The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau

by Henry David Thoreau

  226 tithing-men: in early New England, town officers elected to police the general morals.

  227 ulmarium: a plantation or nursery of elms.

  227 blasted: dried or blighted. “Pig-corn” is corn grown for animal feed; “cob-meal” is made from corncobs ground down.

  228 Lycopodium lucidulum: a species of club moss.

  228 Aaron’s rod: a magic staff. In the Bible, Aaron’s rod variously turns into a serpent (Exodus 7:10), turns the waters of Egypt to blood (Exodus 7:14-24), and sprouts buds, blossoms, and ripe almonds (Numbers 17:8).

  228 Assabet: river just north of Concord that joins with the Sudbury River to form the Concord River.

  229 knee: in shipbuilding, a piece of timber with an angular bend, used to secure the beams of a ship to its sides.

  229 Charon: in Greek mythology the ferryman who carries the shades of the dead over the river Styx. “Charon’s boat” is also the name of a boat-shaped leaf (cymbifolius ).

  229 coppers: boilers or kettles.

  230 discounting: One dictionary Thoreau used, John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1823), defines “to discount” as “to count, to pay back again.”

  230 sulphur: It is not clear why one might haggle over “sulphur.” Farmers in Thoreau’s day carted muck from swamps and low meadows to improve their upland soils. Perhaps a smell of sulfur was a sign of good muck. Or perhaps this is a reference to the fact that farmers spread gypsum, calcium sulfate, as a fertilizer, gypsum being widely used as ballast in ships.

  230 weeds: widows’ weeds, or mourning clothes.

  231 Mount Auburn: The 1830s saw the beginnings of the “rural cemetery movement,” the planting of “gardens for the dead.” Mount Auburn, the first important landscaped cemetery, was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1831. Greenwood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, New York, soon followed.

  231 huckleberry-bird: the field or rush sparrow. Thoreau called it Fringilla juncorum , following Thomas Nuttall; the current scientific name is Spizella pusilla.

  232 make some odds: make a difference.

  232 paper-stainers: makers of wallpaper.

  232 Naples yellow … Tyrian purple: prepared pigments, Naples yellow being a light yellow based on antimoniate lead, Prussian blue a royal blue based on ferrocyanide of iron, raw Sienna a yellow-brown ocherous earth from Italy, burnt Umber a red-brown ocherous earth from Umbria, Gamboge a transparent yellow derived from plant resin, and Tyrian purple a crimson derived from the juices of various shellfish. This last supposedly came from the Mediterranean city of Tyre and was the most celebrated purple dye of the ancient world.

  233 cabinet-keepers: keepers of cabinets of curiosities. See the note for page 211 of “Life without Principle.”

  233 Nabobs, Begums, and Chobdars: In India, a nabob was a provincial governor under the Mogul Empire and, figuratively, someone fond of luxury; begums were princesses or ranking ladies; chobdars were a superior class of footmen.

  233 costs no powder: no gunpowder; that is, for firing ceremonial guns.

  233 liberty-pole: a flagstaff set up in honor of liberty, usually topped with a liberty cap.

  233 cornwallis: a muster of soldiers in masquerade commemorating the end of the Revolutionary War, the British general Charles Cornwallis having surrendered on October 19, 1781.

  234 shaking of props: a reference to a gambling game popular in Boston in the 1850s. Props was a kind of dice game using small white seashells that were shaken in the hand and then thrown on a table.

  234 fluviatile egg-pop: fluvial eggnog.

  234 ivy never sere: allusion to Milton, “Lycidas,” line 2.

  234 C——: Concord (in Thoreau’s journal draft of the passage, October 18. 1858). It was The Atlantic Monthly’s editorial policy to employ this anonymous form for all proper nouns used, as here, in an unflattering context.

  235 spiritual communication: Crackings or knockings were believed to signify the presence of a spirit. In a letter to his sister Sophia on July 13, 1852, Thoreau refers to “idiots inspired by the cracking of a restless board, humbly asking, ‘Please, Spirit, if you cannot answer by knocks, answer by tips of the table” !!!!!!”

  235 “Wrought in a sad sincerity”: from Emerson’s poem “The Problem.” Thoreau has changed the italicized words. The original refers to the architects of Christian churches and reads: “They builded better than they knew;– – / The conscious stone to beauty grew.”

