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NATURE 



{March 21, 1878 



been written. The third remarkable brother was John, 

 who was for a considerable time chaplain at Gibraltar, of 

 which place he wrote a zoology that unfortunately was 

 never printed, and of which the manuscript seems to 

 have vanished, though Prof. Bell says the introduction to 

 it is in his possession. Pity it is he has not given us this 

 fragment, for some of the hints and suggestions that Gil- 

 bert was always imparting to John, his " most steady and 

 communicative correspondent," must surely be therein 

 contained, and it could not fail to have been a valuable 

 addition to these volumes. In the next generation were 

 " Jack," son of the aforesaid John, and a pupil of 

 Gilbert's, who thought highly of him, and Samuel 

 Barker, another nephew, an agreeable and evidently 

 valued correspondent of his uncle's. It seems hardly 

 possible but that diligent research would not have 

 recovered more of these younger men than we find here 

 recorded. 



Of Gilbert himself we doubt not Prof. Bell has done 

 all in his power to gather information, and in some 

 respects he has been successful. Born at Selborne in 

 1720, he went to school at Basingstoke, and to Oxford in 

 1739. There he graduated B.A. in 1743, and the follow- 

 ing year was elected to a Fellowship at Oriel, which he 

 enjoyed till his death. Taking orders he successively 

 held two curacies in Hampshire, one at Selborne till 

 1752, when he filled the office of Proctor ijfiinior Proctor, 

 Prof. Bell is careful to tell us) for a year. Then he took 

 another Hampshire curacy for a couple of years, at the 

 end of which time he came once more to live at Sdborne, 

 which remained his home till his death. In 1757 he 

 accepted the living of Moreton-Pinkney, in Northampton- 

 shire, but the preferment must have been small, as it did 

 not incapacitate him from holding his Fellowship, and, 

 according to the custom of the times, residence was not 

 required of him. The following year his father died, but 

 he did not come into the family property at Selborne — 

 " The Wakes," now possessed by Prof. Bell — until the 

 death of an uncle in 1763. He seems to have made 

 Pennant's acquaintance about 1767, or perhaps a httle 

 earlier. In 1768 we find him writing to Banks, and the 

 following year began his correspondence with Barrington, 

 who, in 1774 and 17 75, communicated to the Royal 

 Society those ever-memorable monographs of the British 

 Birtmdines, which first made known White's powers of 

 observation and felicity of expression. In 1774 he refused 

 no fewer than three college livings, for he was doubtless 

 in easy circumstances, and once more accepted the curacy 

 of his birth-place. At the age of sixty-nine his single 

 book was published, and he survived its appearance just 

 four years. Another event in his life must be noted here 

 — his attachment to the sister of his college friend Tom 

 Mulso. What hindered their union does not appear, but 

 in 1760 the lady was married to Mr. Chapone, and was 

 subsequently the authoress of several well-known works, 

 and a celebrated "blue-stocking." We have to thank 

 Prof. Bell for collecting most of these facts and dates 

 now for the first time published, but they are not very 

 easily gathered from his memoir. 



Of course we have no occasion here to review the 

 letters to Pennant and Barrington which formed the 

 original " Natural History of Selborne." Their place in 

 literature and science is assured. It were impertinent to 



speak of their merits, or to indicate their few— very few 

 — defects. Being the results of the personal experience 

 of their author they will hold their ground for all time. 

 Never before, perhaps, was there so careful an observer, 

 and since, we know of but one other so accurate. That 

 other has no doubt surpassed his predecessor in the 

 ingenuity of his induction and the versatility of its appli- 

 cation, but it is no detriment to Gilbert White that he 

 should be ranked as an observer second only to Mr. 

 Darwin. Numerous editors have tried their hand in 

 annotating this ever-popular work, and many more will 

 make the same attempt. Prof. Bell is chary — too chary, 

 perhaps, of his comments — but if he errs lie errs on the 

 safe side, and readers who have been disgusted with the 

 inanity or the flippancy of the notes to some recent editions, 

 will rejoice that in him they have an editor whose remarks, 

 if they be but few, are always to the point, and never in 

 bad taste. 



Now we ought to consider the new letters, but the length 

 of this article warns us that we must be brief in what we 

 say of them. They remove the present edition from 

 comparison with any other, and we have sincerely to 

 thank Prof. Bell for having shown us, by printing them, 

 that White was even more than had formerly appeared. 

 Every grace of style, every power of thought — in a 

 word, every good quality which was foreshadowed in the 

 famous epistles to Pennant and Barrington is doubled, or 

 more than doubled in intensity in the letters now given to 

 the public — letters, too, which were never prepared by 

 their writer for publication. We have him before us as the 

 instigator to good works, the sage adviser in matters 

 literary and scientific, the self-denier, the man of affec- 

 tionate relations, the man of high aspirations, yet humble ; 

 simple, yet full of humour ; a recluse, yet a man of the 

 world in the best sense. We long to subjoin extracts 

 from them, but want of space renders that impossible. 

 Our readers will read and judge for themselves. It 

 must suffice to say that there are more than one hundred 

 from Gilbert's pen, of which scarcely a dozen have ever 

 been printed before, in addition to a most interesting cor- 

 respondence between John White and Linnajus on the 

 zoology of Gibraltar, and letters from various members 

 of the family which faithfully reflect, as it were, in a 

 remarkable manner Gilbert's own natuie, besides a few — 

 too few, unfortunately — addressed to him by men like 

 Lightfoot, Skinner, Montagu, and Marsham. For the 

 sake of these we readily forgive all th2 shortcomings of 

 the present volume — even the want of a table of contents 

 and of a good index. 



OUR BOOK SHELF 



Proceedins^s oj the London Mathematical Society, vol. 



viii. (November, 1876, to November, 1877), 321 pp, 



(Messrs. Hodgson.) 

 This goodly-sized volume bears testimony to the activity 

 of its members, and contains twenty-nine papers, pub- 

 lished in extenso. We may specially refer to one 

 or two. The ''Pure" side of the subject of mathe- 

 matics, as usual, is the favoured one, and furnishes 

 memoirs by Prof. Cayley on the condition for the exist- 

 ence of a surface cutting at right angles a given s-t of 

 lines, on a general differential equation, geometrical illus- 

 tration of a theorem relating to an irrational function of 

 an imaginary variable, on the circular relation of Mobius 



