IRatuce IRotes: 
Ube Selborne Society’s flDagasfne 
No. 13. JANUARY 15, 1891. Vol. II. 
THE SELBORNE SOCIETY AND ITS MAGAZINE. 
T is a great pleasure to be able to begin a New Year and 
a new volume of Nature Notes with the most cheer- 
ful tidings concerning the condition of our Society and 
the prospects of its magazine. The situation could 
not be better summed up than it was by Mr. G. A. Musgrave, 
the founder of the Selborne Society, in a congratulatory letter 
read at the last meeting of the Council : — “ The influential 
position of the Society has been vastly increased in the year 
1890, through the co-operation of members of high position in 
the literary and scientific worlds ; while its numerical strength 
has steadily grown. Everything promises well, and 1 feel con- 
vinced that all we have to do is to constantly improve our 
methods of working on the lines of the past year.” 
The truth is that a great deal of the most difficult part of the 
Society’s work has been done. The idea that we are a band of 
sentimentalists or faddists, if it ever was entertained, is as dead 
as Julius Caesar by this. What only Selbornians thought yes- 
terday, most educated and refined people think to-day. The 
public press is altogether with us. The leading Dailies, for 
example — the Daily News, always our friend, the Standard, and 
the Daily Telegraph — all had this winter articles on the feeding of 
birds and against their wanton destruction, in which the most 
ardent Selbornian could not suggest an improvement. The 
writers of books on natural history are with us. Each new 
work that appears is more deeply tinged with Selbornian views 
than the last. The natural history journals, such as the Field 
and the Field Club, are among our warmest allies. The day of 
the mere collector is past, the day of the intelligent observer and 
describer, of the biologist and nature lover, has come. 
There are many factors to be taken into account in that 
indirect educational influence of which Miss Isabel Fry not long 
ago spoke in our columns, and in that active Selbornian pro- 
paganda to which Mr. Musgrave has lately called our attention — 
