Gilbert White's house at Selborne is for sale, and a movement is, we understand from the letter of "Naturalist" published in our correspondence columns, being made to collect funds for its purchase and maintenance as a memorial of the old naturalist and scholar who has endeared himself to innumerable English-speaking disciples in this country, in the Colonies, and in the United States. The house, which is a good old-fashioned gentleman's residence, fronting the main street of the village, but with a good lawn and garden, in which stands White's sun-dial, and pleasure grounds behind it, certainly does enshrine and conjure up a great store of sweet memories to the visitor who has the good fortune to have made its former master's daily thoughts his own daily companions from the pages of his book. There is the lawn and the walks on which he noted the intrusions of the hedgehogs. "The manner in which they eat the roots of the plantain in my grass walks is very curious; with their upper mandible, which is much longer than their lower, they bore under the plant, and so eat the root off upward, leaving the tuft of leaves untouched. In this respect they are serviceable. But they deface the walks in some measure by digging little round holes." We can almost see the old gentleman now looking seriously at those little round holes, and then going into his library to put together his notes on the softness of the spines of infant hedgehogs. There are the tall hedges round "my fields" in which he noted a little warbler fidget ing about late in the year, and so got his gun, probably not without hesitation, to collect it, but "it was so desultory that I missed my aim." There is

the ornamented piece of ground near "my garden" where "the hoopoes used to march about in a stately manner, feeding on the walks, many times in the day, and seemed disposed to breed in my outlet, but were frightened and persecuted by idle boys, who would never let them rest." Upstairs, too, is that pleasant bedroom from the window of which he saw as he used to rise in the morning "the swallows and martins clustering on the chimneys and thatch of the neighboring cottages, and could not help being touched with a secret delight, mixed with some degree of mortification; with delight to observe with how much ardor and punctuality these poor little birds obeyed the strong impulses towards migration, or hiding, imprinted on their minds by their great Creator; and with some degree of mortification when I reflected that after all our pains and inquiries we are not yet quite certain to what regions they do migrate, and are still further embarrassed to find that they do not migrate at all." Certainly the preservation of the house as a kind of national relic is well within the limit of things desirable; for it is a thing most suggestive of ideas, and ideas were the main legacy bequeathed by White to posterity. His book became a classic not so much for its contents, charming as they are, as for the frame of mind which it induced in the reader. There can be little doubt that it was to give expression to this mental attitude towards Nature, and this unusual appreciation of the interest inherent in things like the birds, springs, trees, heaths, and animal life of a district, which was nevertheless only part of the whole scheme of Nature of the country, that White published his

notes. He felt obliged to apologize to some extent, and did so by pointing out that he was suggesting a new mode of writing parochial history, which might in turn become the basis of a new form of county history. He was quite right, and the idea has found expression quite on the lines he had in mind in the magnificent series of the "Victoria County Histories" now being published by Messrs. Constable. But

we

feel instinctively convinced that his "pursuits" gave him such deep and tranquil pleasure that he wished to see how far they would appeal to the general public of his day, and whether they might not possibly be ready to take the view of them which he did himself, and which he did not wish to see confined only to his select circle of correspondents, such as Markwell and Daines Barrington and Pennant. He refused a College living that he might not be taken from the surroundings to which his studies and observation were by that time indissolubly linked, and he only survived the publication of his book four years. Thus he never lived long enough away from Selborne for it to become merely objective in his thoughts, neither was the result of his gentle experiment ever known by him. Its success has been indeed astonishing. It was slow and gradual, but the book was never lost sight of, going through enough editions in the first half of the nineteenth century to keep it on the shelves of country houses, and to form a present for "young persons," as he hoped it might be. By the middle of the century the leading naturalists of the country, such as Professor Bell and Yarrell and others, professed themselves the loving disciples of White, though they knew twenty times as much natural history; and a succession of the best authorities on the subjects which White employed his leisure in observing and making con

jectures about have edited and reedited his book. Yet it is in no sense a work of reference. Much of it is carefully written scraps. Though White corresponded with learned naturalists and had their works, he was practically alone. He lets us see this constantly, and takes us into his confidence and tells us his conjectures and experiments. The spirit of the book, and not its facts, gave it its extraordinary influence. It set a mode of thought and endless possibilities before every one who, like him, was "a stationary man" in the country. It showed something, and suggested much, of the mental activities which first-hand observation of Nature can give in almost any locality. It gave encouragement to the natural tendency of Englishmen to excel in seeing for themselves. It more especially encouraged the observation of the habits of animals. With a few exceptions, such as Brehm, English writers are first and the rest nowhere in their discoveries and knowledge of the ways of the animal world when the creatures are left to themselves. As field naturalists they are simply unrivalled, and White was the first of them to communicate their latent power, and to make them dimly feel that they had it.

