posed towards the water." This is a curious fact to him. A neighbor of his, in ploughing late in the fall, turned a water-rat out of his hibernaculum in a field far removed from any water. The rat had laid up more than a gallon of potatoes for its winter food. This was another curious fact that set the writer speculating. His correspondent tells him of a heronry near some manor-house that excites his curiosity much. "Fourscore nests of such a bird on one tree is a rarity which I would ride half as many miles to get a sight of." Such a lively curiosity had the parson. His thirst for exact knowledge was so great that on one occasion he took measurements of the carcass of a moose when he was probably compelled to hold his nose to finish the task. At one place he heard of a woman who professed to cure cancers by the use of toads; some of his brother clergymen believed the story, but when he came to sift the evidence he made up his mind that the woman was a fraud.

He said truly, "There is such a propensity in mankind towards deceiving and being deceived, that one cannot safely relate anything from common report, especially in print, without expressing some degree of doubt and suspicion."

The observations of hardly one man in five hundred are of any value for scientific purposes.

White had the true scientific caution, and was, as a rule, very careful to verify his statements.

Of course the science of White's time was far behind our own. The phenomenon of the weather, for

instance, was not understood then as it is now. The great atmospheric waves that sweep across the continents, and the regular alternations of heat and cold, were unsuspected. White observed that cold descended from above, but he thought that thaws often originated underground, "from warm vapours which arise." He was greatly puzzled, too, when, during the severe cold of December, 1784, the thermometer fell many degrees lower in the valley bottoms than on the hills. He had not observed that the very cold air on such occasions settles down into the valleys and fills them like water, marking the height to which it rises by a level line upon the trees or foliage. It is a wonder that his sharp eye did not detect the true source of honey dew, but it did not. He thought it proceeded from the effluvia of flowers, which, being drawn up into the sky by the warmth of the sun by day, descended again as dew by night.

When a French anatomist announced that he had discovered why the cuckoo did not hatch its own eggs, namely, because the crop or craw of the bird was placed back of the sternum, so as to make a protuberance on the belly, White dissected a cuckoo for himself, and, finding the fact as stated, proceeded to dissect other birds that he knew did incubate, as the fern-owl and a hawk, and finding the craw situated the same as in the cuckoo, justly charged the Frenchman with having reached an unscientific conclusion.

In his seventy-seventh letter White clearly anticipates Darwin as to the beneficial functions of earthworms in the soil, and tells farmers and gardeners

that the little creatures which they look upon as their enemies are really their best friends.

White has had imitators, but no successful rivals. A work much in the spirit and manner of his famous book, called "Jesse's Gleanings in Natural History," was published fifty years later. It had some reputation in its own day, but seems to be quite forgotten in our time. A good reader quickly sees that its pages have not the same fresh, distinctive quality as White's, not the same atmosphere of unconscious curiosity and alert interest. They are stamped with a die far less clear and individual. The field covered is the same, the facts and incidents are the same, but the medium through which we see them all is not the same.

The following extract gives a fair sample of the style:

"The enjoyments and delights of a country life have been sung by poets in all ages, and it is our own fault if we find the country irksome, or less agreeable than a crowded metropolis. It affords many resources of a most agreeable nature, to those who seek for rational and tranquil enjoyments. A beautiful prospect, a walk by the side of a river in fine weather, in the agreeable shade of a wood or cool valley, have great charms for those who are fond of the country. We may then exclaim with Virgil,

'O, qui me gelidis convallibus Haemi

Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!''

But even the Virgilian quotation does not give it the flavor of White's pages.

X

LUCID LITERATURE

NOTHING can make up in a writer for the

want of lucidity. It is one of the cardinal

literary virtues. If the page is not clear, if we see through it as through a glass darkly, if there is the least blur or opacity, the work to that extent is condemned. It is a false notion that some thoughts or ideas are necessarily obscure, or complex, or involved. Ideas are what we make them. If we think obscurely, our ideas are obscure; if one's mental activity is complex, his ideas are complex. Always is the mind of the writer the medium through which we see his matter. Such a poet as George Meredith thinks obscurely. There is a large blind spot in his times an almost total eclipse passes

mind, so that at over his page.

Strain one's vision as one may, one cannot make out just what he is trying to say. Then there are lucid intervals strong, telling lines; then the shadow falls again and the reader is groping in the dark. The difficulty is never innate in his subject, but is in the poet's use of language, as if at times he caught at words blindly and used them without reference to their accepted meanings, as when he says of the skylark, "He drinks his hurried

flight and drops." How can one adjust his mind to the notion of a bird drinking its own flight? Or take this puzzle : —

"Vermilion wings, by distance held

To pause aflight while fleeting swift,
And high aloft the pearl inshelled

Her lucid glow in glow will lift."

Does not the reading of such lines set one's head in a whirl?

The impression of novelty can never be made by a trick in the use of language, nor can the sense of mystery be given by obscurity of expression. Veils and screens and dim lights may do it in the world of sense, but not in the world of ideas. The reader feels all the time that there is something in the way, and that he would see clearly if the writer thought clearly. Freshness and novelty are the gifts of the writer whose mind is fresh and who has lively and novel emotions in the presence of everyday things and events.

There is a sense of mystery in much of the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and in our own Emerson and Whitman, but little or none of the Meredithian blur and opacity. One may not at once catch the full meaning of Wordsworth's "Ode to Immortality," or Tennyson's "Tiresias" or "Ancient Sage," or Emerson's "Brahma," or Whitman's "Sleep Chasings," but how transparent the language, how unequivocal the emotion, how direct and solid the expression! There is a vast difference between the impression or want of impression