Henry Thoreau’s discourse before the Middlesex [County] Agricultural Society” was a resounding success, Bronson Alcott wrote in his journal in late September. The society’s fair was held annually in Concord, drawing enormous throngs of people from neighboring towns and villages. Because this was high-minded New England, the event combined self-improvement with agricultural contests and exhibits. Alcott and Emerson had both delivered lectures in the recent past, their inspirational messages punctuated by the plaintive lowing of penned cattle and sheep. Cash prizes ranging from three to ten dollars were awarded for “best porkers,” “best geese,” and “best stallion.” There were countless other honors for finest apples, best-made boots, sweetest peaches and plums, best watermelon, butter, bread, and flowers. John Brown’s daughter, Sarah, received a dollar award for her exquisite needlework.
That year the fair took place “under rather unfavorable auspices,” because of “the very inclement state of the weather.” The skies were purple with storm clouds, and a silvery rain slanted off and on, dousing the fairgrounds. In an effort to stay dry, people crowded into the exhibition hall, which was “ornamented by suspending carpeting from the upper part of the building.” By two o’clock the weather had cleared enough to allow the marching band to escort a crowd down Main Street and into the Town Hall, where Thoreau delivered what became his most widely read piece of writing during his lifetime. “The Succession of Forest Trees” was soon reprinted in newspapers across the country, first by his acquaintance Horace Greeley at the New-York Tribune, and then by many other smaller periodicals. The essay was the result of Thoreau’s encounter with Darwin.
Despite its evolutionary overtones, Alcott enjoyed his friend’s talk “on Nature’s Methods of planting forest trees by animals and winds,” finding it “admirable and interesting” and every bit as entertaining as “Wild Apples.” The lecture proposed to explain why oak forests were replaced by pine forests when cut down and vice versa—a phenomenon Emerson, Horace Greeley, and many other reasonably informed observers considered an impenetrable mystery. Darwin had observed in the Origin of Species, “Everyone has heard that when an American forest is cut down, a very different vegetation springs up.” One theory held that the appearance of new forests was the product of spontaneous generation (the scientific term at the time was abiogenesis): plants and animals simply came into being, wondrously if inexplicably, animated by some mysterious spark that was either chemical or divine. This idea accorded well with the idealistic science of Agassiz, and in 1859 one of his assistants, Henry James Clark, announced that he had observed microscopic animals come into existence from decomposing muscle. At a meeting of the American Academy, “Professor Agassiz corroborated Mr. Clark’s statements most fully, and spoke of the discovery as one of the very greatest interest and importance.”
Thoreau considered this nonsense. Spontaneous generation was a form of magical thinking. People wanted to believe that plants and animals sprang miraculously into existence; they harbored an innate need to find mystery and the supernatural within everyday life. That sort of thinking was unjustified, however, because it ignored the causal relationships that occurred in nature. Since the mid-1850s, Thoreau had filled his journals with observations about the mechanisms that enabled seeds to disperse. He had carefully observed and described burrs, pollen, and maple wings, hypothesizing how each might travel before germinating. As town surveyor, he had measured dozens of woodlots, paying special attention to the saplings struggling to survive in the deeply shadowed undergrowth. He was confident that plants did not spring from nothing.
Scientific controversy may not have been the only thing that occasioned Thoreau’s talk. National politics may have played a role as well. The pine tree had been an emblem on the early flags of Massachusetts, but by 1860 it was more commonly associated with the South. Northerners claimed the oak as a symbol of their region, an emblem of hardy and unyielding character. This iconography would become especially prevalent during the Civil War—one early historian of the conflict noted, “Amid the acclamations of the civilized world, our Northern oak struck down the Southern pine.” Eight years earlier, in 1852, Charles Loring Brace’s best friend, Frederick Law Olmsted, used the Southern pine to criticize the slave economy in his enormous travelogue, The Cotton Kingdom. The South, he wrote, was filled with “‘old fields’—a coarse, yellow, sandy soil, bearing scarcely anything but pine trees and broom-sedge.” For Olmsted, the history of social injustice was legible in “land that had been in cultivation, used up and ‘turned out,’ not more than six or eight years before.” Disregard for the soil had produced “the nakedness of the impoverished earth,” from which spindly yellow pines had sprung. The metaphor was obvious: the same disregard for natural resources could be linked to the South’s disregard for human lives.
Yet if the struggle between pine and oak forests contained powerful political overtones in 1860, Thoreau did not overtly speak of them. He began his essay instead with an announcement: “I affirmed . . . confidently years ago [that forests are] regularly planted each year by various quadrupeds and birds.” If this answer seems obvious to us today, it wasn’t at the time. Few people had actually paid attention to New World forestation; even fewer had given the process the sustained attention Thoreau had. That scientists do so now is a tribute to Thoreau’s prescience as well as to the environmentalism he helped inspire. But when he announced at the Agricultural Fair that oak forests were planted by animals, he was saying something entirely new. “On the 24th of September, in ’57, as I was paddling down the Assabet . . . I saw a red squirrel,” he reported. The creature buried an acorn at the foot of a hemlock, and later Thoreau returned to find a sapling growing on the spot. Similar examples were sprinkled throughout his talk. “In short,” he explained, “those who have not attended particularly to this subject, are but little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed . . . in collecting, and so disseminating and planting seeds of trees.”
