INTRODUCTION xv 



him to name many of his beasts, birds, insects and flowers, 

 and thus furnished he turns to the work in which his real 

 strength lay, to what he calls (October 31, 1777) "true 

 natural history, because it abounds with anecdote and cir- 

 cumstance," the natural history which seeks above all to study 

 the animals and plants that we have about us as living* things. 

 " Learn as much as possible the manners of animals," he writes 

 to his brother John ; " they are worth a ream of descriptions." 



In the Natural History of Selborne White frequently 

 quotes or makes use of the following books: 



Linnaeus, Systema Natures; Linnaeus, Synopsis Stirpium ; 

 Ray, Synopsis Methodica Avium et Pisdum; Ray, The Wis- 

 dom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation ; Ray, 

 Select Remains of, with his life, by the late W. Derham ; Ray, 

 Historia Insectorum ,* Hudson, Flora Anglica ; Derham, 

 Physico-Theology ; Scopoli, Anni Historico-Naturales ; Stil- 

 lingfleet, Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Natural History ; 

 Pennant, British Zoology ; Hales, Statical Essays ; Willughby, 

 Ornithology ; Geoffroy, Histoire des Insectes. 



Whenever he wished to decorate a letter with quotations, 

 Virgil, Milton and the Bible seem to have come first into his 

 thoughts. Chance quotations show that he had read more 

 widely at some time, but without keeping up (we suppose) 

 any great familiarity with the majority of his authors. All 

 the books which were essential to the Natural History of 

 Selborne would have gone into a single shelf. 



Three of White's correspondents are very particularly 

 associated with the History and Antiquities of Selborne. 

 These are Thomas Pennant, the Hon. Daines Barrington, 

 and the Rev. Dr. Chandler. 



Thomas Pennant (1726-98) was a country gentleman of 

 Downing, near Holywell, in Flintshire. His character and 

 methods are sufficiently delineated in The Literary Life of 

 the late Thomas Pennant, Esq., by Himself (London, 4to, 

 1793), not a posthumous, but as he styles it a "post-existent 

 performance". It relates the career of a man of boundless 

 activity and much self-esteem. He tells how he got a taste 

 for natural history at the age of twelve by reading Willughby's 

 Ornithology, searched Cornwall for minerals, wrote an account 



