Faith in a Seed and a Squirrel: Book Reviewand ExcerptPeter Del TrediciFaith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds andOther Late Natural History Writings. HenryDavid Thoreau, edited by Bradley P. Dean.Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1993. 283pages with line drawings by Abigail Rorer.Hardcover. $25For most Americans, especially those whowere assigned Walden in college, Thoreausticks in the mind as a homespun philosopher-hermit who willingly went to jail for hisbeliefs. But students who dig a little deeperfind another Thoreau, a naturalist trampingthe fields and forests of Concord, recordingminute observations, and trying to tie themtogether in a unified natural philosophy.Until now, this other Thoreau was visibleonly in his journal-some three thousand pagesof it-which, while fascinating to browse, can-not be considered a finished literary work. Inthe later part of his life Thoreau undertook toorganize his natural history observations into acoherent work of science. He died before thetask was complete, leaving behind two unpub-lished manuscripts, "The Dispersion of Seeds,"published in its entirety in this volume (154pages), and "Wild Fruit," only a small part ofwhich is published here (27 pages).The main body of "Dispersion" consists of adescription of the various mechanisms bywhich seeds of common New England trees aredispersed-wind, water, and animals-alongwith a painstaking discussion of his theorieson the relationship between seed dispersal andforest succession. For those who have read theessay entitled "The Succession of ForestTrees," published in 1860, much of the infor-mation on forest succession will not be new.That essay can be viewed as a preamble to"Dispersion," which covers the same ideas butwith many more details to support the theo-ries. Indeed, it is precisely these details thatform the heart of "Dispersion," just as theyform the heart of all natural history studies.Had "Dispersion" been published at thetime Thoreau wrote it, the book would mostcertainly be considered a seminal volume,significant for its groundbreaking treatmentof interrelationships between plants andanimals-a field that has recently becomefashionable under the name coevolution.Because "Dispersion" did not appear in printuntil 1993, one hundred and thirty-one yearsafter it was written, the book is primarilyvaluable for the light it sheds on Thoreau’smind and for its descriptions of New Englandnatural history.For this reviewer the most interesting partsof the book are those that deal with Thoreau’sconcept of forest succession, incomplete andsomewhat skewed though it is. The core of thisidea, as he saw it, is that forests are in a con-tinual state of flux and the dominant speciesof today will be replaced by others tomorrow.A key ingredient in Thoreau’s theory is thatbirds and small rodents play a crucial role inthis process by "planting" the seeds of thereplacement generation. Indeed, the idea25expressed most frequently in "Dispersion" isthat squirrels are the ones who are responsiblefor making the New England forests look theway they do. To a certain extent, possibly inreaction to the creationist view of nature thenprevailing, Thoreau portrays the homely graysquirrel as the driving force behind forestsuccession, exaggerating its role and goingso far as to attribute to the creature a smallmeasure of consciousness about its forest-planting activities.In the following passages Thoreau’s custom-ary brilliant attention to detail is accompaniedby a less customary use of scientific method.Note, too, that he proposes that the earthitself is a living organism, presaging JamesLovelock’s "Gaia" hypothesis by at least ahundred and ten years.Yes, these dense and stretching oakforests, whose withered leaves nowredden and rustle on the hills for many.- a New England mile, were all plantedby the labor of animals. For after someweeks of close scrutiny I cannot avoidthe conclusion that our modern oakwoods sooner or later spring up froman acorn, not where it has fallen fromthe tree, for that is the exception, butwhere it has been dropped or placed by an animal.Consider what a vast work these forest planters are doing! So faras our noblest hardwood forests are concerned, the animals, especiallysquirrels and jays, are our greatest and almost only benefactors. It is tothem that we owe this gift. It is not in vain that a squirrel lives inalmost every forest tree or hollow log or wall or heap of stones.Thus, one would say that our oak forests, vast and indispensableas they are, were produced by a kind of accident, that is, by the fail-ure of animals to reap the fruits of their labors. Yet who shall say thatthey have not a dim knowledge of the value of their labors?-that thesquirrel when it plants an acorn, and the jay when it lets one slip fromunder its foot, has not sometimes a transient thought for its poster-ity, which at least consoles it for its loss?But what is the character of our gratitude to these squirrels-tosay nothing of the others-these planters of forests, these exporteddukes of Athol of many generations, which have found out how highthe oak will grow on many a mountain, how low in many a valley, andhow far and wide on all our plains? Are they on our pension list? Have26we in any way recognized their services? We regard them as vermin.The farmer knows only that they get his seed corn occasionally inthe fields adjacent to his woodlot, and perchance encourages his boysto shoot them every May, furnishing powder and shot for this purpose,while perhaps they are planting the nobler oak-corn (acorn) in itsplace-while up-country they have squirrel hunts on a large scaleevery fall and kill many thousands in a few hours, and all the neigh-borhood rejoices. We should be more civilized as well as humane if werecognized once in a year by some symbolical ceremony the partwhich the squirrel plays in the economy of Nature.2022 2022 2022 ,On entering the wood I began at once tolook about carefully for oak seedlings oranything else of the kind, and directly, ina part of it almost exclusively oak, I wassurprised to see a cluster of little chest-nuts six inches high and close together.Working my hand underneath, I easilylifted them up with all their roots-fourchestnut trees two years old, which hadpartially died down the first year, yet werequite flourishing, with the four greatchestnuts from which they sprang stillattached, but not the burr; and also foursmall acorns which had sent up puny lit-tle trees of the same age