xxviii Introduction 



this point, a gradual development towards literary treatment. 

 The series addressed to the Hon. Daines Harrington, another 

 naturalist of the day, began a little later than that already 

 alluded to : its coiirse was in large part contemporaneous with 

 the course of the letters written to Pennant. A similar change 

 of tone may be observed in this correspondence also between the 

 earlier and the later members of the series. 



About the year 1784, when France and America were in 

 ferment, White must have finally adopted the design of publish- 

 ing both sets of letters, though as early as 1776 he had debated 

 the matter. At that time, I conjecture, he produced most of the 

 first nine (artificial] letters as at present arranged ; but one of 

 them may perhaps be made up of fragments from a real com- 

 munication addressed to Pennant. These introductory chapters 

 are not, as a matter of fact, real letters at all: they consist of a 

 general and formal description of Selborne, its position, soil, 

 surroundings, and so forth ; and their contents might far better 

 have been thrcnvn into the natural form of a preface, save that 

 White in his excessive modesty perhaps shrank from even the 

 bare appearance of deliberate authorship. A single sentence 

 in Letter IX., however, where he refers to the spring of 1 784, 

 allows us to see that these introductory epistles, which pretend to 

 usher in the series, were really an afterthought, designed to put 

 the reader in a position for understanding the matter that 

 folloivs. One or two subsequent letters, more comprehensive in 

 scheme, I believe to have been added or expanded at the same 

 period. 



The first edition of the collected correspondence appeared in 

 1789, the momentous year of the great French Revolution. It 

 was published by Gilbert's brother Benjamin, a bookseller in 

 London the same who gave to Selborne Church the beautiful 

 old German altar-piece which still adorns it. White only out- 

 lived the appearance of his work by four years ; he died in 

 1793. the culminating year of the Terror in Paris. These 



