By: David Spooner

CHAPTER 1

AT THE CROSSROADS OF NATURAL HISTORY

(i)

Just as Henry David Thoreau was starting out as a naturalist and published writer with his "Natural History of Massachusetts" in 1842, Charles Darwin was sketching some preliminary manuscript essays. Indeed even earlier in spring 1837, Darwin had been formulating ideas on geographic speciation and evolution by common descent. So when as early as December 1837 Thoreau remarked "How indispensable to a correct study of nature is a perception of her true meaning—The fact will one day flower out into a truth" (PJ1:19), he was more prescient than he imagined. While Thoreau looked for nature's "true meaning" to emerge organically from his living laboratory in the fields around Concord, Darwin was formulating a theory based upon his fact-collecting voyages that could explain the processes of evolutionary change. Even as outdoor research was reaching its apogee with Darwin's and Wallace's work, science was beginning to shift, so that by mid-century the focus was moving from botany and geology to physics and chemistry. And natural history was breaking up to become biology and zoology so that the individual was already acquiring the ambiguous modern status of object and subject in one—observer of the self as well as scientific observer of nature. One analyst has declared that the Darwinian theory of evolution by way of natural selection "surpassed even the astronomical revolution ushered in by Copernicus in the significance of its implications for our understanding of the nature of the universe and of our place in it." It was as a result of John Gould's observation in March 1837 that the mockingbirds collected by Darwin from three different islands on the Galapagos were three different species that Darwin first grasped the process of geographic speciation. There was not a unique saltation, but an evolution on three separate islands. Soon, by the publication in 1859 of On the origin of species, there became available a comprehensively new theory of nature. Thoreau lived and wrote at this point of intersection. No longer was change and adaptation to imply intended progress, still less to end in perfection.

Even so remnants of earlier thought-systems survive in Darwin. The phrase `natural selection' retains a sense of an external originator and was not Darwin's favored term, and is today often replaced by the entirely non-committal `differential reproduction.' And it was still some decades before species were comprehensively defined in terms of gene pools and the necessary reproductive isolation. Yet Darwin's work continues to represent the greatest rupture in the perceived status of human life in the order of things. As Ernst Mayr puts it: "It is almost impossible for a modern person to project back to the early half of the nineteenth century and reconstruct the thinking of this pre-Darwinian period, so great has been the impact of Darwinism on our views." Thoreau, like Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists, approached scientific method, initially at least, from the residual insights of religion. Basically transcendentalism projected a unity that was lost after the seventeenth century. Perhaps it could acquire such vigor in America because of its lack of a medieval period as a clear cut-off point. What Crollius wrote in 1624 could have been adopted by Emerson and Alcott: "Is it not true that all herbs, plants, trees and other things issuing from the bowels of the earth are so many magic books and signs?" Indeed the Puritan Jonathan Edwards edges towards scientific method, not only with his famed youthful observations on spiders, but with projections such as:

"Any dullard with the help of a little logic can argue a priori; any scholar can repeat the argument from design, and all men can read or hear the Bible. But to see visible symbols of His presence . . . this seeing is the supreme act of humanity."

Robert Milder, though, draws the distinction between the Calvinist together with "his secular descendant, the visionary Romantic" who are "dependent on what Emerson called `more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternals,' " as against Thoreau who "is spiritually a self-starter able to think or write himself into renewal so long as he has the glimmering of an interest or idea to prompt him." Thoreau will move from the analogism of his early observations, the search for correspondence between human growth and growth in prehuman nature—that is "first nature" in Hegel and Marx's term—to the objectivism of the post-1851 entries in his Journal. Indeed the final eleven years of Thoreau's work are now seen by many as his most vital, confirming as they do Darwin's terrible truth that the human species suffers transcendent egotism and illusory control over nature. Today, the peripheral status of the species has been exacerbated by a range of intractable problems: crises within societal organization, pollution and subsequent atmospheric deterioration, enforced single-crop emphasis, and impoverishment leading to the diminution of sources of oxygen from the tropical forests. Simon Schama addresses the Thoreauvian microcosm with the question: "But what did Walden do to Walden?" Especially the later writings of Thoreau struck a great blow against human arrogance towards other species, while Darwin's opus revealed that natural selection works randomly and manifests itself in the universal will to survive.

