William Hamilton Gibson: artist—naturalist—author

The qualities of his art in which the public delighted and which came to be characteristic of all his work, were refinement, gracefulness, and truth. He saw the finer qualities of nature, sought out her delicate beauties, loved her humbler moods, objects, episodes. He vindicated his own taste in the paragraph with which he prefaced the chapter on “Sap Bewitched,” over the signature of “Plinius Secundus”:

“We wonder at the mighty and monstrous shoulders of Elephants, we marvel at the strong necks of bulls: we keep a wondering at the ravening of tigers, and the shag manes of Lions: and yet in comparison of insects there is nothing wherein Nature and her whole power is more seen, neither sheweth she her might more than in these least creatures of all.”

In the spirit of those words he wrought at his art. “These least creatures of all” found in him a loving exponent. He saw their charm, and he was not above interpreting it to others. The web of a spider, the nest of a bird, the down of the dandelion, the leaf of the jewel-weed, the tangle of grasses in a fence-corner, the vegetable contents of a city back-yard,—Gibson found beauties in all these least things, which he did not disdain to celebrate. He had learned from Thoreau, chief among American students and expositors of nature, the meaning of the proverb, “Natura maxima in minimis.” His devotion to the Concord recluse, and to his methods, appears in his studies. That discipleship affected his artistic life. It inspired him in his choice of themes and it drew his eyes still closer to the lesser objects and humbler horizons. He wrote to a friend in 1888:

“There are few authors whom I love more than Thoreau.... I have read him with love and reverence, and have visited his haunts as sacred ground, and have pictured those haunts in projected compositions, and yet hope to see them realized.”

He had no apologies whatsoever for having elected the field of what men call the minor forms of life. He knew there was no such thing as major and minor in the things of nature. One may go in either direction and find infinity. A telescope is no more effective than a microscope; and it begins to look as if the atoms would be found as marvelous as the universe. Gibson repeatedly preached this doctrine. In one place he said:

“There is often an almost inexhaustible field for botanic investigation even on a single fallen tree. My scientific friend already alluded to recently informed me, on his return from an exploring tour, that he had spent two days most delightfully and profitably in the study of the yield of a single dead

tree, and had surprised himself by a discovery by actual count of over a hundred distinct species of plants congregated upon it. Plumy dicentra clustered along its length, graceful sprays of the frost-flower, with its little spire of snow crystals, rose up here and there, scarlet berries of the Indian turnip glowed among the leaves, and, with the crowding beds of lycopodiums and mosses, its ferns and lichens, and host of fungous growths, it became an easy matter to extend the list of species into the second hundred. It is something worth remembering the next time we go into the woods.”

Such study and such affection made him the guide of a great multitude of people in America, teaching them of beauties and graces they had never perceived for themselves. To him thousands of men and women were under the deepest obligation, because he gave knowledge that in small areas and in close quarters one may see great beauties and far-reaching powers and forces. He taught by his art the greatness of the little, the divinity of the familiar. He revealed the wonders of the every-day world, the miracles of the commonplace. He seemed to discern, and had the power to show others, the whole of nature in her humblest parts. He was the prophet of the unnoted and the unprized; for when his appreciative pencil had drawn them, they straightway became noteworthy, brilliant, extraordinary. One feels all the power of this call of his to be the apostle of the unconsidered in a bit of rhapsody over the infinite pictures hung along any country roadside:

“See how the cool gray rails are relieved against that rich dark background of dense olive juniper, how they hide among the prickly foliage! Look at that low-hanging branch which so exquisitely conceals the lowest rail as it emerges from its other side, and spreads out among the creeping briers that wreathe the ground with their shining leaves of crimson and deep bronze! Could any art more daringly concentrate a rhapsody of color than nature has here done in bringing up that gorgeous spray of scarlet sumach, whose fern-like pinnate leaves are so richly massed against that background of dark evergreens? And even in that single branch see the wondrous gradation of color, from purest green to purplish olive melting into crimson, and then to scarlet, and through orange into yellow, and all sustaining in its midst the clustered cone of berries of rich maroon! Verily, it were almost an affront to sit down before such a shrine and attempt to match it in material pigment. A passing sketch, perhaps, that shall serve to aid the memory in the retirement of the studio, but a careful copy, never! until we can have a tenfold lease of life, and paint with sunbeams. But there is more still in this tantalizing ideal, for a luxuriant wild grapevine, that shuts in the fence near by, sends toward us an adventurous branch that climbs the upright rail, and festoons itself from fence to tree, and hangs its luminous canopy over the crest of the yielding juniper. Even from where we stand we can see the pendent clusters of tiny grapes clearly shadowed against the translucent golden screen. Add to all this the charm of life and motion, with trembling leaves and branches bending in the breeze, with here and there a flitting shadow playing across the half hidden rails, and where can you find another such picture, its counterpart in beauty—where? perhaps its very neighbor, for all roadside pictures are ‘hung upon the line,’ they are all by the same great Master, and it is often difficult to choose.”

Two letters must serve as types of hundreds which he received, from every quarter of this country and from England—from California and from Anticosti Island, from Minnesota and from Georgia. The people loved his work. It expressed things they all had felt. It revealed to them things they had never seen. It was at once interpretation and disclosure. They did not know how good it was technically, but they did realize that it was good art in substance and in spirit, and from grateful hearts and lives quickened and enriched by his genius they wrote him their letters of gratitude and recognition. This one is from a Massachusetts town:

The other letter is from his pastor:

. . . . . .

Gibson was a warm partisan of water-color as a medium of artistic expression. He believed thoroughly in the possibilities of that mode of painting, which, it will be noted, was by no means understood or well-developed in this country when he was beginning to paint. His views in reference to it are well set forth in a letter to his mother, describing his first picture for the Water Color Society’s exhibition, written in the winter of 1874. He says:

“I am at present busily engaged on my water-color painting for the coming Spring exhibition. It is only just under way, but all who have seen it express much pleasure and enthusiasm at it and particularly admire my selection of a subject. It would be difficult to find a subject calculated to create such popular favor, and you know that a good selection in this particular is ‘half the battle.’ The idea is this: Subject, a ‘Struggle for Life.’ It is indicated by an old, old tree (an oak if you please) growing under all possible disadvantages, and besieged with a host of parasitic growths which threaten to sap its vitality and hasten its death. The trunk and main portion of a few branches only are shown and but one or two of them are possessed of any leafage. The near portion is devoid of bark and the exposed wood, by the action of the weather without and decay within, has become stained and broken. The interior is hollow, and the rich brown debris of its decomposing wood falls through a large irregular opening at the base of the trunk, and then spreading itself on a moss and lichen covered rock becomes the prey to brilliantly colored fungi and mother to many ferns. The tree is supposed to have started life near a rock and in the course of time its roots have grown over its surface and again by the action of time and other causes are now bare of bark and some of them dead. Higher in the tree, an unsightly gaping hollow presents itself, left after the fall of some dead and useless limb and this, collecting the rain water from each successive shower, has caused the gradual undermining of the tree and hurried it to its approaching death. Close beneath this opening, true to nature, sapping what little life blood still circulates in the part clings a luxuriant clump of the deadly agaric (touch wood) which may so often be seen on trees that have passed their better days. These are not all the burdens under which this aged subject is struggling. The mistletoe has fastened itself upon its only living branch, and parasitic vines innumerable clamber up and surround the trunk in their ‘deadly embrace.’ A brightly colored woodpecker has just alighted on the dying tree and finds food in plenty in the substance of decay. The whole picture is intended to suggest the idea of a struggle, and I know that I can make it so plain that anyone will realize my intention. A little pool of rain water lies at the foot of the rock and touching the roots which will give an additional effect of reflection, and what with this, the warm coloring of dried fallen leaves relieved by a group of delicate ferns, and other like growths, together with a strong play of sunlight on the whole, I see no reason why the picture should not be a good success and feel equal to rendering all that my imagination suggests and pictures. I have only just commenced, but enough is even now suggested to insure an at least attractive result. I have selected the medium of water-color because I believe that more can be done with that than most people are aware. I can work faster with water-color and secure just as brilliant effect as I could in oils. People in general do not know how much can be done with water-color, and I hope that I may live to show them.”

