Selborne Pioneer: Gilbert White as Naturalist and Scientist, a Re-examination, The

Auk, The, Jan 2004 by Heinrich, Bernd

The Selborne Pioneer: Gilbert White as Naturalist and Scientist, a Re-examination.-Ted Dadswcll. 2003. Ashgate Publishing, Hants, England, and Suite 420, 101 Cherry Street, Burlington, Vermont 05401-4405. xviii 238 pp., 13 black-and-white plates. ISBN 0-7546-0749-6. Cloth, $79.95.-Gilbert White lived (1720-1793) in the agricultural village of Selborne, England, where "the human ecology was continuous with the non-human." The eldest of seven surviving children, his fishing and hunting as a young man "paved the way" for natural history, while gardening "gave him his naturalists' apprenticeship." He was also an Anglican cleric, a poet, and as Dadswell makes clear in this book, a remarkable pioneering naturalist and clear-headed scientist.

White has been known primarily for the literary achievement of his Natural History of Selborne. Ironically, that work has enjoyed a worldwide readership over the centuries primarily because it was thought to be unscientific. Now, after the blossoming of ethology and behavioral biology of animals in the wild, it seems instead to have presaged those disciplines.

White became known for his seemingly pedantic measuring to exact detail and his unconventional approach to problems. Much was said of his shouting through a megaphone at his pet tortoise, Timothy, and several writers have (incorrectly) extrapolated that he "played the trumpet" to his bees. he measured the size of hailstones to document what he meant by "large." Perhaps equally bizarre to 18th-century contemporaries was his detailed record-keeping of several species of crickets and the swallows of his district. His primary contribution was his combining of original field observations of birds with a scientific experimental approach to problems. However, a mythology of White evolved, in which his reputation grew as a quaint childlike observer of local trivia. he was said to be contented and a "bit lazy," with "no philosophical ambitions" and "never a victim of introspection."

Classification and physiological research dominated the zoological and botanical sciences in his time. Specimens were collected, described exactly, and named, and they were cut apart, often while still alive. White was little interested in those endeavors and he was the first to concentrate on the life and manners of animals, especially of birds, in the field. Despite his avowed disinterest in the then predominant scientific fashion of nomenclature, he nevertheless identified 440 wild plants and 120 species of birds in his immediate neighborhood. he added the noctule bat and the harvest mouse to the list of British mammals, and he was the first to distinguish the three morphologically similar "leaf warblers," now called the chiff-chaff, willow warbler, and wood warbler, by their songs and habits.

he may or may not have influenced ornithologists in the two centuries after him, but there is no question that he preceded them in trying to solve problems that concerned us not until the first half of the 20th century, and occupy us even now. To him, the annual disappearance of the swallows was a burning problem, though it was no problem at all to his contemporaries who were convinced they hibernate under the mud of local ponds. Aside from his long-standing studies of bird migration, other problems that occupied him include the function of winter flocks of finches, parasitic habits of the cuckoo, bird song dialects, "dispersion" or territoriality, gregariousness and fighting (in rooks), seed dispersion (jays and magpies), instinct and its functionality, and courtship feeding. Through his quantifying and questioning, he maintained patience and a restraint from making generalizations and coming to conclusions where the evidence did not warrant. he warned against the pitfalls of analogy (as Lorenz would do as well) and he challenged the authority of reason, appealing to thorough empirical observations.

His reliance on and presentation of empirical observations presented in detail, though perhaps pedantic then, make his work timeless now. His measuring of the number, kinds, and probable ages of trees in a small woodlot seem modern, as are his description of bird densities in his time (starlings, common now, were scarce then, whereas stone curlews, now rare, were common). The chiff-chaffs arrived punctually almost to the day (20-23 March). Do they still?

Given his many-faceted and seemingly contradictory life and science - only now becoming clearer through the lens of modem biology- it is perhaps not surprising that many myths and misconceptions have attached themselves to Gilbert White. Dadswell cites a recent example concerning earthworms. In 1984 a broadcaster remarked on the air that: "the old naturalist Gilbert White hated earthworms and wanted to get rid of them, unlike Charles Darwin who wrote a book in their defense." The truth is quite different. A century before Darwin's work on earthworms, White had elaborated on their importance. he described them as "a link in the chain of nature [who] if lost, would make a lamentable chasm" because they are "food for half the birds and some quadrupeds," and they "turn soil" and "by their ceaseless boring, contribute greatly to its [soil] drainage and aeration." Furthermore, "they draw leaves and grass into their holes, and manure the soil having eaten this vegetable material. Humble but innumerable, worms are the greatest promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them."