminent scholars were mere botanists—students and chroniclers of the structural facts of flowers—that this revelation of the truth about these blossom features was withheld from them. It was not until they had become philosophers and true seers, not until they sought the divine significance, the reason, which lay behind or beneath these facts, that the flowers disclosed their mysteries to them.”

Gibson’s volume (culled largely from previously-published essays) is a book full of magic and mystery, equally inviting to older children and adults. Some chapters focus on the mysteries of pollination, others on predation and parasitism. In one essay, a “mischief-making midge” lays an egg inside a stem or leaf, producing a gall. Three of Gibson’s accounts have a dimension of tragedy — parasitic wasps laying eggs inside caterpillars, cicadas, and grasshoppers, leading to their slow, inevitable death. Others exude joy and delight; in “The Dandelion Burglar”, a dandelion falls victim, not to an insect, but to a redstart thief — a “tiny, black bird with a rosy band in his tail” who steals the developing seeds of a recently-bloomed dandelion to line its nest. Yet other essays reveal to readers how to take spore prints from a mushroom, and how to increase the likelihood of finding multiple four-leaf clovers. My favorite essay in the book reports on the engineering feats of spiders, building bridges very much in keeping with the feats of human engineering. It is entitled “The Spider’s Span”, and I include it in its entirety below.

Observers who witnessed from day to day the construction of the great Brooklyn Bridge were often heard to remark, as they looked up with awe from the ferryboats beneath at the workmen suspended everywhere among the net-work of cables, “Those men look just like spiders in a web.” The comparison seemed irresistible, and the writer heard it expressed many times. But how few who gave utterance to the sentiment realized the full significance of the “spider” allusion, or for a moment reflected that the span itself was, in many particulars of its construction, but a parallel of an engineering feat of which the spider was the earliest discoverer. Yet among all the distinguished names engraved upon the memorial tablet upon the stone bridge-tower the spider gets no credit.

Day after day and week after week we might have seen, travelling back and forth against the sky, a wheel-shaped messenger reeling off its tiny wire. Night and day it was busy, each trip adding one more strand to the growing cable which was to support the great substructure below. And what was this travelling wheel called? “ The carrier,” or “traveller,” if I remember rightly. Why this obviously intentional slight and discourtesy when every field and wood and copse in the country—indeed, on the globe—showed its living example, and bore its myriadfold witness that the “spider” was the only legitimate and proper designation?

In the other most notable suspension-bridge, at Niagara, the time-honored methods of the spider were further and conspicuously recognized, but here again without any courteous engraven acknowledgment on the tablet of fame, so far as I have learned.

A kite was flown from the American shore, and reeled out so as to fall upon the Canadian side, and this initial strand was drawn across, and subsequently strengthened by the travelling reel. The ends of the added wires were firmly secured at their anchorage, and the completed cable at length re-enforced by guy-ropes.

What is the method of our spider? Ages before the advent of the human engineer he followed the same tactics which we now see him performing in every meadow, or even at our window-sill, or on the bouquet upon our table, linking flower with flower, window-sill with garden fence, bush with bush, tree with tree, with his glistening suspension-bridge spanning the stream, river, and meadow. This wiry thread that tightens across our face as we ride in our carriage, and leaves its tingling “snap” upon our nose, what is this but the model suspension cable of Arachne strengthened a hundredfold by the spider which has travelled back and forth over its course for hours perhaps, each trip leaving a fresh strand, one extremity being anchored on yonder oak in the meadow and the other on the church steeple? Such a cable twenty feet in length is a common challenge in our walks in the open wood road, even making a perceptible motion among the leaves and bending twigs on either side ere it yields to our advance. And to the walker who cares to investigate, a silken bridge a hundred feet in length is not a very exceptional find.

This bridge-building is not confined to any particular month or season, nor to any one species of spider. The autumn will afford us the best opportunity for observation. At that season the spider-egg tufts are turning out their baby spiders by the millions, each a perfect grown spider in miniature, and apparently as skilled at birth in the peculiar arts of its kind as its parents were in their ripe old age. Here is a troop of them upon this drooping branch of wild grape by the river brink. Its leaves are glistening in the loose, rambling tangle which marks their wanderings. They are evidently not satisfied with their present surroundings, and would seem desirous of getting as far as possible from the neighborhood of their cradle and swaddling-clothes. They are the most independent and self-reliant babies on record. They ask advice from no one—indeed their mother died a year ago, perhaps—but each determines to leave his brothers and sisters, to “see the world” for himself, and paddle his own canoe.

Fancy a first trial trip on a tight-rope from the torch of the Statue of Liberty to Governors Island! Yet such is the corresponding feat accomplished by this self-reliant acrobat, which a few days or perhaps hours ago was but an egg!

Here is one family of spiderlings upon the grapevine spray, for instance. They are hanging several yards above the water, and with an ocean, as it were, between them and the distant country upon which their hearts are set. But there is no hesitation or misgiving. Let us closely observe this eager youngster far out upon the point of the leaf. The breeze is blowing across the brook. In an instant, upon reaching the edge of the leaf, the spiderling has thrown up the tip of its body, and a tiny, glistening stream is seen to pour out from its group of spinnerets. Farther and farther it floats, waving across the water like a pennant. Two, three, five, ten, fifteen feet are now seen glistening in the sun. Now it floats in among the herbage upon the opposite bank, and seems reaching out for a foothold. In a minute more its tip has brushed against a tall group of asters, and clings fast, the loose span sagging in the breeze, and as we turn our attention to the spider, we see that he has turned about, and is now “hauling in the slack,” which he continues to do until the span is taut, when he anchors it firmly to the leaf, and without a moment’s ceremony steps out upon his tight-rope, and makes the “trial trip” across the abyss —a feat which Dr. McCook, the spider specialist and historian, has most felicitously compared to the similar trial trip of Engineer Farrington across the cable of the East River Bridge, a thrilling event which was witnessed by thousands of spectators from sailing craft and housetops.

Our spider has now reached the asters twenty feet away, and is doubtless busying himself by further securing the anchorage at this terminus. It is quickly done, for see, he is even now far out over the water on his return trip, arriving at the grape leaf a moment later. His strand is now three times as strong as at first, and will be many times stronger before he is satisfied with it. An hour later, if we care to go up-stream half a mile to the bridge, or half a mile below to the crossing pole, for the sake of examining those asters across the brook, we shall find our spiderling nicely settled in a tiny little home of his own. The glistening span is now like a tough silken thread, and is moored to the head of flowers by a half-dozen guy-threads in all directions, while in their midst, in the “nave of his tiny wheel of lace,” our smart young baby rests from his labors.

Such is the probable course which he would follow, unless, perhaps, his roving spirit, thus tempted, has further asserted itself, and not content with this exploit, he has concluded to span the clouds, and is even now sailing a thousand feet aloft in his “ balloon.”

As a bridge-builder he has had many successful imitators, but as a balloonist he is yet more than a match for his bigger copyist, Homo sapiens, as I shall explain in a subsequent paper [enitled “Ballooning Spiders”].

Only in Their Enchanted Silence: “Wildwood Ways” by Winthrop Packard (1909)

 Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place, Spirituality  1 Response »
Aug 162022
 

In spite of the soft raiment in which the weather garbs itself to-day it is only three days ago that the great organ of the woods piped to the northerly wind as it breathed pedal notes through the pines and piped shrill in the chestnut twigs. And there was more than organ music. The white and red oaks, still holding fast to their brown leaves, gave forth the rattling of a million delicate castanets, and the wind drew like a soft bow across the finer strings of the birches so that all among slender twigs you heard this fine tone of a muted violin singing a little tender song of joy. For the trees were sadly weary of being frozen one day and thawed the next. They thought the real winter was at hand when the cold would be continuous and the snow deep. All we northern-bred folk love the real winter and feel defrauded of our birthright if we do not get it.

Strangest of all were the beeches. They have held the lower of their tan-pale leaves and with them have whispered of snow all winter long. Whatever the day, you had but to stand among them with closed eyes and you could hear the beech word for snow going tick, tick, tick, all about. It seemed as if flakes must be falling and hitting the leaves so plainly they spoke it. Now that the flakes were beginning the beeches never said a word, but just stood mute and watched it come and listened to the music of all the other trees. Or perhaps they listened to something finer yet. It was only in their enchanted silence that I thought I heard it. Now and then the wind held its breath and the oak leaf castanets ceased, and then for a second I would be sure of it; an elfin tinkle so crepuscular, so gossamer fine that it was less a sound than a thought, the ringing of snow crystal on snow crystal as the feathery flakes touched and separated in the frost-keen air. It surely was there and the beech trees heard it and stood breathless in solemn joy at the sound.

This is my third in an extensive number of nature books by Winthrop Packard (1862-1943) of Canton, Massachusetts. This is an example, too, of the need to read many books by the same author, if possible. The first two left me somewhat disenchanted with his nature sketches. But in Wildwood Ways, the enchantment is evident on every page. There is magic here, but always out of the corner of the eye, just beyond reach. Often, as in the passage above, it is a magic of sounds and silences. For all that Packard grounds his winter vignettes in scientific knowledge, he never quite discounts alternative explanations, ways of encountering nature rooted in myth and folklore. Yes, he seems to say, there is a scientific explanation here. But maybe, just maybe, there is more — wonder, beauty, awe. There is the way things are on the surface, and then something deeper — whisperings of trees, reflections of cosmic mysteries. His finest moments, without a doubt, are in an essay entitled “Thin Ice”. I will share the first portion below. The nebular hypothesis is the most widely-accepted explanation for the origin of our solar system; it was first proposed by in 1755 by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Toward midnight the pond fell asleep. All day long it had frolicked with the boisterous north wind, pretending to frown and turn black in the face when the cold shoulders of the gale bore down upon its surface, dimpling as the pressure left it and sparkling in brilliant glee as the low hung sun laughed across its ruffles. The wind went down with the sun, as north winds often do, and left a clear mirror stretching from shore to shore, and reflecting the cold yellow of the winter twilight.

