Introduction xxxvii 



all without one glimmer of generalisation, one passing glimpse 

 of an idea or a theory. We would think their work impossible 

 did we not know it to be true, and did we not see the same type 

 of mind represented noiv in the restricted local botanist and 

 ornithologist of to-day the man who revels in the splitting of 

 critical species, who discovers some new spot on a butterfly's wing, 

 and who makes it his highest glory to have given his own name 

 to this or that insignificant variety of the common stitchwort or 

 the ordinary earwig. 



Gilbert White ivas one of the few eighteenth-century naturalists 

 who stnick the key-note of a higher conception of biology. He 

 was in many ways the forerunner of Darwin and of Milller. 

 His work stands out among the work of his time as conspicuous 

 for its philosophical tone and spirit. He is always observing 

 just those points about life which ivere afterwards to supply clues 

 to the inner secrets of nature. Thus he notes how the young of 

 the stone-curlew love to skulk among the stones in a flinty field, 

 "which are their best security ; for their feathers are so. exactly 

 of the colour of our grey spotted flints, that the most exact 

 observer, unless he catches the eye of the young bird, may be 

 eluded" This is the germ of the theory of Protective Mimicry. 

 In the same way, his remarks on the influence of food upon 

 colour in Letter XV. to Pennant ; his notes on the habits of the 

 swift in Letter XXII. to Barrington ; and many other similar 

 remarks, show premonitions of the final development of rational 

 biology. As to his prescient observations on the part played by 

 earthivorms in the economy of nature, I have already called 

 attention, in my little book on " Charles Darwin" to the extra- 

 ordinary way in which they anticipate our great biologist's 

 theories and experiments in that direction. Indeed, throughout, 

 White was one of the fezv early naturalists who recognised the 

 importance of the cumulative effect of infinitesimal factors a 

 truth on which almost the whole of modern biologv and geology 

 are built up. As zoologist, as botanist, as meteorologist, as 



