xiv INTRODUCTION 



experiments, that the British Museum and the Botanic 

 Gardens at Kew were being set up, or that Cook's voyages 

 were making known the natural productions of another 

 hemisphere. Some of these tokens of scientific activity are 

 passed over altogether ; others are slightly mentioned ; upon 

 none of them does White dwell repeatedly and with interest. 



White's education in natural history, so far as it was a 

 matter of books, consisted mainly in the study of Ray and 

 Linnaeus. Swammerdam he quotes in one or two places, but 

 he shows no general acquaintance with the Biblia Natures. 

 Reaumur and De Geer were, for some reason that we can only 

 guess at, inaccessible to him. In a letter of 1774 he says, 

 " I wish I could read Reaumur and De Geer ". Two years 

 later we have him getting Reaumur's account of Hippobosca 

 transcribed for his own use. It is not to be supposed that 

 White was unable to read the French of Reaumur and De 

 Geer; he means that their works were not to be had in 

 Selborne. Yet so many copies of Reaumur's Histoire des 

 Insectes had been printed (it is still a very common book), 

 that the difficulty of studying his writings is not quite in- 

 telligible. De Geer's great work may well have been hard to 

 get at in 1774, but one would have thought it worth the 

 trouble. White died in almost complete ignorance of the 

 discoveries of these great naturalists. Leeuwenhoeck and 

 Malpighi he never names ; their work was largely anatomical 

 and microscopic, and White was not trained in either method. 1 

 Nor does he seem to have known Buffon, who could have told 

 him that the noctule had already been described. It is 

 probable that the poet Gray, and others who gained no fame 

 as naturalists, were much better read in zoology than Gilbert 

 White. His knowledge of plants was slight, and we find in 

 his books or letters few references to the great development 

 of scientific botany which took place during his lifetime, 

 though he was deeply impressed with the systematic work of 

 Linnaeus. Ray, Willughby, Hudson and Linnaeus taught 



1 In a Better of November 15, 1775, he derides the microscope. " O fie ! for so 

 young a man to use glasses that magnify two hundred times, when Linnaeus 

 planned and perfected his whole sexual system nudis oculis. " But eight years later 

 (Letter to Churton, August 20, 1783) he bids his correspondent apply a magnifying 

 glass to Nostoc and " try to discover the seeds". 