As this chill twilight iced into the frozen purple of dusk, tremulous stars quivered into being out of the violet blackness of space. The nebular hypothesis is born again in the heavens each still winter night. It must have slipped thence into the mind of Kant as he stood in the growing dusk of some German December watching the violet-gray frost vapors of the frozen sky condense into the liquid radiance of early starlight, then tremble again into the crystalline glints of unknown suns whirling in majestic array through the full night along the myriad miles of interstellar space.

Standing on the water’s edge on such a night you realize that you are the very centre of a vast scintillating universe, for the stars shine with equal glory beneath your feet and above your head. The earth is forgotten. It has become transparent, and where before sunset gray sand lay beneath a half-inch of water at your toe-tips, you now gaze downward through infinite space to the nadir, the unchartered, unfathomable distance checked off every thousand million miles or so by unnamed constellations that blur into a milky way beneath your feet. The pond is very deep on still winter nights.

If you will take canoe and glide out into the centre the illusion is complete. There is no more earth nor do the waters under the earth remain; you float in the void of space with the Pleiades for your nearest neighbor and the pole star your only surety. In such situations only can you feel the full loom of the universe. The molecular theory is there stated with yourself as the one molecule at the centre of incomputability. It is a relief to shatter all this with a stroke of the paddle, shivering all the lower half of your incomputable universe into a quivering chaos, and as the shore looms black and uncertain in the bitter chill it is nevertheless good to see, for it is the homely earth coming back to you. You have had your last canoe trip of the year, but it has carried you far.

No wonder that on such a night the pond, falling asleep for the long winter, dreams. A little after midnight it stirred uneasily in its sleep and a faint quiver ran across its surface. A laggard puff of the north wind that, straggling, had itself fallen asleep in the pine wood and waked again, was now hastening to catch up. The surface water had been below the freezing point for some time and with the slight wakening the dreams began to write themselves all along as if the little puff of wind were a pencil that drew the unformulated thoughts in ice crystals. Water lying absolutely still will often do this. Its temperature may go some degrees below the freezing point and it will still be unchanged. Stir it faintly and the ice crystals grow across it at the touch.

Strange to tell, too, the pond’s dreams at first were not of the vast universe that lay hollowed out beneath the sky and was repeated to the eye in its clear depths. Its dreams were of earth and warmth, of vaporous days and humid nights when never a frost chill touched its surface the long year through, and the record the little wind wrote in the ice crystals was of the growth of fern frond and palm and prehistoric plant life that grew in tropic luxuriance in the days when the pond was young.

These first bold, free-hand sketches touched crystal to crystal and joined, embossing a strange network of arabesques, plants drawn faithfully, animals of the coal age sketched in and suggested only, while all among the figures great and small was the plaided level of open water. This solidified, dreamless, about and under the decorations, and the pond was frozen in from shore to shore. Thus I found it the next morning, level and black under one of those sunrises which seem to shatter the great crystal of the still atmosphere into prisms. The cold has been frozen out of the sky, and in its place remains some strange vivific principle which is like an essence of immortality.

I close my eyes and I can imagine myself in that canoe, adrift in the cosmic ocean. Are the stars below me merely reflections, or has the Earth vanished? A brief motion of my paddle in the water grounds me again. But was what I experienced all smoke and mirrors, or was I glimpsing an underlying cosmic reality?

In other places, throughout the book, Packard evokes giants and goblins. I am confident he does not seriously consider their existence; rather, I suspect that they are stand-ins for the wonder and magic we can find in nature. They represent missing pieces of the story, ones science has not revealed to us — and possibly never will. Consider this encounter with the sounds made by an iced-over lake in the dead of winter:

In the whirligig of our New England winter weather the soft rain and strong south wind passed. Then the wind blew strong from the northwest and fair skies and low temperature prevailed for some days, welding the erstwhile softened ice into an elastic surface as resonant as tempered steel. Then came a still warm day in which we had the same increase of temperature under springlike skies as on that previous day. Yet the pond never uttered a word—audible to my listening human ears. Here were the conditions like those of the other message period, yet not a word was said. Even the soft haze which presaged another south blow filled the sky, so apparently nothing was wanted but the voice at the other end of the line. It was along in the evening that I heard the first call, followed rapidly by a great uproar, so that people heard it in their houses half a mile or more away. Immediately I looked up the thermometer. The temperature had not changed a degree for hours. Yet here were the primal forces telephoning back and forth to one another and fairly making the welkin ring with their hubbub. Surely wires were crossed somewhere on the ether waves, or else the tempers of the primal forces themselves were out of sorts.

