No More Learning

We enjoy now, not an Oriental,
but a Boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the
shadow of motes in the sunbeams.

Sometimes our fate grows too homely and familiarly serious ever to be
cruel. Consider how for three months the human destiny is wrapped in
furs. The good Hebrew Revelation takes no cognizance of all this
cheerful snow. Is there no religion for the temperate and frigid
zones? We know of no scripture which records the pure benignity of the
gods on a New England winter night. Their praises have never been
sung, only their wrath deprecated. The best scripture, after all,
records but a meagre faith. Its saints live reserved and austere. Let
a brave, devout man spend the year in the woods of Maine or Labrador,
and see if the Hebrew Scriptures speak adequately to his condition and
experience, from the setting in of winter to the breaking up of the
ice.

Now commences the long winter evening around the farmer's hearth, when
the thoughts of the indwellers travel far abroad, and men are by
nature and necessity charitable and liberal to all creatures. Now is
the happy resistance to cold, when the farmer reaps his reward, and
thinks of his preparedness for winter, and, through the glittering
panes, sees with equanimity "the mansion of the northern bear," for
now the storm is over,--

"The full ethereal round,
Infinite worlds disclosing to the view,
Shines out intensely keen; and all one cope
Of starry glitter glows from pole to pole. "




THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES[6]


Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a
transcendentalist; and for my part I am more interested in the men
than in the cattle. I wish to see once more those old familiar faces,
whose names I do not know, which for me represent the Middlesex
country, and come as near being indigenous to the soil as a white man
can; the men who are not above their business, whose coats are not too
black, whose shoes do not shine very much, who never wear gloves to
conceal their hands. It is true, there are some queer specimens of
humanity attracted to our festival, but all are welcome. I am pretty
sure to meet once more that weak-minded and whimsical fellow,
generally weak-bodied too, who prefers a crooked stick for a cane;
perfectly useless, you would say, only _bizarre_, fit for a cabinet,
like a petrified snake. A ram's horn would be as convenient, and is
yet more curiously twisted. He brings that much indulged bit of the
country with him, from some town's end or other, and introduces it to
Concord groves, as if he had promised it so much sometime. So some, it
seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think
that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best
ruler. Or why choose a man to do plain work who is distinguished for
his oddity? However, I do not know but you will think that they have
committed this mistake who invited me to speak to you to-day.

In my capacity of surveyor, I have often talked with some of you, my
employers, at your dinner-tables, after having gone round and round
and behind your farming, and ascertained exactly what its limits were.
Moreover, taking a surveyor's and a naturalist's liberty, I have been
in the habit of going across your lots much oftener than is usual, as
many of you, perhaps to your sorrow, are aware. Yet many of you, to my
relief, have seemed not to be aware of it; and, when I came across you
in some out-of-the-way nook of your farms, have inquired, with an air
of surprise, if I were not lost, since you had never seen me in that
part of the town or county before; when, if the truth were known, and
it had not been for betraying my secret, I might with more propriety
have inquired if _you_ were not lost, since I had never seen _you_
there before. I have several times shown the proprietor the shortest
way out of his wood-lot.

Therefore, it would seem that I have some title to speak to you
to-day; and considering what that title is, and the occasion that has
called us together, I need offer no apology if I invite your
attention, for the few moments that are allotted me, to a purely
scientific subject.

At those dinner-tables referred to, I have often been asked, as many
of you have been, if I could tell how it happened, that when a pine
wood was cut down an oak one commonly sprang up, and _vice versa_. To
which I have answered, and now answer, that I can tell,--that it is no
mystery to me. As I am not aware that this has been clearly shown by
any one, I shall lay the more stress on this point. Let me lead you
back into your wood-lots again.

When, hereabouts, a single forest tree or a forest springs up
naturally where none of its kind grew before, I do not hesitate to
say, though in some quarters still it may sound paradoxical, that it
came from a seed. Of the various ways by which trees are _known_ to be
propagated,--by transplanting, cuttings, and the like,--this is the
only supposable one under these circumstances. No such tree has ever
been known to spring from anything else. If any one asserts that it
sprang from something else, or from nothing, the burden of proof lies
with him.

It remains, then, only to show how the seed is transported from where
it grows to where it is planted. This is done chiefly by the agency of
the wind, water, and animals. The lighter seeds, as those of pines and
maples, are transported chiefly by wind and water; the heavier, as
acorns and nuts, by animals.

