viii PREFACE 



seemed best to simplify things for the reader by omit- 

 ting the brackets from interpolated words in the case 

 of the unimportant ones where the word to be supplied 

 was obvious, and to retain them only in the case of the 

 more important words, or where there was any possi- 

 bility of a misapprehension of Thoreau's meaning. 



It may be well here to point out the office of the 

 brackets, [ ], as differentiated from parentheses, ( ), 

 since their use is not always understood by readers. 

 Brackets, as used nowadays by most writers and print- 

 ers, show the interpolations of the editor, while the 

 parentheses are the author's own. Thus, in the present 

 volume, a question-mark in brackets, [?], indicates 

 that the editors of the Journal were in doubt as to 

 whether they had rightly interpreted Thoreau's hand- 

 writing, but the same in parentheses, (?), is Thoreau's 

 own query. 



So, too, in the notes, those which are bracketed are 

 the editor's, while the unbracketed notes are later an- 

 notations by Thoreau, usually in pencil, upon the pages 

 of his manuscript journals. The editor has felt free to 

 quote or paraphrase the notes of the published Journal, 

 for a large share of which he was primarily responsi- 

 ble, and he believes that Mr. Torrey will pardon him 

 if in a few cases he has used the latter's phraseology 

 without giving specific credit for it. The present notes 

 are much fuller than those in the Journal, the plan 

 of which did not admit of extensive annotation. 



The bird matter included in Thoreau's more formal 

 works — the Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape 

 Cod, Excursions, and Miscellanies — is not inconsid- 