I seemed to hear familiar words in their roarings, admonitions to get farther away from the transmitter, requests for strangers to get off the line and other little courtesies that pass current in the telephone booth; and so for a half-hour they kept it up. It was all very ghostly and disquieting and savoring of the superhuman to listen to it in the night and wonder what it was all about. At last one or the other giant hung up the receiver with a tremendous bang, and nothing more was to be heard but the mutterings of the other, grumbling about it in notes low and tremendously deep.

Before morning the wind was blowing a wild gale from the south, rain was pouring in torrents and we were evidently on the outer edge of a winter hurricane that had been well up the coast, perhaps as far as Nantucket, when the pond began to talk about it. No; I do not think changes in temperature have much to do with it. My explanation for the scientist is that these noises begin with a drop in the atmospheric pressure, a region of low barometer moving up in advance of the storm. Taking the pressure quite suddenly off the ice would start all the air imprisoned in solution beneath it to pushing upward for a chance to get away. No wonder it groans and whoops with all that wind in its wame.

But privately I am not so sure. We have so many sure-thing theories, and so much definite knowledge to-day that to-morrow is all discredited and cast aside leaving us groping for another theory, that it is just as easy to believe myself eavesdropping at telephone talk between giants. That particular night it sounded to me like Hercules on his way up from Hades with Cerberus under his arm and a bit over-anxious lest the deities fail to have the dog pound ready for him on arrival in the upper regions—but of course that’s pagan myth.

“But of course that’s pagan myth.” But what does Packard really mean by this offhand remark? Is he asserting that the myth is nothing more than the silly imaginings of a bygone age, and ought to be discarded? Or is he instead with irony, echoing those around him while recognizing that the myths of the distant past offer other ways of seeing and describing the world around us? Certainly, Packard does not settle easily for the humdrum and quotidian. In one humorous section, he disparages a settler whose imagination extended no further than naming a small water body “Muddy Pond”:

The gravelly ridges of the woodland I tramped as I faced the golden sun again are singularly like waves of the sea. They roll here and rise to toppling pinnacles there and tumble about in a confusion that seems at once inextricable and as if it had in it some rude but unfathomed order. Surely as at sea every seventh wave is the highest; or is it the ninth, or the third? Just as at sea, the horizon is by no means a level line. Wave-strewn ridges shoulder up into it and now and then a peak lifts that is a cumulation of waves all rushing toward a common center through some obscure prompting of the surface pulsations. Sometimes at sea your ship rises on one of these aggregations of waves and you see yawning in front of it a veritable gulf; or the ship slips down into this gulf and the toppling pinnacle whelms it and the captain reports a tidal wave to the hydrographic office, if he is fortunate enough to reach it. So along my route southward the terminal and lateral moraines, drumlins, and kames rolled and toppled and leapt upward till they had swung me to a pinnacled ridge whence I looked down into a stanza from the Idylls of the King. Along a way like this once rode scornful and petulant Lynette, followed by great-hearted Gareth, newly knighted, on his first quest;

“Then, after one long slope was mounted, saw

Bowl-shaped, through tops of many thousand pines

A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink

To westward—in the deeps whereof a mere,

Round as the red eye of an eagle owl

Under the half-dead sunset glared;—”

That is the way Tennyson saw it, and the counterpart of the gulf, out of which looked the round-eyed mere, lay at my feet. Long years ago some first settler, lacking certainly Tennyson’s outlook, stupidly cognizant only of the worst that his prodding pole could stir up, named the wee gem of a lake “Muddy Pond.” Here surely was another man with eyes and no eyes. Round the margin’s lip, summer and winter, rolls the bronze green sphagnum, its delicate tips simulating shaggy forest growth of hoary pine and fir. Nestling in its gray-gold heart are the delicate pink wonder-orchids of late May, the callopogon and arethusa. Here the pitcher plant holds its purple-veined cups to the summer rain and traps the insects that slide down its velvety lip and may not climb again against this same velvet, become suddenly a spiny chevaux-de-frise. All about are set the wickets of the bog-hobble, the Nesæa verticillata, which in July will blossom into pink-purple flags—decorations, I dare say, of wood-goblins who play at cricket here on the soft turf of a midsummer-night’s tournament.

