“Introduction”
Henry David Thoreau, The Natural History Essays

Robert Sattelmeyer

This essay is reprinted here with the kind permission of Gibbs Smith, Publisher

Copyright © 1980 by Peregrine Smith, Inc. (Order from Gibbs Smith, Publisher)

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[PAGE vii] [¶001] Ever since the first explorers sent back to Europe enthusiastic and distorted accounts of the natural wonders of the new continent, natural history writers have played a large role in defining the nature of American experience. The underlying mythology of the eras of exploration and settlement made the American an Adam-like figure, given a new world and and the opportunity to make himself and society over without the Old World’s traditionary weaknesses. The naturalist’s role was no less than a new version of Adam’s charge in paradise: to name and describe each living thing man was to have dominion over. On a less mythological level, natural history writing provided Americans with an inventory of their riches and a forum for important debate about the relations of man to nature and about the nature of nature itself in the New World. Two of the finest works concerned with natural history in the eighteenth century, for example, William Bartram’s Travels and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, used their subject matter to construct sophisticated visions of the character and potential of life in America—Bartram’s purpose being to dramatize an Enlightenment Quaker’s reasoned rapture at the works of God, and Jefferson’s being to defend American nature (and by extension Americans themselves) [PAGE viii] from the prevailing European theory asserting the inferiority and degeneracy of natural products in the New World. Nineteenth and twentieth century classics such as John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring contained powerful critiques of some fundamental American assumptions about the uses to which nature may be put, and have had a significant impact on the shaping of laws and public policy. The sheer fact of nature itself—its overwhelming presence, its difference from familiar European norms, its seemingly limitless extent—has always been a major component of national self-definition. The naturalist’s challenge has been not merely to describe this massive and protean phenomenon but to interpret its significance for civilization and ultimately render it meaningful to human consciousness.
       [¶002] Yet the naturalist has also been a comic or even a suspicious figure in America. Dr. Battius in Cooper’s The Prairie was a caricature of the early naturalist, absently endangering himself and others in an addled quest for new species, and spouting unintelligible Latin phrases from the new Linnaean taxonomic system. At a deeper level, though, the naturalist’s pursuits could even be subversive of the social and economic order. In a pragmatic, expanding society whose major enterprises were clearing, settling, farming, and building, the destruction of habitat and the displacement if not the extinction of native species was inevitable. In this environment the naturalist [PAGE ix] was doubly suspect because he was concerned about wild plants and animals, and—perhaps even more disturbingly—because he seemed to do no work. His studies necessitated the kind of patient observation of often minute phenomena which could only seem trivial to the mass of his contemporaries.
       [¶003] Although the prevalent atmosphere of Concord, Massachusetts, was probably more tolerant than that of most places in mid-nineteenth century America, Henry Thoreau came in for his share of this distrust and antagonism. He even wrote Walden, in part, to answer his neighbors’ inquiries about what seemed to them an idle way of life for a young man whose family had sacrificed to send him to Harvard College. And in “Life Without Principle,” an essay which dealt in a more concentrated way with the problem of making a living without losing one’s soul, he put the problem succinctly: “If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
       [¶004] Americans in the late twentieth century, who work very hard at cultivating leisure, are probably more willing than Thoreau’s contemporaries were to grant him the broad margin of free time that he required; and his advocacy of the wild as a necessary complement to civilized life has made him something of an environmental oracle, whose words embellish countless calendars, posters, and collections of pho- [PAGE x] tographs. Moreover, in a curious turn of events for a writer who was largely ignored in his own time, his work has become a mark against which later writers are inevitably judged and usually found lacking: it is almost as fatal for a naturalist with literary pretensions to be compared to Thoreau as it is for a humorist to be compared to Mark Twain.
