xxxii Introduction 



Europe at that period was full of -patient and honest observers like 

 White, on whose basis the vast superstructures of Cuvier, Owen, 

 and later of Darwin, were at last to be raised. But most of them are 

 now, as individuals, forgotten, because they did not personally commit 

 their work to print and paper, save in the 'Transactions of learned 

 societies. In White's " Selborne" on the other hand, we have crystal- 

 lised and preserved 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 ; 

 we 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 considera- 

 tion. It 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 

 the test of time ; but the works themselves are as dead as Scopoli and 

 Linnaeus. 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 about beasts or 

 birds, about plants or flowers, about rocks or fossils, about the laws 

 of nature, would dream of going for facts and observations to authors 

 of the eighteenth century. All that those authors had to say of 

 importance 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 value as instruction, but solely for the sake of its 

 place as a stepping-stone in the history of science. 



Letters like White's, 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 under- 