In all the pines, a very thin membrane, in appearance much like an
insect's wing, grows over and around the seed, and independent of it,
while the latter is being developed within its base. Indeed this is
often perfectly developed, though the seed is abortive; nature being,
you would say, more sure to provide the means of transporting the
seed, than to provide the seed to be transported. In other words, a
beautiful thin sack is woven around the seed, with a handle to it such
as the wind can take hold of, and it is then committed to the wind,
expressly that it may transport the seed and extend the range of the
species; and this it does, as effectually as when seeds are sent by
mail in a different kind of sack from the Patent Office. There is a
patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose
managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody
at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more
extensive and regular.

There is, then, no necessity for supposing that the pines have sprung
up from nothing, and I am aware that I am not at all peculiar in
asserting that they come from seeds, though the mode of their
propagation _by nature_ has been but little attended to. They are very
extensively raised from the seed in Europe, and are beginning to be
here.

When you cut down an oak wood, a pine wood will not _at once_ spring
up there unless there are, or have been quite recently, seed-bearing
pines near enough for the seeds to be blown from them. But, adjacent
to a forest of pines, if you prevent other crops from growing there,
you will surely have an extension of your pine forest, provided the
soil is suitable.

As for the heavy seeds and nuts which are not furnished with wings,
the notion is still a very common one that, when the trees which bear
these spring up where none of their kind were noticed before, they
have come from seeds or other principles spontaneously generated there
in an unusual manner, or which have lain dormant in the soil for
centuries, or perhaps been called into activity by the heat of a
burning. I do not believe these assertions, and I will state some of
the ways in which, according to my observation, such forests are
planted and raised.

Every one of these seeds, too, will be found to be winged or legged in
another fashion. Surely it is not wonderful that cherry trees of all
kinds are widely dispersed, since their fruit is well known to be the
favorite food of various birds. Many kinds are called bird cherries,
and they appropriate many more kinds, which are not so called. Eating
cherries is a bird-like employment, and unless we disperse the seeds
occasionally, as they do, I shall think that the birds have the best
right to them. See how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in
order that a bird may be compelled to transport it,--in the very midst
of a tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would devour this
must commonly take the stone also into its mouth or bill. If you ever
ate a cherry, and did not make two bites of it, you must have
perceived it,--right in the centre of the luscious morsel, a large
earthy residuum left on the tongue. We thus take into our mouths
cherry-stones as big as peas, a dozen at once, for Nature can persuade
us to do almost anything when she would compass her ends. Some wild
men and children instinctively swallow these, as the birds do when in
a hurry, it being the shortest way to get rid of them. Thus, though
these seeds are not provided with vegetable wings, Nature has impelled
the thrush tribe to take them into their bills and fly away with them;
and they are winged in another sense, and more effectually than the
seeds of pines, for these are carried even against the wind. The
consequence is, that cherry trees grow not only here but there. The
same is true of a great many other seeds.

But to come to the observation which suggested these remarks. As I
have said, I suspect that I can throw some light on the fact that when
hereabouts a dense pine wood is cut down, oaks and other hard woods
may at once take its place. I have got only to show that the acorns
and nuts, provided they are grown in the neighborhood, are regularly
planted in such woods; for I assert that if an oak tree has not grown
within ten miles, and man has not carried acorns thither, then an oak
wood will not spring up _at once_, when a pine wood is cut down.

Apparently, there were only pines there before. They are cut off, and
after a year or two you see oaks and other hard woods springing up
there, with scarcely a pine amid them, and the wonder commonly is, how
the seed could have lain in the ground so long without decaying. But
the truth is, that it has not lain in the ground so long, but is
regularly planted each year by various quadrupeds and birds.

In this neighborhood, where oaks and pines are about equally
dispersed, if you look through the thickest pine wood, even the
seemingly unmixed pitch pine ones, you will commonly detect many
little oaks, birches, and other hard woods, sprung from seeds carried
into the thicket by squirrels and other animals, and also blown
thither, but which are overshadowed and choked by the pines. The
denser the evergreen wood, the more likely it is to be well planted
with these seeds, because the planters incline to resort with their
forage to the closest covert. They also carry it into birch and other
woods. This planting is carried on annually, and the oldest seedlings
annually die; but when the pines are cleared off, the oaks, having got
just the start they want, and now secured favorable conditions,
immediately spring up to trees.

