Introduction xxxi 



served for us the very stages by which each plane of truth was 

 slowly arrived at. We assist at the deliberations of the early 

 biologists. We see them comparing and identifying species ; we 

 find them fighting for or against some hoary but untenable 

 tradition ; ice note their eager love of truth, their burning desire 

 for exact knowledge, their occasional reluctance to abandon some 

 cherished fable which now seems to us too childish for such Men's 

 serious consideration. Jt is therefore as a historic document 

 that the " Natural History of Selborne " most of all appeals to 

 us ; it shows us by what steps science felt its way in the later 

 years of the eighteenth century. 



Moreover, it is essential to insist upon the point that the 

 interest of these Letters is now chiefly literary. No other work 

 of science of that age survives practically to-day. The contents 

 and results of such works, it is true, survive in modern books, so 

 far as they have stood tJie test of time ; but the works themselves 

 are as dead as Scopoli and Linnceus. Why is this ? Simply 

 because science is always growing ; and even the best of scientific 

 books become rapidly antiquated. Nobody who seriously wishes 

 to-day to learn anything abotit beasts or birds, about plants or 

 flowers, about rocks or fossils, about the laivs of nature, would 

 dream of going for facts and observations to authors of the 

 eighteenth century. All that those authors had to say of im- 

 portance has been adopted, adapted, modified, codified, added to, 

 made more accurate by writers of the nineteenth. When we 

 return upon our steps to read a systematic scientific work of the 

 last century it is never for the sake of its Talue as instruction, 

 but solely for the sake of its place as a stepping-stone in the 

 history of science. 



Letters like Whites, however, stand on a somewhat different 

 footing. We read them partly indeed for this same purpose, as 

 moments in the development of biological thought, but still more 

 as vivid and graphic pictures of a phase of existence. Fully to 

 understand " The Natural History of Selborne" one ought to 



