Gilbert White Reconsidered . 
[October, 
636 
may require some little explanation. Suppose that an 
author in the fourteenth, fifteenth, or even seventeenth 
century, had undertaken to write a history of the sand- 
martin. His first step would have been to colledt all the 
names, learned or “trivial,” by which the bird is known. 
He would have examined their origin, fancying thereby to 
throw some light upon the nature of the sand-martin, and 
quite forgetting that the name of a thing can tell us no 
more about such thing than was known to the person who 
first assigned it the name, and often embodies merely his 
erroneous notions. After having taken up a goodly space 
with this etymological game he would have made a laborious 
search through all accessible books, those especially of clas- 
sical antiquity, for mention of the sand-martin. Every such 
passage he would have carefully quoted and commented 
upon. But it would never have entered his mind to examine 
a sand-martin,— to see with his own eyes wherein it agreed 
with, and wherein it differed from other birds, and in parti- 
cular other members of the swallow group,— to observe its 
habits, its manner of feeding and nesting, and to note the 
localities where it occurs. Hence his learned and ponderous 
book would be a history not of the thing “ sand-martin,” 
but merely of the word “ sand-martin,” and of all the fables, 
dreams, and superstitions which had gradually adhered to 
the word, much like the droppings of rooks on the twigs 
below their nests. This manner of writing natural history 
originated with Pliny, and survived down to the middle of 
the seventeenth century. Gilbert White’s method was the 
very reverse. Caring little as to what names might have 
been given to a bird, or what might have been dreamt about 
it by authors of old, he looked to the fadts, observed pa- 
tiently, and described clearly what he had observed. He 
cannot, indeed, be pronounced the pioneer of this reforma- 
tion. Before him Marcgrave and Bontius had written local 
faunse ; Lister, Swammerdam, Willughby, and many others 
had studied Nature, not in books, but in things. Yet White 
succeeded in winning for his science a degree of popularity 
which in England at least it had never before enjoyed, and 
it thus fell to his lot to become the founder of a school of 
naturalists which has done good service, and which even 
yet is by no means extindt. We refer here not merely to 
his more diredt followers, such as Jesse, Knapp, Jenyns, and 
Rusticus of Godaiming. These writers have avowedly 
chosen White as their model, and adted upon his suggestions. 
Taking up some local centre, they have made its fauna and 
flora their especial study. We are far fiom undervaluing 
