ExtractMonique Allewaert [E]ach wind is self-registering. THOREAU, JOURNAL, NOVEMBER 3, 1861 (last journal entry) Henry David Thoreau’s late, unfinished manuscript Dispersion of Seeds advances the theory of cross-species figuration and interpretation he slowly developed in his Journal. Thoreau’s Journal, which a number of Thoreau’s finest critics have argued was his primary work (Cameron; Walls; Arsić) , is a massive compendium of natural historical events occurring in and near Concord from 1837 through 1861. While occasionally entries to the Journal offer philosophical and literary mediations that scholars have excerpted as parts of larger analyses, more than anything it chronicles details that can only seem mind-numbingly incidental and without any taxonomizing principle. The unfinished Dispersion of Seeds, which Thoreau primarily wrote in late 1860 and revised in the fall of 1861 and into early 1862, was to offer the theory for registering and interpreting this surfeit of natural historical detail that he...