of July 1676. White was a voluminous writer; not only did he engage in controversy with Protestants, but he attacked the personal infallibility of the pope.
WHITE, SIR WILLIAM ARTHUR (1824-1S91), British
diplomatist, was born at Pulawy, in Poland, on the 13th of
February 1S24. He was descended on his father's side from an
Irish Roman Catholic family. His mother's family, though not
of Polish extraction, owned considerable estates in Poland, where
While, though educated at King William's College, Isle of Man,
and Trinity College, Cambridge, spent a great part of his early
days, and thus gained an intimate knowledge of the Slavonic
tongues. From 1843 to 1857 he lived in Poland as a country
gentleman, but in the latter year he accepted a post in the British
consulate at Warsaw, and had almost at once to perform the
duties of acting consul-general. The insurrection of 1863 gave
him an opportunity of showing his immense knowledge of Eastern
politics and his combination of diplomatic tact with resolute
determination.
He was promoted in 1864 to the post of consul
at Danzig. The Eastern Question was, however, the great
passion of his life, and in 1875 he succeeded in getting transferred
to Belgrade as consul-general for Scrvia.
In 1870 he was made
British Agent at Bucharest. In 1884 he was offered by Lord
Granville the choice of the legation at Rio or Buenos Aires, and
in 18S5 Lord Salisbury, who was then at the Foreign Office,
urged him to go to Peking, pointing out the increasing importance
of that post. White's devoted friend. Sir Robert Morier,
wrote in the same sense.
But White, who was already acting
as ambassador ad interim at Constantinople, decided to wait;
and during this year he rendered one of his most conspicuous
services. It was largely owing to his efforts that the war between
Servia and Bulgaria was prevented from spreading into a
universal conflagration, and that the union of Bulgaria and
eastern Rumeha was accepted by the powers. In the following
year he was rewarded with the embassy at Constantinople. He
was the first Roman Catholic ajspointed to a British embassy
since the Reformation. He pursued consistently the poUcy of
counteracting Russian influence in the Balkans by erecting a
barrier of independent states animated with a healthy spirit of
national life, and by supporting Austrian interests in the East.
To the furtherance of this policy he brought an unrivalled
knowledge of all the under-currents of Oriental intrigue, which
his mastery of languages enabled him to derive not only from the
newspapers, of which he was an assiduous reader, but from the
obscurest sources.
His bluff and straightforward manner, and
the knowledge that with him the deed was ready to follow the
word, enabled him at once to inspire confidence and to overawe
less masterful rivals.
The official honours bestowed on him
culminated in 1888 with the G.C.B . and a seat on the Privy
Council. He was stUl ambassador at Constantinople when he
was attacked by influenza during a visit to Berlin, where he died
on the 28th of December 1891.
WHITE, SIR WILLIAM HENRY (1845- ), English naval
architect, was born at Devonport on the 2nd odf February 1845, and at the age of fourteen became an apprentice in the dockyard there. In 1864 he took the first place in the scholarship competition at the Royal School of Architecture, which had then just been established by the Admiralty at South Kensington, and in 1867 he gained his diploma as fellow of the school with first-class honours. At once joining the constructive staff of the Admiralty, he acted as confidential assistant to the chief constructor, Sir Edward Reed, until the latter's retirement in 1870. The loss of the "Captain" in that year was followed by an inquiry for designs for ships of war, and in connexion with this White, together with his old fellow-student, William John, worked out a long series of calculations as to the stability and strength of vessels, the results of which were published in an important paper read in 1871 before the Institution of Naval Architects. In 1872 White was appointed secretary to the Council of Construction at the Admiralty, in 1875 assistant constructor, and in 1881 chief constructor. In April 1883 he left
the service of the Admiralty, at the invitation of Lord (then Sir W. G.) Armstrong, in order to undertake the difficult task of
organizing a department for the construction of warships of the largest size at the Elswick works; but he only remained there for two and a half years, for in October 1885 he returned to the Admiralty in succession to Sir Nathaniel Barnaby as director of naval construction, retaining that post until the beginning of 1902, when ill-health obliged him to relinquish the arduous labours it entailed. During that period, which in Great Britain was one of unprecedented activity in naval shipbuilding as a result of the awakening of public opinion to the vital importance of sea-power, more than 200 vessels of various types were added to the British navy, at a total cost of something like 100 millions sterling, and for the design of all these, as well as for the work of their construction, Sir William White was ultimately responsible. In addition, he did much to further the knowledge of scientific shipbuilding. He was professor of naval architecture at the Royal School from 1870 to 1873, and when in the latter year it was moved to Greenwich to be merged in the Royal Naval College, he reorganized the course of instruction and acted as professor for eight years more. The lectures he gave in that capacity were the foundation of his Manual of Naval Architecture, which has been translated into several foreign languages and is recognized as a standard text-book all over the world. Sir William White, who was chosen a fellow of the Royal Society in 1888, also read many professional papers before various learned and engineering societies. He was created K.C.B. in 1895.
WHITEAVES, JOSEPH FREDERICK (1835- ), British palaeontologist, was born at Oxford, on the 26th of December 1835. He was educated at private schools, and afterwards worked under John Phillips at Oxford (1858-1861); he was led to study the Oolitic rocks, and added largely to our knowledge of the fossils of the Great Oolite series, Cornbrash and Corallian (Rep. Brit. Assoc. 1860, and Ann., Nat. Hist. 1861). In 1861 he visited Canada and made acquaintance with the geology of Quebec and Montreal, and in 1863 he was appointed curator of the museum and secretary of the Natural History Society of Montreal, posts which he occupied until 1875. He studied the land and freshwater mollusca of Lower Canada, and the marine invertebrata of the coasts; and also carried on researches among the older Silurian (or Ordovician) fossils of the neighbourhood of Montreal. In 1875 he joined the palaeontological branch of the Geological Survey of Canada at Montreal; in the following year he became palaeontologist, and in 1877 he was further appointed zoologist and assistant directory of the survey. In 1881 the offices of the survey were removed to Ottawa. His publications on Canadian zoology and palaeontology are numerous and important. Dr. Whiteaves was one of the original fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, and contributed to its Transactions, as well as to the Canadian Naturalist and other journals. He received the hon. degree of LL.D. in 1900 from McGill University, Montreal.
WHITEBAIT, the vernacular name of the small fish which appears in large shoals in the estuary of the Thames during the summer months, and is held in great esteem as a delicacy for the table. Formerly whitebait was supposed to be a distinct species of fish. T. Pennant and G. Shaw believed it to be some kind of Cyprinoid, similar to the bleak, whilst E. Donovan, in his Natural History of British Fishes (1802-1808), misled by specimens sent to him as whitebait, declared it to be the young of the shad. In 1820 W. Yarrell proved conclusively that Donovan's opinion was founded on an error; unfortunately he contented himself with comparing whitebait with the shad only, and in the end adopted the opinion of the Thames fishermen, whose interest it was to represent it as a distinct adult form; thus the whitebait is introduced into Yarrell's History of British Fishes (1836) as Clupea alba. The French ichthyologist Valenciennes went a step farther, declaring it to be not only specifically but also generically distinct from all other Clupeoids. It is now known to consist of the young fry of herrings and sprats in varying proportions mixed with a few shrimps, gobies, sticklebacks, pope-fishes and young flounders; but these impurities are as far as possible picked out from the whitebait before it is
