Henry David Thoreau (b. 1817, d. 1862).  This eccentric American author and naturalist was born at Concord, Mass.  He graduated at Harvard University in 1837.  He was a good English and classical scholar, and was well acquainted with the literature of the East.  His father was a maker of lead pencils, and he followed the business for a time, but afterwards supported himself mainly by teaching, lecturing, land surveying, and carpentering.  In 1845 he built himself a small wooden house near Concord, on the shore of Walden Pond, where he lived about two years.  He was intimate with Hawthorne, Emerson, and other literary celebrities.  His principal works are “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” “A Week on Concord and Merrimac Rivers,” “Excursions,” “Maine Woods,” “Cape Cod,” “A Yankee in Canada,” and “Letters to Various Persons.”  In descriptive power Mr. Thoreau has few, if any, superiors.

1.  In all the pines a very thin membrane, in appearance much like an insect’s wing, grows over and around the seed, and independent of it, while the latter is being developed within its base.  In other words, a beautiful thin sack is woven around the seed, with a handle to it such as the wind can take hold of, and it is then committed to the wind, expressly that it may transport the seed and extend the range of the species; and this it does as effectually as when seeds are sent by mail, in a different kind of sack, from the patent office.

2.  There is, then, no necessity for supposing that the pines have sprung up from nothing, and I am aware that I am not at all peculiar in asserting that they come from seeds, though the mode of their propagation by Nature has been but little attended to.  They are very extensively raised from the seed in Europe, and are beginning to be here.

3.  When you cut down an oak wood, a pine wood will not at once spring up there unless there are, or have been quite recently, seed-bearing pines near enough for the seeds to be blown from them.  But, adjacent to a forest of pines, if you prevent other crops from growing there, you will surely have an extension of your pine forest, provided the soil is suitable.

4.  As I walk amid hickories, even in August, I hear the sound of green pignuts falling from time to time, cut off by the chickaree over my head.  In the fall I notice on the ground, either within or in the neighborhood of oak woods, on all sides of the town, stout oak twigs three or four inches long, bearing half a dozen empty acorn cups, which twigs have been gnawed off by squirrels, on both sides of the nuts, in order to make them more portable.  The jays scream and the red squirrels scold while you are clubbing and shaking the chestnut trees, for they are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never agree.

5.  I frequently see a red or a gray squirrel cast down a green chestnut burr, as I am going through the woods, and I used to think, sometimes, that they were cast at me.  In fact, they are so busy about it, in the midst of the chestnut season, that you can not stand long in the woods without hearing one fall.