ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.] 
Nature Notes : 
THE SELBORNE SOCIETT'S MAGAZINE. 
No. 209. MAY, 1907. VoL. XVIII. 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
By the Right Hon. Lord Avebury, D.C.L., F.K.S. 
Delivered April 26, 1907. 
NCE more I have to congratulate you on the return of 
spring and the prospect of summer. Moreover, among 
the pleasantest incidents of this most charming season 
of the year — as regards which Tennyson asks : — 
“ Can trouble live with .-^pril days 
Or sadness in the summer moons ? ” 
the meeting of the Selborne Society is not the least delightful. 
If spring came but once in a lifetime, if the sun rose and set 
once in a year instead of once in a day, if a rainbow appeared 
once in a century, if flowers were as rare as rubies, and dew 
drops as diamonds, how wonderful they would seem to us, how 
they would astonish and delight us ! 
We undervalue them because they are lavished on us. The 
very word “common” implies some disparagement. If we 
trained our minds properly in the appreciation of beauty, we 
should, on the contrary, wonder at and admire them all the 
more. As Sir Walter Scott said, “ Nothing really worth having 
or caring about in this world is uncommon.” Goethe observes 
that if a rainbow lasts for a quarter of an hour no one looks at 
it any longer. The commonest things are the best and most 
necessary. 
“ The meanest floweret of the vale. 
The simplest note that swells the gale, 
The common sun, the air, the skies, 
To him are opening Paradise.” 
Yet how many men come into the world, and go out of it again, 
without the least idea what sort of a world it is. 
. Charles Lamb did not, of course, intend to be taken seriously 
when he wrote to Wordsworth : — 