The shade of a dense pine wood is more unfavorable to the springing up
of pines of the same species than of oaks within it, though the former
may come up abundantly when the pines are cut, if there chance to be
sound seed in the ground.

But when you cut off a lot of hard wood, very often the little pines
mixed with it have a similar start, for the squirrels have carried off
the nuts to the pines, and not to the more open wood, and they
commonly make pretty clean work of it; and moreover, if the wood was
old, the sprouts will be feeble or entirely fail; to say nothing about
the soil being, in a measure, exhausted for this kind of crop.

If a pine wood is surrounded by a white oak one chiefly, white oaks
may be expected to succeed when the pines are cut. If it is surrounded
instead by an edging of shrub oaks, then you will probably have a
dense shrub oak thicket.

I have no time to go into details, but will say, in a word, that while
the wind is conveying the seeds of pines into hard woods and open
lands, the squirrels and other animals are conveying the seeds of oaks
and walnuts into the pine woods, and thus a rotation of crops is kept
up.

I affirmed this confidently many years ago, and an occasional
examination of dense pine woods confirmed me in my opinion. It has
long been known to observers that squirrels bury nuts in the ground,
but I am not aware that any one has thus accounted for the regular
succession of forests.

On the 24th of September, in 1857, as I was paddling down the Assabet,
in this town, I saw a red squirrel run along the bank under some
herbage, with something large in its mouth. It stopped near the foot
of a hemlock, within a couple of rods of me, and, hastily pawing a
hole with its fore feet, dropped its booty into it, covered it up, and
retreated part way up the trunk of the tree. As I approached the shore
to examine the deposit, the squirrel, descending part way, betrayed no
little anxiety about its treasure, and made two or three motions to
recover it before it finally retreated. Digging there, I found two
green pignuts joined together, with the thick husks on, buried about
an inch and a half under the reddish soil of decayed hemlock
leaves,--just the right depth to plant it. In short, this squirrel was
then engaged in accomplishing two objects, to wit, laying up a store
of winter food for itself, and planting a hickory wood for all
creation. If the squirrel was killed, or neglected its deposit, a
hickory would spring up. The nearest hickory tree was twenty rods
distant. These nuts were there still just fourteen days later, but
were gone when I looked again, November 21st, or six weeks later
still.

I have since examined more carefully several dense woods, which are
said to be, and are apparently, exclusively pine, and always with the
same result. For instance, I walked the same day to a small but very
dense and handsome white pine grove, about fifteen rods square, in the
east part of this town. The trees are large for Concord, being from
ten to twenty inches in diameter, and as exclusively pine as any wood
that I know. Indeed, I selected this wood because I thought it the
least likely to contain anything else. It stands on an open plain or
pasture, except that it adjoins another small pine wood, which has a
few little oaks in it, on the southeast side. On every other side, it
was at least thirty rods from the nearest woods. Standing on the edge
of this grove and looking through it, for it is quite level and free
from underwood, for the most part bare, red-carpeted ground, you would
have said that there was not a hardwood tree in it, young or old. But
on looking carefully along over its floor I discovered, though it was
not till my eye had got used to the search, that, alternating with
thin ferns, and small blueberry bushes, there was, not merely here and
there, but as often as every five feet and with a degree of
regularity, a little oak, from three to twelve inches high, and in one
place I found a green acorn dropped by the base of a pine.

I confess I was surprised to find my theory so perfectly proved in
this case. One of the principal agents in this planting, the red
squirrels, were all the while curiously inspecting me, while I was
inspecting their plantation. Some of the little oaks had been browsed
by cows, which resorted to this wood for shade.

After seven or eight years, the hard woods evidently find such a
locality unfavorable to their growth, the pines being allowed to
stand. As an evidence of this, I observed a diseased red maple
twenty-five feet long, which had been recently prostrated, though it
was still covered with green leaves, the only maple in any position in
the wood.

But although these oaks almost invariably die if the pines are not cut
down, it is probable that they do better for a few years under their
shelter than they would anywhere else.