Of a summer day this tiny bowl is a mile-deep sapphire, holding the sky in its heart. When thunder clouds hang threatening over it, it is a black pearl with evanescent gleams of silver playing in its calm depths; and always the dense green of the swamp cedars that rim its golden bog-edge round are a setting of Alexandrite stone such as they mine in the heart of the Ceylon mountains, decked with lighter pencilings of chrysoprase and beryl. And some man, looking upon all this, saw only the mud beneath it! Probably he trotted the bog and only knew the wickets of the Nesæa verticillata were there because they tripped him. And I’ll warrant the goblins, sitting cross-legged in the deepest shadows of the cedars, waiting for midnight and their game, mocked him with elfin laughter—and all he heard was frogs.

For Packard, nature beckons us to engage with it through not only our physical senses but also our active imagination. He taps into myths and folktales to evoke landscapes in one chapter; in another, on a winter walk, he imagines himself made invisible by the snow; unseen, he observes the comical strutting of a ruffed grouse:

In woodland pathways where the trees were large enough on either side so that they did not bend beneath the snow and obstruct, all passage was noiseless; amongst shrubs and slender saplings it was almost impossible. The bent withes hobbled you, caught you breast high and hurled you back with elastic but unyielding force, throttled you and drowned you in avalanches of smothering white. To attempt to penetrate the thicket was like plunging into soft drifts where in the blinding white twilight you found yourself inexplicably held back by steel-like but invisible bonds, drifts where you felt the shivery touch of the cold fingers of winter magic changing you into a veritable snow man, and as such you emerged. It was more than baptism, it was total immersion, you were initiated into the order of the white woods and not even your heel was vulnerable…

Thus panoplied in white magic, my snowshoes making no sound on the fluffy floor of woodland paths, I felt that I might stalk invisible and unheeded in the wilderness world. The fern-seed of frost fronds had fallen upon my head in fairy grottos built by magic in a night. These had not been there before, they would not be there to-morrow. To-morrow, too, the magic might be gone, but for to-day I was to feel the chill joy of it.

A ruffed grouse was the first woodland creature not to see me. I stalked around a white corner almost upon him and stood poised while he continued to weave his starry necklaces of footprints in festoons about the butts of scrubby oaks and wild-cherry shrubs. He too was barred from the denser tangle which he might wish to penetrate. He did not seem to be seeking food. Seemingly there was nothing under the scrub oaks that he could get. It was more as if, having breakfasted well, he now walked in meditation for a little, before starting in on the serious business of the day. He too was wearing his snowshoes, and they held him up in the soft snow fully as well as mine supported me. His feet that had been bare in autumn now had grown quills which helped support his weight but did not take away from the clean-cut, star-shaped impression of the toes. Rather they made lesser points between these four greater ones and added to the star-like appearance of the tracks.

I knew him for a male bird by the broad tufts of glossy black feathers with which his neck was adorned. It was the first week in February, but then Saint Valentine’s day comes on the fourteenth, and on this day, as all folklore—which right or wrong we must perforce believe—informs us, the birds choose their mates. My cock partridge must have been planning a love sonnet, weaving rhymes as he wove his trail in rhythmic curves that coquetted with one another as rhymes do. His head nodded the rhythm as his feet fell in the proper places. Now and then he bent forward in his walk as one does in deep meditation. If he had hands they would have been clasped behind his back when in this attitude, as his wings were. Again he lifted his head high, fluffed out those glossy black neck feathers and strutted. Here surely was a fine phrase that would reach the waiting heart of that mottled brown hen that was now quietly keeping by herself in some secluded corner of the wood. The thought threw out his chest, and those tail feathers that had folded slimly as he walked in pensive meditation spread and cocked fan-shaped. I half expected him to open his strong, pointed bill and gobble as a turkey does under similar circumstances. The demure placing of star after star in that necklace trail was broken by a little fantastic pas seul, from which he dropped suddenly on both feet, vaulted into the air, and whirred away down arcades of snowy whiteness and vanished. I don’t think he saw me. He was rushing to find the lady and recite that poem to her before he forgot it.

I could continue with even more passages from this small book. It has rekindled my desire to produce an anthology of these lesser-known nature writers. Certainly, my enthusiasm for reading additional works by Packard has been renewed by my encounter with his evocations of a Massachusetts winter — despite all that I have already read by so many others in a similar vein.

My copy of this volume bears a signature on the front endpaper: M.E. Webber, February 11, 1925. Unfortunately, without a first name or location, who this was will remain a mystery. All pages were free, so I can at least assume that he (or she) read the book before me.

