Abstract
GILBERT WHITE'S “Natural History of Selborne”, 1789, is a book which stands alone as the work of a charming, kindly old bachelor, naturalist, and poet. It is simple and happy, full of the joy of life, and has a fine literary style of its own; it will probably be for all time the premier work on the natural history of any part of England. The “Natural History” was largely culled from White's Garden Calendar, published in full by Bowdler Sharpe in his edition of Selborne, 1900, and from the Naturalist's Journal, begun in 1768. The latter is now published for the first time, and it is ably edited, so that passages already used by White are eliminated. But why is it published at all? It was not written by White to be published–and We feel that he would have been very averse from doing so. It adds nothing to White's fame, gives no fresh picture of his life and times, and relatively few natural history observations of value to-day. It was proper to preserve it in the British Museum, but we feel that it would have been preferable to allow it to remain in its honoured obscurity.
Journals of Gilbert White.
Walter Johnson. (Broadway Diaries, Memoirs and Letters.) Pp. xlviii + 463 + 4 plates. (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1931.) 21s. net.
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Biology. Nature 128, 952 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/128952a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/128952a0