The very extensive and thorough experiments of the English have at
length led them to adopt a method of raising oaks almost precisely
like this which somewhat earlier had been adopted by Nature and her
squirrels here; they have simply rediscovered the value of pines as
nurses for oaks. The English experimenters seem, early and generally,
to have found out the importance of using trees of some kind as
nurse-plants for the young oaks. I quote from Loudon what he describes
as "the ultimatum on the subject of planting and sheltering
oaks,"--"an abstract of the practice adopted by the government
officers in the national forests" of England, prepared by Alexander
Milne.

At first some oaks had been planted by themselves, and others mixed
with Scotch pines; "but in all cases," says Mr. Milne, "where oaks
were planted actually among the pines and surrounded by them [though
the soil might be inferior], the oaks were found to be much the best. "
"For several years past, the plan pursued has been to plant the
inclosures with Scotch pines only [a tree very similar to our pitch
pine], and when the pines have got to the height of five or six feet,
then to put in good strong oak plants of about four or five years'
growth among the pines,--not cutting away any pines at first, unless
they happen to be so strong and thick as to overshadow the oaks. In
about two years it becomes necessary to shred the branches of the
pines, to give light and air to the oaks, and in about two or three
more years to begin gradually to remove the pines altogether, taking
out a certain number each year, so that, at the end of twenty or
twenty-five years, not a single Scotch pine shall be left; although,
for the first ten or twelve years, the plantation may have appeared to
contain nothing else but pine. The advantage of this mode of planting
has been found to be that the pines dry and ameliorate the soil,
destroying the coarse grass and brambles which frequently choke and
injure oaks; and that no mending over is necessary, as scarcely an oak
so planted is found to fail. "

Thus much the English planters have discovered by patient experiment,
and, for aught I know, they have taken out a patent for it; but they
appear not to have discovered that it was discovered before, and that
they are merely adopting the method of Nature, which she long ago made
patent to all. She is all the while planting the oaks amid the pines
without our knowledge, and at last, instead of government officers, we
send a party of woodchoppers to cut down the pines, and so rescue an
oak forest, at which we wonder as if it had dropped from the skies.

As I walk amid hickories, even in August, I hear the sound of green
pignuts falling from time to time, cut off by the chickaree over my
head. In the fall, I notice on the ground, either within or in the
neighborhood of oak woods, on all sides of the town, stout oak twigs
three or four inches long, bearing half a dozen empty acorn-cups,
which twigs have been gnawed off by squirrels, on both sides of the
nuts, in order to make them more portable. The jays scream and the red
squirrels scold while you are clubbing and shaking the chestnut trees,
for they are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never agree.
I frequently see a red or gray squirrel cast down a green chestnut
bur, as I am going through the woods, and I used to think, sometimes,
that they were cast at me. In fact, they are so busy about it, in the
midst of the chestnut season, that you cannot stand long in the woods
without hearing one fall. A sportsman told me that he had, the day
before,--that was in the middle of October,--seen a green chestnut bur
dropped on our great river meadow, fifty rods from the nearest wood,
and much further from the nearest chestnut tree, and he could not tell
how it came there. Occasionally, when chestnutting in midwinter, I
find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in its gallery, just under
the leaves, by the common wood mouse (_Mus leucopus_).

But especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation
and planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent by the snow. In
almost every wood, you will see where the red or gray squirrels have
pawed down through the snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet
deep, and almost always directly to a nut or a pine cone, as directly
as if they had started from it and bored upward,--which you and I
could not have done. It would be difficult for us to find one before
the snow falls. Commonly, no doubt, they had deposited them there in
the fall. You wonder if they remember the localities, or discover them
by the scent. The red squirrel commonly has its winter abode in the
earth under a thicket of evergreens, frequently under a small clump of
evergreens in the midst of a deciduous wood. If there are any nut
trees which still retain their nuts standing at a distance without the
wood, their paths often lead directly to and from them. We therefore
need not suppose an oak standing here and there _in_ the wood in order
to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or thirty rods of it, it
is sufficient.

I think that I may venture to say that every white pine cone that
falls to the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing
its seeds, and almost every pitch pine one that falls at all, is cut
off by a squirrel, and they begin to pluck them long before they are
ripe, so that when the crop of white pine cones is a small one, as it
commonly is, they cut off thus almost every one of these before it
fairly ripens. I think, moreover, that their design, if I may so
speak, in cutting them off green, is, partly, to prevent their opening
and losing their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig
through the snow, and the only white pine cones which contain anything
then. I have counted in one heap, within a diameter of four feet, the
cores of 239 pitch pine cones which had been cut off and stripped by
the red squirrel the previous winter.

The nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, are
placed in the most favorable circumstances for germinating. I have
sometimes wondered how those which merely fell on the surface of the
earth got planted; but, by the end of December, I find the chestnut of
the same year partially mixed with the mould, as it were, under the
decaying and mouldy leaves, where there is all the moisture and manure
they want, for the nuts fall fast. In a plentiful year, a large
proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are,
of course, somewhat concealed from squirrels. One winter, when the
crop had been abundant, I got, with the aid of a rake, many quarts of
these nuts as late as the tenth of January, and though some bought at
the store the same day were more than half of them mouldy, I did not
find a single mouldy one among these which I picked from under the wet
and mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed on once or twice. Nature
knows how to pack them best. They were still plump and tender.
Apparently, they do not heat there, though wet. In the spring they
were all sprouting.

Loudon says that "when the nut [of the common walnut of Europe] is to
be preserved through the winter for the purpose of planting in the
following spring, it should be laid in a rot-heap, as soon as
gathered, with the husk on, and the heap should be turned over
frequently in the course of the winter. "

Here, again, he is stealing Nature's "thunder. " How can a poor mortal
do otherwise? for it is she that finds fingers to steal with, and the
treasure to be stolen. In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the
best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know
it. Generally, both large and small ones are most sure to germinate,
and succeed best, when only beaten into the earth with the back of a
spade, and then covered with leaves or straw. These results to which
planters have arrived remind us of the experience of Kane and his
companions at the north, who, when learning to live in that climate,
were surprised to find themselves steadily adopting the customs of the
natives, simply becoming Esquimaux. So, when we experiment in planting
forests, we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does. Would it not
be well to consult with Nature in the outset? for she is the most
extensive and experienced planter of us all, not excepting the Dukes
of Athol.

In short, they who have not attended particularly to this subject are
but little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed,
especially in the fall, in collecting, and so disseminating and
planting, the seeds of trees. It is the almost constant employment of
the squirrels at that season, and you rarely meet with one that has
not a nut in its mouth, or is not just going to get one. One
squirrel-hunter of this town told me that he knew of a walnut tree
which bore particularly good nuts, but that on going to gather them
one fall, he found that he had been anticipated by a family of a dozen
red squirrels. He took out of the tree, which was hollow, one bushel
and three pecks by measurement, without the husks, and they supplied
him and his family for the winter. It would be easy to multiply
instances of this kind. How commonly in the fall you see the
cheek-pouches of the striped squirrel distended by a quantity of nuts!
This species gets its scientific name, _Tamias_, or the steward, from
its habit of storing up nuts and other seeds. Look under a nut tree a
month after the nuts have fallen, and see what proportion of sound
nuts to the abortive ones and shells you will find ordinarily. They
have been already eaten, or dispersed far and wide. The ground looks
like a platform before a grocery, where the gossips of the village sit
to crack nuts and less savory jokes. You have come, you would say,
after the feast was over, and are presented with the shells only.

Occasionally, when threading the woods in the fall, you will hear a
sound as if some one had broken a twig, and, looking up, see a jay
pecking at an acorn, or you will see a flock of them at once about it,
in the top of an oak, and hear them break them off. They then fly to a
suitable limb, and placing the acorn under one foot, hammer away at it
busily, making a sound like a woodpecker's tapping, looking round from
time to time to see if any foe is approaching, and soon reach the
meat, and nibble at it, holding up their heads to swallow, while they
hold the remainder very firmly with their claws. Nevertheless it often
drops to the ground before the bird has done with it. I can confirm
what William Bartram wrote to Wilson, the ornithologist, that "the jay
is one of the most useful agents in the economy of nature, for
disseminating forest trees and other nuciferous and hard-seeded
vegetables on which they feed. Their chief employment during the
autumnal season is foraging to supply their winter stores. In
performing this necessary duty they drop abundance of seed in their
flight over fields, hedges, and by fences, where they alight to
deposit them in the post-holes, etc. It is remarkable what numbers of
young trees rise up in fields and pastures after a wet winter and
spring. These birds alone are capable, in a few years' time, to
replant all the cleared lands. "

I have noticed that squirrels also frequently drop their nuts in open
land, which will still further account for the oaks and walnuts which
spring up in pastures, for, depend on it, every new tree comes from a
seed. When I examine the little oaks, one or two years old, in such
places, I invariably find the empty acorn from which they sprung.