All of this is interesting enough. But what makes the essay fascinating today is the way its tone abruptly shifts. Thoreau launches into the old quarrel with himself about the adequacy of scientific explanation. Is it possible that science overlooks the fact that nature is directional and alive—is going somewhere? “Nature can persuade us to do almost anything when she would compass her ends,” he announces, hinting that the dispersal of seeds might in fact point to an intelligence coursing behind nature. It is as if Thoreau simultaneously accepts Darwin’s theory about the way species come into being while rejecting the limits imposed by that theory—as if he were once again trying to rein in the opposing horses of science and transcendentalism that had divided him for so long. For empirical knowledge is finite, Thoreau suggests. After we have exhausted its limits, we are still left with speculation, supposition, and hypotheses. And those are invariably influenced by belief in some ordering principle. For many people, that principle involves a divinity inherited from four thousand years of tradition. But it also mirrors our own ability to order and organize. “There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe,” Thoreau declared now, “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.” The image begs several questions: Who or what are these managers? How are they managing the intricate process of distributing seeds? And is there any purpose or goal to their management beyond mere reproduction?
Thoreau was by no means alone in raising such questions. In an early draft of the Origin of Species, Darwin had written that nature was composed of “laws ordained by God to govern the universe.” Soon after sending his book to Asa Gray, he wrote, “I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.” (Within a year or so he would abandon the idea of design entirely; it was unnecessary, he realized, for his theory.) In September 1860 Thoreau was close to Darwin’s position. He assumed the universe was governed by laws, but he also believed that the products of those laws occurred in a more or less random way. He hovered between design and chance, between idealism and materialism. Which is why the next step in his argument in “The Succession of Forest Trees” is so remarkable—for Thoreau locates mystery and wonder within materialism.
His touchstone is the seed: an emblem of renewal and vitality. Standing before the audience at the Agricultural Fair, Thoreau announced that he had found some “long extinct plants” growing in the ruins of a cellar. “Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been,” he said, “I have great faith in a seed.” Here he was dispelling the myth of spontaneous creation, but he was also arguing on behalf of a new kind of magic, a new source of awe. “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 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.” His point was that nature’s fecund banks of seeds bear witness to a world of wondrous scope and intricacy. Millions upon millions of seeds and spores are produced and scattered, broadcast by the air and by animals in order that a few plants may find their niche and grow. The countless complex interactions necessary to produce a single maple may be the result of nothing intelligent, omniscient, or all-seeing. But something almost as wondrous replaces this intelligence: a natural world that is blindly self-directing, a world that is driven by struggle and contingency, a universe authored not by some abstract Almighty—but byitself. The world, Thoreau suggests, is its own autobiography.
“The Succession of Forest Trees” reflects a conflict between two visions. One brims with divinity, the other is purely mechanistic. One carries with it a rich heritage of religious belief, the other whispers that God is redundant amid the promise of new discoveries and more complete knowledge. Thoreau moves fluidly between the two, shuttling between the divine and the here-and-now, between theism and materialism. And he endows each with the other. In the address’s final paragraph, he describes seeds as “perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end.” The word transmute is important here: it alludes to Darwin’s transmutation theory as well as to the potent magic of alchemy, the ancient art of transforming base metals into gold. Thoreau had recently planted some squash in his garden. “Here you can dig,” he informed his audience, “not gold, but the value which gold merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it.”
He was speaking of Antonio Blitz, a popular magician of the era famous for his ventriloquism, plate spinning, and his so-called “egg bag,” a linen sack from which he produced dozens of eggs out of thin air. In this offhand reference to the Welsh-born magician, Thoreau sums up the ambiguities of Darwin’s theories in its first year of publication, capturing both the uncertainties and the longings they created. He argues that another form of mystery and magic is still available, one divested of an intervening providence but nevertheless producing wonder at the deep, irreducible materialism of nature.
As such, “The Succession of Forest Trees” is an early response to a world Darwin had introduced—a place divested of God and yet made wonderful by science, a world of weakened faith and exciting discovery. (Emily Dickinson suggested some of the pain of living in this new reality when she wrote, “Nature is a haunted house”; though God once inhabited the natural world, He has since vacated the premises.) Comparing the wonders of seeds and the cheap magic of Blitz, Thoreau concluded with satire: “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.”
We all believe in magic, Thoreau suggests. We all need to feel that there is something more. But the danger is that this need obscures truth. The world is filled with magic, Thoreau asserts, is rich with mystery—just not the kind that religious tradition has led people to expect and rely upon. In order to experience these things, one has to relinquish certainty, to abandon old faiths and old patterns of belief. One has to live in the nick of time, between orthodoxy and the unknown, searching for knowledge and insight amid perpetual irresolution.