Vol. xxxiii.] 24 



family, which could never have been penned with the view 

 of publication, and have never been retouched, as in those 

 which he addressed to his stately correspondents, Pennant 

 and Barrington, for use in their works. Then, too, there is 

 the complete absence of self-importance or self-consciousness. 

 The observation or the remark stands on its own merit, and 

 gains nothing because he happens to be the maker of it, 

 except it be in the tinge of humour that often delicately 

 pervades it. The beauties of the work, apart from the way 

 in which they directly appeal to naturalists, as they did to 

 Darwin, grow upon the reader who is not a naturalist, as 

 Lowell testifies, and the more they are studied the more they 

 seem to defeat analysis.' 



To this it may be added that Gilbert White wrote of 

 Nature as he. saw it at first hand, and not from the opinions 

 and observations of other men ; to use his own words (Letter 

 X. to Barrington) : ' Faunists as you observe, are too apt to 

 acquiesce in bare descriptions, and a few synonyms : the 

 reason is plain ; because all that may be done at home in a 

 man's study, but the investigation of the life and conversation 

 of animals, i& a concern of much more trouble and difficulty, 

 and is not to be attained but by the active and inquisitive, 

 and by those that reside much in the country/ 



Enough perhaps has been said about the general interest 

 of the ' Natural History/ but the far reaching and important 

 influence which its appearance exercised on the study of 

 Ornithology in Great Britain deserves more than passing 

 attention ; not only may it safely be said to have done more 

 to promote a love of Ornithology in this country than any 

 other work that has been written, but it did so at a time when 

 such an incentive was sorely needed. The latter half of the 

 eighteenth century had seen the appearance of several costly 

 and ambitious Ornithological works, of which Catesby's 

 'Natural History of Carolina ' was the forerunner, which, 

 dealing with rare and exotic species and depicting them in 

 highly coloured plates, had to a large extent deflected the 

 attention of Ornithologists from the study of their native 

 birds, and had turned the thoughts and enterprise of observers 



