34 



SCIENCE- GOSSIP. 



AS UNRECOGNISED PIONEER. 

 By W. Johnson. 



IT would be absurd to deny tbat White of 

 Selborne has received full recognition as the 

 forerunner of observers who " look Nature in the 

 face." Unlike Eay, "Willughby, and Sir Thomas 

 Browne fn the seventeenth century, White studied 

 life and its phenomena objectively, not from the 

 recesses of a library. So much is frankly acknow- 

 ledged. But "White's labours as a discoverer and 

 an original thinker are nevertheless overlooked. 



In 1881 Darwin wrote his well-known work 

 " The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the 

 Action of Worms," in which he proved that these 

 creatures have rendered waste places fertile, 

 carpeted many a turfy lawn, and entombed many 

 a forgotten ruin. Yet, 105 years previously, Gilbert 

 White had pointed out that lands subject to 

 inundations are always poor, and that the probable 

 cause is the drowning of the earthworms. In his 

 thirty-fifth letter to Daines Barrington he remarks : 

 "Worms seem to be great promoters of vegetation, 

 which would proceed but lamely without them, 

 by boring, perforating, and loosening the soil, and 

 rendering it pervious to rains and the fibres of 

 plants ; by drawing straws and stalks of leaves 

 and twigs into it ; and, most of all, by throwing up 

 such infinite numbers of lumps of earth called 

 worm-casts, which, being their excrement, is a fine 

 manure for grain and grass." There is more to 

 the same purpose ; but let us turn to a wonderful 

 foreshadowing of Darwin's " Variation of Animals 

 and Plants under Domestication." The passage 

 is not a long one, and occurs in White's forty-fourth 

 letter to Pennant. The gist of it runs thus : " For 

 my own part, I readily concur with you in supposing 

 that house-doves are derived from the small blue 

 rock-pigeon, for many reasons," one of which, as he 

 proceeds to show, is the fact that some pigeons will 

 often betake themselves to " inaccessible caverns 

 and precipices " to rear their young. Further, he 

 quotes that trite, but in this case most luminous, 

 aphorism as to the uselessness of trying to drive 

 out Nature with a pitchfork. Again, we have a 

 hint concerning the agency of insects in securing 

 cross-fertilisation. " Bees," he writes, " are much 

 the best setters of cucumbers," and he advocates 

 tempting these pollen-carriers by means of " a little 

 honey put on the male and female bloom. When 

 once they are induced to haunt the frames, they 

 set all the fruit, and will hover with impatience 

 round the lights in the morning till the glasses 

 are opened. Probatum est." 



Until recent years, when the brothers Garton com- 

 menced their experiments in Lancashire, scarcely 

 any attempts were made to improve the quality 

 of the cultivated grasses, or even of the corn crops, 



which, of course, are also grasses. Yet in 1778 

 White, after stating that " of all sorts of vegeta- 

 tion the grasses seem to be most neglected," con- 

 tinues in this manner : " The study of grasses would 

 be of great consequence to a northerly and grazing 

 kingdom. The botanist that could improve the 

 sward of the district where he lived would be a 

 useful member of society ; to raise a thick turf on 

 a naked soil would be worth volumes of systematic 

 knowledge ; and he would be the best common- 

 wealth's man that could occasion the growth of 

 ' two blades of grass where one alone grew be- 

 fore.' " Who shall say how many students in the 

 colleges at Aspatria, Cirencester, and Downton 

 are to-day reaping, all unconsciously, the first- 

 fruits of the labours of men who have received, 

 also unconsciously, their inspiration from the 

 Selbornian book ? 



Many gardeners and agriculturists now living 

 can remember the time when scarcely anyone 

 thought of the practical application of the re- 

 searches of zoology. The names of Kirby, Spence, 

 Newman, Riley, Howard, and Ormerod spring to the 

 lips as those of the heralds of this kind of economical 

 wisdom. Turn now to those dull days when the 

 War of Independence was still in progress, and 

 the quiet sage of Selborne is found writing thus : 

 " A full history of noxious insects hurtful in the 

 field, garden, and house, suggesting all the known 

 and likely means of destroying them, would be 

 allowed by the public to be a most useful and 

 important work. What knowledge there is of this 

 sort lies scattered and wants to be collected ; great 

 improvements w T ould soon follow of course. A 

 knowledge of the properties, economy, propaga- 

 tion, and, in short, of the life and conversation of 

 these animals is a necessary step to lead us to 

 some method of preventing their depredations." 

 White does his part in this task, and many are the 

 references to the mole cricket, the cockchafer, 

 the Cynips gall-fly, the horse warble fly, the black 

 turnip-fly, the aphides, and the cockroach (Peri- 

 planeta orientalis), the last, it may be noted, being 

 then a comparatively recent importation, and 

 found only in a few villages. The Board of Agri- 

 culture now issues free leaflets dealing with insect 

 pests. How much damage might have been saved 

 had White's advice been acted upon a century ago ! 



In the early part of the " Natural History " 

 there is a detailed description of the geology and 

 soil of the Selborne district. A long line of editors 

 and annotators found difficulty in interpreting the 

 allusions to the "veins of stiff clay," the "rock of 

 white stone, little in appearance removed from 

 chalk," the "black malm," the "white malm, a 



