The value of the Concord Lynx

November 29. 

I told a man the other day that I had got a Canada lynx here in Concord, and his instant question was, "Have you got the reward for him?"

What reward?

Why, the ten dollars which the State offers.

As long as I saw him he neither said nor thought anything about the lynx, but only about this reward.

“Yes," said he, "this State offers ten dollars reward."

You might have inferred that ten dollars was something rarer in this neighborhood than a lynx even, and he was anxious to see it on that account. I have thought that a lynx was a bright-eyed, four-legged, furry beast of the cat kind. But he knew it to be a draught drawn by the cashier of the wildcat bank on the State treasury, payable at sight.

The fact was that, instead of receiving ten dollars for the lynx, I had paid away some dollars in order to get him.

Though we are never made truly rich by the possession of money, the value of things generally is commonly estimated by the amount of money they will fetch. A thing is not valuable - e.g. a fine situation for a house – until it is convertible into so much money, that is, can cease to be what it is and become something else which you prefer. The mean and low values of anything depend on its convertibility into something else and have nothing to do with its intrinsic value.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 29, 1860

See September 11, 1860 ("George Melvin came to tell me this forenoon that a strange animal was killed on Sunday. . . From his description I judged it to be a Canada lynx."); September 13, 1860 ("They who have seen this generally suppose that it got out of a menagerie; others that it strayed down from far north. They call it Canada lynx . . . I do not think it necessary even to suppose it a straggler, but only very rare hereabouts. I have seen two lynxes that were killed between here and Salem since '27. Have heard of another killed in or near Andover. There may have been many more killed as near within thirty years and I not have heard of it, for they who kill one commonly do not know what it is "); October 17, 1860 ("While the man that killed my lynx (and many others) thinks it came out of a menagerie, and the naturalists call it the Canada lynx, and at the White Mountains they call it the Siberian lynx, - in each case forgetting, or ignoring ,that it belongs here, - I call it the Concord lynx."); November 10, 1860 ("Richardson in his "Fauna Boreali-Americana," which I consulted at Cambridge on the 7th , says that the French-Canadians call the Canada lynx indifferently Le Chat or Le Peeshoo"); See also September 29, 1856 ("Dr. Reynolds told me the other day of a Canada lynx (?) killed in Andover, in a swamp, some years ago"); October 20, 1857 ("Melvin tells me that Skinner says he thinks he heard a wildcat scream in E. Hubbard's Wood, by the Close. It is worth the while to have a Skinner in the town; else we should not know that we had wildcats."); November 28, 1857 ("Spoke to Skinner about that wildcat which he says he heard a month ago in Ebby Hubbard’s woods . . a low sort of growling and then a sudden quick-repeated caterwaul, or yow yow you, or yang yang yang. He says they utter this from time to time when on the track of some prey."); February 15, 1858 ("Saw, at a menagerie, a Canada lynx. ") Compare Natural History of Massachusetts (1842) ("The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have disappeared "); March 23, 1856 ("I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here, — the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc., — I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.”)