In 2002, North Point Press published my edition of The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau. The book differs from earlier editions of Thoreau in two ways: it is the first to put his essays in the actual order of their composition, and the first to annotate all of them.

The book's annotations have some maddening holes that I have been trying to fill ever since. In the summer of 2002, the Thoreau Society Bulletin published a list of these "Thoreau Puzzlers," and in the Winter 2004 issue a number of "Solutions" appeared, ones that I and other members of the Society had figured out.

As a supplement to my Thoreau edition, then, what follows here is a combined list of both solved and unsolved annotation puzzles. These are arranged as the book is arranged, by essay in order of composition. The page numbers refer to the 2002 North Point printing of The Essays. I have put a catchphrase for each unsolved puzzle in boldface; for each solved puzzle, the page number appears in bold.

If anyone reading this list can solve one of the puzzles, please write to me (see the "contact" section of this site), and I'll update the list. The more documentation that each solution has, the better; photocopies or digital scans of original sources are best.

page 29: "They who have resided in Greenland tell us that when it freezes, 'the sea smokes like burning turf-land, and a fog or mist arises, called frost smoke....'" What
is Thoreau's source for this citation? J. A. Christie's Thoreau as World Traveler
mentions this passage on page 206 and in the notes, but he does not clarify the
source.

page 34: "This woodland lake...has not been idle..., but, like Abu Musa, teaches that
'sitting still at home is the heavenly way; the going out is the way of the world'"

Thoreau's source for "Abu Musa" is Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens Vol. 2. (London: Bernard Lintot, 1718), where on page 34, we read: "There came some of the Hagis, or Pilgrims..., and asked Abu Musa, what he thought of going out? meaning, to assist Ali, to which he gravely answer’d, My Opinion to Day is different from what it was Yesterday. What you despised in Time past, hath drawn upon you what you see now. The going out, and sitting still at home are two things. Sitting still at Home is the Heavenly Way. The going out, is the Way of the World. Therefore take your Choice.” The context is a question about helping Ali ibn Abi Talib, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, in battles against his enemies.

I looked at a copy of Ockley’s work in the Houghton library at Harvard. Of interest are the final pages of the second volume which contain a nineteen-page list of "Sentences" attributed to Ali. These are Islamic aphorisms, and several of them reappear in Thoreau as, for example, “The remembrance of youth is a sigh” which shows up in the Journal for Oct. 26, 1851. The second of Ali's "sentences," by the way, reads "Contradict thyself, and thou shalt find rest," indicating that the creed of contradiction did not begin in Concord.

Thanks to Austin Meredith for pointing me to Ockley's book. Also, as is often my experience with annotation, once I confirmed this source it became apparent that others knew about it. Robert Sattelmeyer links Thoreau’s references to Abu Musa to Ockley in Thoreau’s Reading; so do the editors of the first volume of the Princeton edition of the Journals.

page 41: "the mansion of the northern bear": what is Thoreau's source for this phrase? The context implies that it is from James Thomson's "Winter," but that is not the case.

page 49: "as a surveyor makes known the existence of a water-power on any stream":
how exactly does a surveyor do that? Can anyone find surveyor's instructions for
determining "a water-power"? I checked one early nineteenth-century textbook,
John Gummere's A Treatise on Surveying, but could find nothing on how to
survey a water-power.

page 69: Thoreau and the Penobscot guide Louis Neptune are discussing the mountain
and its dangers. Neptune says that to pacify Pomola "we must plant one bottle of
rum on the top." Then Thoreau says: "He had been up [the mountain] two or three
times: he had planted letter--English, German, French, &c." What does this
mean?

page 71: A store in Maine has "a preponderance of children's toys," "as if a child, born
into the Maine woods...could not do without such a sugar-man, or skipping-jack,
as the young Rothschild has." Is there a historian of toys who can tell us what these
are? I don't even know if this is two toys, or one toy with two names.

[This one is half-solved: François Specq, who is translating The Maine Woods for a French publisher, wrote to say that "'skipping-jack' is defined in the Harrap’s English-French dictionary as a toy in the shape of a jumping animal that was made from a chicken’s wishbone.”]

page 110: Thoreau takes his description of the lake-filled land looking like a "mirror
broken into a thousand fragments" from J. K. Laski's report of a botanical
expedition to Katahdin: “Dr. Young’s Botanical Expedition to Mount Katahdin,”
Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, September 9, 1847, p. 2 (this being the third of
five installments printed September 7-11, 1847). (Thanks to Brad Dean who
located a mircofilm of the original Bangor newspaper.)

The newspaper account is signed by “one of the party,” but Kirk Maasch, a geologist at the University of Maine, confirms that the author was John Kimball de Laski (1814-1874), a doctor with an interest in geology. De Laski later published three papers in the American Journal of Science, one of which refers to his 1847 ascent of the mountain. Laski’s Bangor newspaper account is reprinted, with many small changes and errors, in The Maine Naturalist, VII, 2 (June 1927), pp. 38-62.

page 132: "If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the
State, he is put in prison...." According to John Broderick, the tax that Thoreau
refused to pay was $1.50. Why does he say "nine shillings"?