Thoreau read Origin on its first appearance in America, acquiring it from the Town Library early in 1860, and immediately gave it his assent. This was no foregone expectation. It required characteristic Thoreau boldness and courage since Emerson's circle included the main proponent of 'special creation,' Louis Agassiz, who had the prestige of Harvard College, which he was involved in expanding, behind him. Prior to his reading of Origin, Thoreau had become interested in Darwin's Journal of Researches . . . during the Voyage of HMS Beagle (1839), which was a talisman of his travels around Concord, and Thoreau's "copious notes attest to his extraordinary prescient sympathy with many of Darwin's interests, including his minutely detailed observational techniques, his fascination with change in nature, even his writing style and the formal construction of the book, which was half travelogue and half naturalist's journal." Indeed Thoreau's method in his Journal of accumulating facts, piling instance upon observed instance, is Darwin's method, even if it takes on rather a holistic pragmatic character. The current of sympathy in his reading of Darwin would be strengthened, Robert D. Richardson argues, by virtue of the Englishman's self-description as "a person fond of natural history" rather than as 'scientist' "like the self-important Agassiz." Donald Worster in Nature's Economy insists we recognize Thoreau's acceptance of natural selection itself, and not just "transformations of nature" or "evolutionary development of species." In fact it was far from a question of passive acceptance on Thoreau's part, for he needs Darwinian natural selection and adaptation to make sense of his own observations. In a Journal entry for December 24, 1853, he describes one of his great insect loves—the cocoons of the Cecropia moth, Hyalophora cecropia:

"In Weston's field, in springy land on the edge of a swamp, I counted thirty-three or four of those large silvery-brown cocoons within a rod or two, and probably there are many more about a foot from the ground, commonly on the main stem—though sometimes on a branch close to the stem—of the alder, sweet-fern, brake, etc., etc. The largest are four inches long by two and a half, bag-shaped and wrinkled and partly concealed by dry leaves,—alders, ferns, etc.,—attached as if sprinkled over them. This evidence of cunning in so humble a creature is affecting, for I am not ready to refer it to an intelligence which the creature does not share, as much as we do the prerogatives of reason. This radiation of the brain. The bare silvery cocoons would otherwise be too obvious. The worm has obviously said to itself: `Man or some other creature may come by and see my casket. I will disguise it, will hang a screen before it' " (J6:23).

Thoreau gives some of the finest accounts in literature of the interrelation between plant and insects outside of Rachel Carson. Only Coleridge is comparable among literary writers. They are a product and vindication of the integrity of Thoreau's observations, and in this he anticipates the development of evolutionary ecology in the 1960s and 1970s when the charge of his deterioration into diffuseness after Walden began to be laid to rest.

Thoreau is the only American writer other than the very different (and neglected) John Dos Passos, and the more subtle Hart Crane and Nabokov, who would experience the full force of Freud's dictum that "science betokens the most complete renunciation of the pleasure-principle of which our minds are capable." Indeed, Thoreau's writing, like Whitman's, is shot through with the fertile, if from a national standpoint double-edged, Emersonian dialectic whereby "the common things in American nature could be realized as American only when turned to use as representative instances in a universal prospect." Rather like Alice, we are deemed now to have come out the other side of objectivism. Quantum evolution has all but dissolved even the palpable world of nature, at least theoretically, although we do continue to eat in order to sustain our incorporating carapace. More transformatory than Galileo's revolution, quantum mechanics has elevated the minuscule—derived from Planck's constant h—into the apotheosis of the infinitesimal. Matter and its shadow anti-matter ultimately dwell in a twilight asymmetric world of quarks and anti-quarks, even muons and taus. I hope by the end of this study to have shown that the organically relatively minute Insecta play a similar and hitherto underestimated role in the Thoreau opus. And then travelling with the author in the spirit of "The Concord nights are stranger than the Arabian nights" (PJ1:37), I will argue that a reading of the full length of Thoreau, for so long obstructed by hang-overs from the lop-sided literary concentration on Walden, suggests a destabilizing of scientific and philosophical writ parallel to Planck's transformation of the minuscule. Because Thoreau worked from the nub of the human in its natural historical habitat, overthrowing history in its species specific sense, he touched a pulse that connects science with the more subjective arenas without being plain either.