There may have been generations of Gilbert Whites in Japan, equipped, that is, with his spirit, and there certainly have been some sixty artists who knew as much as Bewick, and belonged to schools which limited their work to the delineation of the forms and habits of birds and insects. But considering the kind of activities which occupied the attention of this country at the time, it is remarkable that an artist who gave complete expression in form to the things which White saw, though he was entirely detached in locality and education, arose so soon after White's death. We mean

Thomas Bewick, to whose work, whether in illustrating the portraits of birds or morsels of rural scenery, from a piece of bark to an adventure on the high road, there is nihil simile aut secundum. It is significant that nearly all those who now make the endless branches of the tree of Nature their study or pastime unite in acknowledging their debt to Gilbert White. It was a tribute he never would have claimed, and which he did not publish his book to seek. It is entirely spontaneous, it grew up of itself, and it increases in force. The suggestions of the old Fellow of Oriel living in his pretty country house are followed by hundreds of field The Spectator.

clubs and natural history societies, and antiquarian and Nature study clubs. They are informally part of the interests of five Englishmen and Englishwomen out of every six among the more educated classes, and there is a strong desire to impart them as a form of education to the poorer children in the elementary schools. Nor must we forget that in the United States, where Audubon was the pioneer of half-serious natural history, and obtained a great following later, the lines of thought which Gilbert White transmitted are quite as strongly marked as they are in this country.

Some two hundred thousand years ago, at the beginning of that Quaternary Age to which the more moderate anthropologists limit the appearance of man upon the earth, the face of Europe was widely different from what it is now. A belt of land, of which Great Britain, Ireland and Iceland formed the highest points, stretched from Europe to North America, while England and France formed one continuous continent. Over this last there ranged mammoths, elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotami, together with the sabre-toothed tiger, who was probably the most terrible of the flesh-eaters of the ancient world. Here, too, dwelt man, a nomad and a hunter, sleeping, like Robinson Crusoe, in trees, acquainted with the use of fire and armed with a single weapon made from a roughly-chipped flint. He either lived in single pairs or in groups of two or three families, and it is not yet quite settled that he had then acquired the use of speech. He seems

to have gone completely naked, and to have haunted only the flat country and the banks of rivers. As for religion, he had none at all. and he threw his dead into the midden in which are found the bones of the animals he struck down for food. In all respects he seems to have been a most unpleasant and irreclaimable savage.

As time went on, however, the climate in which the man of Western Europe found himself, changed. Formerly it was warm, genial, and without any extremes of heat and cold, to which uniformity some of the learned are inclined to attribute our ancestor's disinclination to improve himself. But now there came a change. There had always been, as there is now, an "ice-cap" or region of intense cold round the North Pole, and now this began to move slowly southward. Some writers have supposed this to be due to the earth entering in its revolution round the sun into an especially cold region of space. Others that it was due to the displacement of the

earth's axis. But neither of these guesses seems to have any astronomical foundation, while the gradual rising of the Continent of Europe and the consequent submersion of the belt of land between England and America seem sufficient of themselves to account for the phenomenon. What is certain is that the ice-cap, either in the shape of a vast sea filled with floating masses of ice or more probably as one huge glacier, crept down until it had covered all England nearly as far south as London, all Scandinavia, save for the high mountain ranges of what are now Sweden and Norway, and all Russia as far south as Moscow. The pieces of rock and gravel which this immense mass of ice pushed before it can be seen lying like seaweed at high-water mark in an irregular line which stretches from the Gulf of Tcheskaya in Russia across Prussia, Denmark, and Holland, crossing our own country just above the valley of the Thames. Meanwhile the other ice-centres of Europe, such as the highest parts of the Alps, Apennines, and the Pyrenees, underwent an enormous extension of their ice-covered surface, the glaciers, by their vertical pressure as they ceased to move, scooping out the hollows which afterwards became such lakes as that of Geneva. It seemed as if all Europe were to be blotted out under one huge sheet of ice.

