• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 409 0

snub as a science-fair project. (“A bean in a Dixie cup? That’s kid stuff,” mine once hooted.) So the energy Thoreau brings to this argument may seem quaint for its obsolescence. But there is something wonderful to be gained from a two-hundred-page walk through the woods with a scientist from a century and a quarter ago. Thoreau had just read On the Origin of Species, and was clearly moving away from the travelogue format of his “excursion” writings, toward an articulation of unifying principles; he was attempting to see the forest among his trees. In his observations of plant communities he touched on succession, allelopathy, and other concepts that would not have names until the birth of the science of ecology in the next century.

His gifts as a writer, though, transcended his contributions to natural science. Thoreau dismissed the notion that poetry and science are incompatible, and captured for his readers the simple wonder we hastily leave behind in the age of reason. “How impatient, how rampant, how precocious these osiers,” he wrote of the willows along his pond. “Some derive their Latin name Salix from salire, ‘to leap,’ they spring up so rapidly—they are so salient. They have hardly made two shoots from the sand in as many springs, when silvery catkins burst out along them, and anon golden blossoms and downy seeds, spreading their race with incredible rapidity.”

He admired the trees for their ingenuity, and praised the wind that catches their seeds for its unfailing providence. He carefully watched the ways and means of the seed-scattering creatures: squirrels, foxes, birds (including, nostalgically, the now extinct ivory-billed woodpecker), a wading moose or cow, or “a wading pickerel fisher of the old school, who does not mind if his clothes be wet,” and even little boys who blow the seeds off dandelion heads to find out whether their mothers want them. (“If they blow off all the seeds at one puff, which they rarely do, then they are not wanted.”)

As I made my leisurely way through Thoreau’s final book I found myself turning down the corner of nearly every other page to note an arresting moment of prose; eventually I realized I was admiring not specific bits of information but the man himself. As a Transcendentalist, Thoreau understood that the scientist and the science are inseparable, and he insinuated himself into his observations in a way that modern science writers, we virtuosos of the passive voice, have been trained carefully to forsake.

“I went forth on the afternoon of October 17th,” one section begins, “expressly to ascertain how chestnuts are propagated.” American chestnuts are now as dead as the ivory-billed woodpeckers, but still a reader can watch this bearded, wide-eyed man—who would within two years of that journal entry be dead himself—inhaling an autumn day and focusing his powers not only on the chestnuts but also on his own heart and the folkloric tenor of his village. “A squirrel goes a-chestnutting perhaps as far as the boys do, and when he gets there he does not have to shake or club the tree, or wait for frost to open the burrs, but he walks up to the burrs and cuts them off and strews the ground with them before they have opened….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.”

Another passage exclaims, “Consider what a vast work these forest planters are doing! So far as our noblest hardwood forests are concerned, the animals, especially squirrels and jays, are our greatest and almost only benefactors.

“But what is the character of our gratitude to these squirrels?…Are they on our pension list? Have we in any way recognized their services?…We should be more civilized as well as humane if we recognized once a year by some symbolical ceremony the part which the squirrel plays in the economy of Nature.”

Faith in a Seed is infused with Thoreau’s delight, his meticulous curiosity and his inspiring patience. Across the silence of 125 years, during which an unforeseeable