In our boyhood's days amongst the solitary Yorkshire moors we dated the coming and the going of the swallows; were chastised for attempting to lie out all night in order to see the owner of a curiously-shaped bird's nest return to it in the morning, and thereby discover the species to which it belonged; invested all our slender stock of pocket-money in a thermometer by which to find out the relationship between the temperature of neighbouring streams and the variation in the spawning time of the trout living in them; noted the flocking of female chaffinches in the winter; and learnt to imitate the call-notes of most of the wild creatures inhabiting the hills around our home.

The mention of these simple facts will suffice to show all lovers of wild life why Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne exercised such a charm over us when a copy first fell into our possession from a second-hand bookstall at a time when we were struggling, with a Yorkshireman's selfdependence and fourteen shillings a week, to maintain ourselves in London, and pining to re-exchange the fœtid air and the coster's strident cry of Clerkenwell for the heather scent and the moorcock's cheerful beck of our native hills.

Here was a countryman talking to a countryman with magical reality of the chattering sedge warbler in the bush,

and the sibilous wood wren in the tree top; of the twittering swallow and the screaming swift; of the drumming snipe, cleaving the still evening air high over his native swamp, and the blast-defying missel-thrush piping his clarion notes from a swaying bough. We saw the glorious massing of the foliage on the steep face of the sunlit Hanger, walked through the thatch-roofed village, drank from the clear cold spring at Well-head until our thirst was slaked, and finally fell asleep holding on to his stirrup-strap and looking up into his benign face as he rode and we walked down the spatewashed sunken road to Alton, discussing the lives and habits of the many feathered friends we both knew and loved so well, delightfully forgetful of the dying traffic-roar of tired London.

We are sometimes asked for an explanation of Gilbert White's ever-green popularity, but never by the man who has heard the swallow snap its bill upon a fly, or battled to exhaustion with the winter's storm. He knows that our author's inimitable descriptions of these and a hundred other happenings of the countryside will for all time appeal with irresistible charm to the heart that loves rural England. He feels the personality of the man who has left these human documents as a priceless legacy of sweetness and light to his race; and admires unstintingly the assiduity, industry, originality, and enthusiasm of their author.

In Letter X. to Barrington he wrote, "The investigation. of the life and conversation of animals is a concern of much trouble and difficulty, and is not to be attained but by the active and inquisitive," and we think that we may, without fear of being charged with undue egotism, lay claim to knowing something of the truth of this statement.

We have seen a great deal of what he saw, and probably at closer range than most men living: we have read his "little cockle-shell of a book," as one editor calls it, oftener than any other work in the English tongue-and each time with increasing pleasure and admiration.

In order to catch the glow of the spirit of Gilbert White it is necessary to visit his beloved country. Who that has

sat alone by night in early May at the top of the Hanger, listening to the sweet song of the nightingale and the soft crick-crick of the beech trees bursting their leaf-sheaths, or seen the sun rise in golden splendour upon their full wealth of foliage in June, could escape the witchery of the place, or wonder that our author's heart abided with it to the end!

In spite of such modern abominations as barbed wire fences and corrugated iron roofs here and there, Selborne still remains a delightful old-world Hampshire village, in which few jarring notes are heard save those of the steam thrasher and the dust fiend motor-car, the latter of which finds lodgment even within the sacred walls of the naturalist's old home. We wonder what he would have thought of rising on a fine summer's morning, and, after taking a walk round his garden, seating himself in one of these vehicles and partaking of an early breakfast with his brothers in Fleet Street. Such a travelling feat would no doubt have appeared to him impossible, and yet it is frequently accom

plished by the present occupier of our author's old homeThe Wakes."

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Some idea may be gathered of the immense popularity of this, the most widely known of all natural history works, when it is stated that the illustration on page vii. of the editions preserved in the British Museum Library represents only one-third of the eighty odd which have seen the light, at prices varying from sixpence to five guineas, since its author first saw it through the press in 1789.

The present edition contains the natural history letters practically as first given to the world by Gilbert White himself, and its chief feature lies in the character of its illustrations. We believe these to come into closer touch with the spirit of the writer than anything hitherto published. The obtaining of the photographs has been a labour of love. We have given of our best, and whatever may be the judgment of present-day naturalists we feel sure that he, at any rate, would have been the first to recognise our honest endeavour to illustrate worthily that which he gathered together with so much care and pains.

We wonder what he would have said if he could have crouched with us, in an artificial rock made for the purpose, every day for a week watching at arm's length a pair of ring ouzels feed their young, and waiting until hope almost faded into despair for a gleam of sunshine by which to photograph them. How quickly he would have observed the interesting fact that the female always gives a note of warning to her chicks when she is approaching with food, whilst the male comes home in silence. How he would have admired the former bird's spreading out of her wings in maternal solicitude, as shown in the illustration on p. 86, on the approach of a shower of rain which she feared might wet her callow brood. What a letter he would have written to Pennant about his experiences inside our stuffed ox, whilst watching a skylark feed her chicks, and a timid little tree pipit go on to her nest, and the behaviour of wheatears and sandpipers in front of a stuffed sheep with the eye of the camera staring at them from its chest. How enthusiastic he