WHITE, ANDREW DICKSON (1832-), American educationist, was born in Homer, New York, on the 7th of November 1832. He graduated at Yale (A.B.) in 1853, studied at the Sorbonne in 1854, and at the University of Berlin in 1855-1856, meanwhile serving as attache at the United States Legation at St Petersburg in 1854-1855. He was professor of history and English literature in 1857-1863, and lecturer on history in 1863-1867 at the University of Michigan. In 1864-1867 he was a member of the New York state Senate, and as chairman of the Committee on Education took an active part in formulating the educational features of the bill under which Cornell University (q.v.) was incorporated (1865). At Mr Cornell's suggestion Mr White drew up a plan of organization for the institution, and in 1867 became its first president, which post he held continuously until 1885, serving thereafter as a member of the board of trustees and of its executive committee. During his administration he greatly strengthened the curriculum of the university, to which he gave his architectural library, and, upon his retirement, his historical and general library of about 20,000 volumes (including bound collections of pamphlets) and about 3000 unbound pamphlets, which was installed in a special room in the main library building of the university. In recognition of this gift the departments of history and political science of the university have been named the President White School of History and Political Science. In 1870 President Grant appointed Benjamin F. Wade, Mr White and Samuel G. Howe a commission to visit Santo Domingo and report on the advisability of the president's project for annexing it to the United States, and in 1895 he was appointed by President Cleveland a member of the commission established to determine the boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana. Dr White was United States minister to Germany in 1879-1881, and to Russia in 1892-1894, and was United States ambassador to Germany in 1897-1903. In 1899 he was president of the American delegation at the Hague Peace Conference. He received the degree of LL.D. from the University of Michigan (1867), from Cornell (1886), from Yale (1887), from St Andrews, Scotland (1902), from Johns Hopkins, (1902), and from Dartmouth (1906); L.H.D. from Columbia (1887) and D.C.L. from Oxford (1902). He was also made an officer of the Legion of Honour, was awarded the royal gold medal of Prussia for arts and sciences in 1902, was president of the American Historical Association, of which he was a founder, in 1884, and was actively identified with various other learned bodies.
His publications include The Greater States of Continental Europe (1874); A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (2 vols., 1896), his most important work, his Autobiography (2 vols., New York, 1905) and Seven Great Statesmen (1910).
WHITE, SIR GEORGE STUART (1835-), British field marshal, the son of an Irish country gentleman, was born in County Antrim on the 6th of July 1835. He was educated at Sandhurst, and in 1853 joined the Inniskillings, with which regiment he served in India during the Mutiny in 1857. In the second Afghan War (1878-80) he was second in command of the Gordon Highlanders, whom he led in their charge at the battle of Charasiah. For conspicuous gallantry in this action, and again shortly afterwards at Kandahar, he received the Victoria Cross. In 1881 he assumed command of the Gordon Highlanders, and took part in the Nile Expedition of 1884-85. As brigadier in the Burmese War (1885-87) he rendered distinguished service, for which he was promoted major-general; and when Sir Frederick (afterwards Lord) Roberts returned to India from Burma in 1887, White was left in command of the force charged with the duty of suppressing the dacoits and pacifying the country. This he accomplished with a thoroughness which earned the thanks of the government of India. He was in command of the Zhob expedition in 1890, and in 1893 he succeeded Lord Roberts as commander-in-chief in India; and during his tenure of this office directed the conduct of the Chitral expedition in 1895 and the Tirah campaign in 1897. In the latter year he was made G.C.B. and in 1898 G.C.S.I. Returning to England in 1898 he became quartermaster-general to the forces; and on the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 he was given command of the forces in Natal. He defeated the Boers at Elandslaagte on the 21st of October 1899 and at Reitfontein on the 24th; but the superior numbers of the Boers enabled them to invest Ladysmith, which Sir George White defended in a siege lasting 119 days, from the 2nd of November 1899 to the 1st of March 1900, in the course of which he refused to entertain Sir Redvers Buller's suggestion that he should arrange terms of capitulation with the enemy (see Ladysmith, Siege and Relief of). After the relief of Ladysmith, White, whose health had been impaired by the siege, returned to England, and was appointed governor of Gibraltar (1900-1904). King Edward VII., who visited the fortress in 1903, personally gave him the baton of a field marshal. In 1905 Sir George White was appointed governor of Chelsea Hospital, and in the same year was decorated with the Order of Merit.
See T. F. G. Coates, Sir George White (1900).
WHITE, GILBERT (1720–1793), English writer on natural history, was born on the 18th of July 1720 in the little Hampshire village of Selborne, which his writings have rendered so familiar to all lovers of either books or nature. He was educated at Basingstoke under Thomas Warton, father of the poet, and subsequently at Oriel College, Oxford, where in 1744 he was elected to a fellowship. Ordained in 1747, he became curate at Swarraton the same year and at Selborne in 1751. In 1752 he was nominated junior proctor at Oxford and became dean of his college. In 1753 he accepted the curacy of Durley, and in 1757 he was a candidate for the provostship of Oriel, but failed to secure election. Soon afterwards he received the college living of Moreton Pinkney, though he did not reside there, and in 1761 he became curate at Faringdon, near Selborne, a position which he held until in 1784 he again became curate in his native parish. He died in his home, The Wakes, Selborne, on the 26th of June 1793.
Gilbert White's daily life was practically unbroken by any great changes or incidents; for nearly half a century his pastoral duties, his watchful country walks, the assiduous care of his garden, and the scrupulous posting of his calendar of observations made up the essentials of a full and delightful life, but hardly of a biography. At most we can only fill up the portrait by reference to the tinge of simple old-fashioned scholarship, which on its historic side made him an eager searcher for antiquities and among old records, and on its poetic occasionally stirred him to an excursion as far as that gentlest slope of Parnassus inhabited by the descriptive muse. Hence we are thrown back upon that correspondence with brother naturalists which has raised his life and its influence so far beyond the commonplace. His strong naturalist tendencies are not, however, properly to be realized without a glance at the history of his younger brothers. The eldest, Thomas, retired from trade to devote himself to natural and physical science, and contributed many papers to the Royal Society, of which he was a fellow. The next, Benjamin, became the publisher of most of the leading works of natural history which appeared during his lifetime, including that of his brother. The third, John, became chaplain at Gibraltar, where he accumulated much material for a work on the natural history of the rock and its neighbourhood, and carried on a scientific correspondence, not only with his eldest brother, but with Linnaeus. The youngest, Henry, was vicar of Fyfield, near Andover. The sister's son, Samuel Barker, also became in time one of White's most valued correspondents. With other naturalists, too, he had intimate relations: with Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington he was in constant correspondence, often too with the botanist John Lightfoot, and sometimes with Sir Joseph Banks and others, while Richard Chandler and other antiquaries kept alive his historic zeal. At first he was content to furnish information from which the works of Pennant and Barrington largely profited; but gradually the ambition of separate authorship developed from a suggestion thrown out by the latter of these writers in 1770. The next year White sketched to Pennant the project of “a natural history of my native parish, an annus historico-naturalis, comprising a journal for a whole
