The Grist of the Gods

John Burroughs (1837–1921)
From American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Interesting Links

“John Burroughs: A Naturalist for the Ages” (Tom Alworth, New York State Parks)

“The Upstate Writer Who Was America’s Most Famous Naturalist” (David Levine, Albany Times Union)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Nature Near Home,” John Burroughs
• “Yosemite Valley in Flood,” John Muir
• “Letter from the Dust Bowl,” Caroline Henderson
• “Krakatau,” Edward O. Wilson

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American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
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Detail from a hand-colored photograph of John Burroughs sitting on the steps of his cabin, Slabsides, from a photographic postcard printed c.1907–09 by Valentine & Sons Co., London, UK. (eBay)

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The following introduction is Bill McKibben’s headnote to “The Grist of the Gods” and other selections by John Burroughs included in American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau:

Of all the writers gathered in American Earth, none came close to being as popular in their day as John Burroughs, the man who reintroduced reading America to the natural world at the turn of the century. For several decades he may have been the most popular writer of any kind in the country—when he and President Theodore Roosevelt traveled across the U.S. by train in 1903, observers said the writer often drew more admirers at their whistle stops than the politician.

Burroughs was born in the sidehill farm country of the picturesque Catskills, where most of his best essays would be set. In 1863 he went to work in Washington as a clerk at the Currency Bureau, and during his decade in the capital he formed a close friendship with Walt Whitman, whose work he would herald throughout his life. He published his first collection of nature essays, Wake-Robin, in 1871; its success eventually let him move home to the Catskills, where he wrote many more of the charming pastoral pieces that earned him his following. They fit the tenor of their place—if John Muir was the craggy champion of the rugged West, John Burroughs is the lower-key bard of the lower-key, lower-elevation eastern mountains, the patron saint of the weekend cottage in the Berkshires.

His gift for close observation and large meaning launched the nature essay as we know it, and his example launched a million people with knapsacks out into meadow and forest. Burroughs is not a sentimentalist, however—he was an indefatigable champion of both Whitman and Darwin, and his writing has slipped into undeserved obscurity in recent decades. Its quietness works quite powerfully in our over-amplified moment, his natural and fluent grace an implicit rebuke to an awful lot of more overheated prose.

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Written in 1907, “The Grist of the Gods” first appeared under the title “Mother Earth” in Putnam’s Monthly and was included in Burroughs’s 1908 collection Leaf and Tendril. The essay reflects his late-in-life interest in geology. “Geology to Burroughs,” writes biographer Perry D. Westbrook, “was the key to man’s understanding of his home, the earth; and it thus served the general function which he always demanded of science—that of aiding man in knowing himself.” Although published nearly 120 years ago, the essay remains surprisingly relevant—and even prescient.

Note: Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist became famous for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The HMS Challenger Expedition (1872–1876) was a scientific voyage made under the auspices of the Royal Society of London that circumnavigated the globe, gathered deep-sea samples, and identified thousands of previously unknown species. The sentence by Huxley quoted by Burroughs is from Huxley’s 1875 paper, “On Some of the Results of the Expedition of H.M.S. Challenger.” The phrase “wreck of matter and the crush of worlds” is a line from the Act 5 of Joseph Addison’s play, Cato, A Tragedy (1713). The stanza by Walt Whitman is from the third section of Song of Myself (1892 version).

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About all we have in mind when we think of the earth is this thin pellicle of soil with which the granite framework of the globe is clothed. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.