Reviewed by: "The Best Read Naturalist": Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson ed. by Michael P. Branch and Clinton Mohs Sean Ross Meehan (bio) "The Best Read Naturalist": Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson Edited by michael p. branch and clinton mohs Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017 252 pp. For too long, Ralph Waldo Emerson's place in the tradition of American nature writing has been largely restricted to one location: Nature, his first book, published in 1836. This restriction has reinforced the lingering doubt that Emerson's transcendentalism was appropriate for the increasingly material interests and scientific concepts of environmental scholarship, now known as ecocriticism. Emerson declares in Nature, "the whole of nature is a metaphor of the mind," a line that has given ecocritics a metaphorically allergic reaction (87). But the problem, as Michael P. Branch and Clinton Mohs argue persuasively in their introduction to "The Best Read Naturalist", is that this conception of Emerson's work and thought as "abstracted from material nature" neglects this author's active and public engagement with the material lessons of natural history and the emergent natural sciences throughout his long career (x). In organizing this much needed and thorough collection of Emerson's most significant nature writings, Branch and Mohs redress this problem by first turning attention to the lesser-known natural history writings that precede Nature. These earlier works include the 1832 sermon known as "God That Made the World" and the series of natural history lectures that Emerson delivered in 1833–34 before the Boston Natural History Society, beginning with "The Uses of Natural History." And just as important in this revision of the abstract Emerson, Branch and Mohs also extend the focus well beyond the 1836 Nature, including in the collection less familiar publications such as "The Method of Nature" (1844) and the 1844 essay titled "Nature"; also included are two important later lectures, "The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science" (1848) and "The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy" (1858). As David M. Robinson and Laura Dassow Walls have demonstrated, two Emerson scholars listed here in a brief bibliography suggesting further readings, Emerson's engagement with the discoveries of nineteenth-century science is both material to his work (serving as an ongoing lecture topic into the 1870s) and meaningful to his philosophy. Nineteenth-century poetics and science interact [End Page 214] throughout these works, making Emerson "arguably America's preeminent literary philosopher of nature" (xi). In refocusing attention on Emerson's interests in natural history and the natural sciences, this collection effectively repositions a "new and more environmentally connected Emerson" that will be of use to faculty teaching upper-level classes in American literature, environmental writing, and topics in environmental studies (xii). Given the exclusive focus on Emerson, adopting this collection for a course would most likely demand an extended case-study approach to Emerson as a representative figure of early American nature writing, potentially taking up one or two weeks of the schedule. As one who has taught Emerson extensively in courses on transcendentalism and environmental writing, as well as seminars on major American authors, I welcome the prospects for using this volume not only for its convenience but also as means to reimagine an environmental Emerson who could play a more vital role in English curricula and the environmental humanities. At the same time, though excited by the ways that Emerson can now serve to further our pedagogical "explorations in ecocriticism" (the title for the series in which this volume is published by the University of Virginia Press), I am also mindful of a limitation of this otherwise useful collection. Other than the volume's introduction and the brief headnotes introducing the context for each selection, there is no critical apparatus. After reading each selection, I wanted to know how Emerson's cross-disciplinary ideas and analogies—analogy being a master term for Emerson—might be taken up in different courses across the campus. Emerson speaks of "radical analogies" pervading the "laws of the world coexist[ing] in each particle" in the 1836 lecture "Humanity of Science" (116). How might this radically analogical thinking be read differently by students and colleagues in literature, philosophy, environmental...