PUBLISHERS' PREFACE TO THE 
FOUETH EDITION. 
INCE the publication of our first edition of 
this work^ in the autumn of 1875^ there has 
appeared in the ^^Transactions of the Norfolk 
and Norwich Naturalists^ Society a series 
often recently discovered letters from Gilbert 
White to Eobert Marsham, with the corresponding replies. 
The extreme interest which attaches to these new letters, 
and the fact of their having been edited for the Society by 
Mr. Harting has enabled us to reprint them in an appendix 
to our present edition, and thus lay before the reader in 
one volume all that has hitherto come to light from the pen 
of the historian of Selborne. 
Those who desire to possess Marsham^s replies to these 
letters, must be referred to the volume of the Society's 
Transactions for 1875-76, in which the entire corre- 
spondence is published. 
