144 
XATURE NOTES 
the Council last year had been nominated to serve again by the 
Council. A vote of thanks to the retiring Councillors was 
proposed by Professor Boulger and seconded by Mr. J. Shaw 
Crompton. 
Mrs. Wilfred Mark Webb, on behalf of the Council, presented 
to Mr. Ernest A. Nash, on the occasion of his wedding, a copper 
inkstand cast in the form of a lobster. Mr. Nash proposed a vote 
of thanks to the Chairman, which was seconded by Mr. Peter 
Lawson, and carried by acclamation. 
A PLEA FOR INDIVIDUAL EFFORT IN THE 
SELBORNE SOCIETY. 
An Address delivered at the Annual General Meeting of the Society 
by Dr. Dudley W. Buxton, Chairman of Council. 
HE Annual General Meeting of the Selborne Society is 
in some sense like the statutory meetings of companies. 
The Report is read and received, elections take place, 
and the Society is started upon a fresh year of labour. 
In another way the meeting resembles those held in the City ; 
it is peaceful and badly attended if the members are contented, 
but turbulent and thronged when the Society is rent by dis- 
sension or torn by controversy. Human nature being what it is, 
this state of things, although to be regretted, is natural. The 
duty of the Chairman is the conduct of the meeting ; his it is 
to lay before the members what their Council has done, and to 
explain what they have omitted to do. But surely the Selborne 
Society must be imbued with the spirit of its titular deity 
Gilbert White of Selborne, and his wraith demands more than 
the dry bones of business, the monotony of a record of things 
done. It is fabled that Midas whispered his secret to the 
w’aving reeds, and that the voiceless leaves repeated through 
the endless ages Midas’ plaint. So is it not true that the words 
of men and the incense of their lives are in a sense whispered 
to the leaves and wafted by the winds, and come reverberating 
down the ages ? What we are to-day, what we know, that by 
which we are environed, are the result of a slow crystallization 
of the thoughts, of the words, and of the deeds of men long 
dead. The Selbornian of the twentieth century owes to Gilbert 
White, and such as he, all that is best in them. I think our 
pious founders, Mr. and Mrs. Musgrave, whom the Selborne 
Society honours to-day, meant to initiate a society which should 
undertake the work Gilbert White loved; but, further, they 
dreamed of a society composed of men and women who w'ould 
be actuated by ideas such as found expression in the writings of 
White of Selborne — ideas which were the outcome of the life 
he led in his Hampshire home. I want to emphasize that the 
Selborne Society has, or should have, a dual life ; the militant. 
