Nuttall & The Virgin Flowery Carpet

What chiefly distinguishes Thomas Nuttall’s ‘Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada’, is a virtue rare in scientific works, a fine literary style. There is nothing over-personal or elaborate in Nuttall's Manual such as there is in Audubon's "Biographies" or Rafinesques’ writings. The beauty of Nuttall's phrase and diction is not something perceived at once, as it would be in a poet's style: he is economical with his gift, and inserted it almost invisibly into his science, so that one quotation from his Manual would give any idea of the restrained art that pervades the whole book. Nuttall was in one way really original among American ornithologists: he made a specialty of studying birds in captivity, and thus he learned things about them which one might strive vainly to discover in the wild. He must, from his account, have kept a great numberof caged birds, all whistling and gabbling, in the old botanical garden.

The end of the Cambridge sojourn came when Harvard refused to grant him an extended leave to join an expedition, so he resigned, probably with a sense of relief, and signed with Captain Wyeth in a cross-continel exploration trip. And so it chanced that it was Nuttall who first picked many of the beautiful spring flowers from the slopes of the Rockies, the little alpine flora that springs up at the edge of perpetual snows, the virgin flowery carpet on which no botanist had gazed before.

He saw the wonders of California and visited the abundant beauties of the Hawaiian Islands. Thus it is that a large share of the finest wild flowers of Colorado and California and intermediate states, were first named Nuttall. On the return journey, around Cape Horn, Nuttall begged the captain to put him ashore, if only for a few hours, on that wild and mysterious spot: the chance to botanize Cape Horn comes to few men today and in that time it was more alluring still. However, the captain looked anxiously at the dark skies, and sailed on without gratifying our naturalist.

But when Nuttall reached Boston and went to pay for his passage, the shipowner would not take money from a scientist of such worth declaring that he had conferred a benefit on them, a humanity by his travels. Late in life Nuttall received an inheritance, an estate in England. It was given him on condition that he must live there nine months out of the year. This was distasteful to Nuttall, but because the money would benefit his favorite sister, he accepted the bequest, only once to return to us. He lived out his last days at "Nutgrove," a poor country gentleman, an exile in his native land, he said, who never ceased to regret that he had left America, with all of its natural beauties and the unexplored wonders of its wilderness that had lured the naturalist.

By: davidbunch

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