The Natural History of Selborne

Forty-four letters to the zoologist Thomas Pennant, then a further sixty-six, independently numbered, to the naturalist Daines Barrington: between them, the curate of a small Hampshire parish sets down four decades of close, patient observation of Selborne's own plants, birds, and animals, moving between his two correspondents' particular interests as the seasons bring new subjects — the migration and hibernation of swallows, the courtship calls of owls, the tunnelling habits of earthworms. Along the way White works out, ahead of his contemporaries, that the harvest mouse, the noctule bat, and the chiffchaff are each their own distinct species rather than variants of ones already known; when an aside threatens to stray into local history instead — a hoard of coins once dredged from a nearby pond — he defers it to a further series of letters on the parish's "more remote history," not included here.

First published in 1789 as The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, and never out of print since, it is often called the first work of natural history to become an English classic; White himself has been called, retrospectively, one of the first ecologists, for a method built on watching living animals over years in their own setting, at a time when most naturalists worked from dead specimens in a study.

This Bibliomancer edition presents White's own prefatory poems and Advertisement, then both complete series of natural-history letters in full — the antiquarian letters mentioned within them were never part of this collection.