8 GLAUCUS; OR, 
there is now established a society of subscribers 
and correspondents. They can remember, too, 
when, on the first appearance of Bewick’s “ British 
Birds,” the excellent sportsman who brought it 
down to the Forest was asked, Why on earth he 
had bought a book about “cock sparrows”? and 
had to justify himself again and again, simply by 
lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to con- 
vince them that there were rather more than a dozen 
sorts of birds (as they then held) indigenous to 
Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which turned 
the tide in favour of Natural History, among the 
higher classes at least, in the south of England, was 
White’s “History of Selborne.” A Hampshire gen- 
tleman and sportsman, whom everybody knew, 
had taken the trouble to write a book about the 
birds and the weeds in his own parish, and the 
every-day things which went on under his eyes, 
and everyone else’s. And all gentlemen, from the 
Weald of Kent to the Vale of Blackmore, shrugged 
their shoulders mysteriously, and said, “Poor fel- 
low!” till they opened the book itself, and dis- 