       [¶005] Still, this popularity and preeminence is largely based on just a few episodes in Thoreau’s life—his two-year stay at Walden Pond and his one-night stay in jail—and on the widespread familiarity of certain sentences from Walden and the essay “Walking”: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” for example, or “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” The actual records of his life-long attention to natural history—his voluminous Journal, his travel books Cape Cod and The Maine Woods, and the essays included in this volume—are comparatively little studied. In fact, Thoreau’s natural history writing and his abilities as a naturalist have frequently even been denigrated, and the consensus of critical opinion on this aspect of his career is a puzzling paradox, most clearly evident in Sherman Paul’s pronouncement in The Shores of America that “In spite of his gifts for nature study, Thoreau was not a good naturalist …” (p. 277). How and why this odd state of affairs came to be can only be understood in the context of Thoreau’s development as a natural historian and of the popular understanding of the mission and methods of science in his day and ours.
       [PAGE xi] [¶006] The foundation of Thoreau’s interest in natural history was his passionate affection for his native environment. Concord was a rural village, and Thoreau’s boyhood pursuits were those of most of his fellows—hunting and fishing, boating, berry-picking—augmented by his family’s cultivation of outdoor activities. With his older brother John, especially, he ranged the countryside, collecting Indian artifacts and watching birds. The two built their own boat, and in 1839 they took it on a two-week trip down the Concord and up the Merrimack Rivers, after which they hiked overland to Mt. Washington in the White mountains. Years later, after John’s sudden death in 1842, Thoreau would commemorate the journey in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. In a Harvard classbook entry, Thoreau described his youth in Wordsworthian terms, saying: “Those hours that should have been devoted to study, have been spent in scouring the woods, and exploring the lakes and streams of my native village.” And as a young man he so impressed Emerson and Hawthorne with his boating skill and knowledge of riparian life that both wrote enthusiastic accounts in their journals of excursions in his company on Concord streams.
       [¶007] By the philosophical currents of his age and his own intellectual training, however, Thoreau looked on nature as much more than he source of recreation or picturesque scenery: it was the phenomenal medium through which divinity and truth were communicated to man. Even more insistently than other [PAGE xii] nineteenth century philosophical and religious movements, the Transcendentalists were preoccupied with the great question of the age—in the words of Nature, Emerson’s important manifesto of the movement, “to what end is nature?” Although the notion that nature provided a link with divinity might seem to ally Thoreau in spirit to earlier naturalists like William Bartram or Gilbert White, who saw in nature the wonderful harmony and balance of God’s creation revealed, a crucial difference existed. To the earlier naturalists (and to many of their descendants today) nature was the evidence of design in the universe; by studying the details and organization of nature one could discover its universal laws and even infer the attributes of its creator, in much the same way that anthropologists might try to reconstruct the culture of a prehistoric people by studying its fossil artifacts. Natural history was a tool, frequently, of what was called Natural Theology, where students expected to find, as the title of a popular book on geology expressed it, The Foot-Prints of the Creator.
       [¶008] Thoreau, like many other Romantics, was intensely interested in science, but he was less interested in the footprints of the Creator than he was in creation itself. He was disposed to find in nature not the result of some previous plan but a phenomenon continually expressive of creation; not the evidence of design but design itself. Nature was the medium through which spirit manifested itself, and Thoreau was quite in earnest when he proclaimed in [PAGE xiii] the climactic “Spring” chapter of Walden that “The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth.”
       [¶009] The essays in which Thoreau reported his investigation of nature and the natural history of New England fall naturally into two groups. The first are apprentice and exploratory pieces growing out of his earliest engagement with nature and the writer’s craft. The essays in the second group were quarried from lectures and unfinished longer studies near the end of his life, and represent that portion of his late work he was able to put in shape for publication before his death in 1862. The reader interested in the overall development of Thoreau’s natural history should bear in mind that in between these two distinct groups of essays lie Thoreau’s two books—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden —and his book-length collections of travel and natural history essays—The Maine Woods and Cape Cod.
       [¶010] After Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1837 he thought of himself (during the hours he could spare from schoolteaching) as an apprentice man of letters, and at first he tried the conventional literary forms of criticism, poetry, and the familiar essay. His efforts in these fields, however, met with little success, even from the sympathetic editors and readers of the Transcendentalists’ magazine, The [PAGE xiv] Dial, where they were published. His mentor Emerson saw more clearly than Thoreau at this time the bent of his young friend’s genius, and one of his first acts upon assuming the editorship of The Dial in 1842 was to ask Thoreau to review several volumes of surveys of the flora and fauna of Massachusetts that had recently been commissioned and published by the state. He explained to Thoreau “the felicity of the subject to him, as it admits of the narrative of all his woodcraft boatcraft & fishcraft.”
