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Works of John Burroughs XV: The Summit of the Years
Unabridged edition; part of a set of complete works of this late 19th/early 20th Century Transcendentalist philosopher.
297 pages, Hardcover
First published September 27, 2015
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About the author
John Burroughs
949 books176 followersIn 1837, naturalist John Burroughs was born on a farm in the Catskills. After teaching, and clerking in government, Burroughs returned to the Catskills, and devoted his life to writing and gardening. He knew Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir and Walt Whitman, writing the first biography of Whitman. Most of his 22 books are collected essays on nature and philosophy. In In The Light of Day (1900) he wrote about his views on religion: "If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go." "When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what is it that I really see there, I am constrained to say, 'There is no God' . . . " In his journal dated Feb. 18, 1910, he wrote: "Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all—that has been my religion." He died on his 83rd birthday. The John Burroughs Sanctuary can be found near West Park, N.Y., and his rustic cabin, Slabsides, has been preserved. D. 1921.
According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Henry David Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the 20th century he had become a virtual cultural institution[peacock term] in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own. His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.
In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.
Since his death in 1921, John Burroughs has been commemorated by the John Burroughs Association. The association maintains the John Burroughs Sanctuary in Esopus, New York, a 170 acre plot of land surrounding Slabsides, and awards a medal each year to "the author of a distinguished book of natural history".
Twelve U.S. schools have been named after Burroughs, including public elementary schools in Washington, DC and Minneapolis, Minnesota, public middle schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Los Angeles, California, a public high school in Burbank, California, and a private secondary school, John Burroughs School, in St. Louis, Missouri. Burroughs Mountain in Mount Rainier National Park is named in his honor.There was a medal named after John Burroughs and the John Burroughs Association publicly recognizes well-written and illustrated natural history publications. Each year the Burroughs medal is awarded to the author of a distinguished book of natural history, with the presentation made during the Association's annual meeting on the first Monday of April.
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bur...
http://research.amnh.org/burroughs/
According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Henry David Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the 20th century he had become a virtual cultural institution[peacock term] in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own. His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.
In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.
Since his death in 1921, John Burroughs has been commemorated by the John Burroughs Association. The association maintains the John Burroughs Sanctuary in Esopus, New York, a 170 acre plot of land surrounding Slabsides, and awards a medal each year to "the author of a distinguished book of natural history".
Twelve U.S. schools have been named after Burroughs, including public elementary schools in Washington, DC and Minneapolis, Minnesota, public middle schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Los Angeles, California, a public high school in Burbank, California, and a private secondary school, John Burroughs School, in St. Louis, Missouri. Burroughs Mountain in Mount Rainier National Park is named in his honor.There was a medal named after John Burroughs and the John Burroughs Association publicly recognizes well-written and illustrated natural history publications. Each year the Burroughs medal is awarded to the author of a distinguished book of natural history, with the presentation made during the Association's annual meeting on the first Monday of April.
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bur...
http://research.amnh.org/burroughs/
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December 13, 2016
Having read a couple of John Burroughs volumes from the Riverside Literature Series, back when I was a child, I decided to put together a "complete works" of my own. At the annual Book Fair in Clayton, MO, (this is back in the 1970s) I found two large chunks of his complete works, but in different editions. Then there were still a half-dozen missing volumes, which I rounded up in used bookstores. Then, foolishly, I put off reading them for decades. Delayed gratification syndrome.
I've been over that for a while now, and have been working my way through it consecutively (though I've already read the Tramping and Camping with Teddy Roosevelt and the poetry collection). A warning for those who are new to Burroughs: whether you're reading POD reprints or originals, his complete works came out in several editions over the years, and they were numbered differently. So this volume is XV in some editions, and XVII or 17 in others.