Six years later, coming back to the same subject in a letter to Colonel Gibson, he defends water-color as a medium in the following hearty fashion:

“Concerning the ‘water-color’ subject, on which you say ‘Of course water-color painting is not or cannot be high art, because it concerns itself too much with detail’ (not verbatim but embodying your

expressed idea), I regret that a man in your position should decline from the standard to which his namesake had elevated him, and come down to such a statement as that. Color is color, whether it is mixed with water or oil, and you can make a broad flat tint in oil-color or water-color just as you choose. There is no reason why one should use ‘one-hair brushes’ in water-color painting either. Neither is there any reason why he should paint more detail in the one than in the other. You should have had one glimpse of the last W. C. Ex. It would have made you open your eyes. I never saw stronger or broader pictures in oil than some that were in that exhibit. Neither does the medium make a snap of difference, excepting so far as it cramps the hand that wields it. The talk about ‘body color’ is a ‘hobby horse’ for art critics to ride on when they get ‘run out’ of their vocabulary. I use both, so do several others, some to such an excess as to abuse it and spoil the result. It should not be used to tell as paint, but to express texture or relief in an object where such qualities are important requisites.”

His own work in this medium showed the same steady and constant improvement as his work with the pencil. He toiled incessantly, and with his toil his power and facility grew. Remembering that he was self-taught in all his art-work; that he wholly lacked the training of the schools; that all his studies had to be made in the rush and under the pressure of his intensely busy life; yet that all of these studies were good enough to have a market value, and to take rank as works of art, his professional career is indeed a marvelous one. It was soon apparent that he was to take his place among the leading workers in color, and in an astonishingly short time he was recognized as one of the first water-colorists in America. He brought the same dash and fervor and sincerity to the color-box that he bestowed upon monotone. He was as ambitious to excel in this field as in his earlier one. He overcame heavy odds, chief among which was a popular prejudice that a man who does one thing well cannot do anything else. The public had come to rank him as a master in illustration. It was not readily converted to the notion that he might take as good a position in color-work. The critics talked, as critics will, in much this strain. “He is not a colorist,” said one. “His best work is in monotone,” said another. “He has won more admirers by his black-and-white work than he ever will win as a water-colorist,” wrote a third. They evidently had not heard the tale of his early attempts, and had not the fear of his caricatures before them. Gibson lived to confute their judgment and to prove his power as a colorist. That he had the root of the matter in him, and that he was qualified by temperament to see and feel the power of nature’s glowing hues he shows in a few lines of revelation, written out of his inmost spirit.

“How many beautiful pictures have I seen emerge from a cloud of dust upon a country road! How many of those pictures have again been half obliterated by the dust of after-years, only to be recalled to life by even so trivial a thing as the bleating of a lamb, the ring of a boyish laugh, or the homely music of the falling pasture bars!

“Pity for him whose heart knows no such sensitive and latent chord of sympathy to yield its harmony along the way, lending an inspiration to the present, while sanctifying the past, and drawing from its better memories a renewed delight in living! There is no walk in life, however dull or prosaic, no circumstance so commonplace, that they can stifle this ever-present melody. It sings in unison with nature in a thousand different keys—in a falling leaf or a cricket’s song. The rain-drops of to-day but repeat the old-time patter on the garret-roof. The noisy katydid, whenever heard, is that same untiring nightly visitant outside your window to whose perpetual whim you loved to listen, and in fancy tantalize until you dropped off to sleep upon your pillow. This skimming swallow sailing near will never cross your path but so surely will he fly to those same old nests beneath the barn-yard eaves. If there is ever a blessed mood ‘most musical, most melancholy,’ it may be found beneath the refining influence of just such reminiscences; for whether or not there are added elements of home association, there are always a legion of indelible memories that love to linger along the country road and lane—highways and byways beloved of fancy—paths of recollection filled with footprints which not even the tempest can obliterate.”