Sitting at the Feet of Nature: “Prose Pastorals” by Herbert Milton Sylvester (1887)

 book review, Environmental conservation, Insects, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Jul 022022
 
The Emerald Pool by Albert Bierstadt (1870)

A half-hour’s climb ends at the well-worn path that follows the steep descent to the edge of Emerald Pool, made famous by its portrait by Bierstadt… At first glance at the liquid emerald below, one’s inclination is to sit down upon the rude plank seat upheld between two huge spruces growing just above the Pool, so restful and so full of repose is this charming nook. It is a place above all others in which to dream and drowse. Strange fancies flit through the brain, and the world is forgotten. I am sitting at the feet of Nature, spellbound by the magic of her subtle influences. Above is the dark silhouette of the treetops against the sky, and below is a circular sheet of water, less than a hundred feet in diameter, unsurpassed in its natural beauty by any woodland pool I have ever seen, and so translucent as to reflect the minutest object above it. It is an emerald cup brimful of liquid amber. At its head, massive buttresses of granite stretch almost across the stream, to stay the torrent of the Peabody but a moment, that with tumultuous roar pushes through the narrow flume of these rocks out into the basin of deep, calm water, leaving a track white as the snow of winter. A few feet below the commotion of the cascade, the boiling, seething current is soon lost in faint and ever-widening ripples, tinged with every shade of green from dark to light, — to almost the paleness of sherry as they reach out toward the shallows at its lower edge, where they again escape in wild, broken leaps over the mountain roadway, paved with immense boulders, into the valley. An old gnarled wide-limbed canoe birch, dirty-white, spotted with blotches of sienna and umber, leans far out over the Pool, every limb and tiny twig of which is reproduced in reverse upon or within its polished surface, while around its ragged margin the tall shapely spruces keep stately watch over this jewel of the mountain, most beautiful when the sun pours down its strong vertical light, when the waters become transparent like crystal, and that are like a huge palette strown with rare colors of sky and wood.

Herbert Milton Sylvester (1849-1923) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, where his father held a management position of some kind in a cotton mill. When Sylvester was 10, his father related to a farm in Maine for his health. Sylvester spent the rest of his childhood there and at Bridgton Academy, a boarding school in rural Maine. After college (location unknown), he went into legal practice, serving in Portland for 13 years before relocating to Boston. While living there, he wrote Prose Pastorals (1887) and Homestead Highways (1888). True to its title, Prose Pastorals is a series of poetic vignettes, mostly reminiscences of Sylvester’s rural childhood in Maine. While not strictly nature writing (farm life figures prominently in some passages), the presence of Nature is woven throughout and is never far from the farmhouse door. “All out-of-door life is filled with poetry and charm,” he announces at one point early in the book. While he finds abundant nature in the farm fields, “It is in the woods,” he observes, “that I find the most perfect repose in nature.”

As a writer, he is perhaps a shade or two shy of profound, and some of his word images, in the style of the times, can be a bit flowery. His poetry, which infuses the book, is solid if some of the rhymes are a tad forced. It is easy to take him as a wealthy city dweller longing for the peace and quiet of his long-lost country life, and that sentiment is present here. Another theme running through the work is his spirituality, heavily influenced by Emerson’s concept of the Over-soul, the transcendent unity of nature of which we are all part. “The lover of Nature,” Sylvester declares,

must, of a truth, be a worshipper at God’s altars. Touch a single key of the piano, and the harp which stands beside will respond with perfect sympathy, but only that string of the harp which accords with that note of the piano will answer with its vibration. Men who are in sympathy with the great Tone constantly sounding throughout Nature will find their hearts unconsciously thrilled with a willing unison of purpose and desire, unconsciously answering its subtle harmonies, unconsciously obedient to the Infinite Hand which has so wonderfully laid the foundations of the grand cathedrals of the woods and mountains. The woods are filled with hosts of unseen worshippers, the mountains with countless altars whose smokes of incense are the white morning mists which lie so lightly along the tree-tops, hiding the battlements of gray, turretted stone and filling the skies with fleecy clouds. The leaping waters that jar the firmly-set rocks the feet of the ever-rising domes, with their tummult and deep reverberations, make the heavy diapson to which all other sounds are attuned. Nature’s grand melodies are ever pitched upon the same key-note. Nature knows no discord. From ocean depth and roar of breaking surf to the light treble of the shallows of the mountain brooklet the harmony is sustained and its rendering is faultless. God sounds the key-note in many a subtle touch of color, tone, and form, animate and inanimate, and wherever he finds a responsive heart there he finds a willing worshipper.

What rescues Sylvester, in my eyes, at least, is that there is another thread running through many of these pastoral pieces. He does not merely celebrate grand vistas and dramatic weather. He also bends down to the ground to explore the myriad invertebrates lurking in the forest leaf litter. He describes ant behaviors from close observations, and frequently mentions (and quotes) John Burroughs. Even Charles Darwin is mentioned a couple of times. He may find “poetry and charm” in nature, but what he notices also piques his curiosity and wonder:

Bird-life and insect-life are full of interest and fascination, and they tell charming stories of intellect and intelligence; and their movements are full of constant surprises, even to those who know them best. The big-bodied humblebee of the fields and meadows, his coat slashed with gold and black velvet, with pollen-covered wings, probing the pink-hewed tubes of the field-clover for their nectar, while the wind sways both bee and clover blossom to and fro like a child in a swing; the ant-carpenter sawing away diligently at a twig or leaf, making lumber for the building and finishing of his house; the gray field-spider setting his filmy trap for a dinner or a breakfast, or else dragging his prey into his funnel-shaped den to sup upon at his leisure, are all abundant in attractions, and are but two or three of the hosts of magicians who make the study of Nature so charming.

