Relationship of John Muir and John Burroughs: "I love you, though at times I want to punch you or thrash the ground with you."

In early 1909, two of the country’s most prominent naturalists had gathered at the rim of the Grand Canyon.

(This photograph is in the public domain and downloaded from National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.)

John Burroughs (1837-1921), seated on the left in the photograph, had journeyed from his home territory in the Catskills of New York, to be guided by John Muir (1838-1914), standing on the right, on a trek to the Petrified Forests, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite, part of Muir’s stomping ground.  

Muir, born in Scotland, was known for his exploration of the American West and his environmental activism and efforts to preserve the American wilderness, as well as for his writings on Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, among other places.  Environmentalist Bill McKibben captured the power of Muir’s writing and his broader importance:  “Beyond its pragmatic force, Muir’s prose introduced an ecstatic new grammar and vocabulary of wilderness into the American imagination:  in some sense, every national park on the planet owes its existence to the spell he cast.”  (McKibben, 2008, p. 84.  Full citations to this and other sources are given at the end of this post.)

Burroughs, in contrast to the peripatetic Muir, had a narrower home range, focused primarily on the Catskill region in New York.  This area was the inspiration for much of his writing that included genial essays, many about the flora and fauna of his Catskill home.  McKibben observed that Burroughs “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. . . . His gift for close observation and large meaning launched the nature essay as we know it.”  (McKibben, 2008, p. 145.)

Burroughs and Muir were an odd couple, to be sure.  Their temperaments could hardly have been more different, and their views of nature could clash.  It was a friction-filled bond, mostly maintained at a distance with several brief meetings and a couple of extensive trips together (the one in 1909 that found them at the Grand Canyon and an expedition to Alaska in 1899).  The relationship was complex, replete with stinging comments and sharp disagreements, though, through it all, I feel there was deep affection.

This post is the result of a serendipitous find made when I was gathering material on New England stone walls (perhaps a topic for a future post).  A stupidly phrased search (using just the word “walls”) of the Middlebury College archive on the Internet Archive turned up a letter written by Muir on June 1, 1910, to Francis Fisher Browne (1843-1913), editor of the literary review The Dial, ostensibly to congratulate him on the 30th anniversary of the magazine.  (Muir, 1910.)  Browne had been part of the group, including Burroughs, that Muir led in 1909 to the Grand Canyon and elsewhere.  Part of the two-page letter was devoted to describing the various writing projects Muir had underway, but, by far, the most interesting part to me was what Muir wrote about his fellow naturalist John Burroughs.  This letter was my introduction to the wonderfully intricate bond between the two men.  (Middlebury College is my alma mater and I assumed that a school in Vermont might have some material related to stone walls in its archives.)

According to Muir biographer Donald Worster, when the two men met for the first time in 1893, “the two Johns were instantly mated for life.”  (Worster, 2008, p. 334.)  This bond, however strong, would be filled with sharp elbows as each man poked at the other.  This post explores some of the backstory to their relationship and shares some examples I particularly enjoy of the personal give and take between the two.  On the way, I will quote from Muir’s June, 1910, letter and provide the source for the sentence quoted in the title.  Bottomline:  this post has no hook, no twist, and no fossils.

One source of tension was that they did not always see eye to eye on nature and science.  For example, for much of his life, Muir expressed a pantheistic view of nature, and saw an underlying divinity and goodness in it.  Later in life, a theism crept into his writing:

His earlier pantheistic tendencies, which celebrated every nodding flower, every zephyr, as divine in itself, became more muted.  “All beauty, all is God,” he had once maintained.  Now he was more careful to reassure his more conventional readers that beauty is made by God.  (Worster, p. 374-375.)

It was a viewpoint not shared by Burroughs.  In a review of Muir’s book The Yosemite, Burroughs took him forcefully to task:

Mr. Muir is a nature-lover of a fine type, one of the best the country has produced. But it may be the reader gets a little tired at times of the frequent recurrence in his pages of a certain note – a note which doubtless dates from his inherited Scottish Presbyterianism. Whatever else wild nature is, she certainly is not pious, and has never been trained in the Sunday-school. But, as reflected in Mr. Muir’s pages, she very often seems on her way to or from the kirk. All his streams and waterfalls and avalanches and storm-buffeted trees sing songs, or hymns, or psalms, or rejoice in some other proper Presbyterian manner.  (Burroughs, 1912, p. 1165.)