One rarely finds a profounder analysis of the true mean between breadth and detail, between effect and incident, nor a truer affirmation of one of the neglected sources of power in translating the larger aspects of the world than in the following:

“‘There is as much finish in the right concealment of things as in the right exhibition of them.’

“Here is a key to the very heart of nature, if one will only use it. And I would but add my faint echo in an entreaty for a deeper sense of the infinity of nature’s living tone and palpitating color—a plea for the more intelligent recognition of the elements that yield the tint which we vainly strive to imitate upon the canvas. Such knowledge will give a voice to every pigment on the palette, and to the brush an answering consciousness; for, whether disciple of a school or not, whether artist, poet, or layman, who can deny that such an attitude toward nature shall yield a harvest of deeper knowledge, and increased delight, not merely in the contemplation of the footprint, but even as truly in the study of the limitless panorama?

“Is there not to me an added charm in the pink flush that mantles the side of yonder mountain-spur when I know so well that it is shed by the myriads of blossoms in an acre of glowing fire-weed? And as my eye follows the cool cloud-shadow as it glides down upon the mountain-slope, among the varied patchwork of its fields and farms, is there not a deepened significance imparted to every separate tint that tells me something of its being?

“If in the faint yellow checkered forms I see fields of billowing wheat and barley, and recall a hundred of their associations, or if from that quaintly-dotted patch there comes a whiff from a sweet-scented field, with its cocks of new-mown hay, its skimming swallows and ringing scythes, with here a luminous gray of sandy meadow fresh from the plough or harrow, and there a weed-grown copse lit up with golden-rod; if that kaleidoscopic medley of grays and olives and browns tells me of its pastures, with their tinkling bells, of its fragrant beds of everlasting, ferns, and hardhack, its trailing junipers and its moss-flecked bowlders, and each of these in turn draws me still closer, and whispers something of itself—the everlasting with its pendent jewel, the orchis with its little confidant and nursling, the gentian with its close-kept secret and its never-opened eye; if yonder bluish bloom means a field of blueberries to me, and that snowy sweep brings visions of the blossoming buckwheat field, with its symphony of humming bees—tell me, have I not only seen the mountain-slope, but have I not also heard its voice?

Such a man could not keep out of the field of color. The feeling in him had to express itself. He must interpret on the canvas what he saw upon the hillside. It was inevitable that he should soon win as hearty praise for his color as he had for his drawing. Of course, the reputation could not be as wide as that he had achieved as illustrator in black and white. Fewer eyes could see his paintings than had been regaled with his illustrations. But when he laid down his brush, to paint no more, he had made a name for himself as one of the foremost American water-colorists.

It is but fair to say that his later experiences taught him a larger respect for “oil” as a medium of artistic expression. He was so eager to enlarge his field of work that he could not but venture upon experiments which brought to him a new sense of power and a knowledge of resources hitherto untouched. A few brief entries in his journal show his state of mind, and his prompt surrender of former prejudices. In March, 1881, he wrote:

“Painting for three weeks on oil-pictures for Academy Exhibition. First attempts in oil for exhibition. Trouble with medium. Final triumph of mind over matter. Painted a week or more on large autumn study commenced at Williamstown. Grew frantic and in a moment of frenzy took a piece of pasteboard and palette-knife and produced strongest picture I ever painted, in less than fifteen minutes,—a revelation which gave me confidence. A victorious fight with an oil-tube which had threatened to get the better of me.”

A few days later he tried a similar study, with which he was even more satisfied. In another entry he says of this attempt:

“Much pleased with effect of sky I carried picture to a finish by four o’clock. Went out and ordered frame for it. A Diaz effect,—quite strong. What a revelation to me who, ten days ago, was disgusted with oil-color as a medium! I am all aglow with enthusiasm at finding another medium for the expression of my thoughts and feelings.”

From this time forward he knew that there were still greater possibilities before him than he had realized, and with the knowledge came a fresh ambition, a stronger challenge to his artistic nature.

