Gilbert White

Gilbert White (1720–1793) was born at Selborne, Hampshire, where his grandfather had been vicar, and educated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he held a fellowship for the rest of his life. A graduate of the wrong college ever to succeed to Selborne's own living, he served the parish instead as its curate at various times and spent nearly all of his life there, watching its plants, birds, and animals with unusual patience: he was the first to distinguish the harvest mouse, the noctule bat, and the chiffchaff as species in their own right. His letters on all of it to two correspondents, the zoologist Thomas Pennant and the naturalist Daines Barrington, became The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), often called the first work of natural history to become an English classic. He died at Selborne.