Product Description

More than any other writer Gilbert White (1720-93) has shaped the relationship between man and nature. A hundred years before Darwin, White realised the crucial role of worms in the formation of soil and understood the significance of territory and song in birds. His precise, scrupulously honest and unaffectedly witty observations led him to interpret animals’ behaviour in a unique manner. This collection of his letters to the explorer and naturalist Daines Barrington and the eminent zoologist Thomas Pennant - White’s intellectual lifelines from his country-village home - are a beautifully written, detailed evocation of the lives of the flora and fauna of eighteenth-century England.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #141536 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Edited with an introduction by Richard Mabey

Customer Reviews

Learn from the Master...
The edition of this book that I possess (circa 1970's) claims that this is something like the third most published book in the English Language, loved from America to Japan. It is a seminal book. When Linnaeus was creating his very methodical classification of the natural world it took a vicar from the little village of Selbourne to put in stone the study of nature through its behavior.

This book taught me how to examine the world around me, but it also offers the guilty pleasure of complete escapism. What could be safer then 1780's Southern England, as yet untouched by industry? Gilbert creates a world where human concerns do not exist and the rhythm of the natural world is all through this collection of letters to his friends.

Please pay "ready attention" to this book.
The letters of Gilbert White are probably more know through reference than reading - people are more likely to know of them because they are mentioned in other books rather than through the actual book itself. This is a shame. This book probably represents the "grand - father" of much of the nature writing that followed it - and for that reason alone many people, both reader and writers, are in its debt.

This book itself is a gentle stroll on foot and horseback through the seasons and landscapes of Selborne during the second half of the 1700's. This is a landscape rich in wildlife and character, and the author has both the skill as a naturalist and writer to bring it to life through the letters he writes - in many ways this is the blog from the 18th Century! But it is also so much more than just the random jottings of an observant man. Questions are pursued over the course of many years, and a good number of ideas and observations are floated that in time would become more important - and more well known. Only in one area does White really stray significantly from current understanding, and that is in his long search for evidence of hibernation in birds, especially those of the "swift and swallow kind".

My only criticism of the book relates to its layout rather than its style or content. Given the need to refer to the notes provided at regular intervals I would have preferred then to have been placed at the bottom of the page rather than at the back of the book, where they tend to act as a "break" on the flow of the text.

In some ways the list of (especially) birds he knows as common, but which are now rare, restricted or extinct in the area, is a marker of how much our landscapes have changed with the passing of the years. But in other ways they show what a skilled observer can find within one local area. In the "Advertisement" at the start of the book White hopes that he may induce his "readers to pay a more ready attention to the wonders of Creation". In this time of rapid environmental change "ready attention" to the world around us would still be highly valuable.