xxxiv Introduction 



He liked the drone of flies among 



His netted peaches ; 

 He liked to watch the sunlight fall 

 Athwart his ivied orchard wall ; 

 Or pause to catch the cuckoo's call 



Beyond the beeches. 



Such of a surety was Gilbert White s ideal ; and we may almost 

 add of him, in Mr, Dobsons apt phrase, " His name was Leisure" 

 Time was not then money ; if was opportunity for enjoyment, for self- 

 development, for culture. And as such White used it, with a con- 

 sciousness of dignity and a sense of worthiness in life which have 

 almost faded out of our hurried modern existence. 



'Tis as a literary monument, therefore, I hold, that we ought above 

 all things to regard these rambling and amiable Letters. They 

 enshrine for us in miniature the daily life of an amateur naturalist in 

 the day 3 when the positions of parson, sportsman, country gentleman, 

 and man of science were not yet incongruous. And in this spirit and 

 from this point of view I have thought it best to edit White's charming 

 volume. I have not attempted the impossible task of bringing our 

 author' s biology " up to date," as a matter of technical modern imforma- 

 tion. To do so would be to overload the work with useless notes, 

 which could only distract the attention of the reader from what is 

 central and essential to the time and place of the original writer. 

 When White wrote, the very convenient Linn<ean system' of nomencla- 

 ture, for example, which marks genus uniformly by one substantive and 

 species by one epithet, had not yet fully superseded the clumsier old 

 descriptive method; so that White frequently refers to birds or 

 mammals by the cumbrous and uncertain many-worded names bestowed 

 upon them by Ray and other early naturalists. I have not in every case 

 endeavoured to correlate these with the accepted modern scientific titles, 

 partly because the identification is often doubtful, but still more because 

 the book must be read in the historic and not in the strictly scientific 

 spirit. Tou must think yourself back mentally into White's position. 

 On the other hand, I have desired to prevent the work from giving 

 currency to really false or exploded views, and still more from being a 



