X WHITE'S SELBORNE 



admiration year by year. 1 How well he improved his oppor- 

 tunities, a perusal of any one of his letters will amply attest. 

 But the opportune occasion and his inherent qualities as a 

 naturalist would have figured but little in the wonderfully 

 interesting record he has left, were it not for his swift infer- 

 ence, his unflagging patience, and the graphic, pleasing style 

 in which his facts are chronicled. To those who dwell amid 

 rural surroundings all their lives without making an observa- 

 tion about nature, his volume is a school, from which the 

 veriest tyro may learn to regard and record, nearly every one 

 having about him a fertile mine to be explored if he but set 

 about it in the right way. 



Analogous reasoning served White but rarely; his facts 

 are taken at first hand, or, as he himself says, from the sub- 

 ject itself, and not from the writings of others. His eye 

 was as keen as Thoreau's and Jefferies's, although he lacked 

 the vivid imaginative sense of the Walden recluse, and the 

 intensely artistic feeling of the great essayist of the Wiltshire 

 Downs. His modesty withal was on a par with his wondrous 

 patience, as was equally his spirit of contentment with his lot 

 in life. His studies of echoes and honey-dews, of wasps and 

 bees, of fogs and mists, of crickets and field-mice, of frosts 

 and meteors, of cobwebs and aphides all have a peculiar 

 charm as presented on his classic page ; while his " Natural- 

 ist's Calendar," compiled jointly with William Markwick, 

 which records the earliest and the latest times in which the 

 circumstances noted were observed, is almost a natural his- 

 tory in itself. 



But the birds were his favorite topic, whose habits he 

 never tired of investigating. It was his opinion that a good 

 ornithologist should be able to distinguish these by their air 



1 Perhaps I may be singular in my opinion, and not so happy as to convey to 

 you the same idea, but I never contemplate these mountains without thinking I 

 perceive somewhat analogous to growth in their gentle swellings and smooth 

 fungus-like protuberances, their fluted sides, and regular hollows and slopes that 

 carry at once the air of vegetative dilatation and expansion. Or was there ever 

 a time when these immense masses of calcareous matter were thrown into fer- 

 mentation by some adventitious moisture; were raised and leavened into such 

 shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs 

 into the sky so much above the less animated clay of the wild below? Letter L VI. 



