Introduction xxix 



rough indications of contemporary events will suffice to place him 

 in his own century. 



The quiet parson naturalist himself, who thus lived and 

 worked at Selborne, could little have suspected the immense 

 popularity which his work was to attain. In order to under- 

 stand tJie peculiar fascination of these sketches and observations, 

 which have passed through edition after edition with increasing 

 frequency, we must consider the special combination of circum- 

 stances under which they were begotten. 



White's period of literary and scientific activity corresponds 

 roughly with that part of the reign of George III. which pre- 

 cedes t/ie French Revolution say, in brief, the age of William 

 Pitt the elder. Now, intellectually, this was an age of steady 

 though sloiu progress in England. The general European 

 scientific movement had gathered head in Britain with the 

 establishment of the Royal Society by Charles II. The later 

 seventeenth and early eighteenth century saw a gradual increase 

 in the interest of learned men in natural phenomena, and par- 

 ticularly in the life of plants and animals. The fauna and flora 

 of Europe then first began to be accurately investigated ; travel 

 in Asia and America brought knowledge of new forms to the 

 ken of acute European naturalists. Zoology and botany formed 

 just at that date, indeed, what one may venture to call the 

 growing-point of science, as astronomy had formed it in the age 

 of Copernicus, and as geology formed it in the age of Lyell. 

 The publication of Linnceus's great work on " The System of 

 Nature" gave an impulse to the study of biology, the effect of 

 which can scarcely be overrated. It was during the forty years 

 roughly covered by White's observations that the science of life 

 began to assume philosophical form and to be prosecuted with 

 some attempt at scientific accuracy. 



Gilbert White, Fellow of Oriel, was a man of highly competent 

 education, a good classical scholar, capable of reading with ease 

 the Latin works and memoirs in which the scientific writing 



