features and to put the reader into sympathetic com- 

 munication with them, that is another matter. 



Hence back of all, the one thing that has told 

 most in keeping White's book alive is undoubtedly 

 its sound style — sentences actually filled with the 

 living breath of a man. We are everywhere face to 

 face with something genuine and real ; objects, ideas, 

 stand out on the page ; the articulation is easy and 

 distinct. The style of the born writer is like an open 

 fire : we are in direct communication with his mind; 

 we see the play of the forces at work ; we get that 

 precious sense of reality. All this is true of White's 

 pages. Yet he had no literary ambitions. His style 

 is that of a scholar, but of a scholar devoted to 

 natural knowledge. There was evidently something 

 winsome and charming about the man personally, 

 and these qualities reappear in his pages. 



White was a type of the true observer — the man 

 with the detective eye. He did not seek to read his 

 own thoughts and theories into Nature, but sub- 

 mitted his mind to her with absolute frankness and 

 ingenuousness. He had infinite curiosity, and de- 

 lighted in nothing so much as a new fact about the 

 birds and the wild life around him,. To see the thinof 

 as it was in itself and in its relations, that was his am- 

 bition. He could resist the tendency of his own mind 

 to believe without sufficient evidence. Apparently 

 he wanted to fall in with the notion current during 



the last century, that swallows hybernated in the 



xi 



