page_title: Gilbert White
section_title: The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
hierarchical_section_title: Gilbert White / The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
caption_attribution_description: English: Title page of 1813 edition of Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne
context_page_description: Gilbert White FRS was a "parson-naturalist", a pioneering English naturalist, ecologist and ornithologist. He is best known for his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.
context_section_description: White is best known for his The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). This is presented as a compilation of his letters to Thomas Pennant, the leading British zoologist of the day, and the Hon. Daines Barrington, an English barrister and another Fellow of the Royal Society, though a number of the 'letters' such as the first nine were never posted, and were written especially for the book. The book has been continuously in print since its first publication. It was long held, "probably apocryphally", to be the fourth-most published book in the English language after the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
  White's biographer, Richard Mabey, praises White's expressiveness:
  What is striking is the way Gilbert [White] often arranges his sentence structure to echo the physical style of a bird's flight. So 'The white-throat uses odd jerks and gesticulations over the tops of hedges and bushes'; and 'Woodpeckers fly volatu undosu [in an undulating flight], opening and closing their wings at every stroke, and so are always rising and falling in curves.'
caption: Title page of White's Natural History, which he published late in life
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