xxxii Introduction 



visit Selborne itself. There, facing the chief street of the village, 

 you see a quiet and unobtrusive old house, which is the one 

 where White made his immortal observations and penned in 

 peace his immortal letters. As you look at the front towards 

 the street, indeed, you wonder that such a sight could afford the 

 bachelor parson sufficient opportunities for watching the intimate 

 life of birds and beasts as his correspondence shows him to have 

 ivatched it. But if you obtain the courteous permission of the 

 present proprietor to enter the house and inspect the garden, 

 you will no longer feel surprised. The front windoivs, it is 

 true, give upon a very compact street of eighteenth century 

 domestic architecture ; the back opens out upon a spacious lawn 

 and garden, sloping up towards the Hanger, and wooded with 

 fine old trees, some of them doubtless of Gilbert White's own 

 planting. Here the easy-minded Fellow of Oriel and curate of 

 Faringdon could sit in his rustic chair all day long, and observe 

 the birds and beasts as they dropped in to visit him. The Letters 

 are the vivid picture of a life so passed the life of a quiet, 

 well-to-do, comparatively unoccupied gentleman of cultivated 

 manners and scientific tastes, studying nature at his ease in his 

 own domain, untroubled by trains, by telegrams, by duns, by 

 domestic worries ; amply satisfied to give up ten years of his life 

 to settling some question of ornithological detail, and well pleased 

 if in the end his conclusions are fortunate enough to mett the 

 approval of the learned Mr. Pennant or the ingenious Mr. 

 Barrington. 



Those times have passed away. Science has become a matter 

 of special education. The field of the amateur has been sadly 

 curtailed. No man now can hope to attain to new facts or 

 generalisations without the copious aid of libraries, instruments, 

 collections, co-operation, long specialist training. But the calm 

 picture of this more peaceful and easy-going past is all the more 

 pleasant to us on that account. I confess 1 can never read a 

 page or two of White without recalling to my mind those ex- 



