the Thoreau Log.
9 February 1853. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes to Horace Greeley:

  Friend Greeley,

  I send you inclosed Putnam’s cheque for 59 dollars, which together with the 20” sent last December—make, nearly enough, principal interest of the $75 which you lent me last July—However I regard that loan as a kindness for which I am still indebted to you both principal and interest. I am sorry that my manuscript should be so mangled, insignificant as it is, but I do not know how I could have helped it fairly, since I was born to be a pantheist—if that be the name of me, and I do the deeds of one.

  I suppose that Sartain is quite out of hearing by this time, & it is well that I sent him no more.

  Let me know how much I am still indebted to you pecuniarily for trouble taken in disposing of my papers – which I am sorry to think were hardly worth our time.

  Yrs with new thanks

  Henry D. Thoreau

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 294)

Cambridge, Mass. Thoreau checks out A generall historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles by John Smith, Collectiones peregrinationum in Indiam Orientalem et Indiam Occidentalem by Theodore de Bry, and Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France, en l’année M. DC. XL. from Harvard College Library (Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 290).

Thoreau also writes in his journal:

  At Cambridge to-day. Dr. [Thaddeus William] Harris think the Indians had no real hemp but their apocynum, and, he thinks, a kind of nettle, and an asclepias, etc. He doubts if the dog was indigenous among them. Finds nothing to convince him in the history of New England. Thinks that the potato which is said to have been carried from Virginia by Raleigh was the ground-nut (which is described, I perceived, in Debry (Heriot ?) among the fruits of Virginia), the potato not being indigenous in North America, and the ground-nut having been called wild potato in New England, the north part of Virginia, and not being found in England. Yet he allows that Raleigh cultivated the potato in Ireland. Saw the grizzly bear near the Haymarket to-day, said (?) to weigh nineteen hundred,—apparently too much . . . Two sables also, that would not be waked up by day, with their faces in each other’s fur. An American chinchilla, and a silver lioness said to be from California.
(Journal, 4:490-491)

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