Introduction xxxvii 



minute learning for which they could suggest no possible employment. 

 But the materials they 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 afterwards pile up with broad design into some noble fabric. 

 Even so, I 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 tediously monotonous 

 and destitute of wide informing principles to a modern reader. They 

 wrangled over the identity or distinctness 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 

 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 repre- 

 sented now 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 was one of the few eighteenth-century naturalists who 

 struck the key-note of a higher conception of biology. He was in many 

 ways the forerunner of Darwin and of Muller. 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 were 

 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 

 Earrington ; and many other similar remarks, show premonitions of the 