       [¶011] Thoreau accepted the commission, and produced for the July 1842 issue “Natural History of Massachusetts,” his first essay on the subject which was increasingly to absorb his energies for the rest of his career. “Natural History of Massachusetts” is patently an apprentice work which neither finds a structure of its own nor actually reviews the volumes named. But Thoreau blithely admits to having placed the surveys at the beginning of the essay “with as much license as the preacher selects his text,” and the interest and energy of the ensuing discourse derive chiefly from self-discovery. Although Thoreau begins by stressing, scholar-like, the winter activity of reading about natural history, this imposed distance from his subject quickly disappears as his rambling catalogue of New England sights and scenes begins. Most important for his future as a naturalist and as a writer, however, is his concluding formulation about the nature of natural history, a passage which really amounts to a kind of prologomena to his life’s work, and which sets forth the [PAGE xv] challenge facing the Transcendentalist as would-be scientist:

“The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science as with ethics,—we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom.”

       [¶012] Behind the tone of youthful self-assurance in this passage lies a crucial, though perhaps not an apparent, distinction. When Thoreau asserts that “the Baconian is as false as any other,” he may seem to be dismissing casually the whole revered inductive superstructure of what we have come to think of as the Scientific Method, in favor of some undefined and possibly mystical “Indian wisdom.” But what he actually says, of course, is that “the Baconian is as false as any other.” This is a statement of principle—a fundamental assumption—that no theory of nature or way of representing nature should be mistaken for nature itself. No result produced by “contrivance and method,” no matter how attractive or useful, should be confused with nature’s essence. [PAGE xvi] The challenge Thoreau set for himself at the beginning of his career, one he would respect if not always be comfortable with for the rest of his life, was how to contribute legitimately to the natural history of New England without succumbing to the lure of method and material results.
       [¶013] Thoreau was encouraged enough by this first effort to turn almost immediately to similar projects. He wrote “A Walk to Wachusett,” based on a trip he made in July of 1842, during the following fall. He began “A Winter Walk” at the same time, although he did not complete the essay until June 1843. The sophistication of his natural history did not increase significantly in these essays, but he did mature greatly as a writer and begin to master the skills which would serve as the basis of his later work. He made strides to correct the anecdotal and rambling character of “Natural History of Massachusetts” in “A Walk to Wachusett” by employing a narrative rather than discursive form, and by subordinating the mere observation of nature to an archetypal pattern—the quest—which deepened the significance of what was observed. The specific quest of “A Walk to Wachusett,” to see if nature is capable of sustaining the imaginative significance with which the narrator invests it, has perhaps a foregone conclusion. But the pattern enabled Thoreau to place his observation of nature in its true context of spiritual aspiration. Henceforth the universal and timeless patterns of the journey out and back, and the ascent and descent of mountains, [PAGE xvii] together with the diurnal and seasonal cycles, would provide him with both structural principles and a symbolic dimension for his writing about nature.
       [¶014] Thoreau still tended to see nature, however, through European conventions of landscape description. “A Walk to Wachusett” focuses less on specific natural detail than on sweeping and sometimes painterly descriptions of broad panoramas or of the picturesque occupations—cultivating hops, for instance—of the country people. “A Winter Walk,” on the other hand, is much closer in tone and spirit to his mature work, for in it he began to concentrate on the particular and even minute details of his environment, and to make this newly-sharpened perception into a kind of tacit source of value, through a central image or conceit running through the whole essay: the idea of feeling summer warmth in winter.
