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: ##  [The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1, by Gilbert
  White](text00000.html#filepos0000000168)
  
  This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler.
  
  cassell’s national library .
  
  #  the  
  Natural History  
  of  
  Selborne
  
  by  
  THE REV. GILBERT WHITE A.M.
  
  Vol. I.
  
  CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:  
  _ london _ , _ paris _ , _ new york & melbourne _ .  
  1887
  
  ##  INTRODUCTION.
  
  Gilbert White was born in the village of Selborne on the 18th of July, in the
  year 1720. His father was a gentleman of good means, with a house at Selborne
  and some acres of land. Gilbert had his school training at Basingstoke, from
  Thomas Warton, the father of the poet of that name, who was born at
  Basingstoke in 1728, six years younger than his brother Joseph, who had been
  born at Dunsford, in Surrey. Thomas Warton, their father, was the youngest of
  three sons of a rector of Breamore, in the New Forest, and the only son of the
  three who was not deaf and dumb. This Thomas, the elder, was an able man, who
  obtained a fellowship