Gilbert White S Journals

This book explores the financial, business risk, ethical, cultural, and emotional rationales underlying the need for companies to actively protect, conserve and improve biodiversity within their sphere of operation.

Gilbert White's name is known universally but, as Ted Dadswell insists in this book, important aspects of his work have frequently been overlooked even by scholarly editors. The Selborne naturalist (1720-1793) has been described as 'a prince of personal observers'; but a shrewd analytical questioning and comparing was also typical of his 'natural knowledge'. Exceptional even in his general aims, White studied the behaviour, the 'manners' and 'conversation', of his animals and plants. He saw, moreover, that an animal or plant and indeed a parish such as his own, was unitary in operation; again and again, a cause had numerous effects and an effect numerous causes. Observation could go forward in circumstances such as these, if one was both sharp-eyed and patient, but how could true investigation be managed? How could a particular cause or effect be isolated or tested? Here what Dadswell calls White's 'comparative habit' was put to good use. Gilbert White was a careful keeper of records, and using these comparatively he 'appealed to controls' while examining his living creatures. Questioning and testing even the 'entirely usual', White was brought back repeatedly to the notion of adaptability. His zoological findings often concerned 'changed or changing' animals (or birds) and their social and inter-personal relationships. Today, we can seem particularly well placed to appreciate his methods and factual claims; our 'ethologists' and ecologists have - seemingly - corroborated much of what he did. And yet just this corroboration renders him the more mysterious. To properly assess White as naturalist, we must be able to approach him not only scientifically but also historically. He hoped for the emergence of teams of behavioural workers but did not try to pre-empt what would be achieved only by such teams, and while he 'saw with his own eyes', as his friend John Mulso says, he was substantially affected by certain of his contemporaries and predecessors. His journals and notebooks show us the naturalist at work. When a perhaps unexpected combination of influences is allowed for, his 'unique' activities can be at least partially explained.

The diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston presents a unique portrait of Civil War North Carolina. Wife of a prominent planter and slaveholder in Halifax County, North Carolina, Mrs. Edmondston spent most of the war on the family plantations Hascosea and Looking Glass. Occasionally she made trips with her husband Patrick to Richmond, Virginia, and to various eastern North Carolina towns. Despite this relative isolation and insulation Kate Edmondston's imagination and inquisitive mind allowed her to observe and follow closely the progress of the war. An avid reader of newspapers, particularly those from the Confederate capital Richmond, she commented extensively on the war and recorded in minute detail the strategies and maneuverings of the Confederate and Union armies, casualties among North Carolina troops, and the weaknesses and strengths of various leaders, North and South, local and sectional. She also fancied herself a poet and wrote odes to various fallen heroes and to the southern war effort. One of her poems even found its way into print in a South Carolina newspaper. Clearly she was influenced by poets and novelists of the Romantic period, for her diary abound with allusions to many pieces of classical literature and the Bible. A diehard "secesh lady," in her own words, she was uncompromisingly prosouthern in her loyalties and intensely bitter toward Unionists, Abraham Lincoln, and northern generals like Benjamin Butler and William Sherman. Inept Confederates and southern leaders she considered undeserving political lackeys did not escape her vitriolic pen, however. The diary reveals a rich mosaic of family, class, and sectional connections. It provides in addition an unusually intimate glimpse of plantation life and the social consequences of war as the conflict crept closer and as a miasma of fear and uncertainty enveloped eastern North Carolina. Mrs. Edmondston's distinct and finely etched class views of nonslaveholding whites, slaves, and freedmen and her perception of the role of women in southern society undergird the entire journal. An intriguing social document in itself, the diary depicts with profound clarity the shattering impact of the war on southern women in particular, whose circumscribed lives were suddenly exposed to the ravages of war and poverty. Characterized by new insights into the Civil War experience on the southern home front, and filled with copious data for historians and genealogists, the Edmondston diary will appeal to many readers as simply a gripping tale of southern life during the conflict. As such, it rivals some of the best-known accounts of the Civil War, including the diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut.