XX INTEODUCTION 



In the eyes of many naturalists (Gilbert White among the 

 rest) Barrington did good service by issuing a form for the 

 observation of periodical natural phenomena. This was the 

 Natu/ralisfs Calendar, which was published regularly for 

 many years. Here were provided columns for meteorological 

 readings, and for the appearance or disappearance of leaves, 

 flowers, insects and birds. It was hoped that the Calendar 

 would rescue many facts which would find a use at some 

 future day. Even in White's diligent hands little seems to 

 have come of these formal entries. He did, it is true, fill his 

 own copy of the Naturalises Calendar with valuable notes, 

 but it is not the things demanded by Barrington, it is the 

 thoughts of Gilbert White himself which give them all their 

 present interest. Any book of blank paper would have done 

 just as well for a vehicle. In natural history and meteorology 

 mere facts are cheap as summer dust ; we want not heaps of 

 crude facts, but facts arranged and interpreted, questions and 

 the answers to questions. From Bacon's time to ours sanguine 

 men have vainly hoped that records of occurrence, bald notes 

 of time and place, and so forth, would furnish valuable material 

 to the future worker. But the fruits of such labours have not 

 answered expectation ; perhaps we might say that there were 

 no fruits at all, or at least that they were never gathered in. 

 Real scientific investigators have not troubled the dusty piles 

 of records and statistics ; they have trusted to fresh and living 

 experience. After nearly a century and a half, crowded with 

 unavailing labours, we may claim to be wiser in some particu- 

 lars than Barrington and White ; we can see better than was 

 then possible which of their schemes were hopeful and which 

 hopeless. It is now time to recognise that the mechanical 

 exploration of nature is barren. Nothing has come or will 

 come (as Biot long ago declaimed) of systematic observations 

 made without special object by men who record with busy 

 pen but unreflecting mind. 



Dr. Richard Chandler (1738-1810), to whose learning and 

 diligence White's account of the antiquities of Selborne owed 

 so much, was first made widely known by his description of 

 the Oxford marbles {Marmora Oxoniensia, 1763). He was 

 afterwards sent with two companions by the Society of Dilet- 