To my mind, the more important source of sparks between the men was the dramatically different personalities of the two.  Muir was a talker.  Worster posited that Muir “liked to gab only a little less than he liked to hike.”  (Worster, 2008, p. 3.)  As a raconteur, Muir sought center stage with his stories and anecdotes.  He was also argumentative, often provoking his listeners and engaging in verbal sparring.  Burroughs considered him a tease.  (Barrus, 1914.)  In comparison, Burroughs was taciturn.  When relating to other people, he looked for conversation and an amicable exchange of ideas, not confrontation.

Muir was impatient with people, Burroughs decidedly more gentle and genteel.  When both Burroughs and Muir joined an expedition to Alaska in 1899 that was mounted to survey the area’s natural resources, things did not go well for Burroughs.  "Muir . . . got on other people's nerves, particularly those of his friend and fellow literary naturalist Burroughs."  (Worster, 2008, p. 361.)  Burroughs, distressed and dismayed by the Alaska wilderness, longed for home.  Muir was not sympathetic.  Worster wrote, “The two men remained bonded in name – 'the twa [two] Johnnies' they were called – and in cause, but Muir was openly disparaging toward Burroughs and his insufficient ardor for the wild."  (Worster, 2008, p. 362.) 

The June 1, 1910, letter that Muir typed to Browne offers delightful evidence of their sometimes fraught connection.  Muir noted that he’d recently written Burroughs suggesting that the naturalist move to the West Coast, urging that he:

write more bird and bee books instead of his new-fangled Catskill Silurean [sic] and Devonian geology on which he at present seems to have gane gite, clean gite, having apparently forgotten that there is a single bird or bee in the sky.  I also proposed that in his ripe mellow autumnal age he go with me to the basin of the Amazon for new ideas, and also to South Africa and Madagascar, where he might see something that would bring his early bird and bee days to mind.  (Muir, 1910.)

Gane gite, clean gite.  This is how Muir dismissed Burroughs’ relatively recent interest in geology, a field that he, Muir, had long embraced and expounded upon, particularly with regard to the impact of glaciers in Alaska and Yosemite.  He joked to Browne that, with regard to geology, Burroughs had “gane gite, clean gite.”  Lovely Scottish expression.  Using the Dictionaries of the Scots Language website, I translate it as:  “gone mad, clean mad.”

This is just one of a multitude of examples of how Muir’s Scottish roots were never far below the surface.  Worster observed:  “Muir, regardless of where he traveled, would remain a Lowland Scot all his days.  Only secondarily would he become a product or patriot of his adopted United States or a citizen of the world.”  (Worster, 2008, p. 14.)

Muir’s observation about Burroughs and geology was, I think, actually serious business.  Muir, critical of Burroughs’ embrace of geology, suggested he ought to go back to his “bird and bee books.”  Was there a note of territoriality over the science and some condescension here?  At least as far as the science is concerned, I think there was.  I find quite telling an anecdote that Clara Barrus (1864-1931) recounted from that 1909 tour of the Petrified Forests, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite.  Barrus, a physician, was Burrough’s intimate companion and had accompanied him on this tour led by Muir.  As the two Johns explored the Petrified Forests, Burroughs kept posing questions about the geological processes involved and Muir, despite his well known expertise, derided the questions, at one point telling Burroughs, “Oh, get a primer of geology, Johnnie.”  (Barrus, 1914.)

Later in his June, 1910, missive, Muir reminded Browne of an incident that occurred during the 1909 trip.

I often think of the misery of Mr. Burroughs and his physician caused by our revels in Burns’ poems, reciting verse about in the resonant board chamber whose walls transmitted every on the blessed words to the sleeping and unwilling ears of John, much to the distress of Miss Barus [sic].  Fun to us, but death and broken slumbers to [typewritten word inked out] Oom John.  (Muir, 1910.)

Again, the Scots side of Muir shines forth as does the apparent penchant for winding people up.  Recitation of Robert Burns' verse at the top of the lungs was likely intended to interrupt Burroughs' sleep and upset Barrus.