So far from the seed having lain dormant in the soil since oaks grew
there before, as many believe, it is well known that it is difficult
to preserve the vitality of acorns long enough to transport them to
Europe; and it is recommended in Loudon's "Arboretum," as the safest
course, to sprout them in pots on the voyage. The same authority
states that "very few acorns of any species will germinate after
having been kept a year," that beech mast "only retains its vital
properties one year," and the black walnut "seldom more than six
months after it has ripened. " I have frequently found that in November
almost every acorn left on the ground had sprouted or decayed. What
with frost, drouth, moisture, and worms, the greater part are soon
destroyed. Yet it is stated by one botanical writer that "acorns that
have lain for centuries, on being ploughed up, have soon vegetated. "

Mr. George B. Emerson, in his valuable Report on the Trees and Shrubs
of this State, says of the pines: "The tenacity of life of the seeds
is remarkable. They will remain for many years unchanged in the
ground, protected by the coolness and deep shade of the forest above
them. But when the forest is removed, and the warmth of the sun
admitted, they immediately vegetate. " Since he does not tell us on
what observation his remark is founded, I must doubt its truth.
Besides, the experience of nursery-men makes it the more questionable.

The stories of wheat raised from seed buried with an ancient Egyptian,
and of raspberries raised from seed found in the stomach of a man in
England, who is supposed to have died sixteen or seventeen hundred
years ago, are generally discredited, simply because the evidence is
not conclusive.

Several men of science, Dr. Carpenter among them, have used the
statement that beach plums sprang up in sand which was dug up forty
miles inland in Maine, to prove that the seed had lain there a very
long time, and some have inferred that the coast has receded so far.
But it seems to me necessary to their argument to show, first, that
beach plums grow only on a beach. They are not uncommon here, which is
about half that distance from the shore; and I remember a dense patch
a few miles north of us, twenty-five miles inland, from which the
fruit was annually carried to market. How much further inland they
grow, I know not. Dr. Charles T. Jackson speaks of finding "beach
plums" (perhaps they were this kind) more than one hundred miles
inland in Maine.

It chances that similar objections lie against all the more notorious
instances of the kind on record.

Yet I am prepared to believe that some seeds, especially small ones,
may retain their vitality for centuries under favorable circumstances.
In the spring of 1859, the old Hunt house, so called, in this town,
whose chimney bore the date 1703, was taken down. This stood on land
which belonged to John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts,
and a part of the house was evidently much older than the above date,
and belonged to the Winthrop family. For many years I have ransacked
this neighborhood for plants, and I consider myself familiar with its
productions. Thinking of the seeds which are said to be sometimes dug
up at an unusual depth in the earth, and thus to reproduce long
extinct plants, it occurred to me last fall that some new or rare
plants might have sprung up in the cellar of this house, which had
been covered from the light so long. Searching there on the 22d of
September, I found, among other rank weeds, a species of nettle
(_Urtica urens_) which I had not found before; dill, which I had not
seen growing spontaneously; the Jerusalem oak (_Chenopodium Botrys_),
which I had seen wild in but one place; black nightshade (_Solanum
nigrum_), which is quite rare hereabouts, and common tobacco, which,
though it was often cultivated here in the last century, has for fifty
years been an unknown plant in this town, and a few months before this
not even I had heard that one man, in the north part of the town, was
cultivating a few plants for his own use. I have no doubt that some or
all of these plants sprang from seeds which had long been buried under
or about that house, and that that tobacco is an additional evidence
that the plant was formerly cultivated here. The cellar has been
filled up this year, and four of those plants, including the tobacco,
are now again extinct in that locality.

