Born:18
July 1720, Selbourne, Hampshire
Died:
26
June 1795
Education: Oriel College, Oxford.
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| The Church of St. Mary's, Selborne, where Gilbert White was curate. (source) |
Gilbert White took holy orders in 1747, and became curate of his home town of Selborne in Southern England (1756).
He was a pioneering naturalist, regarded as England's first ecologist, who recorded his observations of nature drawn from life, rather than from knowledge gained in laboratory by examination of dead specimens. His own notes were supplemented by an exchange of letters with Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington, two friends who were also naturalists.
His careful studies, from 1765 covered a wide range of natural history subjects around the parish. He detailed the flora, and the habits and lives of the local mammals, birds and insects. He published the collected work of about 20 years in a book in 1789, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. (Actually published in Dec. 1788 though given a 1789 date by his publisher, in order to make the book appear fresh for longer. This book has been in print continously since then, and is the fourth most published book in the English language.) The exact, but engagingly written, scientific descriptions of the commonplace creatures of the English countryside appealed to generations of homesick administrators of Empire.
"Earthworms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm...worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them,..." (1770)For example, it was at Selborne in 1767 that Gilbert White first noticed that the harvest mouse (Micromys minutus), the smallest European mouse, with a body only two inches long, was a different species from other mice. In a letter to Thomas Pennant on Nov 4 that year, reproduced as part of his The Natural History of Selborne, he wrote:
"I have procured some of the mice mentioned in my former letters, a young one and a female with young, both of which I have preserved in brandy.The harvest mouse nests in the longest grasses in meadows, in a tennis ball-sized nest. White was apparently the first to notice that the mouse closes up the hole in the side after it enters or leaves its nest. The mouse, whose Latin name Micromys minutus means "the smallest tiny mouse", is so light that it can climb between grass stems using its two-inch prehensile tail, without touching the ground."From the colour, shape, size, and manner of nesting, I make no doubt but that the species is nondescript [not known to science]. "They are much smaller and more slender . . . and have more of the squirrel or dormouse colour . . . They never enter into houses; are carried into ricks and barns with the sheaves; abound in harvest, and build their nests amidst the straws of the corn above the ground, and sometimes in thistles."
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| "The Wakes," Gilbert White's home for most of his life. (source) |
Sadly, the effects of agricultural intensification in modern Britain have greatly reduced the natural habitat for this endearing animal. However, the grounds of Gilbert White's house are now a museum, managed with conservation efforts in mind. In 1998, there was excitement to find that the otherwise increasingly rare harvest mouse had been discovered again nesting in the gardens.
Gilbert White inherited his house, The Wakes, from his uncle, Charles White, in March 1763. To the present day, the countryside around the village remains mostly unchanged from when White knew it in the 18th Century, and is now mainly owned by The National Trust. The Gilbert White House is now a museum preserving many of his items of furniture, possessions, and family portraits. The original manuscript for The Natural History of Selborne is on display. The garden is being restored to White's original designs. (White's House also contains a memorial to the Oates family, including relics and an account of Captain Lawrence Oates's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole.)
LINKS:
The Natural History of Selborne, a Project Gutenburg E-text of the original book.
A short biography including the time periods that Gilbert White was the curate of Selborne. Also seen here are the two St. Mary's church memorial stained glass windows.
Harvest mice return to home of 'father of English natural history', The Daily Telegraph: Monday, 24 August 1998.
Another Nature Note about when the sounds of a grasshopper are not a grasshopper, as noted by Gilbert White.