80 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



standards and fashions, and made its toy Gothicism a 

 perfectly natural development of its decline. In spite 

 of its conformable style, it would have ostracized the 

 Natural History of Selborne, because its facts about real 

 things were an offence against good taste had the work 

 ever come within its radius of judgment. Thus, White 

 accomplished something very notable when, as I say, 

 he married urbanity to rusticity, the fine gentleman to 

 the dairymaid, a style like the " placid and easy flight " 

 of migrating swallows with the " life and conversation " 

 of the swallow himself. 



White's actual discoveries in natural history have 

 been so enormously extended and sometimes displaced 

 by Darwinism and all its later consequents and per- 

 fections that there is a tendency to belittle them. We 

 think of him as an author who contributed to our pleasure 

 rather than our knowledge. That is an injustice. Nor 

 is it only in the famous passage about earthworms 

 that " half the birds and some quadrupeds are almost 

 entirely supported by them," that they are the great 

 promoters of vegetation by boring, perforating and 

 loosening the soil and " rendering it pervious to rains 

 and the fibres of plants," that worm-casts are the finest 

 manure, and so on, and that the earth without them 

 would become " cold, hard-bound and void of fermen- 

 tation, and consequently sterile " that we can read 

 prophecy and anticipation of the overpowering revolu- 

 tion in men's thoughts about the world in the middle 

 of the nineteenth century, whose only analogy in evolu- 

 tionary significance is the discovery of metals. " A 

 circumstance respecting these ponds," he says in another 

 passage but rarely quoted, 



though by no means peculiar to them, I cannot pass over in 

 silence ; and that is, that instinct by which, in summer, all the 

 kine, whether oxen, cows, calves or heifers, retire constantly to 

 the water during its hotter hours ; where, being more exempt 

 from flies, and inhaling the coolness of that element, some belly 

 deep, and some only to mid-leg, they ruminate and solace them- 

 selves from about ten in the morning till four in the afternoon, 

 and then return to their feeding. During this great proportion 

 of the day they drop much dung, in which insects nestle, and so 

 supply food for the fish, which would be poorly subsisted but for 