(ii)

In 1860, largely due to the efforts of Louis Agassiz, the Museum of Comparative Zoology was opened at Harvard. He was the main proponent of American opposition to Darwin, maintaining the immediate intervention of an intelligent Creator, and arguing that although there was no organic progress, yet all creations of God were not simultaneous. His training in continental idealist philosophy during his education in Switzerland meant that, like the German zoologists, he was unable to solve the fundamental problems of evolutionary theory, despite his remarkable advances in the collection of data. Herbert Hovenkamp summarizes Agassiz's and Cuvier's concept:

"During each new geologic epoch, God created a new set of species to replace a previous set that had died off or been destroyed. Each new creations consisted of organisms more sophisticated than those in the previous creation."

Bonnet, a far greater prose writer than Cuvier, put matters in terms that Thoreau up until at least 1854 could have identified with, primarily in its metamorphic aspect: "Who could deny that the Great Power had inscribed in the first Germ of each animal the succession of corresponding Germs released in the diverse Revolutions the planet subsequently underwent? . . . Our world appeared in the form of a larva or caterpillar: it is at present a chrysalis; the final Revolution will remake it in the form of a butterfly." Nevertheless Agassiz's theory of 'special creation' left space for progress in evolution—though not for natural selection—so that his pioneering fieldwork was not impeded by theoretic reservations but carried forward by his interest in the habits of animals. Not least this was because, as Agassiz wrote in An Essay on Classification: "Species, genera, families, etc. exist as thoughts, individuals as facts." His great specialism, embryology, was carried into his concept of evolution as the unfolding of already present characteristics. The totality of empirical data was, for Agassiz, the externalization, or uncovering, of preformed ideas. Facts were real enough, but development was an illusion. Changes were simply a manifestation of an original type, not anything new. Darwinian method and what today is known as population thinking turn this upside down, so that only individual phenomena have reality while the type is an a priori imposition. His biographer writes, "In an era of transition in the interpretation of nature, Agassiz lived as a man who provided basic insights for the new framework of natural history." Thoreau himself not only collected for Agassiz, but he read Agassiz's Principles of Zoology, taking it out of the library for three months in 1851.

There were four principal phases of expansion of American zoology:

1) Descriptive natural history prior to 1847, including early studies on the classification of the habits of animals, characteristic of zoological work up to the arrival of Agassiz in 1846. During this period the Smithsonian and Yale Scientific School were founded, and Scientific American began publication. The root of zoology in the Americas, though, lies with two Hispanics—Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdès (1478-1557) and the Jesuit, Joseph de Acosta (1540-1600)—along with the report on Raleigh's expedition by Thomas Hariot in A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.

2) 1846-1870: Agassiz's work on the structure and developmental history of animals. This was the heyday of morphology and embryology.

3) By 1873, Agassiz had retreated considerably before Darwin, though long before this his colleague, the botanist Asa Gray, was working with Darwin. As Robert V. Bruce succinctly summed up the expansion of these years: "in egalitarian and republican America, scientists knew that the common man also had to be `reached in order to get money.' " So during the 1870s, natural selection was taken on board. But it is worth recalling that as early as the 40s Gray's studies of the plants of the Galapagos and the Hawaiian Islands had suggested to him that one species might edge into another by minute variation. Later, Darwin's method encouraged Gray to apply statistics to the study of plant distribution leading in turn to the naturalist's letter to Gray in September 1857 that was later evidence in confirming his priority over Alfred Russel Wallace in developing the theory of natural selection. And it was the stimulus from Darwin that "set Gray upon the track of his greatest scientific accomplishment—the identification of elements of the flora of eastern North America and those of Japan as a single flora stretching around the earth in the Arctic regions in the period before the Ice Age." Indeed Asa Gray was a key figure in ensuring there was not the general opposition to Darwin in America such as occurred in France. It took the most influential scientist of the 1840s and 1850s, James Dwight Dana, until 1870 to accept Darwin, while Agassiz signaled his retreat with "Evolution and Permanence of Type" in 1873. Dana was "one of the few evangelicals who would, in a single lifetime, run the entire gamut from Agassiz to Darwin, going through a nervous breakdown in the process and finally concluding sometime in the 1870s that even natural selection could be consistent with divine cosmogony." By the 1870s the situation was prepared for the establishment of Entomology as a separate discipline.

