As Emerson will argue and Thoreau will demonstrate, metonymy names and figures a transitional relation between the rhetorical and the empirical. Metonymy ("change of name") figures relationship by way of association through physical or temporal contiguity. Representing one thing by way of its proximal or concrete relation to another thing (or a particular part of the same thing), metonymy is the key trope of empiricism, as poet-critic Lynn Hejinian has argued and demonstrated (with reference both to James's "radical empiricism" as well as to Thoreau's "contact"): "A metonym is a condensation of its context"; "metonymy conserves perception of the world of objects, conserves their quiddity, their particular precisions." In linguistic terms, metonymy is the trope of "contexture" and compression that theorist Roman Jakobson associated with realism and viewed as the antipode to the more abstract form of symbolic displacement characteristic of metaphor. (13) Thoreau's figuring of Walden as "earth's eye," for example, is metaphor, a rather Emersonian sounding one, if we think back to the "transparent eyeball" of Nature; referring to the pickerel of Walden as "small Waldens in the animal kingdom," Thoreau invokes metonymy, the phrase compressing the pickerel's context in the pond's "scale of being," thus signaling linguistically its ecology of relation through biological compression. (14) In Thoreau's Morning Work (1990), H. Daniel Peck has Jakobson's definition of metonymy in mind when he characterizes Thoreau's relational imagination and his journal's "endless elaboration of the natural world through association." (15) In its attention to particularity and to context, metonymy offers the compositional tools for that more intensely empirical writing scholars have found emerging in Thoreau's later work. And yet, this literal figure of empirical contact with the world, metaphor's earthy opposite, as it were, has received little attention from ecocritics interested in Thoreau's own opposition to metaphor.