       [¶015] Emerson almost rejected “A Winter Walk” for The Dial because of this theme of finding warmth in cold, which he considered to be no more than a perverse mannerism of Thoreau’s, a symptom of his unfortunate fondness for paradox. But this motif is absolutely essential to the charge of meaning with which Thoreau wishes to endow the process of sense perception. Nature is cold and dead this winter morning, until the narrator’s imagination, fueled by the flow of sense perception, begins to generate an “increased glow of thought and feeling.” If there is a “slumbering subterranean fire in nature” which not even the intensest cold can extinguish, it is because [PAGE xviii] this warmth answers to the “subterranean fire … in each man’s breast.” The reciprocity of nature and man’s imagination produces the warmth by which life is maintained. Characteristically, Thoreau finds an apparent paradox to be his most effective way of expressing this truth, for it is always the inside of the outside he seeks to reveal, and “our vision does not penetrate the surface of things,” as he put it in Walden.
       [¶016] A corollary of this emphasis on clarity of perception is his discovery—analogous to Faulkner’s discovery of an epic world in his poor northern Mississippi county—that the smallest details of nature may tell the most important stories. Many years later in the introduction to his lecture on “Huckleberries” he would quote Pliny approvingly: In minimis Natura praestat—Nature excels in the least things. He began to pay attention to this important. truth in “A Winter Walk,” noting in almost microscopic detail the “submarine cottages of the caddice-worms,” the “tiny tracks of mice around every stem,” and the chip of wood which “contains inscribed on it the whole history of the woodchopper and his world.”
       [¶017] Yet, on balance, these early essays testify that Thoreau was still an admirer of nature whose enthusiasm and gifted amateur eye masked the fact. that he actually knew relatively little systematic natural history. Additionally, the familiar essay was less than ideally suited to his talents at this stage in his life. In the process of composition his imagination [PAGE xix] worked slowly and accretively, normally requiring years to raise the structures of his works, and the quickly turned out magazine piece was rarely a suitable form for him. Both his education and his craft required long seed times.
       [¶018] The next decade of his life was devoted to the experiment at Walden Pond (1845–1847), to the writing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854), and to the acquisition of something approaching a professional competence as a naturalist. He began to botanize systematically, acquired a basic library of botanical guides, and learned taxonomy. He corresponded with and collected specimens for Louis Agassiz of Harvard, America’s leading scientist. He also knew the work of Asa Gray, Harvard’s other eminent natural scientist, destined to become Agassiz’s rival in the American debate over Darwin’s theory of evolution. He made a study of limnology and of the fishes of Concord rivers and ponds. He read Kirby and Spence and others on insects, and struck up a professional acquaintance with Thaddeus Harris, a prominent entomologist and the librarian of Harvard College. He had been interested in ornithology since boyhood (a family album of bird sightings survives, dating from the 1830s and containing entries by Henry, his brother John, and his sister Sophia), and he compiled a large collection of birds’ nests and eggs. In 1850 he was elected a corresponding member of the Boston Society of Natural History, to which he contributed specimens and various [PAGE xx] written accounts over the years, and whose library and collections he used regularly in pursuing his studies. (His own extensive collections of Indian artifacts, birds’ nests and eggs, and pressed plants went to the Society after his death.) In his work as a surveyor he made a more intimate acquaintance with the farms, swamps, and woodlots of Concord. Gradually his townsmen, who had generally looked askance at his activities, began to come around for help in identifying plants and animals, and to bring him new items for his collections.
       [¶019] In addition to his more systematic reading and collecting, the most important factors in his growth as a careful observer were his daily stints of walking and journal writing. As he states in “Walking,” he averaged at least four hours a day in the field in all weathers, after which he carefully recreated from records kept in pocket notebooks the accounts of his excursions which began to swell the Journal. The bulk of this systematic observation came after 1850, so that thirteen of the fourteen published volumes of the Journal cover only the last eleven years of his active life, from 1850 to 1861.
       [¶020] The vast quantity of observation and raw data in the late Journal has led most critics to see in Thoreau’s increasing attention to the collection of facts a loss of creative power. But this conclusion is based on a kind of false statistic, for there is still about the same amount of reflection and contemplation of ideas in the late Journal as the early Journal; it only appears to be more scattered because [PAGE xxi] Thoreau now used the Journal for the additional purpose of making detailed records of his various natural history observations. In the same way commentators point to Thoreau’s occasional moments of concern or despondency over becoming too absorbed in detail, ignoring the larger fact that he worked happily and with increasing energy on these studies until his final illness, when he prepared as many of his papers as possible for publication.
