ames of the common trees and
plants. He loved also a sprinkling of Latin quotations and allusions
to old and little known authors. The pride of scholarship was strong
in him. Suggestions from what we call the heathen world seemed to
accord with his Gospel of the Wild.

Thoreau loved to write as well as John Muir loved to talk. It was his
ruling passion. He said time never passed so quickly as when he was
writing. It seemed as if the clock had been set back. He evidently
went to Walden for subject-matter for his pen; and the remarkable
thing about it all is that he was always keyed up to the writing
pitch. The fever of expression was always upon him. Day and night,
winter and summer, it raged in his blood. He paused in his walks and
wrote elaborately. The writing of his Journal must have taken as much
time as his walking.

Only Thoreau's constant and unquenchable thirst for intellectual
activity, and to supply material for that all-devouring Journal, can,
to me, account for his main occupation during the greater part of the
last two years of his life, which consisted in traversing the woods
and measuring the trees and stumps and counting their rings.
Apparently not a stump escaped him--pine, oak, birch, chestnut, maple,
old or new, in the pasture or in the woods; he must take its measure
and know its age. He must get the girth of every tree he passed and
some hint of all the local conditions that had influenced its growth.
Over two hundred pages of his Journal are taken up with barren details
of this kind. He cross-questions the stumps and trees as if searching
for the clue to some important problem, but no such problem is
disclosed. He ends where he begins. His vast mass of facts and figures
was incapable of being generalized or systematized. His elaborate
tables of figures, so carefully arranged, absolutely accurate, no
doubt, are void of interest, because no valuable inferences can be
drawn from them.

"I have measured in all eight pitch pine stumps at the Tommy Wheeler
hollow, sawed off within a foot of the ground. I measured the longest
diameter and then at right angles with that, and took the average, and
then selected the side of the stump on which the radius was of average
length, and counted the number of rings in each inch, beginning at the
center, thus:" And then follows a table of figures filling a page. "Of
those eight, average growth about one seventh of an inch per year.
Calling the smallest number of