The “smoke-pictures” which he executed were one more example of his versatility and delight in new and daring methods. He did a great many of them, and they attracted much attention. They were, briefly, black-and-white pictures made by a gas flame upon a cardboard or paper ground. In his first experiments he held the paper before a horizontal flame and by passing one part after another across the flame, secured masses of lamp-black, which he found he could manipulate to great advantage. Landscape, cloud-effects, deep shadows of night or storm were easily within reach. Afterward he attached a rubber tube to his gas-fixture, and with a suitable nozzle was able to sit at his easel and manipulate the pipe as he would a brush. After the paper was well coated with varying shades of gray and black, he would work up the picture with brush or finger or palette-knife, deepening the tones, when desirable, by more smoke, lightening them by scraping and rubbing. The total effect was broad, yet marked by gradations so fine as to be almost beyond the reach of ordinary methods of black-and-white work; while the rich, velvety textures were of a depth quite remarkable. Though he never devised any method of “fixing” the smoke, yet after the lapse of a dozen years, these pictures, when preserved under glass, have kept all their original brilliancy and force.

But all that Gibson had done in his artistic career was to him only an apprenticeship. He meant more than he achieved. He was on the way to better things, when death stayed his feet. With all his tremendous intensity, his restless industry, his fulness of conception and scheme, he was yet a man of undreamed-of patience. He saw far ahead of what he had reached, and planned for it, and meant to attain it. He himself regarded all that he had done in black and white, in water-color, even his beginnings in oil, as only the preparation for a larger, stronger art, in which he should interpret the spiritual side of Nature. There was always before his mind a dream of the subtler phases of natural beauty, the deeper meaning she conveys to the listening soul. He was feeling, with more and more force every day that he lived, the spell of

and the passion grew within him to paint, in the most permanent and adequate medium, the things he was coming to feel and to see. Art was really his goal. Painting was his crowning ambition. His own view of his life was that he had but just fitted himself for a worthier task, that he was just ready to begin the work to which he was called.

CHAPTER V

THE OPEN EYE

WE have seen how the passion for the study of nature was born with Gibson, and grew with his growth. He was a naturalist by nature; and all his training strengthened in him the passion which made the young boy, with a “Cecropia” in sight, “feel like an eagle darting at her prey.” The natural world was to him a perpetual attraction, a land to be explored, a mystery to be searched, a delight to be enjoyed. The frontispiece to his chapter “Across Lots” in “Highways and Byways” represents an upland shrubby pasture, beyond whose limits gleam the waters of a pond, backed by a round-topped hill. In the foreground stretches a rail fence, with a gateway whose bars are dropped; and this open pathway to the wild fields and waters he has suggestively entitled “An Invitation.” That invitation was continually pressing upon him. He always felt it, outweighing all other calls, summoning him from every other career, bidding him take to the fields and the woods and the hills, to listen, to see, to learn, and to impart. In 1867, when he was a boy of seventeen, convalescing from a severe illness, he wrote to a dear friend:

“You ask me what I do all day. This question is very easily answered. It is the same thing over and over again day after day. The great part of the time I spend in the woods, alone. I start off about ten o’clock in the morning and ramble through the woods and thickets. There is one spot in particular which I frequent the most, because there are two wood-thrushes which invariably come and sing to me. This spot is a singular little dell. It is situated in front of a precipice two hundred feet high, in among ferns and large rocks which are shaded by hemlock trees. It is on these trees that the wood-thrushes sit and chant their songs by the hour. Oh, I do not believe I could be happy if this pleasure were taken away from me. I am always happy alone in the woods. I dare say I am destined to spend half my life in just such places. This is the daily program of the way I spend my time. Silly isn’t it? But I can’t help it. It is my nature to enjoy nature, and I mean to do it at every opportunity.” That outburst struck the keynote of Gibson’s life and spirit.

But his love of nature, like his knowledge of it, was broad and catholic. He was not a specialist in any narrow or pedantic sense. He was botanist, ornithologist, entomologist, biologist, all in one. A butterfly had as much interest for him as an evening-primrose, a chipmunk as a nuthatch. Everything was grist that came to his mill. Nothing could better illustrate this universal love of all living things, than a note which he left, on which he intended evidently to base a sketch. Imperfect as it is, it is an admirable illustration of his method and of his broad sympathy and interest. He begins with several experiments at a title, and then outlines his plan; after which he enumerates the “available episodes,” as he calls them, to fill the outline:

“‘A Rare Day with the Speckled Trout. Speckled Beauties. A Rare Day’s Trouting.’ See Burroughs’s ‘Speckled Trout,’ Prime’s ‘I go a-Fishing,’ Isaak Walton.

