SOURCE: Rossi, William. “Poetry and Progress: Thoreau, Lyell, and the Geological Principles of A Week.” American Literature 66, no. 2 (June 1994): 275‐93.

In the following essay, Rossi demonstrates that much of Thoreau's view of science can be traced to Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology.

Well‐known for its witty criticisms of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers's reflective sections as “digressions” from the boating narrative, James Russell Lowell's influential review quickly became the locus classicus for discussions of the book's apparent lack of coherence. “We come upon them like snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing placidly up stream or drifting down,” Lowell quipped. “We were bid to a river‐party, not to be preached at.” But a crucial feature of Lowell's evaluation which those who cite it never mention (irrelevant, as perhaps it has seemed, to any literary assessment) is the way...