Humbled by the complexity of Nature, Sylvester embraces its study as a lifelong endeavor: “How much there is to see in these tramping-grounds of Nature, and how much there is to learn! The ground is written over in all directions with intelligible signs for men’s deciphering.” The passage quoted here, unfortunately, goes on to identify some of those who might seek to decipher these signs: the bee-hunter, the sportsman, the fox-hunter. Indeed, Sylvester admits to a bit of hunting and fishing; after extolling the magnificence of Emerald Pool, he casts a line into the waters and immediately catches a trout. He also shares his approval of crow-hunting, confessing that he finds no redeeming qualities in crows. But while Sylvester may have been too conventional in his leanings to bemoan disappearing birds or logged forests in his writings, he also appears to have avoided the naturalist’s worst vices of the day — shooting birds as specimens and collecting their eggs and nests. I would like to think that he may have felt some faint conservationist leanings, even if they never seem to arise in this book.

In this closing paragraph, I will share a few reflections on my reading experience. This is the third book I have read in a row (not counting the booklet by Minot) that had uncut pages in it, despite its age. In the other two volumes, I did not come across an uncut page until quite a distance into the work. In this case, though, I made it only 13 pages before the first one. According to a hastily scrawled note inside the front cover, the book was a gift from HRP to LS in July of 1887. Apparently, HRP was not a good judge of the reading material LS preferred. That said, reading the book was a tactile delight. The pages are gilt at the top, deckled at the edge, and constituted of high-quality, laid paper. The volume is covered in plain, dark blue cloth that has a pleasant softness in the hand. My copy is in remarkable condition; I was honored to be its first reader, only 135 years after it was originally published.

Jesus Was a Pantheist: “Walks in New England” by Charles Goodrich Whiting (1903)

 book review, Books, Day Hikes, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Jun 262022
 

If you happen to search this book by the title on Amazon or any purveyor of used and/or new books, you are likely to encounter quite a few hiking guides to New England. This is not one of them. The author, Charles Goodrich Whiting (1842-1922), lived and worked in the Springfield, Massachusetts area, and clearly spent many hours out-of-doors. Yet while he writes fondly of the natural landscape (particularly its botanical elements), he does not report on any actual walks he has taken. The frontispiece photo shows him taking a break on a hike up Mount Tom; a brief statement about the photographs (in stunning sepia) mentions “constant companions” that I assume accompanied his hikes; but only once does he report on an actual walk. Even then, all we know is that he and several others climbed the south side of Mount Tom one autumn, walking along the ridge and finding 56 wildflower species in bloom (the first BioBlitz?). Otherwise, there is an endless cavalcade of brief essays (few more than four pages) describing seasonal offerings, mostly plants in bloom at a given time. Blended into the volume are many poems, some enchanting (works of Emerson, Whitman, and Longfellow) and others less so (his own). The third ingredient of this book is a pious Christianity that sees the natural world through a highly positive, somewhat transcendental lens. If not obsessed with the question of death, Whiting certainly brings it up frequently, reminding the reader (and himself) over and over that it does not exist. The essays themselves are arranged in an arc of the seasons, from late winter back through to midwinter. Whiting was an editor for the Springfield Republican newspaper, and author of a Sunday column, “The Saunterer.” The essays in Walks in New England were likely compiled from several years’ worth of his columns. As a result, there is a fair bit of repetition; the same wildflower appears in bloom across multiple essays. One essay may speak of particular weather conditions, but the next essay might be from another year altogether. As a work of phenology, it could have been improved, at the minimum, by an indication of the original publication dates of each piece.

Did I mention that my copy of this book, once in the library of C. J. Peacock, had many uncut pages in it? Apparently, I am the first one to have read it from cover to cover in nearly 120 years.

Now that I have thoroughly disparaged the book, I will argue that it is one that bears closer scrutiny: his Christianity would hardly be called conventional, for one. And for another, his outlook on human civilization and its environmental impacts seems far more ecologically aware than I would have suspected in 1903.

