1770 ‘From whence, then, do our ring-ousels migrate so regularly every September, and make their appearance again, as if in their return, every April?’ he wrote to his friend Thomas Pennant, Fellow of the Royal Society. ‘They are more early this year than common, for some were seen at the usual hill on the fourth of this month.’
This combination of curiosity and close observation typifies Gilbert White’s method. While Captain James Cook was off collecting exotic specimens in the South Seas, this country clergyman in the Hampshire village of Selborne studied what went on around him through the seasons, making careful notes on plants, birds, bees – even earthworms, which he properly valued for their effect on the soil.
His letters to Pennant, and another Academician, Daines Barrington, were published as The Natural History of Selborne in 1788. Admired by writers as distant as Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf, the book has gone through 200 editions and translations, and has never been out of print.
In the same letter he informs Pennant that he had just got hold of a copy of Giovanni Scopoli’s recent work on natural history, in which ‘he advances some false facts’, such as that ‘the hirundo urbica … pullos extra nidum non nutrit’ (‘the house martin doesn’t feed its chicks outside the nest’). This White ‘knew to be wrong’ because he had seen them feeding their young on the wing, but ‘the feat is done in so quick a manner as not to be perceptible to indifferent observers’.
To prevent this sort of careless scrutiny, White urged what he called ‘parochial history’, in which observers stick to what they know and can verify, for (as he went on to say in this letter):
[A]s no man can alone investigate all the works of nature, these partial writers may, each in their department, be more accurate in their discoveries, and freer from errors, than more general writers; and so by degrees may pave the way to an universal correct natural history.
The local is all very well, but it would be hard to sustain if it weren’t for that often overlooked infrastructure of Romantic nature writing, the Systema Naturae (1735) of Carl Linnaeus. White, who had tried and failed to find a permanent position at Oxford, knew that Linnaeus’ universal system of binary classification into family and species (like ‘hirundo urbica’) would still connect his ‘parochial’ observations to the rest of the world. Like his admirer Henry David Thoreau over half a century after him, who also felt himself to be on the cultural margins, Gilbert White had found in Linnaeus a language for the universal oversoul.