The Natural History of Selborne

"This is by the Reverend Gilbert White who was a parson down in Hampshire throughout much of the 1700s. He used to wander around the lands of his parish looking at all the wildlife, and he was a tremendous observer. That’s what was so special about him. He wrote down everything he saw in a series of letters to Thomas Pennant, one of the famed natural historians of his time, a Welshman. It’s a tremendous insight into the natural world of that time. For instance, he was noticing that swallows and martins and swifts disappeared every autumn. Nobody knew too much about migration. There was still a belief that swallows hid in the mud at the bottom of ponds during winter. They had no idea. But he did begin to believe in migration. He had some knowledge of what migration had been observed in Europe through his correspondence, and you can tell from his writing that he was trying to push Pennant into believing that migration occurred. Bat-wise, he only knew of two species of bat, one of which we now call the pipistrelle. The other was the long-eared bat. There was also a bigger bat that he saw flying over and knew it was different. He eventually managed to ‘procure’ two of them (he shot them!) and they were a species that we now call noctule. This is the first record of this high-flying bat and it was him that identified them, so he was picking up new species at a time when there were no field guides and very little published information about wildlife. It’s really tremendous. He was also looking at plants and fossils. This was pre-Darwin so evolution wasn’t really known about, but he found fossils of long-dead sea creatures and it started him thinking. He was such a good observer and questioned everything he saw. It’s what we should all be doing nowadays – not accepting too easily what we read. There are 17 in the UK, possibly 18, but they all look very similar so it’s not surprising that he only knew of two of them at the time. The most recent discoveries of new species are only done using genetics. It’s a group that won’t successfully breed outside of that species. Because bats look very similar to each other it’s hard to tell by looking at them and that’s often how these things get confused."

"In this brief work, written at the end of a very distinguished scholarly career, Gilbert considers decisive phases in the developments of two kinds of history, and behind their differences points to similarities and forces that bring them together. He begins with the new awareness among historians, originating in the late Enlightenment and brought to the fore by the French Revolution and reactions to it, of the uniqueness of particular societies and their cultures, and of a new sense of the interaction of ideas, social forces, policy, and the personality of individual leaders. The systematic study of documents and other primary sources, such as architecture and works of art and literature, gains new importance – as does the manner of their interpretation. Even as Ranke, by applying the critical method of philology to the study of the past, turns history into an autonomous discipline, removed from philosophy, theology, and law, he insists that history is also an art. He seeks to ‘tell a story that is full of tension’. Aesthetic considerations affect not only his narrative, but also the structure of his works. His History of the Popes, for example, is not strictly chronological, but shaped around one great theme: the relationship between state and church in Europe. His conception of history makes it inevitable that Ranke includes discussions of art, literature and culture in his political interpretations. This interaction is also basic to Burckhardt’s work. His Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy opens with political history: the waning power of the empire and the achievement of control by the absolute monarchies of France and Spain. A further central element of the work is the significance of the individual, not only in art and literature, but also in politics. Despite their differences in opinion and purpose, the two historians are linked by strong bonds. And as Gilbert notes in this little book, rich with ideas briefly discussed, in the earlier 19th century ‘there was no real contrast or rivalry between political and cultural history’. He does not add, but the message is implied, that in the study and writing of history today specialisation and breadth of interpretation need not be antagonistic. At times they can be combined in conception and execution. When that is not possible, each may at least acknowledge and convey to the reader the importance of the other. I see myself as a remote descendant and follower of the intellectual tradition Gilbert summarises. Of course, while we have forgotten much since Ranke and Burckhardt wrote, we have also learnt something, but their generosity of spirit and their intellectual sweep remain an inspiration."