Not surprisingly, Burroughs was irritated by some of Muir's behavior on the trip.  For instance, Barrus, in awe of being in the august company of the two naturalists, recounted the following exchange she had with Burroughs:

One day at the Cañon, feeling acutely aware of our incalculable privilege, I [Barrus] said, “To think of having the Grand Cañon, and John Burroughs and John Muir thrown in!”

“I wish Muir was thrown in, sometimes,” retorted Mr. Burroughs, with a twinkle in his eye, “when he gets between me and the Cañon.”  (Barrus, 1914.)

What I really see is an honesty in their relationship born of deep friendship, despite the many flashes of pique.  That is, I think, clearly revealed in an exchange of letters from November and December, 1909.  Geology is at the center of it again.  Burroughs had sent Muir a manuscript he’d written about Yosemite, drawing on the trip he’d taken with Muir earlier in the year.  In it, he’d delved into the geological origins of the valley.  Muir, responding with a typed note on November 26, 1909, didn’t mince words in his criticism.

I have read your Yosemite Ms. and can make nothing of it.  You saw so little of the Valley I think you had better say little or nothing on its origin.  Leave it all out is my advice.  It can do no good to yourself or others to try to tell what you have no chance to know.  Compare this haphazard brazen ignorance with the careful loving life-long bird studies that made you famous.  You must be growing daft.  You say, “come study the geology of the Catskills – those Devonian rocks”.  Could I do it in a day as you did Yosemite, I would come flying.  (Muir, 1909a.)

You must be growing daft.  After delivering those blows, Muir signed off with “Ever faithfully your friend and admirer.”

I assume Burroughs responded to this note with some vitriol and, presumably, argued quite stubbornly against Muir’s take on the geology.  Though I have not located a copy of such a letter, it's evident that Burroughs did pen one because, on December 14, Muir wrote again, seemingly in response to the missing letter.  He opened somewhat defensively:

Now, dear Burroughs, don’t waste your good nature.  I only did as you requested with the Yosemite geology, but you give me no thanks – only the other stuff.  (Muir, 1909b.)

Only the other stuff.  Whoa!  I do wonder what Burroughs wrote.

In the letter, Muir went back on the offensive (perhaps throwing some of Burroughs' words back at him).

If obstinacy, unyielding as Yosemite dome, strangely mixed with lover of flowery hills and dales, bees and trees, bird song and brook song, is a Scotch characteristic, then you, my dear John, are as Scottish as I am or ever likely to be.  (Muir, 1909b.)

Basically, he told Burroughs that without sustained study on site, he would never come to understand the geological origins of Yosemite.  And then he extended an olive branch:

[N]ow that you have got Yosemite on the brain, why not come again.  I’d be delighted to have you, in spite of your rank Scotch Catskill stubbornness, and you might perhaps learn to endure or ignore my glacial behavior and airs.  (Muir, 1909b.)

Burroughs, clearly moved, responded on December 28th.  

You are a dear anyway, Scotch obstinacy and all, and I love you, though at times I want to punch you or thrash the ground with you.  But I have my laugh at your expense — when you are not around.  The other day I said to a friend, “Muir will not agree with you about anything.  If you were to say, ‘Now, Muir, two and two make four anyway,’ Muir would reply, ‘Well, three and two make five, but what of that, Johnny.’  My friend replied, ‘That is the Scotch of it.’ "  Well, it is all right — I love the Scotchman too, and I will forgive him all his quips and jibes and fun at my expense if he will come here next year and help me study the geology of my native Catskills and of the Shawangunk grits at Mohonk.  (Burroughs, 1909.)

(The Shawangunk Grit is a type of bedrock, also known as Shawangunk Conglomerate that can be found at the Mohonk Preserve in New York.)

I love you, though at times I want to punch you or thrash the ground with you.  I sense that that's the relationship from both men's perspective in a single sentence.

Their loving, though contentious, ties would be permanently broken in 1914 with Muir’s death.  Of that passing, Burroughs’ journal entry of December 25, 1914 is quite poignant:

News comes of John Muir’s death – an event I have been expecting and dreading for more than a year.  A unique character – greater as a talker than writer; loved personal combat, and shone in it.  He hated writing, and composed with difficulty, though his books have charm of style; but his talk came easily and showed him at his best.  I shall greatly miss him though I saw him so rarely.  (Burroughs, 1928, p. 283.)

