Introduction xv 



to pay a Master of the Royal Buckhounds, or as men, not 

 many years ago, did to support the Royal Falconer. 



But there is another point of view from which White may 

 be regarded. He was an example of an almost new and un- 

 known kind of man in his own day, and to-day we see him as 

 an example of the kind of worker met with much more 

 amongst so-called "amateurs " than amongst so-called "men 

 of science." Embryology, miscroscopical anatomy and the 

 like have for years past attracted the attention of prominent 

 stars in the world of science to a much larger extent than the 

 study of living nature as it is to be seen in the field, in the 

 botanic garden, or in the aquarium. Perhaps this is not un- 

 natural, for, in the first place, constant patient work has pretty 

 well exhausted the possibilities of these islands for seekers 

 after new species. And, again, the vast field of physiological 

 work opened up by the microscope is one where conceptions 

 of greater magnitude may be come by than in the humbler 

 paths of systematic work. Yet it is surely to be regretted 

 that the attractive and educational subject of field botany 

 should have been so sorely neglected by professional 

 botanists as it has been for these years past. Physiological 

 and microscopic botany is a fine study — no one doubts it — 

 but for children and young students, to my mind there are 

 few more interesting and useful introductions to science than 

 that of field botany — the study of the now despised Natural 

 Orders. 



Perhaps time is bringing its revenge, for the whole bio- 

 logical world is now agog about Mendelism, and what is 

 Mendelism but the result of the work in his garden on common 

 peas of a little-known Abbot of an obscure Abbey. To the 

 seeing eye and the mind trained to study and comparison 

 there is much still to be learnt— much, there is a whole world ! 

 — from the common things which are all around us every 

 day. Those who commit themselves to these studies know 

 not only the joys of discovery — be their discoveries but of a 

 very modest character — but they know also the joys of the 

 open moor and the quiet stream, of " the wind on the heath," 

 of still starry nights when moths were the chase, of the silent 

 movements of the creatures of the wood, when man, the 



