1884-85-] Edinburgh Naturalists Field Club. 191 



led a body of Highlanders up the heights of Alma, and was 

 " winged " in the Indian mutiny, — an event, he says, much re- 

 gretted, because it obliged him ever after to play cricket with only 

 one arm. He became aide-de-camp to the Queen, and a C.B., and 

 now stands high in the service, and has recently written an 

 autobiography in two portly volumes, designated ' The Life of a 

 Soldier.' But he was ever mindful of his happy school-life, and I 

 see in his book he refers to our kind-hearted master, and mentions 

 me as one of the companions of his youth. 



Gilbert White was born in 1720 at Selborne, a village near Wol- 

 mer Forest, a secluded and picturesque spot in the eastern corner 

 of Hampshire. Wolmer is a corruption of Wolfmer, in the same 

 way that we have Cranmer and Hogmer, all after animals since 

 become extinct in these islands, — namely the Wolf, the Crane, and 

 the Hog or wild Boar. After a school career at Basingstoke, 

 White became a student at Oriel College, Oxford, where he gradu- 

 ated in 1743. He was elected a Fellow of his College in the next 

 year, and was one of the senior proctors of the University in 1752. 

 I need scarcely remark that he was always an ardent lover of 

 nature. He was curate of Farringdon for eighteen years, when he 

 accepted the same office in his native village of Selborne, where in 

 patient observation and careful recording of facts and phenomena 

 in natural history, he passed the remaining years of his tranquil and 

 uneventful life. He was often offered Church preferment, which 

 would have added much to his pecuniary emoluments ; but this he 

 always declined, from his strong attachment to his native village and 

 its surroundings, and felt that he should better consult his happiness 

 by remaining the quiet, unassuming, but very observant country 

 curate, than by going to a populous locality where his favourite 

 pursuits could not be followed. And we well believe he was right, 

 for had he accepted the offered preferment. White's ' Selborne ' 

 would never have been written, to become, as it has, the charm and 

 delight of future generations. 



There is no portrait existing of Gilbert White. He is described 

 by one of his parishioners as a little, slim, prim, upright man : 

 another says he was thought very little of till he was dead and 

 gone, and then he was thought a great deal of ; that he was a 

 quiet old gentleman, with very old-fashioned sayings ; that he was 

 extremely kind in giving presents to the poor, and that he used to 

 give a number of poor people a goose each every Christmas. He died 

 at Selborne unmarried in 1793, and his last illness must have been 

 of short duration, for there is a certificate of death signed by him 

 as curate on the 10th June, and he died before the expiration of 

 that month. He suffered at times from deafness, and he laments 

 this affliction, in a letter dated 1774, thus: "Frequent returns of 

 deafness incommode me sadly, and half disqualify me for a natural- 



