82 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



he understood it for what it was, a time, however 

 brief, of energy, happiness, change and experiment, 

 a time of effort and adventure, in which social life and 

 parental love play an increasing and expanding part 

 in its progressive struggle. 



The Natural History of Selborne is an inquiry into 

 the " life and conversation of animals," and it would 

 be a mistake to treat it as something different from 

 itself — a record of field observations. There is little 

 that is old-fashioned here, and the errors are a guarantee 

 of the soundness and perspicuity of White's judgment. 

 He never discovered that the swift is not a congener 

 of the " hirundines " ; he never distinguished between 

 the tree and meadow pipit ; he confused the call notes 

 of the great with the marsh tit, and he was strangely 

 unaware of the existence of the cirl bunting, though 

 it sings to this day in the little churchyard where he 

 lies buried. He knew the sedge — ^that " delicate poly- 

 glot " — but not the reed warbler ; the yellow wagtail 

 and the whinchat, but not that they were migrants ; 

 and he is sorely tempted by the theory that martins 

 and swallows pass the winter in crannies and holes and 

 at the bottoms of ponds, a wildness of hypothesis he 

 would not have entertained for a moment had he 

 possessed an A B C knowledge of anatomy. And White 

 was quite right to be puzzled about the sudden appear- 

 ances of a few swallows and martins on a warm winter's 

 day. 



But these nugoe antiques are a featherweight against 

 his enrichment of natural history. In bulk his 

 letters are indeed extraordinarily free of blunders and 

 howlers, and British zoology owes a great deal more 

 to him than the discovery of the harvest mouse, as 

 English literature owes a great deal more to him than 

 an initiation into the mastery of letter-writing. He 

 wrote charming and faithful sketches of caprimulgus ; 

 he found out that the sexes of chaffinches separate 

 in the winter ; he was the first to distinguish wood- 

 wren, willow-wren and chiff-chaff, and other fine things 

 too numerous to mention. Natural knowledge prac- 

 tically begins with Gilbert White, just as he is the 