Sources

Clara Barrus, Camping with Burroughs and Muir, excerpted from Our Friend John Burroughs, 1914, as presented on the Sierra Club website.

John Burroughs, letter to John Muir, December 28, [1909?], Scholarly Commons, Item 5209,  John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library.  Though Burroughs failed to note the year on the letter, I believe, given what he wrote, that he was responding to Muir’s December 14, 1909, note.  Indeed, the transcription to the letter on the University of the Pacific Library website cites the date as “[1909?].”  I believe the title given to the letter and the heading to the PDF of the letter citing the date as “[1910?]” are incorrect.

John Burroughs, John Muir’s “Yosemite,” Literary Digest,  June 1, 1912, p. 1165, 1168.

John Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, edited by Clara Barrus, 1928.

Bill McKibben, editor, American Earth:  Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, 2008.

John Muir, letter to Francis Fisher Browne, June 1, 1910, scanned version of original document contained in the Abernethy Manuscripts Collection at Middlebury College, available at the Internet Archive.

John Muir, letter to John Burroughs, November 26, 1909a, Scholarly Commons, Item 5933, John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library.

John Muir, letter to John Burroughs, December 14, 1909b, Scholarly Commons, Item 5946,  John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library.

George Washington Wilson ~ His Photographs a Century and a Half Later

One of my favorite photographers is George Washington Wilson (1823 – 1893) who described himself as an artist and a photographer, always in that order.  Though this post features no fossils, there is geology (eventually) and natural history (broadly speaking).

At the outset, a note about sources is in order.  Various sources are cited throughout this post, but special attention should be directed to Roger Taylor’s richly detailed and accessible biography titled George Washington Wilson:  Artist & Photographer (1823~1893), published in 1981.  I’ve relied on Taylor’s work for details of Wilson’s life and for an understanding of the photographic processes of the time.  Unless otherwise noted, please assume that Taylor is my source.

I know George Washington Wilson from his incredibly broad portfolio of beautiful stereoviews which he published in the latter half of the 19th century from establishments in Aberdeen, Scotland.  Shown below is an example of one of his stereoviews, featuring side-by-side photographs of a rowboat on the Loch of Park, Aberdeenshire, at sunset.  I believe Wilson photographed this scene sometime in the late 1850s.

A stereoview is a card on which are pasted two printed photographs of the same subject taken from very slightly different perspectives.  When the card is viewed through a stereoscope, a three- dimensional image is created.  Stereoviews are discussed in several posts on this blog, including this one.

The card presented above includes images that I find particularly striking both for their artistic composition, as well as for the technical mastery they reflect.  As to the latter, if one considers the photographic processes and equipment in use at the time (more on those later) and the challenge of capturing clear images of objects that cannot be posed, including, in this instance, the water, the clouds, and the rowboat with its occupants, the photographs are even more amazing.  Photographs of objects in motion, labeled “Instantaneous,” were difficult to obtain and highly prized.

Son of a tenant farmer, Wilson trained as a painter and specialized in portrait miniatures, finding success with his paintings in Aberdeen during the late 1840s and early 1850s.  This was also a time of striking technological developments in photography which led to the creation of a new, burgeoning business category in Europe, Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere – the professional photographer.  In the 1850s, Wilson expanded his business to include photographic portraits.  Shortly, he fully committed to photography, a move certainly fueled by his success in fulfilling a commission from Prince Albert to photograph the construction of Queen Victoria’s Balmoral Castle.  From his ongoing relationship with the Queen and her family, Wilson would identify himself as Photographer to Her Majesty in Scotland.  Seen below is a photograph by Wilson of the Castle; it was not part of his commissioned construction series.

This image and all others appearing below in this post were selected from stereoviews.

Wilson was also an entrepreneur with a keen eye on the bottom line.  He saw the potential for photographs to generate substantial income.  In 1854, the carte de visite had made its appearance, featuring a posed photographic portrait of one or more individuals mounted on a small (2 ½ x 4 inch) card.  Due to its relatively low cost and ease of exchange, the carte de visite offered a much broader swathe of the general public the opportunity to have and share images of loved ones. Wilson lost no time in focusing on this photographic technique and format, a move which proved financially successful.  But, quite quickly, he felt compelled to push beyond the subject matter and technical limits of the carte de visite, taking his cameras into the wider world to capture landscape images, as he clearly had done in creating the photographs for the stereoview of the Loch of Park presented earlier.

