The Mentor: American Naturalists, Vol. 7, Num. 9, Serial No. 181, June 15, 1919

Published in the summer of 1919, this slender volume captures a pivotal moment in American environmental consciousness. In the aftermath of the Great War, Ernest Ingersoll turned his pen to six men who had fundamentally shaped how Americans understood their relationship with the land: John James Audubon, J. Louis Agassiz, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Ernest Thompson Seton. These were not merely scientists or artists but translators between the human world and the wild, men who documented, celebrated, and defended a rapidly vanishing American landscape. Ingersoll renders their stories with the earnest admiration of someone who recognized he was writing about the architects of a new ecological consciousness. The result is both portrait gallery and time capsule, revealing how early twentieth-century readers looked back at these figures as prophets of a wisdom America desperately needed to remember. For anyone curious about the origins of American environmental thought, this is a fascinating primary source: a window into which naturalists Americans chose to honor, and why, at a moment when the nation was redefining itself.