It is true, I have shown that the animals consume a great part of the
seeds of trees, and so, at least, effectually prevent their becoming
trees; but in all these cases, as I have said, the consumer is
compelled to be at the same time the disperser and planter, and this
is the tax which he pays to Nature. I think it is Linnaeus who says
that while the swine is rooting for acorns he is planting acorns.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has
been, I have great faith in a seed,--a, to me, equally mysterious
origin for it. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am
prepared to expect wonders. I shall even believe that the millennium
is at hand, and that the reign of justice is about to commence, when
the Patent Office, or Government, begins to distribute, and the people
to plant, the seeds of these things.
In the spring of 1857 I planted six seeds sent to me from the Patent
Office, and labeled, I think, _Poitrine jaune grosse_, large yellow
squash. Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighed 1231/2 pounds,
the other bore four, weighing together 1861/4 pounds. Who would have
believed that there was 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_ in that
corner of my 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. A little mysterious hoeing and manuring was all the
_abracadabra presto-change_ that I used, and lo! true to the label,
they found for me 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_ there, where
it never was known to be, nor was before. These talismans had
perchance sprung from America at first, and returned to it with
unabated force. The big squash took a premium at your fair that fall,
and I understood that the man who bought it, intended to sell the
seeds for ten cents apiece. (Were they not cheap at that? ) But I have
more hounds of the same breed. I learn that one which I despatched to
a distant town, true to its instincts, points to the large yellow
squash there, too, where no hound ever found it before, as its
ancestors did here and in France.

Other seeds I have which will find other things in that corner of my
garden, in like fashion, almost any fruit you wish, every year for
ages, until the crop more than fills the whole garden. You have but
little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these
American days. Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances
without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible
treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold
merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it. Yet farmers'
sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his
throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love
darkness rather than light.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] An Address read to the Middlesex Agricultural Society in Concord,
September, 1860.




WALKING


I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,
as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man
as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member
of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an
emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the
minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care
of that.

* * * * *

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a
genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_, which word is beautifully
derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle
Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going _a la Sainte Terre_,"
to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a
_Sainte-Terrer_," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the
Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and
vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense,
such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from _sans
terre_, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense,
will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.
For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in
a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the
saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering
river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course
to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most
probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by
some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land
from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers,
nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our
expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old
hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our
steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the
spirit of undying adventure, never to return,--prepared to send back
our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you
are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife
and child and friends, and never see them again,--if you have paid
your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are
a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes
have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a
new, or rather an old, order,--not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not
Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable
class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to
the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into,
the Walker,--not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of
fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble
art; though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are
to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I
do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom,
and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes
only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from
Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the
Walkers. _Ambulator nascitur, non fit. _ Some of my townsmen, it is
true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took
ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for
half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have
confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions
they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were
elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of
existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.

"When he came to grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge.

"It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here;
Me lyste a lytell for to shote
At the donne dere. "

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend
four hours a day at least--and it is commonly more than
that--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,
absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A
penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am
reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not
only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed
legs, so many of them,--as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not
to stand or walk upon,--I think that they deserve some credit for not
having all committed suicide long ago.

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring
some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the
eleventh hour, or four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem
the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled
with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be
atoned for,--I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance,
to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine
themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months,
aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they
are of,--sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as if it
were three o'clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the
three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage
which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over
against one's self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out
a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I
wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o'clock in
the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the
evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the
street, scattering a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and
whims to the four winds for an airing,--and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men,
stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them
do not _stand_ it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have
been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments,
making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts,
which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers
that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed.
Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture,
which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping
watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with
it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor
occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the
evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just
before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an
hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking
exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated
hours,--as the swinging of dumbbells or chairs; but is itself the
enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in
search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumbbells for
his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures
unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only
beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's
servant to show him her master's study, she answered, "Here is his
library, but his study is out of doors. "