       [¶021] At any rate, the results of his new diligence and competence as a naturalist were manifest in his writings—the “Concord River” chapter of A Week, the exquisite miniatures as well as the larger studies of the pond itself in Walden, and in his accounts of the northern wilderness and the wild seashore in the chapters of The Maine Woods and Cape Cod that were published serially in the 1840s and 1850s. And as far as Thoreau himself was concerned, the real danger to his career lay not in becoming too scientific, but in becoming estranged from the scientific community itself. By continuing in the midst of his detailed studies to hold to a vision of a humane science which would not treat nature merely as matter to be manipulated, he realized that he was stemming an ever-strengthening tide of belief to the contrary. When he was proposed for membership in the Association for the Advancement of Science in 1853, he was asked to complete a form describing his particular field of study, and he realized to his dismay what would happen if he told the truth: “Now, though I could state to a select few that depart- [PAGE xxii] ment of human inquiry which engages me, and should be rejoiced at an opportunity to do so, I felt that it would be to make myself the laughing-stock of the scientific community to describe or attempt to describe to them that branch of science which specially interests me, inasmuch as they do not believe in a science which deals with the higher law.”
       [¶022] Nevertheless, Thoreau did attempt to explain himself, usually by lecturing to local lyceums in New England. All his later natural history essays, in fact, began as lectures, and he did not put them into essay form until near the end of his life. His most concerted attempt to set forth the rationale of his way of life and to explain why civilization could not afford to cut itself off from its wild heritage is “Walking,” an essay which he spliced together from two lectures, “Walking” and “The Wild,” which he gave many times during the 1850s.
       [¶023] “Walking” is one of Thoreau’s better-known essays today because its advocacy of the wild is the philosophical cornerstone of twentieth century movements to preserve wilderness tracts in America. Yet Thoreau did not think of the wild—or of walking either—as a special preserve. It was not for recreation so much as it was for re-creation; it was a particular quality of life that had to be actively cultivated. The spirit of the walk and not the specific route makes one a true saunterer (Sainte-Terrer, Holy-Lander, in his not entirely fanciful etymology), because the walk undertaken rightly denotes a commitment to the highest uses to which [PAGE xxiii] thought and observation may be put. Even Thoreau’s paean to the West—jingoistic as it may appear at first—is primarily in praise of man’s capacity to imagine and live according to his vision of a fairer world. “Westward I go free” may have the ring of pioneer travel about it, but Thoreau had to travel no farther than the Old Marlborough Road in Concord to find his West.
       [¶024] Similarly, the wild has less to do with actual wilderness areas (for that Thoreau went to Maine) than it does with a habit of mind which recognizes the balance of mutually dependent forces in life. The avowed “extreme statement” on behalf of the wild is not atavism or even primitivism, but an attempt to redress an imbalance in our way of thinking about life in nature. The wild is a reminder of an original attachment to the sources of life, and points back to a time and a state where nature and man’s consciousness were not separate entities, and where nature was not an object to be learned and mastered for the sake of material knowledge and power. Hence Thoreau’s proposal, at once earnest and ironic, for a “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance,” for he argues that it is only when we become wise enough to forget. that we “know” nature that we can participate in what he calls “Beautiful Knowledge.” The historical result of increasing knowledge in the scientific sense has been an increased separation and loss of harmony between man and nature, a loss, as Thoreau points out, that can be demonstrated by history and language itself: “We [PAGE xxiv] have to be told that the Greeks called the world Κοσμoς, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.” The wild is valuable and necessary insofar as it enables us to imagine, however fleetingly, that lost harmony.
       [¶025] This belief that nature, if viewed from the correct perspective, could provide one with a way of realigning himself with the sources of beauty and harmony was based on close and careful investigation, and was the result of hard work as much as inspiration. As the 1850s progressed, Thoreau focused increasingly on observing and recording the yearly natural cycle of his local environment, with particular emphasis on the patterns of leafing and flowering, fruiting, and seed dispersal in plants. One offshoot of these larger studies was a discovery he outlined in “The Succession of Forest Trees,” his most sustained treatment of what he termed a “purely scientific subject.” In it he describes a phase in the evolution of a climax forest, dispelling still widely-held beliefs that trees were propagated by spontaneous generation or by seeds that lay dormant in the ground for many years. He also demonstrates that a naturalist who believes in “a science which deals with the higher law” can also produce accurate and useful insights into the operations of nature—and does so with a kind of self-deprecating humor that acknowledges his “outside” position: “Every man is entitled to come to a Cattle-show, even a transcendentalist.”
       [¶026] Even in this discourse, however, meant to be in- [PAGE xxv] formative and useful to his audience of local farmers, Thoreau’s habitual perspective is evident. Although he insists that trees do not spring up by spontaneous generation or some other mysterious process, he dispels this myth in order to call attention to a more fundamental and real mystery—the seed: “Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to accept wonders.” A case in point is the marvelous 186¼ pound squash—“Poitrine jaune grosse”—he raised in his garden: “These seeds were the bait I used to catch it, my ferrets which I sent into its burrow, my brace of terriers which unearthed it.” Here, having just taken pains to disprove the popular fallacies about the generation of plants and to prove that they spring from seeds, Thoreau suddenly shifts the level of his argument to imply that the seed is not only related to the mature fruit by material cause and effect but is perhaps an organic principle in itself of yet another order.
       [¶027] This sort of intermingling of “poetic” and “scientific” truth has led most twentieth century critics to conclude that Thoreau was finally a poor naturalist on the one hand, and, after Walden, a failed creative artist as well, because he could not keep the elementary distinction between the two realms clear. But it seems odd that Thoreau, who was after all thoroughly grounded in the objective natural science of his day, should be so confused about such a fundamental point and find himself finally adrift somewhere between science and mysticism. Another possi-  [PAGE xxvi] bility is that our own implicit and unexamined assumption about the unbridgeable gap between scientific and imaginative truth simply makes it almost impossible to grasp the nature of his work from the inside. Its elements appear to be anomalous because contemporary thought is unconsciously the intellectual heir of that Association for the Advancement of Science, before whom Thoreau was already unlikely to receive an impartial hearing; it being no less true in science than in war that victors write the histories.
       [¶028] At any rate, enough prejudice, conscious or unconscious, has existed towards Thoreau’s kind of natural history that the bulk of his late work in this field has not been considered important enough to be published yet. Toward the end of his life he worked on two long manuscripts, one on seeds and the other on fruits, which the progressive debilitation of tuberculosis did not permit him to complete, but which do survive in preliminary draft versions (in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library). Fortunately, these manuscripts are at last scheduled for publication, in the Princeton Edition of Thoreau’s Writings now in progress, but they have not yet been fully considered in the central debate over Thoreau’s career—whether his late years form a record of declining power and a straying from the vision that led to Walden, or whether they furnish evidence of significant new directions and works which he did not live to complete.
       [¶029] Some necessarily tentative and provisional proposals, however, about the direction of this late work [PAGE xxvii] might be advanced on the basis of published works which were collateral with or part of these longer projects: two essays Thoreau was able to compile from lecture drafts before he died, “Autumnal Tints” and “Wild Apples,” and a small portion of the manuscript on fruits, called “Huckleberries,” edited by Professor Leo Stoller, which is made widely available for the first time in this volume. Although the circumstances of their composition and publication suggest that they may have undergone further refinement at Thoreau’s hands, and although they form only a small portion of much longer and more ambitious projects, these works at least give some hints about the vision and the program of natural science toward which Thoreau was working.
       [¶030] “Autumnal Tints” treats the leaf as fruit, and displays the concern with ripeness that dominates the imagery of Thoreau’s late work. At its basic level, of course, the essay is a catalogue of the different leaves and leaf-tints of a New England fall, bearing witness to Thoreau’s long-standing interest in this phenomenon. One of his earliest literary projects, back in 1841, had been a work called “The Fall of the Leaf.” Although the subject obviously admits of a popular treatment (Thoreau’s essay is, after all, a kind of literary precursor to the fall foliage tour), the leaf held a high and very special place among nature’s forms to Thoreau. He regarded it, in fact, as the archetypal organic form, a kind of ur-phenomenon expressive of creative life. In the “Spring” chapter of Walden it is the narrator’s [PAGE xxviii] climactic meditation on the leaf-forms expressed in the flowing sand of the railroad cut which signals his discovery of a vital principle in nature: “The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.” The leaf is a sort of universal hieroglyph or symbol of creative energy, and thus its ripening and its fall are events to be attended to with care. These events take on an even greater significance when it is recalled that the essay was prepared by Thoreau on his death bed, and that his treatment of the subject closely reflects his own condition.