I now find that The Century Dictionary (first published in 1889 and reprinted until 1911) has this to say about “shilling”: “At the time when the decimal system was adopted by the United States, the shilling ... in the currency of New England and Virginia was equal to one sixth of a dollar.... Reckoning by the shilling is still not uncommon in some parts of the United States, especially in rural New England.” If a shilling is a sixth of a dollar, then nine shillings is $1.50.

page 143: "Because it was a part of the original compact...."

The source is a speech that Daniel Webster gave, March 23, 1848, on the War with Mexico. It is not clear what printing of this speech Thoreau saw; it may have been the one found in the New York Tribune of March 27, 1848, though the punctuation differs slightly. Thanks to Brad Dean for hunting this down.

page 153: "Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the
woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. 'They planted groves and
walks of Platanes,' where they took subdiales ambulations in porticos open to the
air." What is thoreau's source for the quotation? Perhaps Pliny, Natural History 12,
which discusses the plane tree--though I cannot find this phrase there. Pliny's
Natural History 14.11.5 has the phrase subdiales inambulationes, but that is not
quite the phrase Thoreau uses, and appears to be unrelated.

John Claudius Loudon writes about the plane tree in Arboretum et fruiticetum Britannicum (IV 2037ff), but again that doesn't seem to be Thoreau's source.

page 161: I had thought that the panorama of the Mississippi that Thoreau saw was
the one painted by John Banvard, but Richard Schneider argues that it is the one by
Sam Stockwell. I ended up including both names. What are Sam Stockwell's
dates?

page 166: Thoreau suggests an etymological link between "mallard" and wildness.
My note reads: "the OED reports the conjecture that the English 'mallard' derives
from the Old High German Madelhart, which in turn may have been the name for
the wild duck in a Germanic beast-epic, now lost." The problem is that the OED's
source for this connection dates from about 1896. Thus, Thoreau's source for the
etymological link is not known, nor therefore do we know what exact link he
thinks there is. What is it and what is his source?

page 168: on "the partridge loves peas," my note indicates that this is "a Wolof
proverb." That connection was found on a now-defunct web site. Is this right, and
if so, what was Thoreau's source?

page 171: "Many a poor sore-eyed student ... would grow faster, both intellectually
and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool's
allowance." What is a "fool's allowance"?

page 172: Chaldean Oracles: Thoreau’s source for the Greek is Isaac Preston Cory,
Ancient Fragments of the Phoenician, Chaldaean, Egyptian, Tyrian,
Carthaginian, Indian, Persian, and Other Writers: with an Introductory
Dissertation and an Inquiry into the Philosophy and Trinity of the Ancients.
(London: William Pickering, 1832), p. 273.

Cory’s book contains “The Chaldaean Oracles of Zoroaster,” pages 239-280, a collection of almost 200 fragments, mostly Greek. Number CLXVII has the Greek exactly as Thoreau reproduces it, but for an accent over the ‘w’ in the third word. Cory’s translation reads: “You will not understand it, as when understanding some particular thing.” Thoreau retranslates this as: “You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing.” He may have altered the reading because the word "understanding" had a particular Lockian meaning to the transcendentalists (see the introduction to the Hyde edition of the essays).

page 230: "This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I chaffer
with this man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the cost of carting."

Why might farmers haggle over sulphur? My note says: "Farmers in Thoreau's day carted muck from swamps and low meadows to improve their upland soils. Perhaps a smell of sulphur was a sign of good muck. Or perhaps this is a reference to the fact that farmers spread gypsum, calcium sulphate, as a fertilizer, gypsum being widely used as ballast in ships." This was suggested to me by the ecologist Brian Donahue, but neither of us is sure.

page 232: Thoreau tells a story about "the fathers of the town" who set out maple
bean poles that later grew into sugar maple trees. Is there any source for this tale?

page 255: "It is stated by one botanical writer that 'acorns that have lain for
centuries, on being ploughed up, have soon vegetated.'" Who is Thoreau citing?

page 262: Thoreau writes of Brown, "though he was tempted by the offer of some
petty office in the army, when he was eighteen, he not only declined that, but he
also refused to train when warned, and was fined for it." Is this true? If so, or if not,
how do we know?

page 265: John Brown "said...that the reason why such greatly superior numbers
quailed before him, was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a
cause...." Who is the "prisoner," and what is Thoreau's source?

page 287: Thoreau quotes Brown saying, "It will pay." What is Thoreau's source?

page 293: "'The fruit of the crab in the forests of France' is said to be 'a
great resource for the wild boar.'" What is Thoreau's source?

page 294: "At Michalemas time...." John Brand, Observations on the Popular
Antiquities of Great Britain.London: Bohn, 1849), p. 356. (Thanks to Brad Dean
for this.)

page 295: "As an old English manuscript says, 'The mo appelen the tree bereth the
more sche boweth to the folk.'" What is the source?

page 296: What is Thoreau's source for the chant that begins ""Stand fast, root! bear
well, top!"?

page 303: "As Palladius says, 'Et injussu consternitur ubere mali'...." Where is this
in Palladius? Where did Thoreau find it?

[Still not solved, but Brad Dean surmised that the source must be Scriptores Rei Rusticate (Heidelberg, 1595), a copy of which Bronson Alcott owned. Now someone needs to see if the citation appears in that book.]

page 303: Thoreau cites Loudon on "the custom of grippling." The context implies
that "grippling" is "gleaning," but can anyone find "grippling" defined as such?

page 306: What is the source of the poem that begins, "Nor is it every apple I
desire...."?