  235 twelve species: Thoreau owned Asa Gray’s Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States (Boston: J. Munroe, 1848), which lists eighteen species of oak. The twelve local species Thoreau had likely seen are the scrub oak (Quercus ilicifolia), the black oak (velutina, then called tinctoria), the chestnut oak (prinus), the dwarf chinquapin oak (prinoides), the scarlet oak (coccinea), the shingle oak (imbricaria ), the mossy-cup or bur oak (macrocarpa), the pin oak (palustris), the red oak (rubra), the swamp white oak (bicolor, then called prinus discolor), the white oak (alba), and the willow oak (phellos).

  236 arrow-headed character: cuneiform script such as that used in ancient Sumerian, Assyrian, and Persian writing.

  236 Rosetta Stone: the famous tablet bearing inscriptions in Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphic, and demotic scripts. It provided the key to deciphering hieroglyphics.

  236 embayed: a poetic way of saying “bathed” or “steeped.” Thoreau seems to intend a pun as well: the eye is bathed, but also held as if in a bay.

  237 friths: firths, long narrow inlets of the sea.

  237 Dionysius: Thoreau’s journal entry for July 29, 1857, includes this: “Loudon in his ‘Arboretum,’ vol. iv, page 2038, says, ‘Dionysius the geographer compares the form of the Morea in the Levant, the ancient Peloponnesus, to the leaf of this tree [the Oriental plane]; and Pliny makes the same remark in allusion to its numerous bays.” Dionysius is probably Dionysius Periegetes (fourth century A.D.), the author of a geographical poem, Oikumenes Periegesis.

  237 Pliny: Pliny the Elder (23-79), a celebrated Roman naturalist.

  237 Morea: the Peloponnesus, the peninsula forming the southern portion of Greece.

  237 Oriental plane tree: Platanus orientalis; the related American species is the sycamore or buttonwood, P. occidentatis.

  237 filibusters: adventurers who engage in a private military action in a foreign country. In Thoreau’s day the famous examples were Narciso López, who led an expedition against Cuba (1850-1851), and William Walker, who led expeditions against the Mexican state of Sonora (1853-1854) and against Nicaragua (1855-1858).

  237 New-found Island: probably meant generically, though the Canadian province of Newfoundland contains many islands.

  237 Celebes: an island of central Indonesia, first visited by Europeans in 1512.

  238 cliff: Lee’s cliff, about a mile and a half southwest of Walden Pond. Pine Hill straddles the Concord-Lincoln town line, two miles from Lee’s cliff.

  239 Methuselah: the biblical patriarch, said to have lived 969 years.

  239 China-aster: Callistephus chinensis.

  239 Isle of Orleans: an island near Quebec, Canada, in the St. Lawrence River.

  240 Hudson’s Bay: an inland sea of east-central Canada.

  241 Juncaceae and Gramineae: at the time, the family names of the rushes and the grasses, respectively.

  241 Brocken spectre: ghostly reflection. Specifically, an optical phenomenon named from the Brocken, a mountain of the Harz range in Germany, where it had been frequently observed. It consists of the shadow of the observer cast at sunrise or sunset in apparently gigantic size upon the mist or fog around the mountain summit.

  241 Swedenborg: Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Swedish scientist and mystical theologian (and one of the figures in Emerson’s Representative Men).

  241 meadow-hen: the Virginia rail, Rallus limicola.

  242 have the refusal: may choose to accept or refuse.

  THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES

  Thoreau’s journals show that he began to focus on the prob
lem of seed dispersal early in 1856. His observations culminated in this, his most scientific work, initially delivered as a lecture on September 20, 1860. It was first printed in the New-York Weekly Tribune, October 6, 1860, and soon thereafter in the Transactions of the Middlesex Agricultural Society for 1860.

  A major event in the previous year had been the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a copy of which arrived in Concord on January 1, 1860. The book sharpened the debate between those who believed in “special creation” (new species being placed in the world by God) and those who believed in the “developmental principle” or “descent with modification.” Thoreau found the latter argument more persuasive, as this essay shows. As Robert D. Richardson, Jr., writes, in his intellectual biography of Thoreau, “Darwin’s concluding chapter repeats his conviction … that ‘we are as yet profoundly ignorant of the many occasional means of transport’ of species from one place to another. The dispersion of seeds, then, was a topic that needed attention … . The more Thoreau could show about plants springing from other plants via seeds transported from one place to another, the less tenable the theory of special creation becomes.”