4) 1890 onwards. Experimental biology and the advance in knowledge of organisms through experiment became the core of Zoology.

Thoreau, then, was coming into being as a writer, after Emerson's prompting, at a time of formation in those sciences that touch on what remained in the first part of the nineteenth century, Natural History. Coleridge's distinction between reason and understanding was a crux for all natural historians. Where understanding concerned itself with the collection of empirical data through observation, reason was a faculty for divining the spiritual in the factual, an organ of the mind similar to those of sight and hearing. This reason or intuition could therefore hold its own with those fields of knowledge thrown up by the fragmentation of natural history taking place by mid-century with the rise of geology, chemistry and biology which were seeking out the "`imponderables' such as heat, light and electricity," together with the inner functioning of the human body. The Mendelian revolution and the role of genetics were not available until 1866, so the observer of nature was largely on his or her own. But even at an early stage of his growth as writer there are important parallels between Thoreau's emphasis on detached, minute observation and Darwin's field methods. For whereas Agassiz and Dana saw ontogeny (individual development) recapitulating phylogeny (species development), the evolutionists argued that ontogeny programmed phylogeny. As Hovenkamp encapsulates this difference: "the individual in other words, determined the history of his species through his own variations above and beyond the final development of his ancestors." Emerson summed up the freedom of the observer to capture the ontogenetic detail in his "Humanity of Science" in 1836 immediately prior to Thoreau's emergence as a writer when he wrote a touch optimistically—"Our microscopes are not necessary. They are a pretty toy for chamber philosophers, but nature has brought every fact within reach of the unarmed eye somewhere."

However Thoreau was to forge a very fruitful relationship with an early American entomologist who also transformed the library at Harvard College—Thaddeus William Harris.

(iii)

Thomas Say's American Entomology, published from Philadelphia between 1824 and 1828 was the first accurate account of the insect species of North America. Say's biographer, Patricia Tyson Stroud, explains the impetus driving this massive project—

"An important effect of the War of 1812 was stimulation of the evolving sense of American identity. Say and most of his peers in the natural sciences in Philadelphia felt this incitement acutely and would demand that dependence on European savants give way to American expertise in establishing American science."

The phase of Say's brief dominance in American entomology was characterized by a development of a broader system of classification than the Linnaean, and included naturalists such as Thomas Nuttall. However the growth of the universities led to the subject's gradual integration as a discipline, though even as late as the 1840s the only formal course on offer was a single term of natural history, taken at the end of a senior year. It was taught by Thaddeus Harris at Harvard, and consisted of 17 lectures on botany. Thoreau was fortunate enough to take the course in the first year it was offered. Already Harris had taken steps to further entomology by making it useful to farmers and other agriculturalists. The state of Massachusetts published his manual on insect pests in 1841, Report on the Insects of Massachusetts Injurious to Vegetation. As a result of this he became the first paid entomologist in American, and a revised edition appeared in 1852, with a further re-issue in a special edition in 1862 with splendid woodcuts. So Harris balanced between the utilitarian lines on which entomology was to develop, and a genuine natural historical concern with the subject. The first full-time appointment went to Asa Fitch, the New York state entomologist from 1853. Townend Glover at the Bureau of Agriculture held the first federal position between 1854 and 1878. As Bruce puts it: "Beyond the work of Harris, Fitch, and Glover, little more was done in applied entomology during the antebellum period." Harris himself complained that his work suffered from the relative poverty of his collection of insects, but meantime the Smithsonian through the efforts of the Pennsylvanian zoologist, Spencer F. Baird, had developed a fine collection from scratch by 1853. Much later John Henry Comstock founded Cornell entomology which would provide the base for the greatest of all literary entomologists—Vladimir Nabokov.