       [¶031] One expression of the law to be discerned in the fall foliage is that “Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it commences a more independent and individual existence ... acquires a bright tint. So do leaves.” The high color is a sign of ripeness, not decay, and the fall itself is a sort of individuation, the commencement of “a more independent and individual existence,” and not a death. This notion is of course at odds with the scientific explanation of what happens when a leaf falls (which Thoreau knew perfectly well), but his slant on natural facts, as should be evident by now, is deeply opposed in principle to the customary assumptions about what constitutes organic life or even reality. He is “more interested in the rosy cheek” than in “the particular diet the maiden fed on”; which is to say that while Thoreau is cognizant of the physiologist’s explanation, he knows that the phenomenon is greater than the sum of these parts, and has no use for an explanation which [PAGE xxix] fails to take into account the perception which shapes the appearance itself.
       [¶032] This much is clear from the concluding portion of the essay, where Thoreau refers more than once to the “intention of the eye” as a determinant of reality. This principle, which Thoreau derives and illustrates from experience, means in essence that one must know what he is looking for before he can see it. “The astronomer,” as he says, “knows where to go star-gathering, and sees one clearly in his mind before any have seen it with a glass.” The history of science itself suggests the basic reasonableness of this proposition (think, for example, of the theoretical anticipation of the major discoveries of physics in this century). But the proposition undercuts at the same time the cherished and popular myth of a perfectly objective and quantifiable world which presupposes nature as matter independent of and anterior to any perceiving consciousness.
       [¶033] In effect, Thoreau found himself fighting a kind of rear-guard or guerilla action against scientific materialism, and he adopted as his favored rhetorical strategies “extreme statement,” paradox, and the deliberate inversion of accepted wisdom, in order to try to startle his audience out of unexamined and merely habitual modes of thought. In the introduction to “Huckleberries,” for example, the customary standards of littleness and greatness are reversed, not in order to allow Thoreau to deliver a few broadsides at politics and education but to try to induce in his auditors a new perspective on familiar objects [PAGE xxx] and ideas. Thoreau’s natural history would ultimately undermine the social as well as the philosophical conventions, for the humble huckleberry is the launching point for a radical critique—almost reminiscent of Marx at times—of entrepreneurial activity which robs the community of its natural birthright and promotes the division of labor and the alienation of the worker from his work. Elsewhere in “Huckleberries” he sounds what by now has become a familiar plea for cities and towns to set aside a portion of their wild and uninhabited lands as a resource for future generations. In his own country, though, Thoreau was a prophet without honor: even Emerson was unable at last to follow sympathetically or to grasp the nature of his work, and in regard to “Huckleberries,” this long-buried and unknown work, there is a kind of consummate irony in the famous criticism of Thoreau leveled by Emerson in his funeral oration: “instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.”
       [¶034] “Wild Apples” is the most complete and most compelling of these late works, and furnishes perhaps the best evidence of the range of reference of Thoreau’s detailed studies of his native ground. And portions of the essay are memorable in their own right for narrative and descriptive verve—the struggle of the apple tree against its bovine foes and its eventual triumph over them, for instance—independent of any historical or scientific context. The subject was perfectly suited to Thoreau. The wild apple [PAGE xxxi] was appealing to him because it was a forgotten and neglected fruit, one of the “least things” at which nature excelled, flourishing in the unfrequented corners of New England its chronicler instinctively sought; and because its situation and its qualities were so transparently suggestive of his own: a cultivated plant tending back to the wild, bearing its fruit late and unnoticed by most, crabbed and gnarled perhaps, but bracing if taken in the right spirit.