  245 Cattle-Show: the county fair or, more formally, the Exhibition of the Middlesex Agricultural Society. In 1860 the event included plowing matches with teams of horses and exhibitions of horses, fowl, swine, carts and wagons, boots and shoes, fruit, vegetables, butter, and needlework.

  245 cabinet: that is, cabinet of curiosities for the display of rare and odd items.

  247 Patent Office: At the time the U.S. Patent Office distributed packets of seed by mail (the squash seeds, for example, that Thoreau speaks of at the end of the essay).

  248 pericarp: the wall of a ripened seed or fruit.

  249 pignuts: seeds of the broom hickory, Carya glabra.

  251 Loudon: John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843), Scottish landscape gardener and horticulturalist. In July 1857 Thoreau’s journals begin referring to Loudon’s encyclopedic work Arboretum et fruticetum Britannicum; or, The Trees and Shrubs of Britain, 2nd ed., 8 vols. (London: J. C. Loudon, 1844). The citations he gives here are from volume 3 of that work.

  252 chickaree: popular name of the American red squirrel, Tamiasciurus hudsonicus.

  252 Mus leucopus: now Peromyscus leucopus, the white-footed mouse.

  253 “when the nut”: from volume 3 of Loudon’s Arboretum et fruticetum.

  253 rot-heap: compost pile.

  253 Kane: Elisha Kent Kane (1820-1857), American physician and Arctic explorer. In February 1854 Thoreau had read Kane’s book The U.S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: A Personal Narrative (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853).

  254 Dukes of Athol: James, duke of Atholl, and his son John had estates at Dunkeld and Atholl in northern Scotland. They planted first thousands and then millions of larch trees on rocky ground. Thoreau knew of them from several sources, primarily Loudon’s Arboretum et fruticetum, but also George Emerson’s A Report on the Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of Massachusetts (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1846) and John S. Springer’s Forest Life and Forest Trees: Comprising Winter Camp-Life among the Loggers, and Wild Wood Adventure; with Descriptions of Lumbering Operations on the Various Rivers of Maine and New Brunswick (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851).

  254 Tamias: The Greek root, ταµεα, means housekeeper or housewife, and related words mean steward or storeroom.

  254 Bartram: William Bartram (1739-1823), American naturalist who wrote Travels through North and South Carolina (1791).

  254 Wilson: Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), American ornithologist. Thoreau cites Bartram’s remarks on the jay from Wilson’s American Ornithology (Philadelphia: Bradford & Inskeep, 1808), vol. 1, pp. 16-17.

  255 “nuciferous”: bearing or producing nuts.

  255 “very few acorns”: from volume 3 of Loudon’s Arboretum et fruticetum.

  255 beech mast: beechnuts used as animal food.

  255 “acorns that have lain”: The source for this citation is not known.

  255 Emerson: George B. Emerson (1797-1881), educator and naturalist. Thoreau cites from Emerson’s Report on the Trees and Shrubs, p. 54.

  255 ancient Egyptian: Both this and the story of the raspberry seeds come from William Carpenter, Vegetable Physiology and Botany (London: Wm. S. Orr and Co., 1854), p. 291.

  256 Carpenter: William Carpenter (1813-1885). See the note for page 218 of “Autumnal Tints.” The source is Carpenter’s Vegetable Physiology, p. 290.

  256 Jackson: Charles T. Jackson (1805-1880) wrote a series of annual reports on the geology of Maine. Thoreau’s source here is Jackson’s Third Report (1839). See the note for page 64 of “Ktaadn.”

  256 Urtica urens: the small stinging nettle, a European plant. Thoreau’s account of finding these plants is in his journal for the mentioned date, September 22, 1857.

  256 Chenopodium Botrys: a species of goosefoot or pigweed, commonly called both Jerusalem oak and feather geranium. It is a garden plant brought from Europe.

  256 Solanum nigrum: also called common nightshade. It is an import from Europe.

  257 Linnæus: See the note for page 6 of “Natural History of Massachusetts.”

  258 Blitz: Signor Blitz (1810-1877), a professional magician, was an accomplished ventriloquist, juggler, and bird handler.

  A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN

  On October 16, 1859, John Brown and twenty-one men attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Brown seems to have hoped to incite a slave insurrection and start a guerrilla war against the South.

  News of the raid reached Concord on October 19. Brown was well known in town, having visited early in 1857 and again in May 1859, lecturing both times about the Free-Soil fight against slavery in the Kansas Territory (see Section IV of the Introduction).

  Thoreau delivered this plea at the Concord Town Hall on October 30. Many of his neighbors thought it a bad idea for Thoreau to speak, but he insisted. Walter Harding, in his biography of Thoreau, writes: “Since he was a citizen of Concord, the selectmen could not deny him the use of the Town Hall, but they did refuse to ting the town bell to announce the meeting, so Thoreau rang it himself. The hall was filled … . Edward Emerson thought Thoreau read his paper ‘as if it burned him’ and noted that ‘many of those who came to scoff remained to pray.’”

  The speech was published the next year in James Redpath’s anthology Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860).

  261 fain: happily; gladly.

  261 his grandfather: Brown’s paternal grandfather joined the Continental army but was probably not “an officer,” as he died of dysentery a few weeks after enlisting.

  261 born: in West Torrington, Connecticut, May 9, 1800.

  261 to Ohio: In 1805 the Browns moved to Hudson, Ohio, southwest of Cleveland.

  262 troubles in Kansas: A civil war had broken out in Kansas over the question of whether the territory would be Free-Soil or slaveholding. See the note for “destiny of Nebraska,” page 181 of “Slavery in Massachusetts,” and see Section IV of the Introduction.

  262 Kansas was made free: Thoreau’s past tense may refer to the fact that the Free State party had gained control of Kansas in the election of October 1857; Kansas did not actually enact a constitution prohibiting slavery until it entered the Union in January 1861.

  262 Germany: Brown traveled to Europe in 1849 in hopes of selling wool in England; the trip included a visit to Hamburg.

  262 Ethan Allen and Stark: heroes of the American Revolution. In what is now Vermont, Allen (1738-1789) organized a volunteer militia, the Green Mountain Boys, who helped capture Fort Ticonderoga from the British (1775). General John Stark (1728-1822) defeated the British at Bennington, Vermont (1777).

  263 “rural exterior”: from an article in the Chicago Press and Tribune as reprinted in the New-York Daily Tribune, October 24, 1859.

  263 Cromwell: Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), who
ruled England (1653-1658) after the Puritan Revolution.

  263 parched corn in remembrance: An apocryphal story had it that during the summer of 1623 the Pilgrims had so little corn that they were forced to ration five kernels per person per day until the harvest. It had become the custom in Thoreau’s time for a Forefathers’ Day dinner to include five symbolic parched corn kernels on each plate in remembrance of the colonists’ privations and perseverance.

  263 “In his camp”: Thoreau’s source is James Redpath, who met Brown in Kansas shortly after the Pottawatomie massacre. Redpath, a journalist and would-be hagiographer, published his memoir of the meeting in the Boston Atlas and Daily Bee on the Monday before Thoreau’s speech. The sketch later appeared in his 1860 book Public Life of Capt. John Brown.

  263 “Buford ruffians’”: In the spring of 1856 a battalion of about four hundred armed Southerners, led by Jefferson Buford, entered the Kansas Territory prepared to fight the Free State settlers. Their banners read THE SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE and ALABAMA FOR KANSAS—NORTH OF 36°30’.

  264 Cromwellian troop: Of his troops during the Puritan Revolution Cromwell said, “We can only resist the superior training of the King’s soldiers, by enlisting godly men.”

  264 Border Ruffians: pro-slavery settlers in the Kansas Territory, active along the Missouri-Kansas border.

  264 talking to Buncombe: giving an empty or insincere speech. Buncombe is a county in North Carolina whose congressman in the 1820s had supposedly said that he was obligated to give a dull speech “for Buncombe.”

  264 run an imaginary line: This event supposedly happened in the spring of 1856 near Pottawatomie, Kansas, Brown and his son Salmon having disguised themselves as government surveyors to spy on a company of Georgians.

  265 price set upon his head: After Brown had led a raid into Missouri in December 1858, President James Buchanan offered a reward of $250 for his capture; the state of Missouri offered $3,000. Brown and Thoreau would have had this exchange the following spring, when Brown was in Concord and stayed in the Thoreau household.

  265 Vallandigham: Representative Clement L. Vallandigham (1820-1871), a conservative Democrat from Ohio. He arrived in Harpers Ferry the day after Brown was captured and participated in the interrogation, suspecting a conspiracy involving men from Ohio. The remarks Thoreau cites are from a letter to the editor of an Ohio newspaper Vallandigham wrote, October 22, 1859, describing his time in Harpers Ferry.