"It is. He’s sitting in his house down in Selborne and observing what’s around him. He doesn’t travel far. He just observes and by doing that, you can see lots of wonderful things. That’s what attracted me with Gilbert White. Even on a new estate, like I live in here, I can be out looking at the things happening in the garden. Say the false widow spider—which is one that has a bad press at the moment, because of the various sensationalist things that have been written. I’ve got them in the garden and they don’t cause me any harm at all. I can go out at night with a torch and see them just sitting and waiting for insects to come into their vision or their web. Gilbert White talks about just watching spiders spinning silk. It’s a particularly British thing, I think. Some of the early people who were into spiders were, like Gilbert White, vicars. The Reverend Octavius Pickard-Cambridge was the vicar of Bloxworth down in Devon. When you’re looking at the scientific names of species, they often have the name of the person who first described them—and a number of them are Pickard-Cambridge. There are a number of others as well, around the 1700s and 1800s—these country parsons obviously weren’t busy enough, because they had the time to go out and observe and record. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a tradition that has been maintained in the UK. A lot of the biodiversity we have records of is provided by amateurs. It’s people who have taken on that tradition and carried it through to the present day. The problem, these days, is that they’re all my age or older. We are getting some younger people coming through. But there is a danger, I think, that we will lose this reputation that we have built up—right from Victorian times and earlier—of observation of the natural world, particularly in terms of invertebrates. We’re going to lose that because there aren’t the people coming through to carry on with it, which is a shame. How can we interest younger people? We do all sorts of things to try and do that and we’re successful, to a degree. But Gilbert White was one of the first who did this. Darwin was into earthworms in a big way, and barnacles. And, in The Voyage of the Beagle , he describes observing spiders ballooning from the rigging of the boat off the coast of Argentina. He was a bit puzzled about what was happening. They were just spinning silk to drift on the breeze and disperse and find landfall somewhere or other. That’s principally how spiders move around. He observed this and writes about it, as Gilbert White does. With the larger spiders, it happens when they’re young. What they tend to do is climb up to a high point, wherever that might be. In a field of grassland, they would climb to the top of a grass stalk. The weather conditions need to be just right, and it appears that there might be some electrostatic influence as well from the ground, which causes them to move up. Then they stick their bottoms in the air and they spin silk. The breeze—and it only needs to be a very slight breeze, if it’s any stronger it’s not going to work—carries the silk and eventually lifts them up, and they will drift on the breeze for quite a decent distance. I suspect that one or two species of spiders we occasionally find on the south coast of the UK have drifted across from France, because the same species is found very commonly in northern France. There’s a phenomenon called ‘gossamer,’ where you get lots of spiders spinning silk at the same time in the same location, and you get a whole field covered in silk. The word is supposed to derive from ‘goose summer,’ a festival which celebrates the eating of geese sometime in November. This is a feature that you occasionally see, but the weather conditions have got to be just right for it to happen. Yes. The book is a collection of letters. He’s writing to his friends around the country saying what he’s been observing. He’s got a number of correspondents he writes to. Let me read you a bit: Selborne, March 15th, 1773 Dear Sir, By my journal for last autumn it appears that the house martins bred very late, and stayed very late in these parts; for, on the 1st October, I saw young martins in their nest nearly fledged; and again, on the 21st October, we had at the next house a nest full of young martins just ready to fly; and the old ones were hawking for insects with great alertness. The next morning the brood forsook their nest, and were flying round the village. From this day I never saw one of the swallow kind till November 3rd, when twenty, or perhaps thirty, house martins were playing all day long by the side of the hanging wood, and over my field. Did these small weak birds, some of which were nestling twelve days ago, shift their quarters at this late season of the year to the other side of the northern tropic? Or rather, is it not more probable that the next church, ruin, chalk-cliff, steep covert, or perhaps sandbank, lake, or pool (as a more northern naturalist would say), may become their hybernaculum , and afford them a ready and obvious retreat?” So he’s observing, but he’s also trying to work out what’s happening. He’s not just making notes. He’s thinking about why house martins are flying around on the 21st of October and into November, which is, these days, quite unusual. He’s using his observations to then process what is happening in the natural world. The book is full of this. He produced two books, and the first one is this lovely little King Penguin, which was given to me by my mentor when I started working on spiders in Sherwood Forest about 40 years ago."