Walden's Man of Science
Walter Harding
When Thoreau in 1853 was asked to join the Association for the Advancement of Science (now the "triple A's," or American Association for the Advancement of Science) our country's most prestigious scientific organization, it took him nine months to even answer their letter, then only to turn them down, and comment privately in his journal, "The fact is I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot. Now I think of it, I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations."
"Mystic" and "transcendentalist" are not words in great favor with most of the scientific community, either in Thoreau's day or in ours, and so scientists have understandably tended to look rather scoffingly at Henry Thoreau. They have delighted in pointing out that he was not always accurate in his natural history observations; that he regularly confused the wood thrush and the hermit thrush, the black-throated blue warbler and the indigo bunting, the red-breasted and the white-breasted nuthatch; and that the mysterious "night warbler" he sought vainly all his life to identify was quite obviously the common oven bird; that he thought he saw a prairie chicken in the woods of Maine a thousand miles outside its range and yet never spotted the common and spectacular rose-breasted grosbeak in his native Concord until he was 36. He mistook the distinctive hole-drilling of the yellow-bellied sapsucker for the work of the downy woodpecker, and he accepted unquestioningly the mistaken folklore that a bittern produced its weird pumping sound by sucking up gallons of water and belching it forth. That seemingly is not a very good record for a man who liked to think of himself as at least an amateur ornithologist, but when we remember that there were no good field guides to American birds in those days— Thoreau at times even had to resort to British ornithologies to try to identify American birds—it is not so surprisingly bad. In a field such as botany (and Thoreau thought of himself as an amateur botanist too), where the excellent field guides of Asa Gray became available just at the time Thoreau needed them (and Thoreau despite his notorious parsimony ended up with three volumes of Gray in his personal library), he made very few mistakes—in fact the only one I know of is a lifelong confusion of the black and white spruces.
