Excerpt from Notes on New England Birds
It may be well here to point out the office of the brackets, as differentiated from parentheses, since their use is not always understood by readers. Brackets, as used nowadays by most writers and print ers, show the interpolations of the editor, while the parentheses are the author’s own. Thus, in the present volume, a question-mark in brackets, indicates that the editors of the Journal were in doubt as to whether they had rightly interpreted Thoreau’s hand writing, but the same in parentheses, is Thoreau’s own query.
So, too, in the notes, those which are bracketed are the editor’s, while the unbracketed notes are later an notations by Thoreau, usually in pencil, upon the pages of his manuscript journals. The editor has felt free to quote or paraphrase the notes of the published Journal, for a large share of which he was primarily responsi ble, and he believes that Mr. Torrey will pardon him if in a few cases he has used the latter’s phraseology without giving specific credit for it. The present notes are much fuller than those in the Journal, the plan of which did not admit of extensive annotation.
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