“Jesus was a pantheist…he knew no space where God was not,” Whiting declared. And while the gnostic, pantheistic Jesus is recognized in some circles today, it was certainly not the conventional perspective on his nature at the time Whiting lived. There are glimmers of this Jesus in the four gospels of the New Testament; but mostly this is the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian scripture excluded from the New Testament as apocryphal. The 77th verse from that gospel reads, “Jesus said, ‘I am the light that shines upon all things. Indeed, I am all things. Everything comes from me, and everything returns to me. Whenever you split a log or turn over a stone, you can find me there.'” But Whiting’s spirituality does not stop there. Consider these passages from his book:

Let us open our eyes, our ears, our hearts to the great current of life, of which we are but a part, — how small a part or how great we cannot yet imagine…

The universe, from least atom to greatest concourse of atoms, from the simplest sensitiveness to the furthest reaches of man’s soul, is all one living being, of which man no less surely and no more truly than the amoeba is the expression…

All life is one; we are one with tree and shrub and flower, one with squirrel and bird, one even with the sinuous serpent…

On a mountain top dwells the vast Oversoul, and man accepts his place, and is silent…

Although Whiting cannot help but single out a serpent, this one is beneficent, a vital part of creation in which “everything in Nature has its value.” But alas, like Eden, this garden universe in which we exist as part of all that is also has a serpent in the darker sense. Where that evil arises, how harm can come from a part of all that is (a fragment of God?) is unaddressed. But it is there, and it is us. After another lovely passage about the beauty of Nature, Whiting interjects, “So goes on the life of earth, only interfered with by man, who does his worst to ruin and obliterate this constant impulse of life.” A few pages later, in a different essay, Whiting again disrupts a peaceful forest landscape to add social commentary: “…and as one drinks of the cold spring beneath the hemlocks, he partakes of the greatest blessing of Nature, the pure essence of her life, distilled through clouds and suns, and filtered through the channel of the holy earth, where as yet man has not arrived to delete and pollute with his many inventions.” Finally, here is one more passage of condemnation, with the added thought that what we do to nature we do ultimately to ourselves: “As for man, only he introduces a breach in the order of being, and destroys tree and flower and bird without respect to their offices, despoiling himself the worst of all.”

At various points, Whiting identifies several ways that humans have adversely impacted nature. One is deforestation; there are repeated references to “the woodsman’s axe”, and Whiting notes that almost all trees in the region are no older than 30 years. Another is air pollution, “the soft coal smoke that hangs over the valley,” an inevitable by-product of industrialization, and entirely unregulated at the time. The steam railroads, meanwhile, were sparking many fires along their routes. Yet another destructive force is the hunter:

Now all the forest regions would be full of squirrels, rabbits, foxes and others of their kin, — of grouse and woodcock, too, — were it not for the hunters, who almost outnumber the game. The woodland on our western hills abounded in these charming creatures, 40 years ago, but now there are probably more gray squirrels in Springfield streets than there are on Mount Tom or Mount Holyoke. It is probable that city protection may yet be the only means to preserve them.

But the worst of the hunters were those going after birds, mostly for the millinery trade. The result had been not only the decimation of many bird species but an ecological impact too, as Whiting explains:

In the state of Nature all these [insects] are kept in subjection by the birds, but since of late years the birds have been slaughered by wholesale to make women’s hats hideous, the balance is lost, and hence we have plagues of elm beetles, cottony louses, and gypsy and brown-tailed moths. Thousands of varieties of insects have found their proper food on trees from time immemorial, and might continue to do so without reminding us of the Plagues of Egypt, were it not for the women who want birds and feathers of birds on their hats… Why do they proclaim themselves murderers?

Dutch Elm Disease, spread by the elm beetle, arrived in the United States. Could it be that the depredation of birds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries helped enable this beetle to spread the blight more rapidly than otherwise would have been the case? Beyond this intriguing prospect, I have to admit that I am quite impressed by Whiting’s grasp of how food chains work, way back in 1903.

Finally, Whiting also appears to have decried in humanity what we would refer to today as a limited grasp of sustainability.

What has man been given reason for? Apparently, to make a dollar to-day. forgeting that generations are to come after him to whom this dollar will be valueless because long since expended, and whom his destruction of the very sources of life has left us poor indeed…

What the earth is to render, what society is to become, when we are gone, — these things are not sufficiently regarded by the present generation.

Wow. That sounds frightfully like our present situation. It is quite depressing, really. Whiting felt the same way. After a few pages indicting humanity for these crimes against Nature, he announces, “Let us try to escape from these difficult and dispiriting thoughts,” and returns to his descriptions of field and forest scenes. As T.S. Eliot would later observe in Burnt Norton, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Finally, about C.J. Peacock (not to be confused with J. Alfred Prufrock, also from T.S. Eliot): it turns out that another book from his collection ended up in the holdings of the University of Prince Edward Island, which happens to have established a program called Book Lives. It traces, wherever possible, the life stories of those who originally owned the books. In this case, C.J. Peacock was born in 1834 in Yorkshire, England. He apprenticed to become a draper (a very different “man of the cloth”) but ended up working as a dentist in Scarborough, England. He retired in 1911, but it is not known when he died or how his book made its journey back across the Atlantic Ocean.

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