To take photography on the road was no mean feat because Wilson was using the wet-collodion technology to capture his images.  When a scene was to be photographed, the photographer first had to create a light sensitive plate.  Roger Taylor describes the process as follows:

The collodion solution was, for the most part, commercially prepared by dissolved gun cotton in ether.  The photographer then used this viscous mass to coat a glass plate which had been carefully cleaned and degreased.  After an even coating had been applied, the ether present in the solution evaporated, leaving a moist absorbent film adhering to the plate.  This was then made sensitive to light by dipping it into a bath of silver salts which were readily taken up by the collodion film.  After the excess solution was drained off, the still moist plate was secured in a light-tight plate holder so that it could be taken into the light and to the camera for exposure.  (p. 194)

This whole process had to be undertaken in near total darkness.

To develop the image that had been taken up by the film on the glass plate, the photographer carefully followed another series of complex and sensitive steps.  This involved submerging the plate with the captured image in pyrogallic and acetic acid, a step requiring the photographer to judge when the image was correctly developed.  The image was then fixed on the plate using a solution of the highly poisonous hypo or potassium cyanide.  Again, the photographer worked in near darkness.

Wilson outfitted a wagon with the requisite hardware and chemicals and, accompanied by an assistant, undertook journeys throughout Britain taking photographs.  The image below, which features a view of the Pass at Ballater (in Aberdeenshire, near the River Dee, Scotland) may include in the left foreground Wilson’s own horse-drawn wagon, his darkroom on wheels.  The wagon is also an example of how Wilson often included something in his photographs to provide a sense of scale.  On occasion he used a wagon, more often it was one or more people.

The degree to which Wilson found financial triumph as a photographer cannot be overestimated.  His firm also printed photographs in larger, single-image formats.  In due course, Wilson became “the world’s largest publisher of photographs,” and, fulfilling the demand for his images, must have taxed his establishment.  (John Jones, Wonders of the Stereoscope, 1976, p. 54.)  In the 1870s, G.W. Wilson & Company had some 45,000 glass negatives from which it produced photographs for sale.  The average daily production of prints was estimated by Wilson’s son Alexander at 3,000; thus, potentially a million prints were produced annually.  (Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography From 1839 to the Present, 1982, p. 105.)

It was no accident that the success of his enterprise coincided with the explosion of tourism.  Presumably rising incomes coupled with the expansion of rail lines in Great Britain turned travelers into sightseers and tourists.  Tourists, of course, sought mementos of the places visited, and photographs quite nicely satisfied that need.

Regardless of the commercial success Wilson enjoyed, it’s the beauty of the photographs that are the heart of his claim to fame.  He brought an inspired artist’s eye to his work, his photographs reflect careful creative intention.  They are typically tightly composed images that, to my mind, merit the label art.

Though landscapes may have been a predominant subject of his photographs, he also created many stunning images of other subjects.  These included, perhaps most prominently, the interiors and exteriors of cathedrals throughout Britain.  Seen below is one example:  the nave of Gloucester Cathedral in England.

He also photographically explored the ruins of abbeys and other religious structures.  Pictured below is a view of Melrose Abbey in Scotland.

Wilson has been called one of the two “giants among British stereographers” and the one “who had no peer in scenic photography.”  (William C. Darrah, The World of Stereographs, 1997, p 104.)

There are among Wilson’s landscape photographs, a small handful to which I am powerfully drawn, not just for the artistry expressed in the image, but, primarily, for the stories of natural history (interpreting that term broadly) that are told in the images.  Here are three of those.

Fingal’s Cave, Staffa

The first shows the entrance to a geological structure known as Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa, in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides.

It’s a remarkable photograph of a remarkable geological structure, the enormity of which becomes clear when one spots the two (perhaps three) men standing to the right of the mouth of the cave.  The cave, which acquired its name from the hero of an epic poem by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, has walls that stand about 72 feet tall and the opening extends some 269 feet.  These awe-inspiring hexagonal basalt columns are products of a lava flow some 60 million years ago.  Such geometrically symmetrical columns are relatively common features of basalt structures because, as lava solidifies and cools, the stresses from temperature change and pressure can generate vertical fractures, or columnar joints, at the surface of the basalt.  These then spread into the interior of the basalt.  Those at the surface begin as tetragonal joint networks, developing into hexagonal joints as they journey inward.  (Atilla Aydin and James M. DeGraff, Evolution of Polygonal Fracture Patterns in Lava Flows, Science, January 29, 1988.)

That’s a stab at a scientific explanation for these columns.  Folklore would have it that the cave is one end of a bridge that stretches to the geologically similar Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.  Purportedly, an Irish giant created the bridge in order to travel to Scotland to defeat a rival.  The basalt columns on Staffa are indeed geologically linked to the Giant’s Causeway.

It’s not surprising that Wilson’s portfolio included photographs of the basalt columns on Staffa.  The island became a tourist attraction beginning in the late 18th century, attracting such luminaries as Queen Victoria, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Jules Verne, and Sir Walter Scott.  In addition, the cave has inspired musicians from Felix Mendelssohn to Pink Floyd.  (Jeff Wallenfeldt, Fingal’s Cave, Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

Cheesewring

I love this photograph of the “Cheesewring” structure near Liskeard in Cornwall in part because it looks for all the world as though it’s about to fall on the poor person seated at its base.  An example of Wilson’s sense of humor, I suspect.

The Cheesewring (still standing) is a granite tor; a tor is a stack of stone blocks that forms naturally through differential weathering and erosion of rocks.  According to the novelist Wilkie Collins, the name of this tor supposedly comes from its resemblance to a Cornish cheese press, also called a “wring.”  (Rambles Beyond Railways; or Notes in Cornwall, 1851, p. 58.)

The Cheesewring stands amid a landscape punctuated by other standing rock or fallen tors.  Collins described it with some literary flourishes:  “The whole plain appeared like the site of an ancient city of palaces, overthrown and crumbled like atoms by an earthquake.”  (p. 61)  He offered two explanations of the Cheesewring.  Either it was built by Druids or it was the result of geological forces.  He opted for the latter, though his explanation of the way in which those forces conspired to stacks these rocks leaves something to be desired.  (Admittedly, the same criticism applies to the explanation I provided above.  I haven't found a satisfactory one, though, clearly, I, too, opt for one grounded in geology.)

I do really enjoy Collins’ characterization of the Cheesewring itself:  “If a man dreamt of a great pile of stones in a nightmare, he would dream of such a pile as the Cheese-Wring.  All of the heaviest and largest of the seven thick slabs of which it is composed are at the top; all the lightest and smallest at the bottom. . . .  When you first see the Cheese-Wring, you instinctively shrink from walking under it.”  (p. 65)

Stonehenge

There’s a certain logic in moving from Cheesewring to Stonehenge given the association of both in the popular imagination with Druids.  Wilson visited Stonehenge possibly in 1860 and took several pictures of it from different vantage points.  The image below shows the megalithic structure from the East.

Stonehenge was the product of intense labor by neolithic peoples, an effort that stretched over millennia, beginning 5,000 years ago as a circular ditch dug into the dirt.  The area was graced at some later point with wooden posts; said posts were replaced with large stones beginning in roughly 2,600 BCE.  The amount of labor required to quarry the multi-ton stone slabs, move them from the quarry to the site on the Salisbury Plain, and then erect them is almost unfathomable given the technology available at the time.  Current thinking about the purpose of Stonehenge includes two primary hypotheses, one astronomical in nature (functioning as an observatory), the other religious (possibly focused on ancestor worship).  (James Owens, Stonehenge, National Geographic.)

The image above that Wilson took of Stonehenge from the East is curious.  It’s almost as though he wanted to have the viewer first believe that the stones erected on the plain are relatively small.  He took the photograph from such a distance, including a broad expanse of grass, that puts the circle of stones into the deep middle ground.  It’s not until the sheep in the scene, the man leaning against one of the center pillars, and the wagon on the right all come into focus, that the impressive size of the structure comes clear.

I’ll close by observing that, more than 150 years after George Washington Wilson traveled across Great Britain photographing the landscape, his images are still speaking.