xxxvi Introduction 



hand observation. Book-knowledge tends more and more to 

 supersede direct contact with nature. But White may suggest 

 to us a more excellent way. The record of his long years spent 

 in finding out for himself what the beasts and birds really did 

 do makes us feel that books are of little use beside direct eyesight. 

 Nowadays, the traveller in relatively new lands has to watch 

 the fauna and flora as White watched them in England ; but 

 at home in Europe it is too often the case that intimacy with 

 printed pages is substituted for intimacy with the objects they 

 describe for us. 



Nor is this all. White has another and a higher side. He 

 represents the dawn of the philosophic spirit in science. In no 

 small degree, he leads up to the generation of colossal thinkers 

 the generation of Lyell, Darwin, Spencer ; and Hiixley. 



The learned men of the sixteenth century, it often seems to me, 

 were individually wasted for the sake of humanity that came 

 after tJiem. They spent their lives in useless wrangling over 

 petty points of Ciceronian Latin and Periclean Greek ; they 

 accumulated stores of minute learning for ivhich they could suggest 

 no possible employment. But the materials tJiey collected proved 

 useful in time for the evolution of that higher type of scholarship 

 which came out in Gibbon and the French Encyclopedists, and 

 which has revolutionised the conceptions of ancient literature and 

 ancient history in our own day. These men were like brick-makers 

 who blindly fashion bricks which some great architect may after- 

 wards pile up ivith broad design into some noble fabric. Even 

 so, 1 feel, the men of science of the eighteenth century were 

 individually wasted for the sake of the future of their subjects. 

 They collected great masses of unrelated facts, which seem tedi- 

 ously monotonous, and destitute of wide informing principles 

 to a modern reader. They wrangled over the identity or dis- 

 tinctness of species. They framed with care endless artificial 

 systems of classification. They noted petty points of structure, 

 apart from function. And for the most part, they did it 