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a
certain roughness of character,--will cause a thicker cuticle to grow
over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and
hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their
delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may
produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin,
accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions.
Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to
our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind
blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to
proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a
scurf that will fall off fast enough,--that the natural remedy is to
be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the
winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the
more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the
laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism,
whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness.
That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself
white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would
become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some
sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods
to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. "They planted
groves and walks of Platanes," where they took _subdiales
ambulationes_ in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use
to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I
am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods
bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would
fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.
But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village.
The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my
body is,--I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my
senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of
something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a
shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good
works,--for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I
have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together,
I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great
happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours'
walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.
A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as
the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of
harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within
a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and
the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become
quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of
houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees,
simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest
stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle
of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after
his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not
see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole
in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the
middle of a boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found
his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had
been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was
his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles,
commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without
crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by
the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside.
There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From
many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The
farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and
their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade
and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the
most alarming of them all,--I am pleased to see how little space they
occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that
still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the
traveler thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the
great road,--follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and
it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely,
and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field
into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off
to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from
one year's end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not,
for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion
of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads
are the arms and legs,--a trivial or quadrivial place, the
thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers. The word is from the Latin
_villa_, which together with _via_, a way, or more anciently _ved_ and
_vella_, Varro derives from _veho_, to carry, because the villa is the
place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living
by teaming were said _vellaturam facere_. Hence, too, the Latin word
_vilis_ and our vile, also _villain_. This suggests what kind of
degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel
that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk
across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not
travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get
to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they
lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The
landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not
make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old
prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may
name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius,
nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a
truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so
called, that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as
if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is
the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now,
methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the
bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or
two such roads in every town.


[Illustration: _The Old Marlborough Road_]

THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD

Where they once dug for money,
But never found any;
Where sometimes Martial Miles
Singly files,
And Elijah Wood,
I fear for no good:
No other man,
Save Elisha Dugan,--
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv'st all alone,
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it;
It is a living way,
As the Christians say.
Not many there be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.
What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?
Great guide-boards of stone,
But travelers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns.
It is worth going to see
Where you _might_ be.
What king
Did the thing,
I am still wondering;
Set up how or when,
By what selectmen,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They're a great endeavor
To be something forever;
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveler might groan,
And in one sentence
Grave all that is known;
Which another might read,
In his extreme need.
I know one or two
Lines that would do,
Literature that might stand
All over the land,
Which a man could remember
Till next December,
And read again in the spring,
After the thawing.
If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode,
You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private
property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys
comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be
partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will
take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,--when fences shall be
multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to
the _public_ road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall
be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy
a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true
enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the
evil days come.

* * * * *

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we
will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature,
which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is
not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we
are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one.
We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this
actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love
to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we
find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet
exist distinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will
bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I
find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and
inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or
deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to
settle,--varies a few degrees, and does not always point due
southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation,
but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future
lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer
on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a
circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits
which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case
opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I
turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour,
until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the
southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go
free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that
I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind
the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk
thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western
horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there
are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me.
Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the
wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and
withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on
this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the
prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and
not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say
that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have
witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the
settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement,
and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first
generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment.
The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet.
"The world ends there," say they; "beyond there is nothing but a
shoreless sea. " It is unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and
literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into
the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is
a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity
to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed
this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before
it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the
Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of
singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest
walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something
akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,--which, in
some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe,
impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they
were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its
particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging
narrower streams with their dead,--that something like the _furor_
which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred
to a worm in their tails, affects both nations and individuals, either
perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles
over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real
estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that
disturbance into account.

"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes. "

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a
West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He
appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is
the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night
of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor
only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and
the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial
paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients,
enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when
looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the
foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men
in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.

"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last _he_ rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new. "

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with
that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and
varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the
European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that
"the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America
than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred
and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there
are but thirty that attain this size. " Later botanists more than
confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his
youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its
greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most
gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently
described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes
farther,--farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says:
"As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made
for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World. . . .
The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands
of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of
his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding,
by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses
on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not,
and turns upon his footprints for an instant. " When he has exhausted
the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences
his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages. " So far
Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the
Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The
younger Michaux, in his "Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,"
says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From
what part of the world have you come? ' As if these vast and fertile
regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of
all the inhabitants of the globe. "

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, _Ex Oriente lux; ex
Occidente_ FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of
Canada, tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres
of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger
scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly
colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old
World. . . . The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is
bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks
larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning
is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains
are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains
broader. " This statement will do at least to set against Buffon's
account of this part of the world and its productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies _laeta_, _glabra_ plantis
Americanis" (I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the
aspect of American plants); and I think that in this country there are
no, or at most very few, _Africanae bestiae_, African beasts, as the
Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly
fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles
of the centre of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the
inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveler can
lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America
without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies.