xxx Introduction 



they consist of a general and formal description of Selborne, its 

 position, soil, surroundings, and so forth ; and their contents might far 

 better have been thrown into the natural form of a preface, save 

 that White in his excessive modesty perhaps shrank from even the bare 

 appearance of deliberate authorship. A single sentence in Letter IX., 

 however, where he refers to the spring 0/1784, allows us to see that 

 these introductory epistles, which pretend to usher in the series, were 

 really an afterthought, designed to put the reader in a position for 

 understanding the matter that follows. One or two subsequent letters, 

 more comprehensive in scheme, I believe to have been added or expanded 

 at the same period. 



The first edition of the collected correspondence appeared in 1789, 

 the momentous year of the great French Revolution. It was published 

 by Gilbert" s brother Benjamin, a bookseller in London the same who 

 gave to Selborne Church the beautiful old German altar-piece which 

 still adorns it. White only outlived the appearance of his work by 

 four years ; he died in 1793, *he culminating year of the Terror in 

 Paris. These 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 understand the peculiar fascination 

 of these sketches and observations, which have passed through edition 

 after edition with increasing frequency, we must consider the special 

 combination of circumstances 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 precedes the French 

 Revolution say, in brief, the age of William Pitt the elder. Now> 

 intellectually, this was an age of steady though slow 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 particularly 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 