“Begin: It was the 29th of June. A glimpse of a large platter of speckled trout, a one day’s catch displayed with pride by a neighbor, revived my old-time zeal and reminded me that there was but one day left in which to beat the record. I consequently start off fully equipped, and meet with an interesting train of episodes, and an accumulation of a basket of specimens,—plants, insects, bird’s nests. Following the course of the stream, the incidents are such as are perfectly appropriate to this setting and the season. A trout occasionally alluded to, as an accessory, jumping, etc.

“Or begin with quotation about ‘Not even a minister is to be trusted on the subject of fish.’ Fish stories. I have one to tell which however it may compare with others has at least the merit of truth. It is true that I once caught forty-nine trout, within an hour; but that was not a circumstance to the fortune which has often since befallen me. My last is a fair sample of these lucky days.

“End something in this vein,—after an enumeration of natural beauties: And, by the way, the trout? There in the rippling pools; for I left them all there! And yet there are those who would have followed my trail, and have brought home nothing but a basketful of dead fish. Finish with some apt quotation or quaint proverb, of how one went and brought back chaff, and another fetched the kernel.”

It is plain that such a man as this did not love Nature for the sake of the contribution she made to his particular sport or his favorite study. He was one of that class whom Professor John Van Dyke has in mind, in entitling a certain book of his “Nature for Its Own Sake.” He was out after anything that mother Nature vouchsafed to put in his way, and he gathered up reverently whatever he found, as something good for him because it came from her. Witness a single incident in which he modestly attributes to fortune what was quite as much due to his own habitual alertness.

“By a fortunate train of weather conditions I was once favored with a phenomenon by which almost the entire vegetable bill of fare of the winter birds, at least in the way of seeds, was spread out before me—brought to my feet, as it were.

“Walking upon the firm and polished snow-crust, picking my way along a rail-fence at the foot of a steep, sloping pasture, I suddenly aroused into flight a flock of small birds from behind the bulwark of drifts with which the fence was hemmed in and partially buried. So loud was the united flutter of their wings that it at first suggested the whir of a partridge, until I saw it dissipated in the flock of smaller fry above the edge of the drift. They proved to be, as I remember, mostly snowbirds, white buntings, and goldfinches, though doubtless the cedar-birds, winter-wrens, tree-sparrows, pine and purple finches, were also among them. Their noisy flight was the signal for a general alarm all along the line, following the fence for several hundred feet, each zigzag corner sending up its winged bevy to perch and twitter upon the upper rails. Almost every projecting beam showed its chirruping sentinel.

“Interested to discover the secret of such a great feathery convocation, I crept up to the edge of the slippery drift and looked over. Beyond the fence rose the steep, white, glistening slope of the pasture, a distance of a furlong or more, its surface mottled with its brown withered vegetation. Following the rambling rails on either side were drifts of the most fantastic form, now and then almost peering above the fence riders, and between them ran a winding valley, in which the old fence seemed to be walking knee-deep in snow. It needed only a second glance into this hollow, whence the startled flocks had flown, to understand its attractiveness for the birds. Its depths were fairly littered with the choicest kind of allurement. The very cream of the pasture had flowed into this trough. It was the hopper which had received the entire wind-blown tribute of the weedy upland that looked down upon it, and of the overhanging woods far up the slope. Here were wind-rows of various seeds which had been dislodged from the weeds and trees and blown along the glassy snow to be caught in this convenient bin. The small goblet-shaped hollows around the projecting grass-stems were full to the brim with their good cheer, and the deeper vales and gullies were marked out everywhere by their brown meandering lines of intermingled chaff and seeds, often to the depth of two inches or more. A happy valley and a land of plenty, surely!

