title: The Natural History of Selborne
author:  Gilbert White 
description: <br /><strong>Gilbert White</strong> was born in 1720 in Selborne in Hampshire and went to Oriel College, Oxford, where he became a Fellow in 1743. He took ordination and held a number of curacies in the vicinity of Selborne before finally becoming permanent curate of his birthplace in 1784, a position he held until his death in 1793. In 1751 he started keeping his 'Garden Kalendar', and later the 'Naturalist's Journal' he kept for 25 years. <em>The Natural History of Selborne</em> is based on his correspondence with two distinguished naturalists, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington.<br /><br /><strong>Anne Secord</strong> is an Affiliated Research Scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. The focus of her research and writing is on popular natural history in nineteenth-century Britain, and on horticulture, medicine, and consumption in the eighteenth century. She is completing a book that explores social class, observation, and skill in nineteenth-century natural history for the University of Chicago Press.<br />
zlib_text: This Etext created by Tokuya Matsumoto <toqyam@os.rim.or.jp>
  
  The Natural History of Selborne
  
  by Gilbert White
  
  ## INVITATION TO SELBORNE.
  
  See, Selborne spreads her boldest beauties round  
  The varied valley, and the mountain ground,  
  Wildly majestic ! What is all the pride,  
  Of flats, with loads of ornaments supplied ?—  
  Unpleasing, tasteless, impotent expense,  
  Compared with Nature's rude magnificenee.  
  
  Arise, my stranger, to these wild scenes haste;  
  The unfinish'd farm awaits your forming taste:  
  Plan the pavilion, airy, light, and true;  
  Through the high arch call in the length'ning view;  
  Expand the forest sloping up the hill;  
  Swell to a lake the scant, penurious rill;  
  Extend the vista; raise the castle mound  
  In antique taste, with turrets ivy-crown'd:  
  O'er the gay lawn the flow'ry shrub dispread,  
  Or with the blending garden mix the mead;  
  Bid China's pale, fantastic fence delight;  
  Or with the mimic statue trap the sight.  
  
  Oft on some evening, sunny, so