Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays

Huckleberries

Huckleberries Agrestem tenui meditabor arundine musam I am going to play a rustic strain on my slender reed— non injussa cano— but I trust that I do not sing unbidden things. M any public speakers are accustomed, as I think foolishly, to talk about what they call little things in a patronising way sometimes , advising, perhaps, that they be not wholly neglected; but in making this distinction they really use no juster measure than a ten-foot pole, and their own ignorance. According to this rule a small potato is a little thing, a big one a great thing. A hogshead-full of anything, the big cheese which it took so many oxen to draw, a national salute, a state-muster, a fat ox, the horse Columbus, or Mr. Blank, the Ossian Boy—there is no danger that any body will call these little things. A cartwheel is a great thing, a snow flake a little thing. The Wellingtonia gigantea, the famous California tree, is a great thing, the seed from which it sprang a little thing. Scarcely one traveller has noticed the seed at all, and so with all the seeds or origins of things. But Pliny said, In minimis Natura praestat—Nature excels in the least things. In this country a political speech, whether by Mr. Seward or Caleb Cushing, is a great thing, a ray of light a little thing. It would be felt 166 huckleberries 167 to be a greater national calamity if you should take six inches from the corporeal bulk of one or two gentlemen in Congress than if you should take a yard from their wisdom and manhood. I have noticed that whatever is thought to be covered by the word “education”—whether reading, writing or ’rithmetick—is a great thing, but almost all that constitutes education is a little thing in the estimation of such speakers as I refer to. In short, whatever they know and care but little about is a little thing, and accordingly almost every thing good or great is little in their sense, and is very slow to grow any bigger. When the husk gets separated from the kernel, almost all men run after the husk and pay their respects to that. It is only the husk of Christianity that is so bruited and wide spread in this world, the kernel is still the very least and rarest of all things. There is not a single church founded on it. To obey the higher law is generally considered the last manifestation of littleness. I have observed that many English naturalists have a pitiful habit of speaking of their proper pursuit as a sort of trifling or waste of time— a mere interruption to more important employments and “severer studies”—for which they must ask pardon of the reader. As if they would have you believe that all the rest of their lives was consecrated to some truly great and serious enterprise. But it happens that we never hear more of this, as we certainly should, if it were only some great public or philanthropic service, and therefore conclude that they have been engaged in the heroic and magnanimous enterprise of feeding, clothing, housing and warming themselves and their dependents, the chief value of all which was that it enabled them to pursue just these studies of which they speak so slightingly. The “severer study” they refer to was keeping their accounts. Comparatively speaking, what they call their graver pursuits and severer studies was the real trifling and misspense of life, and were they such fools as not to know it? It is, in effect at least, mere cant. All mankind have depended on them for this intellectual food. 168 huckleberries I presume that every one of my audience knows what a huckleberry is—has seen a huckleberry, gathered a huckleberry, nay tasted a huckleberry—and that being the case, that you will not be averse to revisiting the huckleberry field in imagination this evening, though the pleasure of this excursion may fall as far short of the reality, as the flavor of a dried huckleberry is inferior to that of a fresh one. Huckleberries begin to be ripe July third (or generally the thirteenth ), are thick enough to pick about the twenty-second, at their height about the fifth of August, and last fresh till after the middle of that month. This, as you...