       [¶035] Yet it finally requires the sort of altered perspective on natural facts which Thoreau strove to induce in his audiences if “Wild Apples” is to be seen as a coherent whole, for without such a perspective (or the willingness, at least, to entertain it) crucial parts of the essay will seem at best to be unrelated to the descriptive body of the piece. What, for example, is the function of the very detailed philological and historical account of the apple which begins the essay? It is far too detailed merely to “introduce” the subject; and since “Wild Apples” was originally a lecture which Thoreau revised for publication during his final illness, it seems equally unlikely that this long recital of definitions and historical facts is mere padding.
       [¶036] The key to this section is the deceptively bland opening sentence: “It is remarkable how closely the history of the Apple-tree is connected with that of man.” Thoreau does more here than establish the groundwork for a metaphorical connection between man and the apple tree. He suggests, rather, by trac- [PAGE xxxii] ing the significance of the apple in language and history, that it is a natural fact which can best be understood through an understanding of its evolution in human thought. By giving as his opening coordinates, so to speak, not merely the genus and species of the apple, but its meaning in history, poetry, mythology, religion, and folklore, Thoreau suggests an alternative approach to customary scientific description, which involves actively putting the history back in natural history. Since the reality of natural phenomena is in part dependent upon the perceiver, true natural history involves the historical evolution of this perception. What the apple tree means, finally, is the sum of its histories, of its relationship to man. Man and the apple tree have grown up together.
       [¶037] The frame Thoreau provides for his subject, then, in this introduction, seeks to establish an interconnectedness between supposedly independent and discrete phenomena and human thought. He deliberately reverses the path of normal science, which seeks for objectivity to isolate and separate the object studied.
       [¶038] This historical dimension opens even more far-reaching levels of significance. The word for apple, we learn, if traced back far enough once meant “riches in general,” all the productions of nature which were at man’s disposal. And, as Thoreau also points out in an understatement of epic proportions, “Some have thought that the first human pair were tempted by its fruit.” Thus the apple embodies simultaneously man’s dominion over nature and his [PAGE xxxiii] fall from harmony with it—the ultimate paradox of human knowledge. If we understand the story of the Fall at one level to represent the separation of man from an original harmony with nature, a falling into self-consciousness in which nature began to be perceived as other, then the history of the apple tree becomes the history of man’s relation to nature. How the apple tree is defined and perceived is at any moment an index of our condition with respect to that original harmony and our prospects for regaining it.
       [¶039] Hence Thoreau’s glorification of the wild apple, on the one hand, and his startling jeremiad at the end of the essay over its disappearance. He celebrates the wild apple because it suggests the possibilities of reattachment and harmony with nature without the sacrifice of knowledge. The apple tree has grown cultivated and domestic with man, and now aspires back to its original state without giving up its fruitfulness. That fruitfulness is all the more valuable because it is achieved after such a struggle. It suggests, in its balance of the wild and the cultivated, the possibility of victory over both ignorance and the tyranny of knowledge.
       [¶040] In this light the conclusion of the essay is a powerful and pertinent warning, and not merely a curious lapse into preaching, for it constitutes Thoreau’s final plea against losing once and for all the possibility of achieving the harmony the apple tree suggests. “The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past,” given the spread of those assumptions and habits of mind about nature which made his voice [PAGE xxxiv] more and more isolated even in his own day. The inevitable result will be a universal malaise arising from the final separation of man from nature. Thoreau’s choice of biblical text is hauntingly appropriate to his plea, for it is the death of nature and the alienation of man which ensue from the denial of creative spirit working through both: 
“ ‘The vine is dried up, and the fig-tree languisheth; the pomegranate-tree, the palm-tree also, and the apple-tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of man.’ ”
       [¶041] The naturalist’s mission as Thoreau finally expressed it went far beyond the naming of the products of the New World garden. Up through the writing of Walden his imagination had centered on the Spring as an emblem of physical and spiritual rebirth, but in his later years he became more concerned with the Fall as season and as spiritual fact.. If that Fall was to be a fortunate one, our way of knowing must lead us back to and not away from its great central life.

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