Many thanks to those who have listened to my ideas and read my manuscript—Juliet Fuller, Marianne Merola, Paul Slovak, Lars Engle, Bob Jackson, Joli Jensen, Brian Hosmer, Kristen Oertel, Ken Taylor, Laura Dassow Walls, Bill Rossi, and John Stauffer—
and to the generous institutions that made those ideas and that manuscript possible—the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities—
and to those libraries and archives that granted permission to quote and use images—Harvard’s Houghton Library, Gray Herbarium, Ernst Mayer Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Countway Library of Medicine; the Concord Free Public Library; the New York Historical Society; the spectacular Berg Collection at the New York Public Library; the Library of Congress; the Morgan Library & Museum; the New Bedford Museum of Whaling; and the National Portrait Gallery, Meserve Collection.
To all, as Thoreau put it, “my thanksgiving is perpetual.”