CENTENARY OF W. H. HUDSON

Abstract

W. H. HUDSON, the centenary of whose birth is celebrated this month (see NATURE of August 9, p. 160), was unique as an interpreter of Nature, and that is perhaps the reason why he has had neither followers nor predecessors. The school of modern ornithology and natural history acknowledges no debt to Hudson; its highly specialized activities would, indeed, have been abhorrent to a naturalist who wrote “To specialize isto lose your soul”. Its prophets and teachers have been Edmund Selous, Eliot Howard and the biologists, not Hudson. Nor is it possible to trace any line of descent or genealogical tree between him and such great or less dynamic names as John Evelyn, Gilbert White, Dorothy Wordsworth, Edward Jesse, Thomas Miller, Charles Watterton, Frank Buckland, RichardJefferies, and others, all of whom are to be gathered from the ‘herbarium’ of the English rural tradition. If we prospect English writers who have immortalized foreign scenes like Bates, Darwin, Wallace, Belt and their kin, we shall find only a superficial resemblance between their works and the Hudsonian corpus of exotic reminiscence like “Far Away and Long Ago”, “Idle Days in Patagonia”, “The Purple Land”, “El Ombu” and “The Naturalist in La Plata”. The only exception to so general a statement is perhaps “Argentine Ornithology”, written avowedly as a text–book and in conjunction with W. C. Sclater, a professed man of science. But even in this work Hudson is plainly cramped and ill at ease, while his descriptions are constantly flooding the scientific banks of classification and the presentation of strictly relevant data.