Gilbert White was a pioneer in fieldwork and a significant figure in the modern scientific approach to natural history. Since his The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne was published in 1789 it has gone through over 300 editions. Astonishingly, however, he was left out of The Great Naturalists (2007), a key overview from the Natural History Museum featuring 39 naturalists. And, in 2013, the historian Amy M. King wrote that ‘the permanent renown of White's text arguably has little to do with any lasting scientific achievement per se', when, as Richard Mabey wrote in his 1986 biography of White: ‘Darwin praised [White] as one of his chief reasons for his interest in biology.'
Darwin not only read White's book in 1837, later saying that it had made a deep impression on him, but also made a pilgrimage to Selborne, White's beloved home village and ‘native spot' in Hampshire, where he was a curate for most of his life. Robert McCrum wrote in the Guardian (in August 2017): ‘The young Charles Darwin would grow up with White's book at his side – [White] is the indispensable precursor to those great Victorians who would transform our ideas about life on Earth, especially in the undergrowth – Lyell, Spencer, Huxley and Darwin.'
Yet, despite this admiration, Darwin only mentions White once, in The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (1881), ‘in relation to the popular notion that healthy worms rarely, if ever, completely vacate their burrows at night', and does not acknowledge White's work on the significance of earthworms in creating and maintaining topsoil. Fifty years before this, White had written: ‘Earthworms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature … if lost, would make a lamentable chasm.' This discrepancy led the paleobiologist Gerhard C. Cadée to conclude that ‘Darwin did not want to have a forerunner' for his ideas.
By seeking the laws of nature, Darwin was in a different league from White, but it has been argued that the theory of evolution could never have been propounded without White's pioneering fieldwork. Rather than simply studying dead specimens, White observed live birds and animals in their own habitats over many years. As McCrum says, this was a ‘new kind of zoology, scientific, precise and based on the steady accumulation of detail', using Linnaean classification.
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