The American Botanist 



VOL. XIV JOLIET, ILL:, AUGUST 1908 No. 3 



'^ man shall pefhaps rush by and trample down plants 



yi 



as high as his head, and cannot be said to linoiv that 



they exist, though he may have cut many tons of them, littered 



his stables with them, and fed them to his cattle for years. 



jfet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he may be overcome 



by their beauty." — Thoreau. 



LIBRARY 



NEW YORK 



THOREAU'S COVE. botanical 



By Willard N. Clute. OARbi^N. 



I T is just possible that the name of Henry D. Thoreau is a 

 *■ name, only, to many of the rising generation of naturalists, 

 but to those wlio are familiar with the literature of the out- 

 door world, it will CAer stand for a unique and interesting 

 figure among students of nature. Thoreau practically devoted 

 his entire life to a communion with nature following his chosen 

 bent with a zeal and ethusiasm never equalled before or since. 

 A thinker of much depth, contemporary and friend of Alcott. 

 Hawthorne, Emerson, Channing and other eminent men, he 

 gave a new fame to an already famous town, and has left an 

 impress upon the natural history of New England akin to that 

 which Gilbert White left upon Old England, but far deeper and 

 richer in effect He never married, preferred solitude to com- 

 pany, and satisfying his few wants with the money earned by 

 ^ occasional lectures, and by odd jobs of surveying for the sur- 

 ■^ rounding countryside, he was free to devote himself to the con- 

 Is^ templation of nature 



Thoreau was born in Concord. Mass., July 12, 1817 and 

 spent most of his life in his native town. In 1845 he built with 

 his own hands a small frame house on the shore of Walden 



