My CommonPlace

Gilbert White was born at a vicarage in Selbourne, England. As a child he moved about a hundred yards from the vicarage to a house his family inherited from his grandfather — and died there at the age of almost 73. In a February 22, 1770 letter to his friend Thomas Pennant, he wrote: “… my little intelligence is confined to the narrow sphere of my own observations at home.” Earlier he had written: “It has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbors whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been attached from my childhood.” In his first letter to another friend, Daines Barrington, he apologized for his lack of scholarship. He professes to be “an out-of-door naturalist, one that takes his observations from the subject itself, and not from the writings of others.” In a later letter to Barrington, he says: ” … it is no small undertaking for a man unsupported and alone to begin a natural history from his own autopsia! Though there is endless room for observation in the field of nature, which is boundless, yet investigation (where a man endeavors to be sure of his facts) can make but slow progress; and all that one could collect in many years would go into a very narrow compass.” Gilbert White was born a century earlier than Darwin, and Darwin traveled around the world, but these two great naturalists seem to have had a lot in common ….