Transcendental Flowers

Henry David Thoreau's seed plants are examined by REED C. ROLLINS, Director of the Gray Herbarium at the University Herbarium. Six portfolios of dried and mounted specimens collected by Thoreau were given to the University recently by the Trustees of the Concord Free Public Library.

Thoreau gathered most of the specimens between 1850 and 1856, when he "traveled widely in Concord." After friends berated him for the beaten appearance of his hat, which he used to carry the plants after he picked them, he said, "It was not so much my hat as my botany-box."

The seed plants were presented by Thoreau to the Boston Society of Natural History, and by the Society to the Concord Library. Thoreau's collections of grasses and sedges, the property of the New England Botanical Club, are also deposited at the University Herbarium.

In the picture, Rollins compares a Thoreau specimen with the description in Bigelow's Plants of Boston and Vicinity, published in 1814, which Thoreau used to identify plants. Thoreau (1817-1862) graduated from Harvard in 1837.