The classification of species was now beginning to separate the professionals from the amateur naturalists. The initial practitioners were first and foremost classifiers concerned with the adult of the insect species, and not with their life histories. As Leland Howard says: "When the economic entomologist began to appear he was frowned down upon by the systematic worker and considered on the whole to be an unscientific dabbler of the farmer class." (The `economic entomologist' is the American equivalent of the British `applied entomologist,' both concerned with the application of insect studies to agricultural improvement). The process of specialization begins in earnest in mid-century. The word 'scientist' is only coined while Thoreau was in college, while the word `ecologist' is introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. There was now not only the theory of Darwin to consider, but the issue of methods of classification and indeed collection, together with the development of the instruments of observation. Natural History, though, was one of the last studies to be incorporated into bureaucratic systematization, allowing some space for the autodidact polymath. Thoreau would concur with Whitman's reservations about "the love of the precise, the exact, the methodical" which "is characteristic of the age of machinery, of a commercial and industrial age like ours." For Concord was becoming a suburb of Boston during Thoreau's lifetime:

"Concord was a commercially thriving agricultural community and regional crossroads in which cows and chickens greatly outnumbered native wildlife and meadows overwhelmed forests. Massachusetts was leading a national and global revolution in industrialization and social change."

So "the emerging world was no community at all but a riot of impersonal forces (those of the literary market included) in which a dissenting voice was not even met with disapproval because it went unheard." This social revolution paradoxically provided the favorable conditions for insects around Walden. At this time, the landscape was a patchwork thanks to "selective Indian burning [which] thus promoted the mosaic quality of New England ecosystems, creating forests in many different states of ecological succession." Later New England became more afforested, and the annual cuttings which had served as a type of coppicing—what Thoreau called sproutlands—and had been favorable to the dappled sunshine and shade together with forest rides beloved of lepidoptera and other insects, were abandoned.

(iv)

The early colonists had little trouble from injurious insects, so had no cause to make systematic strides in this field. Nonetheless in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society for 1771—a Society derided by later Natural History Societies as non-specialist—Colonel Landon Carter of Virginia produced "Observations concerning the Fly Weevil, that Destroys the Wheat, with Some Useful Discoveries and Conclusions regarding the Propagation and Progress of that Pernicious Insect, and the Methods to be Used to Prevent the Destruction of the Grain by It." In 1789 William Bartram read "Observations on the Pea Fly or Beetle, and Fruit Curculio" to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture." (The Curculio is a type of firefly). And in 1810 he encouraged his great-nephew, Thomas Say, to begin collecting beetles and butterflies, essential of course at this phase of the evolution of entomology, not least because Harris would find his lack of a European collection a great hindrance for comparative work. Bartram on ephemerae is, as will become clear, in the Thoreau tradition of insect writing if a touch more rapturous:

"The importance of the existence of these beautiful and delicately formed little creatures, whose frame and organization are equally wonderful, more delicate, and perhaps as complicated as those of the most perfect human being, is well worth a few moments contemplation."

The effect of science as a whole upon Thoreau's writing is similar to that in Whitman as described by John Burroughs: "Science fed Whitman's imagination and made him bold; its effects were moral and spiritual." Later, Thaddeus Harris was to attend the lectures of Professor William Dandridge Peck (1763-1834) at Harvard College. Peck's pioneering entomological article was "The Description and History of the Canker Worm" (1795), describing the species as Phalaena vernata, the spring cankerworm.

So a considerable body of preparatory work had been done before the Revolutionary War of 1812. And in 1812, the Academy of Natural Sciences was founded at Philadelphia. This was overtaken a little later by the Boston Society of Natural History, though "even in Boston the rise of Harvard, which helped societies in the short run overshadowed and so diminished them in the long run." Thoreau became a corresponding member of the Society in 1850, and when he died his occupation was given not as `Writer,' but `Natural Historian.' There was a distinctly political edge to the growth of Entomology in ante-bellum America. Around Boston in the 1810s, injurious insects began to attract attention. The Hessian fly was particularly troublesome to wheat farming. And another species damaged squashes and pumpkins to such an extent that the Bostonians named it the Gage bug, after the much hated British general in charge of forces of occupation. Other introductions caused much annoyance and some agricultural damage, such as the black fly, which Thoreau missed when he returned from Maine to Concord as having disappeared with the moose. A domestic pest was the European cockroach, while it was as early as 1666 that the cankerworm had appeared. Colonial gardens brought "grasshoppers, garden fleas, maggots, and various species of `worms' and `flies.' "