Burroughs wrote in a number of modes. He wrote straight "naturalist" essays, he wrote scientific speculations, he wrote literary criticism (he was Walt Whitman's major advocate when people only knew "O Captain, My Captain"), and a few of his pieces are secular sermons, really. In this collection his classic naturalist style is exemplified by the last two essays, "A Hay-Barn Idyll" and "In Field and Wood" (the latter subdivided in seven shorter parts). I enjoyed both of those quite a bit, and they follow the pattern of him making an observation about something he's seen in nature and then free-associating on the subject for a while. Sometimes there's a bit of a "point" to the collection of observations, but most of the time he avoids moralizing or pontificating.
These two were preceded by one of the sermons, "The Round World," which was interesting to consider. The subject is the difference between our experience of the world (within our horizons) and the actuality of its spherical, high-speed nature.
"A Barn-Door Outlook" (in summer he often wrote on a sawhorse table set up inside the door of a hay barn) is another nature essay, but much of the rest of the book is speculation. The subject of many of the pieces is the question of instinct versus intelligence in animals. He thinks that almost everything we see in animal behavior is instinct, even though it can look like wisdom (a view he supports with many observations of idiotic, mindless animal behavior). Science has still not answered this question, but we've come a very long way, and so his take on things is more of historical interest than actual interest. And he, himself, was tired of the question, and he swears off writing about it ever again in the Introduction.
He comes out very strongly against laboratory study of animal intelligence, since it puts the animals in stress-inducing and unnatural situations. He felt that if they had intelligence, we would be less likely to find it in the lab than in studying them somehow in the field. It's a legitimate concern, but we can now see the place of the lab in the process (while also seeing less need for labs than we used to).
In sum, this was one of the less interesting collection in the Works; but Burroughs is worth reading even so. I'm glad I read this one, and the next volume is already queued up for early next year.
I've been over that for a while now, and have been working my way through it consecutively (though I've already read the Tramping and Camping with Teddy Roosevelt and the poetry collection). A warning for those who are new to Burroughs: whether you're reading POD reprints or originals, his complete works came out in several editions over the years, and they were numbered differently. So this volume is XV in some editions, and XVII or 17 in others.
Burroughs wrote in a number of modes. He wrote straight "naturalist" essays, he wrote scientific speculations, he wrote literary criticism (he was Walt Whitman's major advocate when people only knew "O Captain, My Captain"), and a few of his pieces are secular sermons, really. In this collection his classic naturalist style is exemplified by the last two essays, "A Hay-Barn Idyll" and "In Field and Wood" (the latter subdivided in seven shorter parts). I enjoyed both of those quite a bit, and they follow the pattern of him making an observation about something he's seen in nature and then free-associating on the subject for a while. Sometimes there's a bit of a "point" to the collection of observations, but most of the time he avoids moralizing or pontificating.
These two were preceded by one of the sermons, "The Round World," which was interesting to consider. The subject is the difference between our experience of the world (within our horizons) and the actuality of its spherical, high-speed nature.
"A Barn-Door Outlook" (in summer he often wrote on a sawhorse table set up inside the door of a hay barn) is another nature essay, but much of the rest of the book is speculation. The subject of many of the pieces is the question of instinct versus intelligence in animals. He thinks that almost everything we see in animal behavior is instinct, even though it can look like wisdom (a view he supports with many observations of idiotic, mindless animal behavior). Science has still not answered this question, but we've come a very long way, and so his take on things is more of historical interest than actual interest. And he, himself, was tired of the question, and he swears off writing about it ever again in the Introduction.
He comes out very strongly against laboratory study of animal intelligence, since it puts the animals in stress-inducing and unnatural situations. He felt that if they had intelligence, we would be less likely to find it in the lab than in studying them somehow in the field. It's a legitimate concern, but we can now see the place of the lab in the process (while also seeing less need for labs than we used to).
In sum, this was one of the less interesting collection in the Works; but Burroughs is worth reading even so. I'm glad I read this one, and the next volume is already queued up for early next year.
Displaying 1 of 1 review