“A single handful of this grist taken up at random presented a surprising variety of elements, offering a wide choice for the most fastidious bird appetite. Curious to test this question further, I followed the fence for a long distance, occasionally sampling the meadow crumbs, and continually discovering some new ingredient of fruit or seed.

“Even the powdery chaff which I blew away in order to better reveal the larger morsels, proved to be the fine seed of various grasses and sedges; while among the more conspicuous which remained I noted the following considerable list, not to mention others which were then beyond my limited botanical knowledge. The seeds of the alder, birch, hemlock, ragweed, bur-marigold, and wild-carrot, were, perhaps, the most numerous and general. There was an exclusive colony of dried grapes assembled in one particular corner, doubtless laying their plans for a future arborescent monopoly of the rails in their vicinity. I found, also, numbers of larch seeds, both with and without their wings. Stag-horn-sumach, poison-ivy, ash, and hop-hornbeam representatives were frequent, and one chaffy handful, downy with goldenrod and aster seeds was lit up with a bright scarlet berry of black alder, like a tiny live coal in a bed of ashes. There was an occasional withered poke-berry to be met with, also fruits of sheep-berry, ampelopsis, juniper, and hawthorn. Another sample challenged my audacious familiarity with the fangs of a Cenchrus bur—the spiny fruit of the hedgehog grass, and still another was pretty well doctored with the poisonous seeds of stramonium, or jimson-weed, a line of which followed along the base of a drift like an open trail fuse of blasting powder leading up to a drill hole well calked with chaff. I recall also a few samaras of the tulip-tree, some hazel-nuts, oats, foxtail-grass seed, as well as several other queer diminutive forms which were unknown to me at the time, and which I cannot now identify from memory.”

If we were to name the quality most characteristic of his work as a naturalist, it would be his habit of close and accurate observation. He saw more of the objects and incidents of the natural world in a square rod, than most men, even fairly observant, would see in a square mile. His books are a mass of evidence of the minuteness and the accuracy of his observations; and his note-books tell with still greater force the story of his patience and industry in preparing himself to report what he had seen. They show that he looked and saw for himself, and that his stories of plant and insect life are genuine studies, at first hand. A fine instance of the personal observation and actual experience which lay behind his work is afforded in the case of the chapter upon the “Bombardier-Beetle” in “Sharp Eyes.” It is but a brief sketch, and reports only a curious performance on the part of a rather rare insect. But the observed facts on which it is based are set down in a record almost as long as the sketch itself, and in a manner to show the foundation of close attention and scrutiny to which he was continually subjecting the face of the earth. He writes under date of September 28th, at Williamstown, Massachusetts. The note begins with a memorandum to the effect that he carried his camera, with four plates, and that he observed tumble-bugs, ichneumon flies, and dung beetles. “In turning over a large stone, as is my habit in my walks, I discerned beneath it a little beetle which I at first supposed to be the common species, so closely resembling the Bombardier beetle of Europe. I had no special desire to capture it, and as it escaped beneath the grass and debris, my attention was arrested by a series of queer detonations, which made me suspect that some kind of a toad lay concealed near by. As I rummaged among the leaves I heard the queer report right at my fingers’ ends, and at the same time noticed a tiny cloud of smoke emerging from the same quarter. The fact then dawned upon me that perhaps I had discovered a genuine Bombardier. A moment’s search revealed the little fellow, and he discharged his battery six times or so. I captured him. I have not yet read of this species having been discovered in America. And certainly the allied species of this country possess no such detonating power. Before the detonation the body of the beetle would swell considerably. I kept the beetle and several of its allied species in a box some weeks afterward, and observed the explosion several times. Mrs. Gibson also heard it once and distinctly saw the small cloud of smoke of the volatile fluid. About two days after the capture of the Bombardier, I espied a beetle crawling on the floor of my room, and thinking that my pet had escaped I captured the insect. It proved to be another of the same species, but evidently of the other sex, and it was undoubtedly seeking for its imprisoned mate. There are numerous parallel instances in my own experience, but in this instance it is especially remarkable that I should find a second individual of a species so rare in America that I had never been able to find one before; and although I overturned at least a thousand stones during my stay in Williamstown, I was never able to discover another specimen.”