The first to fly before the advancing cold into the regions that remained temperate were the herb-eating animals who found the leaves and grasses on which they fed either killed or covered by the ice. Then followed the flesh-eaters who preyed upon their more peaceable fellows, and, with them, man, who was probably even then one of the most destructive flesheaters of them all. But here they found a new danger awaiting them.

The tilting of the earth's floor which led to the filling up of the Atlantic Ocean and perhaps some increase in the flooding of what is now the desert of Sahara had caused the formation of a mass of vapor which descended in the form of rain upon all lands south of the ice-cap. The rains seem to have fallen almost incessantly, swelling further the already swollen rivers into floods and surpassing the Biblical Deluge in so far that they must have lasted for years and centuries instead of days. What became of the other animals during this time we do not know, but probably the strength and swiftness of the larger brutes like the elephants and tigers enabled them to transport themselves to high ground beyond the reach of the floods. As for man, the weakest and yet the most resourceful of the larger brutes, he took refuge from the storms in grottoes and caverns, and it was here that, for the first time, he became a social animal. Here the fire, which on the banks of the stream where he had before made his resting-place was perhaps only an occasional accident, be

came

really the domestic hearth round which huddled all the different families compelled by the storms to take refuge in the cave. Here for the first time the long periods of enforced idleness from the chase induced him to make himself clothes from the skins of the animals which he snared or ran down. Here, too, the leisure and perhaps the spirit of emulation produced by the society of his fellows, led him to fashion new weapons and tools, to make scrapers for skins, axes for cutting, maces for striking, instead of the clumsy chipped flint held in the hand which, in the earlier days, formed bis only implement. And here especially, the pressure of common danger and the need of organized defence against the cave-bear and the cave-lion led him

to elect a common leader as stags and horses are wont to do, to whose rule he voluntarily submitted. The arts of decoration, of industry and of government all took their rise within the cave.

At length the glaciers retreated, and as the new vegetation sprang up in their wake, the animals followed it northward, and with the animals went man. But it was a changed being who went with them, and after this his rise was rapid. The drying-up of the land had cleared away the fogs which had for so long hid the sun, and henceforth the summers were more hot, while the winters, owing to radiation, were more cold than before. Hence the animals-now chiefly the horse and the reindeer-by which primitive man lived, migrated at fixed times in search of the climate necessary to them, and man became a traveller. True, too, to the lessons of mutual help that he had learned in the cave, he hit upon a plan of division of labor, so that the most skilful handicraftsman stayed at home and made axes, while the swiftest and strongest hunter used them abroad for their mutual sustenance. And now began the lawnings of art. Vanity seems to have been its first motive; for its earliest efforts seem to have been directed to painting the face with different colored earths, to making ornaments that were not yet amulets, and to adorning the skins in which the artist was clad. But before long, art began to be practised for its own sake,

The Academy.

or rather for the pleasure that it gave to the practiser, and weapons, tools, and sometimes the rocks were covered with pictorial representations of animals and of man himself. It is even possible that in the figures shown upon certain colored stones belonging to palæolithic times, we have the first precursor of a system of writing. And as the materials necessary for such designs were not always to be found in one place, while well-decorated weapons, tools and clothes had a certain value of their own, some sort of system of barter with distant tribes sprang up, and so trade was born.

Here we must stop. It is the opinion of writers like M. de Mortillet that in Europe, at all events, the education of our ancestors was completed by the invasion of tribes coming from Asia Minor, who introduced among the aborigines the domestication of animals, the practice of agriculture, and finally, religion, war, and slavery. It may be so, although this raises the question how these invaders themselves came to be instructed in these matters, which is a question which cannot here be answered. Perhaps enough has been said to show us in these days of Alpine accidents, when the ice takes its toll of victims as regularly as does the sea, how important a part the glacier, now only thought of as part of the regular furni ture of the playground of Europe, has formerly played in the civilization of the European man.

F. Legge.