ANNUAL MEETING 
105 
the season. It was really dreadful to think of the destruction 
which was going on in those ways. He was told the other day 
a story by a gentleman staying at a country house. The host 
lamented to him that so many birds were disappearing, particu- 
larly, he said, the hawks and the owls. “ When I was young,” 
he complained, “ there used to be a number of them about here. 
Now there are hardly any left and I cannot make out what has 
become of them.” “ I can tell you,” said the guest ; “ they are 
all nailed up round your gamekeeper’s cottage.” Perhaps, 
however, this was not the case now so much as a few years 
ago. In the preservation of plants, also, some good had 
been done, but still it was sad to see how the wild flowers, 
particularly the primroses and cowslips, were disappearing in 
the neighbourhood of London. Of course it was pleasant 
to see how much the children enjoyed them — and grown-up 
persons too — but he wished they would, while enjoying them, 
remember that if they took them all and left none for seed, 
the time was not far distant when none would be left for 
anyone to enjoy. While he admitted that the local authorities 
were doing good work in the matter of preserving wild birds, 
he wished they would not be quite so tidy about our countr}^ 
roads and lanes. A certain amount of lu.\uriance and wildness 
in this direction was a great beauty, but there was a tendency 
on the part of persons in authority to trim the hedges and 
replace old footpaths by gravelled walks, with kerbstones laid 
on either side, to which he very much objected, both as a rate- 
payer and as a lover of Nature. There had been several very 
interesting works on natural history published during the past 
year. First and foremost he desired to mention the beautiful 
edition of “White’s Selborne” itself. While he agreed that 
if anyone wished to read the book straight through, it was 
better to have it in the form in which it finally appeared, yet 
there was much interest in seeing the process by which White 
arrived at his conclusions. He wished also just to refer to one 
passage in Maeterlinck’s book on the Bee. The author there 
expressed the opinion — which was also that of Victor Hugo 
and many other distinguished writers — that “all things in 
Nature are sad when our eyes rest too closely upon them, and 
thus it ever shall be so long as we know not her secret, and 
even whether secret truly there be.” He did not think that 
was the spirit of Gilbert White or of the Selborne Society. 
If the contemplation of Nature was to make them sad, he, 
for one, should prefer to look somewhere else. But if they 
looked at Nature in the right way he really did not see 
why it should have that effect. The mistake seemed to be 
in considering the effect upon any particular individual instead of 
the effect upon the race. Nature did not trouble herself about 
the individual, but her great object — and her wise object, 
too — was the greatest happiness of the greatest number. If 
once they realised that, then he thought they would find no need 