A few weeks earlier in the same summer, he recorded another incident which shows his alertness of eye and the success with which it was constantly rewarded. He was on a trip to South Amboy, to study orchids in a conservatory there. He wrote:

“In a ramble near the station I found (as usual) exactly what I had started out to hunt for, a large patch of milkweed. This luck is an every day experience with me and has long since ceased to be a surprise. Once let my vision be set on the qui-vive for any given object, and I am led to it as by some irresistible intuition. No matter whether the object sought be a four-leaved clover, a certain flower, a rare caterpillar, a gold-bug or a ‘walking-stick,’ I am soon rewarded. I was desirous of discovering a specimen of an insect laden with pollen of milkweed. In less than ten minutes I found a large tract of pollen, in full bloom. In an instant more I detected a beautiful Cetonia beetle, nestling in a tuft of blossoms. Soon there came a small yellow hornet, which I captured. Its legs were fringed with the pollen-masses. So were the toes of the beetle.”

Probably Gibson explains his own success in a sentence or two in one of his own chapters: “Anticipation is an equipment, the surest talisman to discovery, and anticipation may be quickened, either by pictorial hint or previous experience. The retina must be on the alert.” That certainly was true of his own eye, and the fact that he was such an enthusiastic seeker accounts in large measure for the fact that he was such a successful finder.

His notebooks show the broad scope of his observations and of his studies. They cover every corner of natural life. One day he would go out and bring back material for pages of memoranda concerning the chase of what he believed to be a hermit thrush. On another day he makes an entry of fourteen varieties of golden-rod analyzed, six kinds of aster, and, as he adds, “many others.” One page of his notes gives the results of careful experiments with three dozen dandelion blossoms, to determine how long the flower requires to pass from bud to the state when it floats away in silvery down. Another passage records in a minute description his first observation of the snapping of the witch-hazel seeds, to which he adds a list of a dozen subjects for illustration. He counts the number of different plants he finds in his city back-yard. He sets down the things seen in a walk through the Park with a lantern, from nine o’clock to eleven at night. He notes that on a certain June 29th, in the midst of a heavy thunder storm he heard the song of the Wilson thrush in the woods near his house. He makes liberal memoranda of the things most touching his attention after a fresh snow-fall. He sets down a list of more than a score of birds whose song he heard “in a continuous roundel,” while sitting on his porch on a quiet Sunday. Thoreau in his hermit haunts at Walden was not more minute and attentive in his observations than this eager three-fold worker, hurrying from city to country and back to city again, equally busy at sketching, and writing, and observing. There are pages upon pages of his notes which read like the “Natural History of Selborne” in their detailed and leisurely narrative of things seen and heard in the fields and beside the brooks. In these records of his intermittent life in the country one never hears the faintest echo of the bustling round of the dweller in cities. He drops all that when he locks the door of his town-house behind him. Once in the open air he is again the free and buoyant youth, preoccupied only by the purposes and the pursuits which belong to the open air, the meadow, and the wood. Indeed it seems as if his early training and experiences, those school-days at the “Gunnery,” the passions there born, the habits there fostered and confirmed, lay at the basis of all his life afield. He himself somewhere said: “To the average observer, if the eye is ever thus to be a means of grace, it must store up its harvest while hearts are light and life is new, when eyes are bright and undimmed. How many a prisoner caged in city walls is living on the harvest stored in free, unburdened youth, which has never been replenished.” Perhaps that was true of this observer so much above the “average,” and caught for half his time in the city’s durance.

But even there he proved again the truth of Lovelace’s lines:

He made the city rural, and told others his secret:

“How little do we appreciate our opportunities for natural observation! Even under the most apparently discouraging and commonplace environment, what a neglected harvest! A back-yard city grass-plot, forsooth, what an invitation! Yet there is one interrogation to which the local naturalist is continually called to respond. If perchance he dwells in Connecticut, how repeatedly is he asked, ‘Don’t you find your particular locality in Connecticut a specially rich field for natural observation?’ The botanist of New Jersey or the ornithologist of Esopus-on-Hudson is expected to give an affirmative reply to similar questions