Thoreau's principal collaborator in identification of insects—and other creatures—at Concord was Thaddeus William Harris. Born at Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1795, Harris's father (also Thaddeus Harris) had been a minister in the Congregationalist Church and, like his son after him, had been Librarian at Harvard College, albeit briefly. He wrote the technically exacting The Natural History of the Bible, published in 1820. Here again the sciences grow organically from the religious foundations of America. Raymond Stearns points to the fact that it is Cotton Mather who "was the first native born colonial to advance beyond the status of a mere field agent for European scientists in the New World and to demonstrate a genuine philosophical approach to science, with scientific ideas and hypotheses of his own, in addition to the contribution of specimens and observations of natural phenomena." But science for Mather remained a revelation of the splendor of God, as indeed was the case with Jonathan Edwards, often for Emerson and early on for Thoreau. Indeed the first full-time entomologist, Asa Fitch (1809-78) embodied this (apparent) paradox, the scientist who was at the same time a pious Christian. Doctor Fitch's daughter recounted the incident when evening family prayers were interrupted by a moth attracted to the light. "Here was a dilemma. The spirit of the naturalist, however, overcame the religious feeling and in a somewhat shamefaced manner the entomologist reached out for his butterfly net and captured and bottled the specimen before finishing his chapter." The specimen proved new to science. The Memoir of Thaddeus William Harris, M.D. by Edward D. Harris observes that "as early as 1820 he was closely studying the habits of certain insects and plants in connection with his medical pursuits."On November 10, 1823, Say—who named 1,500 new American insects—is writing to Harris:

"entomology, which had so long been condemned in this country as a frivolous pursuit, seems now to be almost able to command that attention which its importance demands, & the formidable depredations of the insect race upon the vitals of the agricultural interest, compel the farmer to devote much attention to their manners and habits which he would not otherwise have deigned to bestow. This may be said to be the triumph of Entomology over the prejudices of the selfish."

Again in 1823—and 1823 and 1824 seem to be key dates in entomology's development in America—Harris published his first economic paper, "Upon the Natural History of the Salt Marsh Caterpillar." In 1832 he put together a catalog of American insects that included some 2,300 species. As William and Mabel Smallwood summarize: "the large number of accurate descriptions of insects, and the emphasis upon their economic importance, opened up a field in which the natural scientist was to be replaced by the technical entomologist, a type which has continued to the present time." His father's work undoubtedly had a major influence upon Harris's career in that as the Memoir remarks "both were men of untiring industry in their respective pursuits, of equal thoroughness, precision, and accuracy in their literary work." Emerson, in thrall to Schelling's Natur-Philosophie, pontificated—utilizing philosophical idealism to prop up snobbism—to the effect that while those under continental influence were comparing tribes and kingdoms, "Peck & Harris count the cilia & spines on a beetle's wing." It was, of course, such attention to detail that was crucial to Darwin's and Wallace's sketching of the theory of evolution by genetic variation and natural selection. Nevertheless by January 1853 Thoreau is writing in his Journal: "Being at Cambridge day before yesterday—Sibley told me that Agassiz told him that Harris was the greatest entomologist in the world, and gave him permission to repeat the remark" (PJ5:417). However Thoreau would bring to his records and observations of insects something lacking in all but the very greatest entomologists—vision. So much so that Franklin Benjamin Sanborn reports that one of Harvard's natural historians—clearly Thaddeus Harris—remarked to Bronson Alcott that "if Emerson had not spoiled him, Thoreau would have made a good entomologist." As I hope will emerge from this study, in this respect alone Thoreau can be spoken of in the same breath as Nabokov who had the greatest understanding of natural phenomena in the sense that Laura Dassow Walls uses the term—facts as the crossroads of the objective and subjective. He would have understood entirely what Nabokov meant when he said "I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is."