strongly attached to the charms of rural scenery, he early fixed his residence in his native village, where he spent the greater part of his life in literary occupations, and especially in the study of nature. This he followed with patient assiduity, and a mind ever open to the lessons of piety and benevolence which such a study is so well calculated to afford. Though several occasions offered of settling upon a college living, he could never persuade himself to quit the beloved spot, which was, indeed, a peculiarly happy situation for an observer. He was much esteemed by a select society of intelligent and worthy friends, to whom he paid occasional visits. Thus his days passed, tranquil and serene, with scarcely any other vicissitudes than those of the seasons, till they closed at a mature age on June 26, 1793."

Gilbert White lived and died a bachelor, and it is to be regretted that no portrait remains to preserve a record of his personal appearance.

His brother John, to whom frequent reference is made in the succeeding pages, was at one time Vicar of Blackburn, in Lancashire. He afterwards became resident at Gibraltar, where he made large collections for a Natural History of the place, from the unpublished manuscript of which an extract is given at page 282. He is honourably mentioned by Pennant in his "Literary Life," as having rendered him material assistance in connection with the birds and fishes. of Gibraltar.

Another brother, Thomas (to whose observations, made at his house at South Lambeth, our author occasionally refers), was a wholesale ironmonger in London; but quitting business with an ample fortune; devoted much of his time to literary pursuits, especially on subjects connected with meteorology and natural history. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and author of numerous essays which appeared in the "Gentleman's Magazine" between the years. 1780 and 1790, under the signature of T. H. W. Among these a series of articles on the trees of Great Britain are particularly deserving of notice, for the extensive information, good taste, and variety of reading which they display.

A third brother, Benjamin, the publisher of the first edition of the present work, was during much of the latter half of the past century the principal publisher of English books on Natural History. On the death of Gilbert he succeeded to the estate at Selborne, and transferred his business to his second son, John, who continued it until within a few years of the present time. From this establishment emanated, among many other important publications, most of the works of Ellis, Pennant, Montagu, Latham, Donovan, Andrews, the elder Sowerby, Curtis, Lightfoot, and other well-known naturalists. The house in which the business was carried on was originally distinguished, according to the fashion of the times, by the sign of the Horace's Head, a misreading of which gave rise to a whimsical mistake on the part of Scopoli, who, in dedicating the several plates of his "Delicia Floræ et Fauna Insubrica" to various patrons of natural history, inscribed one of them as published "Auspiciis DD. DD. Beniamini White, et Horatii Head, Bibliopol. Londinensium." It may be added, that in his "Vitæ suæ Vices," published at the end of the third and last part of the work just quoted, the same writer enumerates among the "eruditi viri cum quibus commercium litterarium colui," the name of " D. White, ex Gibraltariâ." Many passages in the present work prove how highly Scopoli was esteemed by our author, with whose family these. circumstances, trivial as they are, serve in some degree to connect his name.

In Gilbert White's diaries mention is also made of a "brother Harry." He too was in the church, and rector of Fyfield, near Andover, in the county of Hants, whence one of the letters to Daines Barrington is dated, and where, as appears by various references in the course of the volume, a series of meteorological observations were made for comparison with those registered at Selborne, South Lambeth, and Lyndon, in the county of Rutland.

In the commencement of his tenth letter to Pennant, the earliest in date of the entire series, Gilbert White laments the want of neighbours whose studies led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge. But from his continued cor

respondence with the relatives just enumerated, from his occasional visits to most of them, and from the return of those visits to himself, (for his house, although that of a bachelor, was always open to his family and friends,) he must, in his latter years, have felt this want much less sensibly than at the period when it was noted as an apology for the slender progress which he then conceived himself to have made in the science. Few men have had the good fortune to possess so many near connexions engaged in pursuits so congenial with their own.

THOMAS PENNANT, the correspondent for many years of Gilbert White and the esteemed friend to whom the first series of his Letters on the Natural History of his native place were addressed, was among the most active of the scientific and literary characters of his day. At the commencement of his correspondence with White, he was busily engaged in the preparation of the octavo edition of his British Zoology: the first edition of that work had preceded it but a few years; and it was quickly followed by others; and by other works on zoology, and on antiquities, and by tours, topographies, and other productions; all of which were deservedly popular. For more than forty years his pen was never idle. Industrious himself, he was the cause also of industry in others; and the enumeration which he gives of the services he did to the professors of the art of engraving by the multitude of plates executed by them for his several works, while it furnishes a list of the principal of his productions, will also afford some idea of the extent and variety of his labours.

He

Of many of these works several editions were required, and the superintendence of them added to the demands on him for continual devotion to literary pursuits. Many minor works were also published by him, including numerous papers in the "Philosophical Transactions." maintained too an active correspondence both at home and abroad throughout the whole of his life; and numbered among his friends the most distinguished men in the several branches of knowledge which he cultivated. Linnæus was among his earliest correspondents; and with Pallas he was in frequent communication.

"I am often astonished," he says, in his Literary Life of himself, "at the multiplicity of my publications, especially when I reflect on the various duties it has fallen to my lot to discharge, as father of a family, landlord of a small but numerous tenantry, and a not inactive magistrate. I had a great share of health during the literary part of my days. Much of this was owing to the riding exercise of my extensive tours, to my manner of living, and to my temperance. I go to rest at ten; and rise winter and summer at seven, and shave regularly at the same hour, being a true misopogon. I avoid the meal of excess, a supper; and my soul rises with vigour to its employs, and, I trust, does not disappoint the end of its Creator."

Pennant died in 1798, in the seventy-third year of his age; having survived for more than seven years the literary death which he had anticipated for himself in 1791.

DAINES BARRINGTON, honourable by birth and respected for his talents, was well suited, by the pursuits to which from choice he had devoted himself, to become the favourite

correspondent of an observer like Gilbert White. The legal studies which he had originally cultivated as a professional duty, and in which he had been so successful as to have merited the office of recorder of Bristol, and to have become subsequently a Welsh judge, were eventually laid aside by him, although not until after they had fostered in him an attachment to antiquarian pursuits which he retained through life so strongly as to entitle him to be distinguished among his fellow-students in that department of knowledge as a vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries. To the "Transactions" of that body he was a frequent contributor. He also made numerous communications to the Royal Society, which were printed in the "Philosophical Transactions." Many of them were afterwards republished by himself in a separate form, under the title of " Miscellanies;" a work alluded to with satisfaction by our historian in his Letter LI. In his essays Barrington availed himself freely of the information imparted to him by White, whose authority he repeatedly quotes, and whose merits as a "well read, ingenious, and observant" naturalist he is ever ready to acknowledge.

A large proportion of the essays in the "Miscellanies" are on subjects of natural history; and in many of them Daines Barrington was the advocate of views directly opposed to those of our author's other correspondent, Pennant. Thus, for instance, while Pennant felt a full conviction as to the migration of many birds, Barrington was most sceptical on the subject; and it is scarcely to be doubted that his letters to Gilbert White tended to keep alive and to increase the suspicions which the historian of Selborne always entertained that the little creatures whose presence delighted him during the summer, were still at hand, though hidden from him, in the winter. Another point on which his two correspondents disagreed was as to the authority which they attributed to Ray and to Linnæus; and White was evidently quite aware of the difference of their feelings on this subject, humouring them so far as to accommodate himself to the wishes of each when addressing him in particular. When sending to Pennant, in his Letter XVI.,